Sex, Lies, and Headlocks (2 page)

Eighty-four-year-old Stu Hart was sitting down to dinner with his wife Helen when she called. A friend who was watching the pay-per-view from a sports bar had already told them that there had been an accident. Martha began the call with the words “This is the worst thing I’m ever going to have to say.”

Stu and Helen raised eight boys who’d gone into wrestling and four girls who’d married wrestlers. How had the business come to this? They asked themselves that question over and over that night, as did many of the other people who remembered when wrestling belonged to a much simpler time.

ONE

ON JULY 14, 1948
, the six men who controlled most of the wrestling in the Midwest met in a small room at the President Hotel in Waterloo, Iowa. None trusted the other more than was absolutely necessary, but they’d agreed to come here to discuss the kind of thing that can bind even the most suspicious rivals—money.

Arrayed around the room were P. L. “Pinky” George, a former bantamweight fighter who ran all the shows out of Des Moines; Al Haft, who liked to book big names in Columbus but couldn’t keep them for long because he was notoriously cheap; Orville Brown, a 250-pound brawler from Kansas City; Max Clayton, a genial Omaha businessman who paid only $25 for a main event but made up for it by buying his favorite wrestlers straight whiskey and steaks; and Tony Stecher, who ran the Minneapolis territory while managing his brother Joe, a three-time world champion who could dent a sack of grain with his thighs. Finally, there was the man who’d called them together, a forty-two-year-old ex-sportswriter named Sam Muchnick.

Through most of the Roaring Twenties, Muchnick covered the Cardinals for the
St. Louis Times
, becoming close friends with the slugger Rogers Hornsby and weaving his way into a luminous world of late-night parties where he rubbed shoulders with Babe Ruth, Mae West, and even Al Capone. In 1932, when the
Times
was folded into the
St. Louis Star
, he lost his job, said good-bye to the news business, and went to work for the local wrestling baron in town, a Greek named Anthony Pakiotis whom everyone knew as Tom Packs.

Wrestling was at least as popular as baseball in St. Louis, and that was due to the biggest star on Packs’s roster, a rock-jawed wrestler named Lou Thesz. Born Aloysius Martin Thesz to a Hungarian family that settled in a rural Michigan village called Bonat, the wrestler made his name driving a Model A Ford to as many gigs as he could reach with a tank of fifteen-cent-a-gallon gas. By the early 1930s, he’d played enough athletic clubs to develop a sizable following among émigré Europeans who’d landed in the Midwest looking for work. In his job for Packs, Sam Muchnick became an advance man for Thesz, hawking his matches from train platforms and saloons in tiny towns.

From the time Thesz became champion in 1937, the sportswriter and the wrestler were frequent traveling companions. Then in March of 1942, Muchnick began to feud with Packs and left to form his own touring company across town. He managed to mount just three shows before he was called into service for World War II, and when he returned the landscape in St. Louis had changed. An investor group fronted by Thesz had bought out Packs, assuming they could take control of the town without too much trouble. That was why Muchnick was in Waterloo, Iowa.

As he scanned the faces of the bosses, he knew he wasn’t the only one who was having troubles. They all had problems keeping talent and avoiding bidding wars. Perhaps they should consider formalizing their ties. Surely they could see the money that could be made if they agreed to share their headliners, unite around a single champion, fix the wage scales, and blacklist any wrestler who refused to toe the line. Of course, what he was suggesting sounded an awful lot like a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, but they all had friends in high places and wouldn’t be afraid to use them if the need arose.

No sooner had Muchnick left the President Hotel with their collective okay than his fortunes turned. Through the early part of 1949, he presided over a string of sold-out houses. As more promoters began to join the ranks of the Waterloo cartel, which they’d dubbed the National Wrestling Alliance, Thesz could see that he’d been outflanked. Unable to compete for long with the larger group, he broached to Muchnick the idea of merging their two outfits. Muchnick, who still harbored some doubt about the long-term prospects of the NWA and was eager to avoid a protracted battle with Thesz, quickly agreed. There was just one condition: He wanted Thesz to lose a title match to Orville Brown of Kansas City, whom the bosses had selected to wear their cartel’s belt. In the interests of unifying the various factions, Thesz agreed.

