Shooters

Jonathan Snowden

Description

Shooters tells the stories of athletes like Brock Lesnar and Bobby Lashley, men who have lived their lives on the border between 'works' and 'shoots', between the routines of the professional wrestling circuit and the legitimate confrontations that made their reputations. From catch wrestling masters Ad Santel and Billy Robinson to pro-wrestling icons like Strangler Lewis and Lou Thesz, from Olympic heroes Danny Hodge and Kurt Angle, Shooters takes readers from the shadowy carnival tent and the dingy training hall to the bright lights of the squared circle.

Sujets

• Lucha libre profesional
• Wrestling

Informations

• Publié par: Ecw Press
• Date de parution: 09 août 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781770902213
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Table of Contents
COVER INTRO 1| MULDOON and the Dawn of AMERICAN WRESTLING 2| THE UNCIVILIZED Import: CATCH-AS-CATCH-CAN 3| “FARMER” BURNS 4| JENKINS, THE TURK, and the AMERICAN TITLE 5| THE RUSSIAN Lion ROARS 6| OLD WORLD vs. NEW WORLD: Gotch vs. Hackenschmidt 7| From the KODOKAN to the COUNT of COMBAT: Mitsuyo Maeda 8| A WORLD Without HEROES 9| POLICEMEN, TRUSTBUSTERS, and the Double Cross 10| THESZ 11| THE REVOLUTION Will Be TELEVISED 12| THE GREAT DANNY HODGE 13| NO ONE BEFORE KIMURA, and No One After 14| WIGAN 15| JUDO GENE and Bad News 16| THE INOKI LEGEND BORN 17| BRISCO: The Last of His Kind 18| THE UWF and Shoot Style 19| THE NEXT LEVEL: The Shoot-style Revolution 20| UFC: No Holds Barred 21| FIGHTING for PRIDE 22| SAKU 23| BRAWL for ALL 24| YOUR OLYMPIC HERO: Kurt Angle 25| THE NEXT BIG THING 26| WRESTLING INVASION 27| THE FUTURE SOURCES ACKNOWLEGMENTS ABOUT the AUTHOR COPYRIGHT




INTRO
Wrestling may be the only universal sport. It transcends culture, race, and creed. The art form has been passed down all over the world, each country doing things just a little differently. The Greeks perfected brutal submission holds. In Switzerland and Iceland, they wrestled with their belts on, concentrating on throwing opponents with this handle rather than grappling on the ground. The Egyptians thought wrestling form important enough to preserve it on pottery. Turks bathed in oil before pushing each other around, accompanied by increasingly frantic music. On the American frontier, rough and tumble grapplers would often wrestle until one of the men had their eye gouged out.
Kings wrestled. So did battlefield generals and American presidents. Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great were both big believers in the art of wrestling. Even the angels wrestled in the Bible. There are many great wrestling stories to be told, but we’ll focus on just one — the tale of the sport’s true toughmen.
Tales of toughmen, of great fighters, are often tall to begin with. But they tend to grow taller with every subsequent retelling. The odds get longer, the foes grow ever bigger and more dangerous, and contests that lasted mere moments are turned by memory and by legend into epic struggles that lasted hours. We have a shared impulse, a kind of collective desire, to transform even the best among us into even better versions of themselves. It’s not enough to have been a strong fighter with a record of fine victories; we demand ever greater heroes with ever greater triumphs, and we get them in the stories we tell.
Shooters traces those stories back to the men behind the myths, following the evolution of a sport that combined art and entertainment, skill and spectacle long before the WWE and UFC. Our story takes us around the world, from Japan to America and back again, and south to Brazil and back again. It all begins in the New York of the 1880s, at the dawn of professional wrestling.




