THE PHANTOM OF THE RING
The Man Who Saw the Future, Part 1
I recently received this news item from my good friend Mike Lano, wrestling’s premier photographer:
Juan Rafael “Levi” Rodriquez Mamani, who worked as Ghenghis Khan for Titanes en el Ring, died this week from liver cancer in Argentina. He was 69 yrs. old.
Besides working for [the] Titanes en el Ring tv show and Lucha Fuerta in Argentina, [he was also involved with] the Super Catch promotion of Paraguay.
.
.
Ghenghis Khan
.
While I give my audience a moment or two for a collective “Who dat?†I’d like to add that Ghenghis Khan was one of the stars of the promotion that was headed by Martin Karadagian. And Mr. Karadagian, while no better known than the anonymous wrestlers who toiled for him, was one of the most influential individuals in the evolution of professional wrestling.
Here was the muse that tickled the brain of Vincent K. McMahon and from the humble confines of his South American promotion, initiated a paradigm shift in the nature of the pseudo-sport. Imagine, if you will, a promotion that featured outrageous characters such as an unbeatable mummy, a court jester, a devious clown, a mad Mongol, evil hippies, secret agents, an E.T. with a ray gun, the Frankenstein monster, a French Beatle, a Mexican Bandit and most outrageous of all, an invisible man.
.
Titanes en el Ring 1972 group photo
.
Consider also that the good guys not only had to fight the rudos (heels), but also an evil referee with a massive dog’s head, top hat and walking stick who called everything the way the rudos wanted it. And it all happened well over 30 years ago.
If you don’t know who Martin Karadagian was, you’re not alone. His stay here in the U.S. was not exactly a memorable one, but in Argentina he was the equivalent to Bruno Sammartino in popular longevity. After leaving the ring, he bought the local promotion, which he then fashioned into possibly the most visionary promotion in the history of wrestling. The gimmicks, angles and characters he created in the 70s would resonate loudly in U.S. rings in the 80s and are still felt today in both major U.S. promotions.
The emergence of what is called “sports-entertainment,†replacing the traditional form of professional wrestling, is credited to Vince McMahon by fawning media such as ESPN, whose E-60 television program did a piece about him entitled “Lord of the Ring.†But however McMahon wants to take credit for the current form of wrestling, he was a latecomer. Martin Karadagian had beaten him to the punch by more than a decade, and had actually done it better and far more outrageously. The same can be said of Jarrett’s Memphis promotion. Karadagian also beat them to the punch long before they incorporated a comedian into their booking. He did so back in 1961. Even Mike LaBell incorporated some of Karadagian’s concepts into his shows, but in his case it was too little, too late.
I have previously written about Karadagian twice: once in 1990 for Wrestling Forum and around 2001 for Wrestling Perspective. I’ve always been astonished by his achievements and the fact he never got the credit – or blame – for those achievements. In fact, I believe that the only other person who even wrote about the Amazing Karadagian was Bill Kunkel in Pro Wrestling Torch. Since then, other visionary historians such as Kurt Brown took up the cudgels, but to this day, Karadagian remains something of a cult secret. It’s time we told the wrestling world about him.
.
.
So who was this Martin Karadagian anyway?
.
Martin Karadagian
.
He was born Martin Karadayijan Fernandez on April 30, 1922, in the San Telmo section of Buenos Aires, Argentina. His mother, Paulina Fernandez de Karadayijan, was a native Argentinean. His father, Hamparzun Karadayijan, came with his family to Argentina via Spain in order to escape the genocidal war of the Turks against the Armenians. Hamparzun was quite the b.s. artist, claiming that he was a Baron in Armenia, having been born of royal blood. He would also claim to be a violin prodigy, as well as a virtuoso on the piano. The reality was that he managed a butcher shop in his Buenos Aries neighborhood, where he put the young Martin to work. The family was poor; they owned the house they lived in, but were burdened with huge mortgage payments. As a result, each member of the family had to work in order to maintain their meager lifestyle. Besides working in the butcher shop, Martin also did odd jobs, such as selling caramel candy on street corners and hawking newspapers. On some occasions he ever resorted to begging; anything to help feed the family.
Let us digress a bit on the subject of Argentina itself. The popular perception of Argentina in the U.S. is that of a Third World country. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Many economists place Argentina in the First World, although a series of financial shocks rocked the country from the 70s to the turn of the century. Nevertheless, it is a rich country, bolstered by immigration of Italians, Spaniards, Germans and other Europeans seeking a better way of life or escape from oppression, as with the Armenians, who constituted a large community in and around Buenos Aries.
If one is poor, the ways out of poverty are usually education and athletics. If one wasn’t educationally inclined or denied an education, then it was athletics. And that was the road Martin chose. His first love was soccer, but he lacked the necessary quickness that would propel him to the top tier of professional teams. Wrestling was second, but there, due to his size and agility, he fared better, especially in the Greco-Roman style, which was popular due to the European immigrant influence. Somewhere around his 18th birthday he decided to try a career in the pro rings and began attending training sessions at El Gimnaio Luna Park, the best-known boxing and wrestling arena in Buenos Aires.
.
.
However, anyone who listened to Karadagian, who clearly inherited his father’s ability to terraform the truth, would “learn†that just before his ninth birthday, he won a YMCA-sponsored Pan-American amateur Greco-Roman tournament for his age group in Detroit, Michigan. He later claimed that at the age of 12 (1935) he won a similar tournament in London and received his winning medal from Queen Elizabeth herself. The story is spoiled by, among other things, the fact that George VI was the English monarch at the time, Princess Elizabeth being only around nine years of age and probably living in Kenya at that time. And if that weren’t enough, he would later claim to have won a tournament in Crete in 1943, defeating, among others, Angelo Roncalli, who later became Pope John XXIII. Never mind that Crete was under Nazi control and it was wartime – why let that get in the way of a good story?
