The Paranoid Shoot-Style in American Pro Wrestling

Jon Langmead’s Ballyhoo!; plus, matches of the year

Jon Langmead’s Ballyhoo! The Roughhousers, Con Artists, and Wildmen Who Invented Professional Wrestling (University of Missouri Press) is the book about the early history of the sport the general public has needed for decades—but who’s the general public? The general wrestling public mostly wants to watch wrestlers, and, on occasion, wrestling; it would be challenging to get even the fan who knows who the “Bruno” Michael Cole sometimes mentions in hushed tones to read about, say, Frank Gotch, of whom no footage is known to survive. So first and foremost this book is for those who already have an interest in the subject: the twenty or so people who research the topic through newspaper clippings and memoirs, plus the somewhat larger group who read their work on message boards like Wrestling Classics and in largely self-published books. (Langmead dedicates his book to historian Steve Yohe, and if that name means anything to you, you’ve probably bought it already.) As a hook for them, Ballyhoo! is styled as a biography of Jack Curley, the all-time most important wrestling promoter not currently accused of sex trafficking; they’ll appreciate this as a research synthesis that Langmead constructs with the same professionalism he displays in his night job as drummer for the Paranoid Style. But an important secondary audience should be those interested in the American public’s relationship to “kayfabe”—a term not used in the book, as it would be an anachronism—how can something that’s transparently a con remain compelling? This has rarely been irrelevant to American politics; Langmead starts his preface several Sazeracs into a night with Huey Long, one of Curley’s numerous Presidential candidate buddies (the most surprising: Eugene Debs.)

Match of the year (1900) as presented by Georges Méliès: work or shoot?

One thing this book should settle, but probably won’t, is that the prelapsarian age when pro wrestling consisted of genuine contests lasted about ten minutes; Langmead describes an 1875 match that the San Francisco Chronicle called “a job, a palpable job.” If the initial impetus for fixing fights was to swindle gamblers, it soon became apparent that matches without some predetermination had a tendency to be unacceptably violent, or worse, boring. The degree to which ticket-buyers knew that what they were seeing wasn’t on the level is unknowable. I suspect that many in a given audience thought that wrestling was fake, except for the match they were there to see, which was real. To be fair, sometimes they were right. The biggest match of 1908, pitting Estonia-born world champion George Hackenschmidt against Iowan Frank Gotch, was probably a legitimate contest given the degree of scratching and gouging reported. Hackenschmidt quit, and Gotch became an American hero.

Curley, who claimed to have been born in San Francisco on July 4th, 1876, the nation’s centennial (even Louis Armstrong might have rolled his eyes at that one), knew this meant money. After riding the rails to a gym in Chicago and falling into the boxing and wrestling worlds, he began putting shows together. Ballyhoo’s dual mandate as a history and biography means it can get muddled as to which major achievements were Curley’s, so let’s set them out here: his great wrestling promotions were the Gotch-Hackenschmidt rematch; his 1918-20 Madison Square Garden-based run rotating and keeping satisfied a cast of big guys with big egos; and his run with “Golden Greek” Jim Londos in the early 1930s. (In boxing, he put together the fight between Jack Johnson and OG Great White Hope Jess Willard in Havana; his non-fighting clients included Bill Tilden and Rudolph Valentino.) By 1911, Gotch rivaled Johnson as America’s most famous American athlete, and if Hackenschmidt wasn’t in the shape he was three years earlier, the public didn’t need to know that in advance. Between 20,000 and 30,000 fans filled Comiskey Park in Chicago; adjusted for inflation, it’s plausible the box office take remained the sport’s record until WrestleMania III. The match itself was a debacle. Hackenschmidt showed up clearly injured, and the Chicago Police Department cancelled all bets before Gotch made short work of the former champ. With the crowd feeling somewhere between unsatisfied and swindled, Chicago was killed off as a wrestling town for years. Langmead captures a police officer’s sentiment: “If it had been a fake, he said, it would have been more exciting.”

