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CHAPTER 1

The Origins of Sports Entertainment

Introduction

In February 1989, Vince McMahon burst everyone's bubble by acknowledging that pro wrestling was sports entertainment, with emphasis on the word "entertainment." McMahon's World Wrestling Federation wanted to get out from under the auspices of the New Jersey Athletic Commission and its levy on sports TV revenues. The WWF told the state senate that professional wrestling was "an activity in which participants struggle hand-in-hand primarily for the purpose of providing entertainment to spectators rather than conducting a bona fide athletic contest." Wrestlers and wrestling fans who'd been defending the sport's legitimacy collectively moaned. "They've got a cartoon going there," scoffed long-time star Verne Gagne, owner of the rival American Wrestling Association. "Sure there was entertainment when we wrestled, but most of us were real wrestlers."

Actually, McMahon was only about 100 years late to the party. Pro wrestling was athletic, or sports, entertainment from the get-go. And he wasn't the first promoter/confessor. In 1886, Charles E. "Parson" Davies came under fire from a citizens' decency group that attacked his Chicago boxing and wrestling promotions as "barbarous and immoral." Davies was indignant — read this carefully — saying he presented "refined, well-conducted, athletic entertainments ... Why, all the exhibitions we have here are boy-play compared to what they have in some other cities."

Northwest promoter C.L. "Steve" McPherson echoed Davies in 1949: "In serious consideration, open and above board, I arrange with Hairy the Ape and Cyril Dovewing ... to stage a main bout exhibition ... Often we do decide in advance who will win." Promoter John Heim of Milwaukee blew the sport's cover in 1957: "There hasn't been a legitimate wrestling contest in fifty years. We tried it once — and you could have heard a pin drop." The athleticism and the skill are for real. But wrestling and sports entertainment? They've always been joined at the hip.

I. The Parson of Chicago

Think Don King without the high hair. Charles E. "Parson" Davies was everything that the boxing impresario was, only a century earlier — promoter, ring announcer, manager of champions, timekeeper, raconteur, man about town, saloon proprietor, and publicist extraordinaire with considerable access to large stakes of money, most of which belonged to other people. An Irish immigrant, orphaned as a teen, Davies started in the sporting life in Chicago in 1877 by organizing heel-to-toe footraces, called "pedestrianism," when he was just twenty-six. Legend has it that railroad magnate William K. Vanderbilt bestowed the "Parson" nickname on him in 1879 when he saw a solemn man in a black frock coat advising champion walker George Rowell during a competition in New York. Vanderbilt told a reporter that he thought the man looked like a cleric. Davies became the Parson for the rest of his life, and his congregation was the realm of athletics from boxers to wrestlers to sword fighters. To legendary sportswriter Grantland Rice, Davies was "the greatest promoter of his day."

Modern professional wrestling lacks a single defined father, such as basketball has with James Naismith. But Davies certainly has a claim to paternity. Every tour of the same cast of wrestlers, night after night, city after city, owes him a hat tip. Every vicious killing machine is a descendant of Evan "Strangler" Lewis, Davies' greatest wrestling find. And every quest for championship glory has its roots in the 1887 match between Lewis and Joe Acton of England, when Davies engineered the first orchestrated world title change. "Professional barnstorming and athletic promotion in America traces to the fine hand of Davies," said J Michael Kenyon, the late wrestling historian and Seattle sportswriter. "His work was seminal. Professional wrestling owes a considerable debt to him for getting the catch-as-catch-can business off to a rousing start."

Born in Antrim, Ireland, on July 7, 1851, Davies built a reputation as a top promoter of pedestrianism, a national fad open to anyone capable of putting one foot in front of the other for up to six days at a time. He drummed up interest in the media, managed racers, and sponsored events for purses that ranged from $500 to $5,000, including a fifty-two-hour-long man-versus-stallion race in 1879 in Chicago. (The horse, Hesing Junior, won by fifty-two miles.) When race walking faded, Davies moved into boxing, where he made his biggest mark. For nearly two decades, just about every fight or fighter of consequence bore his imprint. He promoted John L. Sullivan when the bare-knuckles champion conducted exhibitions to skirt state and local bans on prizefighting. From his Chicago base, Davies built a stable of more than two dozen boxers, though he lost a member of his brigade when heavyweight contender Jimmy Elliott, an excon, bolted a Davies-led tour of Kansas, returned to Chicago, and lost a gunfight with another boxer.

Wrestling had its share of rough characters too, but it was underdeveloped as a sport and came, for the most part, without the political entanglements and payoffs that plagued boxing. In short, it was ready for Davies. Parson was in charge from booking to ring bell. A match he promoted between his charge John Rabshaw and Lew Moore in 1884 in Chicago serves as an example. First, Davies came to the ropes and read the articles of agreement for the match — in this case, each side put up $250 for a two out of three falls contest. He read the rules to the crowd. He made a final money call from backers of the wrestlers. He asked each man to settle on a referee. When they couldn't agree, a Davies associate appointed one. Then Davies loaned the referee his watch.

