Phantom — A History of the Surreal — Part 1
September 4th, 2008The Phantom of the Ring reviews National Wrestling Alliance: The Untold Story of the Monopoly That Strangled Pro Wrestling, by Tim Hornbaker. ECW Press.
The Phantom of the Ring
A History of the Surreal — Part 1
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Just when we were becoming convinced there would never be a comprehensive history of the sport that has no history, professional wrestling, there finally comes along a book that begins to lay that very groundwork.
This is a long review. But this is also an important book and deserving of the length.
Tim Hornbaker’s history of the National Wrestling Alliance is a well written and comprehensive look at the organization that dominated pro wrestling for at least ten years, and remained a major influence until its demise at the combined hands of Ted Turner, Vince McMahon, and, of all people, Paul Heyman. Along the way it became a victim of its own success, so much so that the Justice Department investigated it for antitrust violations. That, combined with its own members’ insatiable short term greed, doomed the organization’s dominance of the squared circle.
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“Nature Boy” Buddy Rogers
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Hornbaker’s title is somewhat of a misnomer. True, the NWA was a monopoly, but it should have been titled “The Monopoly That Tried to Strangle Pro Wrestling.” As the book itself shows, promoters outside the NWA fold were able to survive, and in some cases, thrive, even though some of the best and most well-known talent was denied to them. Members drifted in and out as time went on, able to withstand any sanctions. The NWA even elected a president in 1961 (Karl Sarpolis) whose promotion recognized another wrestler (Gene Kiniski) instead of Buddy Rogers as world champion. A good analogy would be to visualize the trio, Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, and Frank Costello, who made the Syndicate into what it became. Now substitute Moe Howard for Luciano, Larry Fine for Meyer Lansky, and Curly Howard for Frank Costello and one has the NWA. This gang that couldn’t shoot straight was so inept, so blatant, so obvious in their conniving that even the Justice Department, looking for an easy kill, became involved in their activities.
It didn’t start that way. What morphed into the NWA we know was the idea of an Iowa promoter named Paul “Pinkie” George, who was looking for a way to share talent. The dominant promoters of the time (late 40s) were Paul Bowser in Boston and Tom Packs in St. Louis, and they were adverse to sharing their talent with their neighbors, having learned the hard way the not-so-fine art of the double-cross. Each did not get to where they were by accident: they parlayed a combination of hard work and good fortune into a dominant position. In Bowser’s case, his success came from his shrewd knowledge of his customers, giving them such popular champions as Steve Casey and Frank Sexton. Further, his henchman Eddie Quinn parlayed Quebec into a hotbed of wrestling. Fortune came his way with the death of rival Jack Curley, which took the New York City area out as a major player and allowed Bowser a small measure of revenge over the man who double crossed him and took him out of the New York market.
Curley himself was just short of being the quintessential rags-to-riches-to-rags story. Born Jacques Armand Scheul in San Francisco of Alastian Jewish parents, he knocked around from job to job before riding the rails to Chicago and landing a job as an assistant manager in a gym, where he helped train boxers and wrestlers. From there the next step was promoting, and Curley found that was where his talents lay. In boxing he was associated with welterweight legend Tommy Ryan and later promoted the famous Jack Johnson dive to Jess Willard in Havana, Cuba. With regard to wrestling, Curley first began promoting club bouts as a sideline between boxing cards, but later branched out with a Gotch versus Beell match and as manager of Hackenschmidt for his 1911 rematch with Gotch. The acrimonious stink after the rematch caused a schism between Curley and the Gotch camp to the point where Curley was frozen out of Chicago. He packed up and moved to New York City, where he made quite splash with an “international” tournament at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1915. Featured was Curley’s latest discovery, the Masked Marvel, who plowed through the early rounds until unmasked by Strangler Lewis as Mort Henderson, prelim wrestler from Pennsylvania. Curley later matched the Marvel with Champion Joe Stecher when Stecher’s scheduled opponent, Stan Zbyszko, was injured at the hands of Alex Aberg. No matter, for Curley made a handsome killing on the bout, probably predicated on the mystery of the Marvel. Just as well, for Curley’s tour with Willard (including a circus bout with none other than Frank Gotch) ended in a lawsuit by Curley (settled with a $10,000 check from Willard) and a ban from promoting boxing in New York, courtesy of Tex Rickard (the two incidents were unrelated). Curley later repaid the favor by conspiring with New York Athletic Commissioner William Muldoon to deny Rickard’s application for a license to promote wrestling.