As it happened, Brown never made it to their showdown. In early November 1949, he and his business partner, Bobby Bruns, were seriously injured when their car collided head-on with an eighteen-wheeler. (Brown and Bruns had wrestled each other in Des Moines earlier in the night. When the news broke that two “blood enemies” had been traveling together in the same car, it created an instant scandal in the press.) Days later, the cartel held their second convention in St. Louis and voted Thesz in as their new champion.

Thesz was no fool. He knew that one of the best ways to keep from being cheated was to make friends with the athletic commissioners in the towns he played, since they were the only ones who would give him straight answers about the number of tickets that had been sold. Thanks to those relationships, he frequently got 10 percent of the take for each show he worked. (An average wrestler was lucky to get a paycheck, let alone a percentage.) He could have made more, but he insisted on reserving another 3 percent for one of his idols, Ed Lewis.

In the 1920s, every child fan of wrestling aspired to be Ed “Strangler” Lewis, a five-foot-ten mountain with a twenty-two-inch neck whose drawing power was so immense that he demanded and received $125,000 guarantees to perform. The insouciant Lewis cut a wide figure in the social and sports pages, drinking late into the night with friends like Jack Dempsey and then waking up the next afternoon ready to wrestle for four hours at a stretch. Thesz was still making his way up the ladder in 1936 when Lewis happened by the Business Men’s Gym in St. Louis and offered to mix it up with him for fun. Lewis may have been twice as old as Thesz, but he was also twice as fast and dropped him in their first clench. The Hungarian amateur was humiliated, but Lewis provided instant balm, kindly encouraging him to persevere and even calling his father to say it was his considered opinion that the boy would go far. The call quelled any doubts that Thesz’s father, a shoemaker, had about his son’s choice of career.

By the time Lewis was in his fifties, the star had become a tragic figure. He was nearly broke, prone to staph infections from all the time he’d spent on dirty mats, and suffered from an eye disease that was causing him to go blind. Remembering the champ’s kindness, Thesz made it his personal mission to keep Lewis alive and well when he took over the NWA title. He took Lewis away from a job working as a greeter at a Los Angeles athletic club and hired him as advance man with the 3 percent take. The arrangement infuriated the bosses but Thesz held it inviolate, arguing that Lewis’s celebrity and connections helped them in any town they worked, especially in Washington, where he frequently lunched with J. Edgar Hoover.

During the 1950s, the spread of television made Thesz a wealthy man while increasing the powers of the NWA. Celebrity-hungry executives looking for low-cost programming loved pro wrestling; it was easy to understand and inexpensive to produce, requiring only an announcer and a camera focused on a twenty-by-twenty ring. Between 1948 and 1955, each of the three major television networks broadcast wrestling programs at one time or another, with the longest-running one aired by the DuMont Television Network from the Marigold Arena in Chicago.

Those shows hastened the emergence of the wrestler as performer. The greatest
heel heat
(negative crowd response) was generated by wrestlers portraying stereotypical roles of America’s enemies—whether it be Nazi Germany, Japan, the Soviet Union, or later on, Iran or Iraq. A pair of goose-stepping, swastika-sporting Nazis were more likely to hail from Berlin, Wisconsin, than Berlin, Germany. One of the early Nazi heels, Fritz Von Erich, was actually a Texan named Jack Adkisson who had shared the field with Doak Walker at SMU. “Russian” villain Boris Malenko was a Jew from New Jersey named Larry Simon. In some cases, the ethnic terrors were in charge of promoting their own territories. The Sheik of Araby, who used a prayer rug to pray to Allah before each match, was Ed Farhat, a Detroit native who ran things in Michigan.

The first man to break out of this genre was George Raymond Wagner, the son of a house painter from Seward, Nebraska, who perfected the role of the imperious narcissist by dubbing himself Gorgeous George. Forever trailed by a perfume-pumping valet, the villainous George preened around the ring dressed in a lace and fur-trimmed robe, biting ears and gouging eyes and lustily insulting the fans who helped turn him into one of the first icons of television’s golden age. Those were the days of wrestling board games, pulp posters, and cereal prizes, and Wagner was on all of them.