Davies didn't come cheap. He took one-half of the gross gate receipts, an unheard-of cut for a manager/promoter in today's environment. Even so, Joe Choynski, a Hall of Fame heavyweight boxer whom Davies pressed into service as wrestler, said Parson was worth every penny. "Davies was the world's best prize-fighting press agent — very liberal in booming the game," Choynski told the Chicago Evening Post in 1910. "His word went a long way with the promoters. He was worth all he got from the fighters he made or kept busy."

That's what the Wisconsin backers of Evan Lewis envisioned when they solicited Davies to push their local wrestling star into the national limelight. Lewis had overwhelmed foe after foe with his signature stranglehold, a move akin to a rear naked choke in today's mixed martial arts. Davies met Lewis for the first time on April 22, 1885, when he emceed a combination boxing/wrestling show in Madison, Wisconsin. In later years, Lewis told a New York newspaper that Davies rechristened him from Evan to Strangler after assuming his management. Parson knew what he was doing. On January 28, 1886, Lewis beat Matsada Sorakichi in Chicago when the Japanese wrestler quit, claiming the stranglehold was unfair. A rematch set for February 15 carried one of the earliest stipulations in wrestling — barring use of the dreaded stranglehold. Instead, as a standing-room-only crowd of 3,500 people gasped in horror, Lewis grabbed Sorakichi by the left ankle and twisted it over his own left leg in an attempt to break it like a dead branch. The fall lasted just fifty seconds. Sorakichi fainted in the ring as outraged fans shrieked, "Coward! Brute! Devil!" at the victorious Lewis. The Chicago Times reported eight or nine spectators passed out at the dreadful sight, though the supposedly maimed Sorakichi was giving wrestling exhibitions in Milwaukee eleven days later.

In Lewis, Davies had created a wrestling version of John L. Sullivan, a brute who elicited both awe and ticket sales. Now, he needed a title to complete the package. Englishman Joe Acton was the generally recognized champion at catch-as-catch-can wrestling, similar to the freewheeling style we know today. With Davies as his manager, Lewis met Acton on February 7, 1886, in Chicago for $250 a side, plus the receipts from 4,000 fans at $1.50 a ticket. Lewis had the size advantage and the stranglehold in his arsenal, but Acton, the betting favorite, took three of four falls and the match.

Things were set up just right. When the two squared off again on April 11, the stakes were raised to $500. Given what had transpired in their first match, it would have been hard for bettors to resist doubling down on Acton. But a whiff of fix was in the Chicago air. The Chicago Tribune reported that gamblers at one gaming parlor were rushing to lay money on Lewis at any odds, causing the bookkeeper to stop accepting bets. Suspicions about an arranged title change proved to be correct. In front of 3,500 fans, Acton won the first fall, but Lewis easily took the next three in a combined total of fewer than fifteen minutes. "Davies had added another champion to his résumé," his biographer Mark T. Dunn wrote in Chicago's Greatest Sportsman.

Two months later, Tom Connors of England upset Lewis in Pittsburgh, winning a decision when Lewis ignored the referee's order to stop choking his foe. Davies petitioned for a rematch in the friendly grounds of Chicago for higher stakes — $1,000 a side — but the fight fell through. Under those circumstances, Davies wanted to make doubly certain that everyone knew Lewis was the true kingpin of the world. He imported Jack Wannop, a boxer and wrestler who laid a vague claim to the British wrestling championship, and shipped him to Wisconsin to train with John Kline, a Davies confederate. The two-month buildup for the May 7, 1888, match in Chicago was spectacular. Davies appears to have planted stories that Lewis feared the Englishman's considerable abilities, and newspapers across the country billed it as the definitive match for the world championship. Lewis whipped Wannop in straight three falls in less than fifteen minutes, with an estimated $20,000 in bets changing hands. "Lewis surprised us all by the easy way in which he threw Wannop," Davies told a Pittsburgh reporter, likely with a suppressed smile.

With a championship secure, Davies hit the road with his "Company of Gladiators," a forerunner of the circuits that sprung up in later years with the same wrestlers repeating similar matches in different venues. Lewis and William Muldoon were the headliners, but Sorakichi was part of the caravan too, apparently having forgiven Lewis for allegedly crippling him. They held matinees in New York, Washington, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and New York, among other places. In researching Davies' life, Dunn was impressed by the way he navigated a minefield of fans, hoodlums, politicians, and athletes. "To be as successful as he was, people had to like him, not just in wrestling or in boxing, but in all phases of life," Dunn wrote.

Davies remained as Lewis' manager through 1895, including a tour of San Francisco in 1890 in which the Strangler and a beefier Acton reprised their title fights of 1886. By then, Davies was fully concentrating on boxing. In 1889, he acquired the contract of Peter Jackson, a skilled Black heavyweight from Australia. Davies labored long and hard to secure main event matches for Jackson, especially against Sullivan, but had little success in breaking the color barrier. So the promoter cast Jackson in a version of Uncle Tom's Cabin and toured the country with him. Just to spice things up, Davies had Jackson and Choynski spar three rounds as part of the show. "There is no disputing the fact that 'Parson' Davies is a shrewd manipulator of sporting matters," the San Francisco Call opined.