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Toots Mondt
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Sticking to wrestling, Curley became the leading promoter in New York City until his death in 1937. He survived the attempt by the Gold Dust Trust (Ed Lewis, Toots Mondt, Billy Sandow) to freeze him out of business by aligning himself with Joe Stecher’s faction. He also aligned himself with politically helpful charities, such as the Hearst Milk Fund, that could keep the Mob at bay. (Unlike a few other promoters in the Midwest, Curley was never called upon by the Mob to provide strikebreakers. This was most likely because Louis Lepke and Albert Anastasia had a lock on the labor market in the City.) But he took a strong hit in 1932 when his champion, Jim Londos, walked out in a contractual dispute over money that Curley’s booker, Toots Mondt, was chiseling him out of. Exit Londos, enter Ed Lewis. But Londos was at the height of his fame while Lewis’ star was clearly on the decline. Even sorting things out with Londos in 1934 and putting him over again for the title didn’t help matters. The luster was off the Golden Greek, in part due to the persuasiveness of Curley’s publicity, possibly edited by the “Fall Guy” Marcus Griffith himself. Attendance suffered and Curley was to broker a deal with Paul Bowser to share talent. Unfortunately, Curley also had to accept Bowser’s champ, Danno O’Mahoney. Unfortunate, because Mondt, who was now splitting time between New York and Lou Daro’s Los Angeles promotion, was neither a fan of O’Mahoney or Bowser, for that matter, and in a famous bout in Madison Square Garden in March, 1936, Dick Shikat clamped the hammerlock heard around the wrestling world and hooked O’Mahoney for the title. Mondt’s partners in this heist were Jack Pfeffer and the Johnston Brothers, who were angered at being cut out of Curley’s world a couple of years before and were now looking for pay back. Pfeffer, in turn, had Al Haft as his partner. Supposedly, Haft bore some sort of grudge against Bowser and was looking for his chance.
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Jim Londos
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Bowser didn’t take his beating lying down. He filed suit against Shikat and a trial was set for Columbus, Ohio. One of Bowser’s star witnesses was none other than Jack Curley, who claimed to be just as surprised by the turn of events as Bowser was. Curley actually had an excuse: major surgery in 1934 had left him infirm and dependent on his lieutenants, who neglected to keep him up to speed on issues affecting the promotion. But the trial never got underway. Shortly before, Shikat conveniently dropped his title to Haft employee Ali Baba. Now it was Haft’s turn to be stung as Mondt and Pfeffer arraigned for a referee in Newark, New Jersey, to disqualify Ali Baba and award the belt to Pfeffer’s boy Dave Levin. Mondt, in turn, gave Pfeffer around $15,000 for Levin’s contract and promptly took his new employee out to California for lucrative series of bouts against local sensation Vincent Lopez (besides wrestling, Lopez was known in Hollywood as the bodyguard and lover of Mae West).