But by the late fifties, the networks had overexposed big-time wrestling and started dropping it from their lineups. The novelty of television wrestling faded, as did George. Shortly before he retired in 1962, the alcohol-ravaged showman opened Gorgeous George’s Ringside Bar in Van Nuys, California, only to sell it off to pay for his hospitalization for liver damage a year later. He died after suffering a heart attack on Christmas Eve in 1963, hours after bumming drinks from the very bartender he’d hired. He was forty-eight years old. The wrestlers he’d once worked with passed around a hat to help bury him in an orchid-colored casket, beside which his last girlfriend, a stripper, collapsed crying.

The men who buried him were members of a closed society that had its own set of rules, even their own way of speaking. Their language hailed from turn-of-the-century carnivals, where house brawlers would take on challengers, also known as
marks
, from the crowd. When the best of them wrestled one another, they couldn’t afford to go at each other for real, lest they get hurt. So they rigged their matches, deciding who’d win beforehand. Since more than a few were already on the lam from the law, conning the public came naturally. They even developed a secret language that allowed them to guard their secret—a pig-Latin dialect called carny. Whenever an outsider was in their midst, they’d quiet each other by saying
kayfabe
. In time,
kayfabe
became a metaphor for the wall of silence that wrestlers built around their business.

The business that employed them took place behind closed doors, in the locker rooms of smoke-filled auditoriums, in the offices of regional promoters, and at the conventions where the power brokers met to choose their world champion. Straight shooters like Thesz called those annual gatherings “meetings of a pack of thieves” for a reason. Most were hustlers who had ice water for blood, and allegiances could shift in the blink of an eye. As for real blood, it was commonplace to use it in this new world for ratings.
Blading
, or cutting one’s self with the tip of a razor blade, not only roiled a rabid audience but allowed less-talented performers to connect with the fans. Those who
got color
(intentionally cut themselves) would get more
green
from their promoters.

Getting green also meant putting up with an endless calendar of one-night stands, making six bucks and spending four while spilling blood on canvasses in dingy union halls, some as far away as western Canada. “Those roads took a lot of people’s lives,” recalled Wayne Coleman, who wrestled as Superstar Billy Graham. “The oil would cover the ice and you couldn’t see anything but black. It was legitimately sixty degrees below zero. Between Calgary and Edmonton and Saskatchewan, you had to stop at these horrible, horrible pit stops for food. It was like living on the edge of the earth.”

On those trips to the middle of nowhere, wrestlers would dream about playing Sunday afternoons at the Chase Hotel in St. Louis, where Muchnick taped three installments of his flagship show,
Wrestling at the Chase
. It was held in the elegant Khorassan Room, in which linen-covered tables were arrayed around the ring and couples arrived in their Sunday best to hear a young sportscaster named Joe Garagiola emcee the show.

Muchnick demanded that his wrestlers behave like gentlemen outside the ring, down to wearing coats and ties on airplanes. He also enforced a widely accepted prohibition against
heels
(villains) and
babyfaces
(heroes) traveling together to maintain the facade, though occasionally a good guy would get caught socializing with an enemy. (He probably never knew that his heels and babyfaces would walk over to the corner of Eighth and Olive streets after a show and party together at the lounge of the Senator Hotel. They figured that since Sam would never be caught entering the joint, neither would they.)

In many cases, the Boys wouldn’t even let their own families in on their secrets about rigged matches and role-playing. Most opponents of the long-haired, earring-wearing ruffian Mario Galento hated working with him because they feared his wife would be at ringside, toting a gun in her purse just in case things got out of hand—which they often did. The promoters who worked with Galento finally had to ask him to
smarten up
his wife by telling her the business was a
work
, or a con. She wouldn’t speak to him for three days after he told her the truth.

The threat of being shot by a family member was rare. But the prospect of being attacked by an irate spectator wasn’t. Women would jump from their seats to stick hat pins into the wrestlers they believed were villains, and their dates might throw rocks or even bottles. One evening in South Carolina, a seventy-eight-year-old fanatic with a hawk-bill knife stabbed one of the great heels, Al Rogowski. Though he received a hundred stitches across thirteen inches of his chest, he refused to be admitted to a hospital and drove back home, returning to the ring a day later.