4, 1916. The bout, with Stecher the titleholder, drew great criticism from press who covered the slow, uneventful contest. These were the types of matches Mondt wanted to rid wrestling of, though that would not come without its share of unintended consequences. Mondt wanted the wrestlers to work less, so he established time limits. Extended grappling sessions were all but removed. For the most part, wrestling manifested into pantomime fighting.
Until Griffin’s book, most fans and media operated as if the matches were legitimate when for years they weren’t. Anyone who said otherwise broke “kayfabe,” wrestlespeak for the portrayal of what was real or true, and hookers had an easy remedy for that. Joints were always there for twisting. Arteries always good for pinching. But pro wrestling was shifting from showcasing athletes well versed in the foundation of the game—the damaging catch-as-catch-can stylings of pioneers Lewis, Gotch, and Burns—to those playing off showmanship and characters who could create “heat” with the audience.
A couple days before Muhammad Ali—technically he was Cassius Clay, and remained so until 1964—made his first ring appearance in Las Vegas, a ten-round decision over Duke Sabedong, the nineteen-year-old from Louisville, Ky., reformatted his mind as to how he wanted people reacting to him.
During a live radio interview to promote Ali’s seventh fight, the boxer, sitting beside beloved matchmaker Mel Greb, responded somewhat meekly about himself, considering the reputation he went on to earn. A year removed from winning a gold medal in Rome, Ali was joined in studio by iconic pro wrestler “Gorgeous” George Wagner, a champion at talking, annoying people, and creating headlines, but not much else as it pertained to wrestling. Thankfully for George, he was in a profession that rewarded such abilities.
The night before Ali took to the Convention Center on June 26, 1961, against Sabedong, a six-foot-six Hawaiian, George faced Freddie Blassie in the same building. George and Blassie were two of the best-known wrestlers working out of the Los Angeles territory at the time. Much had changed about pro wrestling since the Gold Dust Trio days, and while Blassie could handle himself some, George was the sort of wrestler who would have been tied in knots had “Strangler” Lewis or Joe Stecher placed their hands on him. “Gorgeous” George represented a consequence of pro wrestling’s push to campiness, a true departure from the submission wrestling techniques born out of Greece and Japan and countless corners of the world, to a showy mindless form of entertainment that fills the gap between television commercials. George was primarily a character pushed to the top of cards based on his charisma and drawing power. After pro wrestling prioritized selling and showmanship over honest-to-goodness skills, the conditions were set for wrestlers like George to emerge.
Well past the peak of George’s career—when the TV boom during the late 1940s demanded content to draw in viewers, all three networks featured pro wrestling on their airwaves, and business received a surprising boost that jolted it out of a considerable lull— the 220-pound “Human Orchid” still made the most out of getting people to hate him. George was a drunk by the summer of 1961. His liver was shot, and he was two Christmases from dying, broke, of a heart attack. It was coincidence or fate that Mel Greb put the wrestler in the same room with the fresh-faced, smooth-skinned African American Ali.
“I’ll kill him; I’ll tear his arm off,” George ranted about his opponent, the classic Freddie Blassie. “If this bum beats me, I’ll crawl across the ring and cut off my hair, but it’s not gonna happen because I’m the greatest wrestler in the world.”
Ali absorbed what was in front of him and considered how much he wanted to see “Gorgeous” George in action. No matter what happened, the boxer felt as if something unmissable was about to go down and he needed to watch a man who proclaimed he’d win because he was the prettier wrestler.
“That’s when I decided I’d never been shy about talking,” the boxer said to historian Thomas Hauser in the biography Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times. “But if I talked even more, there was no telling how much money people would pay to see me.”
Ali was simply playing off his strengths. He was already a poet, creating and reciting lines about his favorite boxers and moments, so it wasn’t as if George inspired him to make rhymes. More to the point, this was brashness recognizing itself in an unadulterated, propped-up form. Ali loved the show business side of pro wrestling, and George woke him up to what was possible.
It was a full house for George and Blassie, about double what Ali and Sabedong managed to produce the following night. Angelo Dundee’s charge watched the man that captivated him go through his usual shtick. George stepped into the ring on a cutout of a red carpet. “Pomp and Circumstance” played over loudspeakers. He tossed out gold-colored bobby pins that were removed from his hair to a hissing, snarling crowd. “Georgie pins,” the 14-karat version, were reserved for friends and well-wishers willing to swear an oath never to confuse regular bobby pins for these. The wrestler’s personal valet, whether lady or gentleman, used a super-sized sterling silver atomizer to douse his corner, the referee, the crowd, and, sometimes, his opponent in the sweet-smelling “Chanel No. 10,” a concoction that existed only in the fanciful world of “Gorgeous” George. His marcelled platinum locks, courtesy of Hollywood’s famous Frank & Joseph Hair Salon, were perfectly suited for the lacy, frilly gowns and sequined satin robes he wore into the ring.
“I don’t really think I’m gorgeous,” the wrestler, a natural brunette, was known to say. “But what’s my opinion against millions?” Once he stepped between the ropes and prepared to put on a show, he delighted in slowly folding his robes, reportedly valued at as much as $2,000 apiece. The slower the fold, he discovered, the more the crowd despised him. Against Blassie, George wore a form-fitting red velvet one. He was absurd, but that was the point. More than a third of his fans were women, and on plenty of occasions George dealt with the threat of having a purse hurled at him. Men were known to stick lit cigars into his calves. They hated him but they watched, especially in Los Angeles, where the Olympic Auditorium was home for “G.G.”
“When he got to the ring, everyone booed,” Muhammad Ali would later tell Dundee, according to John Capouya in his book Gorgeous George: The Outrageous Bad-Boy Wrestler Who Created American Pop Culture. “I looked around and I saw everybody was mad. I was mad! I saw 15,000 people coming to see this man get beat, and his talking did it. And I said, ‘This is a gooood idea.’”
Ali needed no gimmicks to attract or repel people. He was a magnet, always; it just depended on the other side’s polarity. The public’s feelings about the boxer throughout his career were based on tangible things: cockiness born from self-belief and success in real competition; a conversion to Islam; unconventional political views; changing his identity from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali; challenging the U.S. government as a conscientious objector during the war in Vietnam; civil rights activism; and dozens of other important stances he took throughout his career. Ali changed the way fighters approached publicity. Unafraid to consider consequences in the ring and out, Ali spoke like no boxer before him, offering statements on serious topics or clownish things as he wished. The man was much more than a lug, but when he incorporated an over-the-top feel to his language, when he harangued opponents for being ugly or looking like a bear or, in Inoki’s case, a pelican, or when he began bragging about himself, which he hadn’t done much until pro wrestlers changed his perspective, people simply ate it up.
When George Wagner bumped into Ali in Las Vegas, the bright lights had long dimmed on the wrestler’s career. Following promotional wars and match-fixing scandals that emerged out of pro wrestling’s turbulent 1930s, George’s buffoonery was the sort of thing no one watching could be confused about, and the total lack of a sporting attitude actually helped propel him to prominence and rekindled a new kind of interest in pro wrestling in America. Pro wrestling needed to be fake and not many of the boys were less real than “Gorgeous” George.
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