Curley, his health and fortune failing, could no longer afford to rent Madison Square Garden. It was just as well, because with the Garden there was a surtax, a payment made to Louis Lepke and associates to handle any “unexpected” labor trouble that could arise. He moved instead to the Hippodrome, a Midtown location first used to stage musicals and vaudeville shows before being converted into a sports arena to handle the two big crazes of the 30s: cycling and marathon dancing. For wrestling, it could handle about 10,000 patrons, but Curley never came close to a sellout. The ten count tolled for him on July 12, 1937. Mondt, Ray Fabiani of Philadelphia, and old pro Rudy Dusek tried to pick up the pieces, but it was too late. Mondt had poisoned the well too often and the public voted with its feet. Also, the failure to book the Garden caused wrestling to drop in prestige and the trio wound up booking smaller arenas and the outer boroughs. Without a strong attraction, only the fanatics attended and it wasn’t until after the war and the arrival of Primo Carnera on the scene that things revived.
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Primo Carnera
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Although Hornbaker does not go into such detail about Curley, we thought it worth mentioning as a prime illustration of the old George Santayana chestnut about those that ignore history are doomed to repeat it. In wrestling, this has proven to be worthy of a physical law.
In the case of Packs, it was his connection as the booker for the National Wrestling Association, a group of state athletic commissioners, that cemented his position as a mover and shaker in the world of pro wrestling. Known as one of the hardest working promoters in the game, Packs built St. Louis into a major market. But it was his style that rubbed his neighboring promoters the wrong way. His czar-like attitude combined with a reluctance to share his champion, the popular Bill Longson, with his regional neighbors only served to alienate them and send them searching for alternatives. Pinkie George found that alternative in an alliance with Kansas City promoter Orville Brown, Max Clayton in Omaha, and Tony Stecher in Minnesota. Seeing a good idea in the making, they were joined in 1948 by Fred Kohler from Chicago and upstart Sam Muchnick of St. Louis, who was promoting against the established Packs. They would later be joined by Harry Light of Detroit and Al Haft of Ohio, among others. Brown was named as the first champ in a unanimous vote. Getting Kohler was a real coup for the group, although we doubt they realized its impact at first. Kohler was beginning to have his Chicago wrestling cards broadcast. Television was the beast that would change everything. Now a promoter no longer had to groom a grappler for his audience over a series of weeks; television would make his stars for him in less than half the time. In fact, without the advent of televised wrestling matches the NWA would have remained just a wet dream for George.
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Sam Muchnick
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Meanwhile Packs was taking a beating. Not from Muchnick, whom he outdrew 2 to 1, but from a wayward turn in other investments. Needing a cash transfusion to avert financial ruin, Packs sold the St. Louis promotion to a consortium consisting of Thesz, Longson, Eddie Quinn and Frank Tunney of Toronto. Changes were made as Thesz went over on Longson in Indianapolis, but the competition from Muchnick stiffened and when the two met in Houston to woo Morris Sigel to their respective folds, Thesz came to the realization that if he couldn’t beat them, he might as well join them, and so the two offices were merged. A unification match between Thesz and Brown was scheduled, but a near-fatal car accident left Brown unable to compete and Thesz was unanimously as the new champ.
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Lou Thesz
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In reality, the NWA was the ultimate shadow organization. Though it seemed to present strength and unity, it was largely held together by the strength and character of one man. That man was its greatest champion, Lou Thesz. As Atlas held up the Earth, so Thesz held up the NWA. Had it been anyone else, the NWA might have survived four or five years before dissolving into useless bickering. Thesz gave the NWA, and pro wrestling by extension, a sense of respectability. He was the Champ, his only gimmick being his ability. He didn’t need a valet, a mask, or bleached blond hair. When fans saw him in the ring, they knew who the real deal was. Thesz was also willing to take on a grueling travel schedule. By visiting every member territory, Thesz cemented the NWA and helped it expand. He went from town to town, taking on the local hero or villain, adjusting his ring personality accordingly. Considering he held the belt from 1949 to 1957, with only a brief respite in 1956 when a fractured ankle forced him to drop the strap to Whipper Watson, Thesz comes across as almost superhuman. Working about an average of 175 dates a year and traveling to such areas as Japan and the Far East, only a superbly conditioned athlete with an extraordinary sense of dedication could have withstood the pounding, both physical and mental. His dedication to his craft was such that when the NWA powers decided to dump Buddy Rogers, Thesz accepted the invitation to hold the belt a sixth time. As we’ve said before: like astrology, the story of wrestling is written in the stars, and Lou Thesz was the brightest star in the firmament.
