Wrestling Heritage

By Ray Hulm

Wrestling Heritage welcomes memories, further information and corrections.

---

On the day that I retired from my final job as a lockkeeper I left the following on the wall. …… ” I started work at fifteen years of age. Worked on the river and at sea but I also worked in factories and fields, in the circus and in films. I never achieved much. But I never crossed a picket line. Never judged a fellow worker by their colour or creed Nor sucked up to the bosses for my own ends”….. Pretty much sums it all up.

The Golden Age of Wrestling.
Fact or Fiction?

One of wrestling journalism’s most enduring themes has been the myth of The Golden Age. According to this version of history there was a time when the mat game, if not as pure as the driven snow, was a genuine  competitive sport and at least more  shoot than show. ​

The problem comes when we try to locate this golden age in time. ​

Was it before the war?  Perhaps it was before Ed Lewis rolled over for Wayne Munn or before C B Cochran whispered in Hack’s ear. The more that was discovered about the history  of the game the further into the past this Garden of Eden seemed to recede. The splendid research of people like Ruslan Pashayev and Ron Historyo had got some of us wondering if wrestling was ever on the level. Personally I’m just waiting to be told that Milo of Croton was just another worker, albeit one with a nice bull gimmick. ​

For me at least, a more interesting question is why? Why wrestling? Because although corruption in sport must be as old as gambling, and can certainly be traced from Regency horse racing and prizefighting right up to present day cricket match  fixing scandals, only in wrestling did the worked match become the norm and actually transcend corruption to become a totally dishonest, but much loved form of family entertainment. Only in wrestling. True, the Harlem Globetrotters developed a similar form of worked basketball complete with “house” opponents, comedy routines etc. but  the point is that normal competitive basketball continued to develop regardless of the Globetrotters. Competitive wrestling continued in the amateur sphere of course but the professional game was, and is, completely dominated by show wrestling. ​

My own view about why all this came to pass is that in the first place wrestling is one of the few sports, perhaps the only sport, where exhibitions are more entertaining than the real thing. In the second place, wrestling lends itself to worked  matches in a way that most sports don’t. Just imagine trying to work a boxing or football match. The old pros worked their bouts because they could. 

Wrestling’s (and also old time prize fighting’s) relationship with show business in general, and the circus in particular, is a grand subject for research. We are told that the French circus was the birthplace of worked matches and the last of the  great English bare knuckle fighters Tom Sayers was certainly involved in that other ring.​

It must seem at times that after a decades work Wrestling Heritage has more or less cracked it and there is not much more to know about the early days of the mat game. Nothing could be further from the truth I reckon. There’s enough unsolved  mystery left to see us lot out.

There are two elements to fights being worked , one for money and betting in the fields of Lancashire and the other for entertainment in the Music Halls.​

My own version of a Golden Age is those days when we more or less believed that the results were real and any clowning about was because they were good enough to do so. We thought champions were champions and rivals only met a handful of times over many years.​

Digital newspapers have well and truly exposed how much smaller rosters were and how they were kept fresh by spreading bouts about the country in different towns. How they worked the match, the return match and then the grudge match and then it was just about exhausted in that town, but little did we know they did it in a dozen more. That for me is a  Golden deception in a Golden age.​

And for every true character  from another country, there were probably another two made up from the local area. Vic Hessle and Henry Pierlot and Bobo Matu being great examples.​

That colour made it a golden age.​

I have never stopped watching wrestling , I still enjoy it. I won’t go to live wrestling again anymore than I would bother with live Football. It’s part of life’s journey for me that there was a magic impressionable age.​

Today on Heritage there is a real danger that it has all been said. There are a few of us left who want to talk about the 1950’s and 1960’s and even history before that. On a private note I would like to unmask the Ghoul for Bernard , I would like to know who Wild Tarzan was, I would like all that TV footage from the 1950’s back on TV , even Stampede Wrestling.​

The country is still full of old folks homes and plenty of people over 90 who must have memories for this site.​

Think about it guys, is there anyone you know who might have memories of a Golden Age?

Here is an interesting note from the Los Angeles Times in 1901:​

“…Dec. 29, 1901–San Francisco, CA: Thiebaud Bauer died at age 47. Bauer was credited with being the first masked wrestler who brought the Greco-Roman style of wrestling from Europe to America in 1874. Unable to find Greco-Roman style wrestlers in New York City, he moved to San Francisco where he wrestled a number of matches with Professor William Miller that made the style the talk of America. During this period, Bauer claimed the World Greco-Roman Title. By May 1875, the two were kicked out of San Francisco for working matches. Bauer, and Miller then worked their way across American ripping off gamblers, until they reached New York City. On January 19, 1880, Bauer dropped his GR World Title to William Muldoon, an even bigger form of worker, who became one of the most famous wrestlers in history…” 

There’s a fun project at​

wrestlingperspective.com/working.html

It’s an attempt to gather together early examples of newspapers questioning wrestling’s reality or asserting it was not on the level. There’s speculation in the 1860s and by 1877 they are flat out discussing that the finishes are worked.

​5160

---