After falling out with Johnson over movie rights, Curley set up shop in New York, and some way or another secured the cooperation of the east’s major wrestlers and promoters, not to mention some of the sportswriters. The big four stars at the time were paranoid farm boy Joe Stecher, anointed as Gotch’s successor before Gotch retired and then died without giving him the win; his longtime rival, heavyset headlock king Ed “Strangler” Lewis; Polish strongman Wladek Zbyszko; and former amateur champ Earl Caddock, who upset Stecher for the main line of the world title in 1917. New York banned boxing that year, and Curley oversaw a wrestling boom that included innovations like time limits (Stecher and Lewis previously fought to an infamously boring five-hour draw stopped by its referee “in the name of humanity.”) He sold out Madison Square Garden seven times while keeping his headliners placated when they weren’t drafted into military service, trading multiple claims to the heavyweight championship between them. The era peaked with Stecher beating Caddock in Janaury 1920 to finally become the undisputed champion. Remarkably, 25 minutes of footage of that match survives, albeit in poor quality. It’s difficult for even someone who’s going to praise an hour-long grappling match a few hundred words from now to call the wrestling “entertaining”; likely the importance of making the contest look legitimate trumped the desire for action. Later that year, New York reinstated boxing, then established an athletic commission that would also oversee wrestling; Curley found himself unlicensed for some years.

While Curley was on the outs, promoters like Billy Sandow and Paul Bowser took a more relaxed attitude towards realism, allowing a more theatrical style and pushing former college football stars as champs in the ring, which carried the substantial risk of an opponent booked to lose deciding to go into business for himself. The result was the splintering of the world championship, with all manner of claimants arising. Heavily in debt in the late 1920s, Curley had his largest gold strike when he put his version of the title on Jim Londos in 1930. The muscular Greek-born Londos had long been a draw, but was thought too small to be a credible champion until promoters stopped being paranoid about credibility. What followed was the sport’s most impressive box office run until Hulk Hogan, as Londos drew big crowds week in and week out. In contrast to wrestlers of the Stecher-Caddock ilk, it’s easy to see Londos’s appeal with modern eyes. Langmead puts it well— “he used his body to connect with spectators across vast arenas. He could communicate joy or agony through his pained facial expressions and exuberant leaps”—as did Damon Runyon—“he has more grace, more rhythm, more poetry of motion than any other [wrestler] of my observation.” The 5’8” Londos proved too big for Curley or anyone else to control, strong-arming his way into independence and drawing crowds for decades before retiring to his orchard in SoCal in one of wrestling’s few happy endings. After one final short run of superprofits through Irish fighter Danno O’Mahony, and one last double-cross, wrestling’s credibility collapsed in a series of investigations and exposés. It would be long after Curley’s 1937 death that the sport would return to mass popularity with the rise of television. With wrestling history periodically rewritten by the self-interested, Curley faded from institutional memory until a push by historians led by Yohe got him into the Wrestling Observer Hall of Fame in 2002.

Langmead recounts all this without assuming any previous knowledge of the era or of wrestling jargon. Those new to the subject will get to hear much-told stories, like those of the Masked Marvel or Wayne Munn, for the first time, and those who’ve heard them before may find Langmead’s tellings to be the most compelling—I love wrestling historians, but their prose styles are often optimized for message board posting. The Johnson chapter is particularly fine: both he and Curley were far from saints, but there’s a heroism in the lengths they were willing to go to to make some money out of a boxing match (at one point, Curley was negotiating with Pancho Villa.) Intrigue is in abundance, and any streaming company in search of an idea for their next prestige series could do worse than to get in touch with Langmead. Call Steve Yohe, too.

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Top ten matches of 2023

No WWE because I don’t feel like praising anyone over there at the moment (not that there’s much I would’ve considered.)

1. Kenichiro Arai vs. GENTARO, 2 out of 3 falls, Mutoha Pro Wrestling 2/5/23

A 60-minute grappling epic isn’t for everyone, but for us sickos this is as rewarding a mat-based match as the 21st century has seen. GENTARO is a strong-limbed technician who’s capable of bursts of meathead mode; the jumpsuited champion Arai is a slippery customer who’s mastered the minor dark arts of joint manipulation and of using whatever appendage he has free to discomfort his opponent. With a hour to play with, there’s plenty of time to tell little stories—a long headscissors sequence in the first half pays off unexpectedly deep in the match—but the joy is more in the moment-to-moment jockeying than in the overall narrative. The culmination is a battle of Figure 4s where they both struggle to find ways to inflict just a little more pain on the other, regardless of their own position. You can buy this match from itako18jp on Twitter for 660 yen (that’s 11 yen per minute.)