George reigned as the first president of the NWA but stepped aside in favor of Muchnick. Sam Muchnick was the perfect politician for the role. He had the rare ability to see the bigger picture and realized that more could be made through cooperation than by warfare. Sam abilities were put to the test time after time, putting out small fires before they got the chance to blow up into full fledged conflagrations. A case in point was the battle in Southern California in 1953 that threatened to split the promotion into at least two, possibly four, parts. Sam brokered a peace that kept the promotion together, and, by extension, the NWA, for Sam knew, given the nature of his promoters, that any small fissure had the potential to grow into a chasm that would take the entire membership with it. Muchnick’s background as a sportswriter for the St. Louis Times came in handy when issuing press releases and dealing with reporters. In fact, his journalistic wherewithal came in very handy in slowing down the Justice Department’s antitrust investigation, giving the NWA needed time to prepare some sort of defense.
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Sam Muchnick with Lou Thesz
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As a promoter, Muchnick was regarded highly by those who wrestled for him. His payoffs were fair and he always delivered whatever money he promised. (For more on Sam Muchnick as a promoter, check out Larry Matysik’s excellent book, Wrestling at the Chase.) Being president of the NWA consumed much of his time, so much so that his six city territory was cut to just St. Louis. He was compensated by his brethren for his duties and was also given the privilege of booking the champion. Muchnick was also fair in his policies as a booker. Any member who wanted the champ was granted dates, no matter where the territory was. Thesz told us there were many times when he looked over his itinerary and looked askance at some of the towns where he was booked. When he complained to Muchnick, the answer was usually the same: “It’s the promoter who books the cities, I only send you to the territory. It’s important that you work this town for this guy, and it will pay off down the road.” Thesz, while placated, as it was the promoter of the territory that covered his expenses (“Never enough,” Thesz said.), still was never satisfied with answers. The politics of this, combined with other goings-on in the St. Louis office, caused him to sell his shares in the office to Muchnick in 1955. Thesz was winding down his career as champion to concentrate on making his own dates and tours as a freelancer.
But not even Muchnick could keep the jackals penned in forever. His cohorts, while they respected his fairness and honesty, so rare in a world where double-crosses and back stabbings are commonplace, resented his salary and his exclusive booking of the champion. They also came to resent one of Muchnick’s golden policies: that of one world’s champion. Their promotions were based on a champion as a draw, and as Thesz couldn’t be everywhere at once, they promoted their various regional champions as the world’s champion. Perhaps he was the AWA champion for Paul Bowser or the MWA champion for Al Haft or the California champion for Johnny Doyle and Cal Eaton, but he was still viewed by Muchnick and the rest of the NWA as a threat to the solidarity of the organization. Muchnick compromised to an extent by allowing these promoters to use their regional champs, but only on condition that they call them, “the Eastern Champion,” The Ohio Champion,” etc., and never book them as champ outside the territory. This worked while Thesz was champ because Lou could visit their territory every so often and show them just who the real champ was – and he made money for them (the most important thing as far as they were concerned), so they relented to the NWA rules.