Professional wrestling has a long and popular history in Argentina. It enjoyed a heyday in the 20s and 30s with stars like Ivan Linow, Martin Zikoff, Ad Santel, and the Zbyszko Brothers. At one time Wladek Zbyszko claimed the Argentinean version of the world’s title.
The Argentinean promotion in the mid-1930s was a bit like the WWWF in the 1960’s – emphasizing the big and strong (and slow) over speed, agility, and moves. The promoters as well as major stars were “Man Mountain Zelezniak†(Ivan Zelezniak) and “El Conde Polaco†(Karol Nowina, a peripatetic legit tough guy who also boxed and who was one of the big worldwide stars of the late 1920s and early 1930s, especially on the Toronto circuit). The Zbyszkos may have also had a piece of the promotion at one time: they often sent trainees (such as the young Johnny Valentine) down there to get seasoning.
The headquarters of the promotion was Luna Park. During the Forties and Fifties fans could see lucha libre at Luna Park every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. When television arrived in the early 50s, wrestling from Luna Park became a national obsession, as fans all over the country watched their heroes fight the villains of society each week on the small box. The success enabled Zelezniak to import main event talent from abroad, which only made wrestling even more of a must-see.
The success of Antonino Rocca in the States lead to a plethora of Argentinean imports; it seems every promotion had to have one. If a legitimate one couldn’t be found, they made one up, as in the cast of Karl Von Hess, who wrestled as Mora Duba for Ed McLemore in Dallas. But while they had great success at first, the talent gap started to show and one by one, nearly all the imports returned to Argentina. Karadagian fared no differently. He mainly worked for Tony Stecher in Minnesota and in the northeast for Vince McMahon, first as a babyface, then later as heel when the babyface act didn’t work. In any case he was back in Argentina by 1953. He just never clicked with the fans, which I suppose were expecting another acrobat like Rocca. That wasn’t Karadagian. At any rate he was back in Buenos Aires and at the bottom of the ladder. His rise from curtain jerker to head of the promotion three years later is nothing less than astounding.
The first thing he had to realize was the he wasn’t as big or strong as the guys on top here; nor was he adept at the wrestling style needed to get over big. So the first thing, as he would later admit in interviews was to develop a style and a persona that entertained.
Although he never admitted it, it seems that Karadagian took his style from Nature Boy Buddy Rogers: a self-important heel without any sense of decency who reacted quite histrionically to everything. When getting a beat-down from the face he would shuffle halfway across the ring on his knees in supposed penitence, or would hop across the ring in supposed pain. As the face approached he would drop to his knees and beg for mercy. When the babyface wavered or looked to the crowd for approval, Martin would strike out and bust open his opponent’s forehead. It made for great theater.
.
.
He also made sure that he was billed as an Armenian and, although a rotten heel, was embraced by the Armenian community. Armenians in Argentina, like most minorities in a lot of countries, were generally suspected of things they never actually did. Thus, fans could expect the worst from Martin and he always made sure their expectations were fulfilled.
By saving the money he made in the ring and combining that with the money he earned from his other career as an importer/exporter of jewels and gold (among other things, if you get the drift). Under the table dealing with under the table people prepared Karadagian well for the people he would deal with as a wrestling promoter. By 1956, Ivan Zelezniak was looking to retire as a promoter. Karadagian offered to buy him out. So, in order to give Zelezniak a nicer payday, the two worked out a multi-match angle with the blow-off being a beard vs. beard match. The matches all sold out Luna Park, and in the end Karadagian sheared Zelezniak’s beard, and a new era in Argentine wrestling was born.
The shift from wrestling to sports-entertainment didn’t happen overnight. Karadagian promoted his cards in the traditional style, though incorporating gimmick matches he saw in the States, such as wrestling bear vs. wrestler and wrestler vs. boxer matches. The latter were very popular, given the Argentine love of martial sports. But on August 10, 1957, the concept crashed in disaster. Karadagian agreed to fight beloved boxing hero Jose “El Mono†Gatica. Gatica was on the downside of his career. His most famous patron, Juan Peron, had fallen from power, and that, combined with Gatica’s freewheeling spending habits and a divorce, left him broke and badly in need of a paycheck. He agreed to a worked match with Karadagian in which he would put the wrestler over. But a funny thing happened in Luna Park, as Gatica apparently had a change of mind. He caught Karadagian squarely in the side of the head with a well-placed jab. Karadagian went down to the mat, but rose before the count was up and shook it off, figuring it was simply a mistake. But when Gatica clipped him again with another roundhouse right, Karadagian figured a double-cross. The next time Gatica fired a punch, Karadagian ducked and hooked the boxer’s ankle. He then proceeded to break it, causing a compound fracture. Gatica would never be the same and died in obscurity, having been run over by a bus at the age of 38 after leaving a nightclub.
But it was an even more dangerous opponent that nearly put Karadagian out of business before he had a chance to change it, and that was Overexposure. Gates fell dramatically, along with television ratings, and it looked as though Karadagian’s run as a promoter was going to be short and not so sweet.
NEXT: Karadagian survived the economic downturn and change wrestling in the process.
– The Phantom of the Ring
You can write to the Phantom care of Karen Belcher