2. Fuminori Abe/Takuya Nomura vs. Hideki Suzuki/Mitsuru Sato, Big Japan Pro Wrestling 10/22/23

The Astronauts’ (Abe and Nomura) run with the BJW belts was the best tag team title run in at least a decade (plus they promoted their own show, on which they beat each other bloody, as best friends do.) Their general formula is simple: Nomura’s a babyface who’s immensely sympathetic yet credible; Abe fights with a chip on his shoulder the size of which is not uncommon among those of us who are Jim Londos’s height. Good opponents can force variations out of them; in this case, Abe and Sato ties each other up for much of the end game, and Nomura’s forced to bite his way out of Hideki “I can’t believe I got WWE money for a year” Suzuki’s onslaught.

3. Jon Moxley vs. Orange Cassidy, AEW All Out 9/3/23

Cassidy’s journey from Chikara’s-not-dead comedy guy to babyface workhorse has been one of the better stories AEW’s told. This is a middle chapter: Moxley’s violence (or Orange’s blood) awakens something vicious in Cassidy that he doesn’t quite know what to do with, and we get the year’s best going out on your shield sequence. As with most wrestling stories, the ending may not be entirely satisfactory; it’s the journey.

4 & 5. La Brava Rebel vs. Sadika and Avisman vs. Solar, Lucha Memes vs. Zona 23 10/21/23

The duality of indie lucha. Avisman (age 49) and Solar (67) grind each other through innumerable exotic submissions. Despite Avisman’s theatrical yelping and Solar’s discomfort at having his aging body stretched out of shape, there’s a beauty to the flow. Later in the night, Sadika and La Rebel shower each other and a substantial proportion of the crowd in assorted beverages and glass. The kind of match which results in a puddle that you’re not sure whether to call beer filled with blood or blood filled with beer.

6. El Hijo del Vikingo vs. Kenny Omega, AEW Dynamite 3/22/23

Weird year for Vikingo. His home promotion, AAA, went to shit; meanwhile, his first AEW appearance appeared to instantly make him a star in the U.S. In addition to still being the most spectacular high-flyer in wrestling, this match showed that in the right situation with the right opponent (and plenty of credit to Omega for knowing his role was to play base and make his bumps look as potentially crippling as possible) he could string his spots into a genuinely dramatic match. Most of Vikingo’s subsequent AEW matches have been on Rampage, their C-show. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

7. Fujita “Jr.” Hayato vs. Takanori Ito, GLEAT Ver.6 7/1/23

Even if you don’t know how the UWF point system works, the in-match story is simple: can Hayato get his guillotine choke to stick before Ito KOs him? The backstory is Hayato was out for four years fighting cancer, and every time he gets up from a knockdown, he has a huge shit-eating grin letting you how happy he is to be there. Hayato’s cancer has returned; I have no idea if he’ll wrestle again, but I hope he grins like that again.

8. Bryan Danielson vs. Zack Sabre Jr., AEW WrestleDream 10/1/23

Danielson and Moxley are the best commentators on each other’s matches. Here, apart from claiming Danielson’s movements derive from tantric sex stuff, Moxley gets across the storyline that 7-time Bryan Danielson Award-winner Sabre is the more offensive mat wrestler, while 12-time Bryan Danielson Award-winner Danielson is more reactive; it’s partly true, which is enough, and the two of them wrestle to it. Might’ve been actual match of the year five years ago before Sabre got New Japan-ized, but still great.

9. Eddie Kingston vs. Bryan Danielson, AEW Dynamite 12/27/23

“Have the best two wrestlers in America fight multiple times” doesn’t require booking genius; if they’ve despised each other for decades, that’s a bonus. Here, Danielson lets his disdain control him instead of utilizing it. Tonight’s rematch seems like a good bet to make this list next year (though if you’ve learned anything from this post, it should be “don’t bet on wrestling.”)

10. Hechicero vs. Soberano Jr., NJPW/CMLL FantasticaMania 2/28/23

Lucha dorks like Danielson and me have long known that Hechicero’s one of the best in the world, not least for his versatility: here, as is standard in his CMLL matches, he only shows glimpses of his mat skills and focuses on being the strongest base in his promotion. Soberano, to my surprise, was also one of the best wrestlers in the world in 2023, and maybe was even better later in the year after turning rudo; even as a face here, Hechicero isn’t going to let him get indulgent.