Mark Palmer
Rev Rewind is a new feature that provides profiles of legendary wrestlers and other stories of historical interest for the “oldest and greatest sport.”
It seemed like a classic mismatch — one of those wrestling match-ups where the outcome was assured long before the contestants took to the mat.
In one corner, the defending champ, from Russia, known as “the Lion “– undefeated in a long string of bouts with internationally-respected competition. An incredible physical specimen with a 20-inch neck, and 52-inch chest tapering down to a 36-inch waist, the muscular Russian caused more than one opponent to literally submit to end the match early rather than get caught up in the crushing power of his bearhug and risk injury being lifted high overhead and thrown violently to the mat for the fall.
Facing this fearsome champion, a farm boy from the heartland of America — the best big man this country had to offer. Although lacking the showy muscles of his foreign rival, the US wrestler was deceptively strong from years of hoisting hay bales and hogs.
This account may sound familiar to modern-day wrestling fans. But, no, this isn’t a description of the contestants of the super-heavyweight Greco-Roman finals match at the 2000 Sydney Olympics between defending champ Alexander Karelin of Russia “known as “the Siberian Tiger “for the ferocity with which he tore into opponents, and “the Experiment “for his almost freakishly muscular physique — and Rulon Gardner, the Wyoming dairy farmer who shocked the world by handing the three-time Olympic gold medallist his first defeat in thirteen years.
What we’re describing is a match-up from nearly a century ago between George “the Russian Lion “Hackenschmidt, the massively muscular world wrestling champion “¦ and Frank “the Iowa Plowboy “Gotch. The two men met in the professional wrestling ring twice ““- first, in April 1908, and then on Labor Day 1911 — both times in Chicago.
Why are we talking about pro wrestlers?
The first question that may have occurred to many of you is: RevWrestling.com is an amateur wrestling website. What is an article about professional wrestlers and their matches doing here?
For starters, George Hackenschmidt and Frank Gotch were major sports superstars of the early 20th century. Fans of all ages collected cabinet cards and postcards with their images, read their books, and devoured articles about them in newspapers. Their epic matches were front-page news around the world — akin to today’s Super Bowl or soccer’s World Cup in terms of garnering global attention — and helped to launch organized amateur wrestling in the United States in the early part of the 20th century. In fact, a large number of high school and college wrestling programs can trace their roots back to the 1910s and 1920s — the era when Hackenschmidt and Gotch were still household names, and highly respected athletes.
Historical perspective
The world of George Hackenschmidt and Frank Gotch was a vastly different place than we know today. Realize that their first match in April 1908 was less than five years after Wilbur and Orville Wright had their first successful flight of a motorized aircraft at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina (December 1903), so commercial air travel was still a number of years in the future. Likewise, the automobile was still somewhat rare. Before Henry Ford got into the car business in 1903, only the rich could afford automobiles “¦ and, outside the cities, paved roads were few and far between. Passenger trains were the primary means for Americans to travel great distances on land; overseas travel was limited to ships. (Note that the sinking of the Titanic in April 1912 was just eight months after the second Gotch/Hackenschmidt match on Labor Day 1911 “¦ and World War I was yet to occur.)
In 1908, Theodore “Teddy “Roosevelt was in his last year of his second term as US President; William Howard Taft would be inaugurated as President in 1909. The US population in 1908 was approximately 89 million, growing to 94 million by 1911 — one-third of today’s census figures. At the time of the Gotch/Hackenschmidt matches, host city Chicago had nearly two million residents, and was the second-largest city in the country.
The sports page 100 years ago
What were the popular sports of a century ago? Major league baseball got plenty of newspaper coverage and drew thousands of fans; Frank Gotch took in a Chicago Cubs game the Sunday afternoon before the 1911 rematch. Another fan favorite was professional cycling — bicycle races, usually held on steeply banked oval tracks, was all the rage in the early 1900s. Football was a college game that was working to overcome an image as a violent, brutal and sometimes deadly sport; there was no National Football League. Likewise, the National Basketball Association was a distant dream; basketball was a game played in schools and at YMCAs.
As for personal combat sports “¦ in the early part of the 20th century, boxing seemed to have a split personality. “The manly art of self-defense “was a staple at private men’s clubs and many colleges as a pure, amateur athletic endeavor”¦ while, professional boxing matches were outlawed in many states. Organized amateur wrestling had something of an elite image, as it was pretty much limited to men’s athletic clubs, Y’s, and eastern colleges such as Penn State and Ivy League schools. Unlike today, professional wrestling was viewed as a legitimate sporting activity by the general public. Among pro wrestling historians, there is some debate as to how “real “it was; some argue that “routine “matches had predetermined outcomes, while many if not most historians seem to be in agreement that championship matches were real contests.
It’s also important to note that the theatrical elements we associate with today’s WWE — wrestlers portraying roles as “faces “(good guys) or “heels “(bad guys), wearing costumes, performing spectacular moves, and acting out soap-opera-like storylines — were not in evidence in professional wrestling in the Gotch/Hackenschmidt era. Both of their championship matches were filmed and shown to the public in theaters, but these films cannot be located at this time. However, a number of amateur wrestling champions have viewed the oldest existing film available of a professional wrestling match: a 1920 title bout at Madison Square Garden between Joe Stecher and Earl Caddock — two Midwestern farm boys who were also World War I heroes — and have commented on how much it looks like a modern-day college wrestling match. There were no flying chairs, no flying leaps off the top rope, no chokeholds, no whipping the opponent into the turnbuckles. From viewing this film and reading accounts of other professional wrestling matches of the time, it seems the Stecher-Caddock title match was a typical example of professional wrestling in the US up to the early to mid- 1920s, when the theatrical aspect we associate with pro wrestling today started to make its appearance.
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