1
MULDOON and the Dawn of AMERICAN WRESTLING
William Muldoon was built like a Greek God. In an era that saw women afraid to reveal even their ankles beneath a long skirt, the “Solid Man” wasn’t afraid to show a little skin. Even as far back as the 1880s, at the dawn of professionalism in sports, wrestlers already needed gimmicks to sell bouts to the masses. Muldoon, for his part, was leading the way. He was a gifted wrestler but a better salesman. His gimmick was dressing as a Roman gladiator. Before bouts he was photographed in a loincloth and sandals, often naked from the waist up.
He was a man who knew gimmicks, and with the gladiator getup, he was taking iconography to the next level. Donald Mrozek, author of Sport and American Mentality 1880–1910 , thinks Muldoon was onto something that resonated with his audience. Muldoon’s costumes suggested that he was something more than a mere man. His sculpted body was the proof:
Closely tailored and spare, Muldoon’s costume emphasized his good proportions and well-developed physique. It not only had the practical advantage of freeing him of encumbrances for wrestling; it was a way of calling great attention to the attributes of his body apart from his physical performance. As much as it constituted an aid to Muldoon’s performance in the ring by its sparsity and an assist to his image by flattering his impressive physique, Muldoon’s costume was the feathering of a peacock, the uninhibited flaunting of the body in general and the male body in particular.
Muldoon had first learned to use that rock solid body in the Union Army during the Civil War. Just a boy when he enlisted, Muldoon had essentially grown to manhood in raucous Army camps. The Union in particular often whittled away long hours with impromptu as well as organized wrestling contests. It’s said that wrestling was such a big part of life in the Army that General Ulysses S. Grant had to apologize to Confederate leader Robert E. Lee when Lee came to Appomatox to surrender. Grant’s tent, it seems, was in disarray:
“Pay no attention to things, Bob,” the General said, “me and some of the boys were having a wrestling match in here last night.”
Muldoon was one of the very best grapplers in the Union Army and never gave up the sport. Not ready to give up the soldiering life either, he volunteered on the French side during the Franco-Prussian War in 1871. It was there that he was introduced to Greco-Roman wrestling. Developed in France and quickly spreading throughout the European continent, it was a style well suited for a man with Muldoon’s physical gifts. Never the quickest or most skilled, what Muldoon did have going for him was size and strength. Greco, which prohibited holds below the waist, was the perfect style for a man of his statuesque proportions.
When he returned to New York in 1876, he settled into a career as a police officer. Even as he progressed to the rank of detective, wrestling was never far from his thoughts. His home base was Harry Hill’s saloon, known for comely barmaids, nefarious characters, and equally nefarious prizefights. Muldoon became acquainted with boxing at Harry Hill’s, but it was wrestling where he made his mark. The boxing matches were illegal, so it was easier to strip to the waist and grapple — especially for a police officer making a few extra bucks. For a prize between $5 and $10, Muldoon would wrestle anyone who dared.
Muldoon soon took his act on the road, the first step towards wrestling’s demise as a legitimate sport. At these vaudeville shows, often contested on the same stages that housed plays and other high art, the goal was to entertain — and to convince the audience into putting their money down on side bets. Professional wrestling’s secret isn’t that it once featured real contests and later shifted towards entertainment. The real secret is that, from Muldoon’s time forward, professional wrestling was never a legitimate sport. Very early on, powerful promoters took hold of the sport, and money became the primary motivator. Even before Muldoon’s reign as champion, fans and critics were already decrying a sport that was anything but pure. The Brooklyn Eagle contends that wrestling bouts were being scripted all the way back in the 1870s, singling out a match between Frenchman Thiebaud Bauer and “Professor” William Miller:
There is probably no sport before the public — not even excepting professional billiard playing — in which there has been so much regular “hippodroming” and crookedness practiced as in the wrestling arena within the past two or three years. There has scarcely been an important contest in which the result has not been known beforehand. A system of humbug has been carried on in the form of creating a supposed bitter rivalry between prominent wrestlers, in order to get up an excitement, and matches have been arranged which have been alleged to be for thousands of dollars a side, when not a dollar has been put up on either side, the contest being one for the gate money alone, and that is equally divided, the betting deciding as to which party should win. The men have been found guilty of it and in one case the knavery was publicly exposed out West. But still the people are being gulled by these so-called championship wrestling matches. The latest contest in the wrestling arena was that between Miller and Bauer at Boston last night, in which Miller was defeated, Bauer winning in one fall. The usual $1,000 challenge followed, and another profitable gate money match will be arranged. Pools were sold at Boston on the match, in which Miller was the favorite with those not behind the scores, he being the strongest man and the best wrestler. The fact is nothing has been such a blight on honest sport as the curse of the pool box. It has almost killed professional billiards in the Metropolis; has broken into the healthy life of baseball; driven professional oarsmen out of the arena, and brought odium upon every sport with which it has been connected. But for the pool rooms of Chicago and St. Louis — encouraged by the local press there — there would have been no such crookedness in the Western baseball nines, which recent developments have disclosed.
Bauer would lose a rematch to Miller, giving up two of three falls for the princely sum of $500. Muldoon, while later becoming a very serious man and the head of the New York State Athletic Commission, wasn’t above that kind of tomfoolery in his own nascent wrestling career. He worked closely with the above mentioned Miller in a series of bouts in 1878 and was caught by police detective Thomas Adams and the New York Times trying to work a match with Bauer to build up his name:
Muldoon attempted to perpetrate a little dodge on the public by making an arrangement with the wrestler Bauer to appear at the entertainment in a match with him, it being prearranged that Muldoon should throw Bauer, and thus enlarge upon h