REAL NAME: Edmund R. Quinn
BORN: 1906 in Waltham, MA
DIED: December 14, 1965
Eddie Quinn was the long-time wrestling and boxing promoter in Montreal.
Growing up in Massachusetts, he was a boxer as a youth, and was later a taxi driver.
In the 1930s, he got involved in promoting in Massachusetts but it wasn’t until 1939, when he was granted the rights to run Montreal by the Montreal Athletic Commission, that he made it big.
Eddie Quinn, Killer Kowalski, Yvon Robert Sr. Courtesy Paul LeDuc
Jack Ganson was the promoter before Quinn in Montreal, and he tried to run a fairly clean, upstanding show. Quinn instead brought back the show, the shenanigans and the mayhem.
Quinn took wrestling to unforeseen heights in Montreal, and stuck with it during its ups and downs. He made wrestling the number two spectator sport in Quebec (after hockey, of course).
Out of his Canadian Athletic Promotions office, Quinn ran shows throughout Quebec and into New England, as well as helping out other promoters across the country.
His star for much of the time was Yvon Robert, who held the world title for a while. Other big names who worked regularly in Montreal were Edouard Carpentier, Yukon Eric, and Killer Kowalski.
A three-match series with Robert against Gorgeous George was likely the peak of Montreal promotion at the time.
He was the promoter when Killer Kowalski took off Yukon Eric’s ear with a knee-drop in 1953.
In 1959, he ran a incredibly success mixed match with former boxing champ Jersey Joe Walcott against Nature Boy Buddy Rogers. Walcott quit in the third round when Rogers got into his legs.
From the 1960s on, he used Bob ‘Legs’ Langevin as his figurehead promoter, while he controlled the purse-strings backstage.
“I was the promoter in Montreal, but Quinn put the money,” remembered Langevin for SLAM! Wrestling. “He needed a responsible person to be a promoter, that he could talk to and everything.”
Quinn died in December 1965 of a cerebral hemorrhage in the Hobb Nursing Home in Northhampton, N.H., a facility that he and his wife, Gertrude, had bought when he retired from the Montreal sporting life.
