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The Buzz on Professional Wrestling: Book Excerpt

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SLAM! Wrestling is excited to offer you an excerpt from the upcoming paperback book from Lebhar-Friedman Books called The Buzz on Professional Wrestling. Here’s their sell line:

Professional wrestling. Fake? Tell that to those who’ve been body-slammed, piled-driven, or cracked over the head with a “steel” chair. Okay, maybe, wrestling is fake, but The Buzz on Professional Wrestling isn’t. From old timers like Gorgeous George and Bruno Sammartino to new hotshots like the Rock, Triple H, and Goldberg, from alliances and counter alliances like DX and nWo, from babes like Chyna to bimbos like Kimberly, The Buzz on Professional Wrestling by Scott Keith is your private pay-per-view.

Excerpted chapter:
WRESTLING HISTORY
By Scott Keith

While it can be argued that nearly everything in wrestling that has ever happened or ever will happen can be traced back to the sport’s origins in the late 1800s (and even more primitive origins since the dawn of man), it’s often hard to substantiate anything said from before 1960 or so due to the notoriously fluid state of the “truth” in wrestling and the general lack of records on the part of those involved.

There are, however, a few things about wrestling’s wonder years that we do know for certain:

1) There is no point in the history of wrestling where you can nostalgically look back and say that “it wasn’t fake.” It was always predetermined, but it used to be much more purely athletic and lacking in story lines, so the illusion of realism was easier to create. “Lou Thesz loses to Wilbur Snyder” was pretty straightforward, and all the motivations for the next show stemmed from the wrestling in the previous one. Thesz lost, so now he wants revenge. QED. If you really feel like going back far enough, you could say that the earliest professional matches with legitimate Olympic stars like George Hackenschmidt, at the turn of the century, were likely “real,” but then they also lasted two or three hours and featured long stretches with both men lying on the mat in a headlock, so it’s somewhat of a moot point to begin with. Suffice it to say that by 1925, when Stanislaus Zbyszko won the World title against the wishes of the promoter, “fake” aspect of the sport was already ingrained enough that this burst of reality was, indeed, a rare occurrence.

2) The first time that there was a real and tangible World Heavyweight title in pro wrestling was 1948, with the formation of the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA), which had the support of dozens of local promoters around North America. Claims are frequently made by the remnants of this once-great organization today about that title dating back to 1904, but this is roughly on par with Hollywood claiming that Braveheart is legally binding proof of William Wallace’s actions four centuries ago-merely a fanciful invention of the imagination of the creators, and nothing more.

3) Pro wrestling was absolutely not staged in the bingo halls and smoky bars that some would have you believe it was prior to the early ’80s. In fact, the WWF themselves released tapes on their Coliseum Video label showing old matches held in the ’60s or earlier, featuring arenas holding upwards of 30,000 people without the benefit of “sports entertainment” to fill them. The “smoky bars” line (fed to the press on a seemingly daily basis) was an invention of the early ’90s, when the WWF was going through a very rough financial period and was reduced to doing the wrestling equivalent of barnstormin — minor-league hockey arenas, convention centers, and other humble venues — and thus needed a convenient comparison point. And so the excuse of “Sure, it looks bad now, but even 10 years ago this company was doing bingo halls….” was born. Hulk Hogan, who is often heralded as the savior of wrestling from such small beginnings, was himself on the undercard of a show in 1982 that drew more than 50,000 people to New York’s Shea Stadium to see Bruno Sammartino face rival Larry Zbyszko. And the “Hogan and the WWF saved wrestling” argument doesn’t even take the influence of Japan into account, where tens of thousands of people flocking to see wrestling was a regular occurrence before any of them had even heard of Hogan.

With those notions out of the way, let’s talk about the NWA. Pretty much everything that ever happened up until the 1990s can be related to that organization.

In this age of having only two major promotions (World Championship Wrestling and the World Wrestling Federation), it’s hard to fathom, but before 1948 there used to be dozens of different promotions, manned by an equal number of promoters, covering just about every square inch of America once wrestling got hot after the Great Depression.

No problem, more money for everyone, right? Right-up until a point. Today It’s second nature in wrestling, or even boxing, for the focal point of a match to be the title at stake < the right to say that one man is better than the other and have the belt to back it up. It’s a very manly thing.

However,”Southeast Georgia mid-heavyweight champion” just didn’t have that money-making ring to it, and further, it didn’t have the kind of scope that the sheer bombast of wrestling pretty much demands by itself. So in the very early part of the century, a lot of promoters came to the exact same conclusion at the same time: We need a world champion. Trouble is, all of them started claiming that their champion was the one, leading to situations like a promoter in San Francisco claiming his guy was the world champion, despite that champion never having left San Francisco! This was fairly common, happening all over the country.

A note on world titles before we go any further: It is generally accepted that there are five titles in wrestling as of the year 2000 that are true world titles: The WWF championship, the WCW World title, the ECW World title, All Japan’s Triple Crown, and New Japan’s IWGP title. Any other claims to a world title at this point are dubious at best. The WWF does not refer to theirs as a world title-the kayfabed reason is that “World Wrestling Federation World champion” is redundant. The true reason is that they just like to be pretentious and hold their title above the rest. Whatever the reason, wherever the WWF is concerned in this book the terms “WWF title” and “World title” are considered interchangeable.