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But there was one thing Muchnick couldn’t control and that was the fine art of chiseling. For most wrestling promoters chiseling the boys was as natural as breathing. Even the big stars weren’t immune. Attractions such as Antonino Rocca, Primo Carnera, and Verne Gagne were under contract to promoters such as Fred Kohler, Toots Mondt, Vince McMahon, Johnny Doyle, etc., whereby the promoter got a taste of what the wrestler earned. If one was a mid-card performer or a prelim performer, it was even worse. Most of the time they were paid the bare minimums, around $10 to $17.50 per match for prelim, and maybe $25 to $100 the further up the card they were billed. The best illustration of this is in Hornbaker’s chapter on the Thesz-Baron Leone match (Ch. 8), wrestling’s first $100,000 gate ($103,277.75, to be exact). Prelim wrestlers reportedly got the minimum $15, mid carders no more than a couple of hundred. Leone received 5.46 percent of the net ($6,650), from which he had to pay his bookers about $2,200. Even the Champ himself was chiseled. Thesz was supposed to get 15 percent of the net, which translated into $12,228, but ended up gettling $9,000 with the rest going to the booking office. Amazing.
Oh, there were attempts to garner a better deal for the boys. Hornbaker notes that at an April, 1953, meeting in Hot Springs, Arkansas (The retirement home of gangster Owney Madden, who provided a sanctuary for those on the run and hosted Mob conventions. Draw your own conclusions.), the Health and Welfare Committee of the NWA (?!), consisting of Kohler, George and Ed Don George, advocated a three-dollar per man, per show deductible that would go into a fund for health and life insurance. (We had heard it was five dollars. We stand corrected.) Needless to say, Hornbaker notes it was rejected at a later meeting in September by a vote of 25 to 5. We were surprised it was that close. Obviously, the promoters, in their usual myopic way, figured that the supply of talent that could be made bankable was endless, so why share the pie?
Besides being a way to tighten their grip on the short hairs of the boys, the membership also saw the NWA as a great way to wipe out competition in their area. There was only one obstacle to this plan: the competition didn’t wish to be wiped out. They only dug in their heels and fought back. The NWA had formidable resources on its side, not only name talent, but also the connivance of state athletic commissions. These commissions were well oiled by the promoters, who contributed to their parties and held political fund raisers. And they returned the favor in kind. For instance, in 1953 the Indiana Athletic Commission issued only four promotional licenses, all to NWA members. Any other promoter in the state wishing to stage a show had to negotiate with them. But in a sweet twist of irony, it was the same state athletic commissions that proved to be the catalyst in the dismemberment of the NWA. There were previous whistle blowers, most notably Southern California promoter Nick Lutze, but their complaints landed in the forgotten files section of government investigators. When Baltimore promoter Ed Contos complained to his friends in the Maryland State Athletic Commission about his abuse at the hands of Toots Mondt, Chairman John Marshall Boone contacted Sam Muchnick about the situation, but little, if anything, was done. A second letter went unheeded, and in a neat maneuver, Boone declared Baltimore an “open city” due to the bankruptcy filing of the Manhattan Booking Agency and thus available for promoters other than Mondt (April 27, 1954).
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Vince McMahon, Sr.
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Now momentum was beginning to pick up. In the neighboring state of Pennsylvania, State Athletic Commissioner Frank Wiener took up the cudgels for his buddy Ray Fabiani (both Contos and Fabiani were rejected by the NWA at the urging of Toots) by firing off a letter to Muchnick in which he called the conditions in Pennsylvania “deplorable” (p. 123). The governor of Pennsylvania, another good buddy of Fabiani, backed up his athletic commissioner by threatening to suspend all wrestling events in the state “if significant changes are not made.” This is funny, given the fact that Mondt and Fabiani were once tight as members of the Curley trust in the 30s. But time wounds all heels and Mondt was eager to keep his former friend away from a pie Mondt believed was his and his alone, forgetting the fact that Fabiani was well-connected politically. Tootsie Boy was a genius when it came to the ring, but an idiot when it came to politics. His eastern promotion would have collapsed of Toots’ bloated weight long ago if Vince McMahon, Sr., a master at the art of the political, hadn’t gained control from Madman Mondt. Boone became the first public official to publicly speak out against NWA practices, and he was followed by Wiener, who declared Pennsylvania and open state, free of NWA control, whatever that meant.
- - The Phantom of the Ring
You can write to the Phantom care of Karen Belcher
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