A lifelong bachelor and leader in the Elks Lodge, Davies relocated to New Orleans to run a theater, music academy, and pool hall that served as a haven for gaming interests. He never lost an opportunity to rub elbows with the high and mighty. With his friend Bat Masterson, the gunslinger turned sportsman, Davies visited President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House in 1906. Always on the lookout for publicity, he brought with him Feodor Machnow, a nine-foot-three-inch tall Russian. Roosevelt glanced at the giant, threw his arm around Davies, and whisked him into his office to gossip about sports. "Come in, Parson," he said. "It is you I want to talk with."

Davies' later years were difficult. Starting in 1908, he suffered from rheumatism, endured a series of paralyzing strokes, and was confined to a wheelchair for years. In 1912, friends established a fundraiser for him after he had gone through all his money. Davies traveled to Ireland and spent time with relatives stateside until he settled into the Elks National Home in Bedford, Virginia. He died there on June 28, 1920, a few days short of his sixty-ninth birthday. "Parson Davies was the best known sportsman in the Western Hemisphere," Masterson mourned in the New York Morning Telegraph. "His word was his bond. He never repudiated an obligation or failed to keep his word. Generous to a fault and courageous as a lion, he batted his way up from a poor immigrant boy to the highest distinction in the realm of sports ... They are not growing any more Parson Davies these days."

II. The Terrible Turk

Yousouf was a monster. When his hands, strengthened by years of dock work and one-on-one combat, were not wrapped around his opponents' throats, they became shovels in his feeding exhibitions, three sirloin steaks at a time. He never took a bath, fearful that it might sap his strength. He disregarded the few wrestling rules he understood, owed his allegiance only to a vaguely sinister sultan, and paraded through the streets of New York in baggy pants and a fez. No one could describe him accurately, A.J. Liebling wrote in the New Yorker, because people who saw him were too frightened to take notes. There is no definite moment when you can pinpoint the transition of wrestling from a test of skill and science rooted in the ancient Greeks to lowbrow athletic farce. But March 26, 1898, seems as good a starting point as any.

That is the night that Yousouf went nuts, chucking the respected Ernest Roeber five feet off an unroped stage seventy-five seconds into their match at Madison Square Garden. The crowd, the largest ever to witness a wrestling event in the United States, erupted in a frenzy, threatened to lynch The Turk and catcalled for twenty-five minutes as a reported fifty police guards escorted him to safety. More than anything, though, The Turk's antics demonstrated wild-eyed entertainment was the way to get the fans going and the turnstiles churning. As the New YorkWorld concluded, "There was not one of the 9,000 spectators who will not go to the next match arranged for The Turk."

William A. Brady could not have been more pleased. A theater and sports promoter, Brady hyped Yousouf as the sport's first barbaric foreign menace, though his man had legitimate wrestling credentials. He was born Yusuf Ismail — you'll also find it as Youssuf Ishmaelo — in 1857 in the Bulgarian village of Cherna, which then was part of the Ottoman Empire. He was said to be a third-generation wrestler, an honorable man skilled at wrestling doused in olive oil, a Turkish tradition for more than six centuries. Yousouf won at least one national title at the annual Kirkpinar event, according to several accounts. He established himself as a force in France as part of a trio of invading Turkish wrestlers starting in 1895, when he was a Marseilles dock worker by day and a manbeast by night. Historian Graham Noble uncovered one particularly savage match account from Paris in which Yousouf allegedly ripped Ibrahim Mahmout's nostrils and twisted his arms. Gendarmes had to break up the devastation.

How much of that is real and how much is apocryphal has been lost to the ages. Images depict Yousouf as something less than a force of nature, pushing forty years old, slump-shouldered and doughy, about six-foot-two and 250 pounds. Wrestler/promoter/scout Antonio Pierri, known as the "Terrible Greek," brought him to the United States in February 1898, gave him a paltry twenty-five dollars a week, and stuck him in a Bowery tenement room. When Pierri handed him over for $200 to Brady, to whom the term "farfetched" seldom occurred, myth and reality became one. Brady put The Turk front and center in New York's London Theater, offering $100 to anyone who could stay with him for fifteen minutes. Though weighing just 125 pounds, George Bothner took up the challenge. Later famous as a wrestler and gym owner, Bothner was a mere late night snack for The Turk. "The Turk picked me up as if I was a kitten ... Before I could give a wriggle or a squirm he dashed me down on the bare boards with terrific strength knocking all the strength and wits out of me," Bothner told author Nat Fleischer in From Milo to Londos. To burnish his reputation, Yousouf finished off German wrestler Ernest Ziegler on the floor of the Richelieu hotel in New York in forty-five seconds and then chugged down Ziegler's bottle of wine. That was a tiny sip of alcohol compared with the twenty-five glasses of beer his publicists said he consumed daily.

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Excerpted from "The Storytellers"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Greg Oliver and Steven Johnson.
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