Some of the individual promotions’ titles were generally accepted as bigger than others, mainly because the people who held them had more drawing power. Former weightlifting champion George Hackenschmidt brought instant credibility to his claim as a champion, as did such major stars as Ed “Strangler” Lewis. The problem was not merely one of credibility, it was actual legitimacy of the title itself. It was fine for the fans to think that Lewis was the only true champion, but what if he lost the title? Would that title retain the same legitimacy just because someone beat him for it, or would the result be in doubt enough that people would still consider Lewis to be the rightful champion, since it was a self-proclaimed title rather than a crowning by the promotion. This problem actually went on for a good 40 years before legal reasons solved it.

In 1947, several Midwest promoters attempted to get around the extremely strict anti-trust laws of the time by forming an alliance (instead of merging into one monopoly) and recognizing a single world champion between the various promotions. This uber-promotion became known as the National Wrestling Alliance (or NWA for short) and would last for more than 50 years as a major force in wrestling. The first champion as named by the NWA was (not coincidentally) group member Orville Brown, and the most widely accepted of the “other” world champions left was National Wrestling Assocation champion Lou Thesz. A match was scheduled between Brown and Thesz to unify the titles, but a car accident ended Brown’s career before that could happen and Thesz was awarded the NWA World title on November 25, 1949, his first of six.

Nearly every major happening that occurred between 1950 and the start of the “modern era” was because of something that the NWA did.

By the late 1950s, other promoters had aspirations of covering the kind of area that the NWA did. The only major strongholds of wrestling not covered by the NWA at that point were the northern regions (which were in kind of a tenuous love-hate partnership with the NWA) and the Northeast (which were ruled unquestionably by Toots Mondt and Vince McMahon, Sr., who in turn could be called faithful NWA members in the same sense that Frank Gifford could be called a faithful husband). The fact that McMahon controlled the all-important New York market (and specifically Madison Square Garden) was a sore spot that haunted the NWA for years to come.

The first real sign of trouble with the NWA’s “undisputed” world title came in 1957, as Eduardo Carpentier defeated Lou Thesz to win the belt in a best-of-three falls match (the standard for title matches at that time). However, one of the falls was decided on a DQ, so one group of NWA Promoters chose not to recognize that title switch, while another group (led by Nebraska promoter Wally Karbo) chose not only to recognize Carpentier, but to continue recognizing that claim when Minnesota amateur wrestling legend Verne Gagne won the title from him in 1958. The situation worsened until finally Karbo’s group (led, not coincidentally, by Gagne himself) split off in dramatic fashion to form the American Wrestling Association (or AWA for short), the first major challenger to the NWA’s dominance of wrestling in America. Verne Gagne was given the first AWA World title, shocking no one. The AWA lasted some 40 years before folding in 1991 for monetary reasons.

A more dramatic and earthshaking change came when the NWA in the early ’60s put their title on Buddy Rogers, who until that point had been the exclusive property of Toots Mondt in the Northeast. Toots rarely let Rogers defend that title outside of his territory, and indeed, when the time came for Lou Thesz to win the NWA title back, Toots (and mastermind Vince McMahon) simply refused to recognize that switch, and (in wrestling terms) dared the NWA to do something about it. They didn’t, and in April 1963, they split from the NWA and formed the third major promotion in the U.S.: The World Wide Wrestling Federation, which today is the worldwide juggernaut simply known as the WWF. Rogers “won” the first WWWF World title in Rio de Janeiro in a tournament of which no footage exists (wink, wink), but his reign was short-lived, as heart problems forced him to drop that title to rising star Bruno Sammartino later that year in a 43-second match. Bruno would hold that title for an amazing eight years, selling out arenas all over the eastern seaboard.

While the upstart WWWF and AWA each boasted their own version of the World title, it was agreed by everyone outside the business that the NWA was the true class of the wrestling promotions. While the WWWF had a tendency to focus on showmanship and musclemen like Sammartino, and the AWA was essentially Verne Gagne’s one-man show, the NWA featured the best wrestling action and biggest stars night after night. In fact, the WWWF actually rejoined the NWA in the early ’70s during rough financial times and accepted a demotion of their world title to a lesser status. At the same time, however, something very big was happening that no one at the time really understood yet.

Vince McMahon’s son, Vince Jr., had been a part of the WWWF promotion since he was a teenager. His main role was on-screen announcer and interviewer, but he did some work behind the scenes as well in preparation to inherit the family business when his father passed away. Up until that point, there was rivalry between the promotions and old grudges carried from years past, but everyone generally behaved themselves. Vince, however, had different ideas.

When he assumed control of his father’s Capitol Sports Group in 1979, the first thing he did was buy out his father’s share completely, along with those of longtime employees Robert Marella (better known as Gorilla Monsoon) and Pat Patterson, then dropped the ‘Wide’ from the company name, officially renaming the promotion the World Wrestling Federation. He also dissolved the Capitol Sports Group and replaced it with Titan Sports Inc. By 1983, he found the laws and regulations of the NWA too restrictive, so he quit the group and started picking fights with NWA promoters over territorial rights. When he split from the NWA, he restored the WWF title to world title status, then took the title off six-year reigning champion Bob Backlund and put it on evil foreigner the Iron Sheik, in preparation for a change that would send shock waves throughout the business and forever alter the public perception of wrestling, making him millions of dollars in the process. You may have heard of the guy who he picked to lead the way – Hulk Hogan.

Take a trip through wrestling’s past and peer into its future with our time capsule of heroic highlights.

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