Savage unconscious. He hadn’t worked a fight that included impeding blood circulation to the brain as an option. Media reports indicated the boxer was out cold for almost twenty minutes, an absurd length that these days would require at least a siren-filled ride to the hospital.
Adding insult to injury, LeBell “accidentally” stepped on Savage’s chest as he walked away. He winked. This incensed a riled-up crowd, already uncomfortable with the idea that boxing was bested by an Asian martial art. Well before Savage came to his senses, the Salt Lake City crowd grew spiteful. Chairs and cushions flew. A fan attempted to stab LeBell after he stepped out of the ring. The martial artist half-parried the attack and moved past his assailant, but he got stuck nevertheless. “I kept on going but it went through me,” LeBell said. “It was pretty big.” Still, the judo man survived, won the day, and martial artists rejoiced.
With LeBell assigned as the referee, and Ali facing Inoki, the martial arts community reacted in 1976 as if a great opportunity to score another big win over boxing was theirs for the taking. “The way it was billed, we were so excited,” said William Viola Sr., a martial artist out of Pittsburgh, who bought all-in on the attraction. “The catch wrestler, Inoki, would actually be able to use all his skills. Ali was the boxer and he’d box. The buildup was unbelievable.”
Unlike all-time great Jack Dempsey, Ali actually agreed to take on a mixed-style test. He wanted it and so did Inoki, and in the end their rules weren’t so different than what Dempsey and Lewis floated to the public during the 1920s. Ali laid down and Inoki accepted a challenge to determine the best fighter in the world. Yet many English-speaking boxing scribes maligned the heavyweight champion for participating in a “farce”—otherwise known as something great boxers have always been connected with.
ROUND THREE
Marcus Griffin, in 1937, authored an apparent attempt to uncover the world of professional wrestling. Whether Griffin acted as a reporter or a flack is up for debate, as are reported events strewn throughout the pages of his book, Fall Guys: The Barnums of Bounce—The Inside Story of the Wrestling Business, America’s Most Profitable and Best Organized Professional Sport. Sorting fact from fiction in the wrestling world did not come easy then, and it still doesn’t. Wrestling is as underhanded and shifty a business as there ever was. Indisputable, however, is that Fall Guys exposed the wrestling world to the public in a way it hadn’t been before, and that Griffin earned full credit for coining the “Gold Dust Trio.”
No one uttered that term prior to Griffin’s work being published, but everyone in the pro wrestling world remembered it afterwards. The group nickname stuck because in many ways the Gold Dust Trio bridged pro wrestling’s lingering competitive nerve, the roots of catch-as-catch-can, to part-of-an-angle exhibitions indicative of WWE’s product in 2016.
“Strangler” Lewis, Billy Sandow, and one of the smartest pro wrestling people that ever lived, Joe “Toots” Mondt— whom Griffin, a newspaperman, was rumored to be on the payroll of from 1933 to 1937, and whose interviews were used as Fall Guys’ main source—changed pro wrestling. Mondt’s shift in ring philosophy and practice, Sandow’s approach to consolidating wrestlers under exclusive contracts, and Lewis’ star power, when combined, were that meaningful.
Mondt, a young wrestler, booked matches, plotted storylines, and envisioned an open style that blended elements of combat sports without the trouble of sport—an impediment, from time to time, to exciting wrestling action. Body slams and suplexes were mixed in with fisticuffs and grappling, laying the framework for a charged-up, vaudevilleinspired creation: “Slam Bang Western-Style Wrestling.” This wasn’t dumb luck. Even in his youth, Mondt possessed a wealth of knowledge regarding many forms of competitive combat sports.
Compared to wrestling during the previous decade, when crowds sat through hours-long grappling matches, Mondt’s creation was a huge hit with fans, in part because of the finishes he engineered. More than a revamping of the style of wrestling, Mondt, Sandow, and Lewis established a troupe of wrestlers who traveled like the circuses Mondt worked as a teenager, where he crossed paths with the man who taught him how to wrestle, fellow Iowan Martin “Farmer” Burns.
It took some research, according to Griffin’s account, before Mondt unearthed the story of James Figg, through which he explained to Sandow and Lewis what he wanted to accomplish. Figg, a fistic nonconformist whom Jack Dempsey called the father of modern boxing, was one of the first cross-trained fighters. During the second decade of the eighteenth century, the Briton was considered the best prizefighter on the planet. He could box a wrestler. Grapple a boxer. He could fight in the clinch. This was the basis for “Figg’s Fighting,” a style that became well-known throughout the British Isles as his reputation grew.
Sandow and Lewis saw the light, and within a few months the wrestling gates grew as members of the establishment, four promoters in the Northeast known as “The Trust,” quickly felt the pinch of hard competition.
Even before being publicly rebuffed by Dempsey, “Strangler” Lewis, the man most Americans accepted as the best heavyweight wrestler at the time, toured the country as the tip of the Gold Dust spear. The best wrestlers, like Lewis, actually knew what they were doing, and sometimes painfully implemented their knowledge against other presumably tough men. Up until the 1920s, the hierarchy of wrestling was based around whoever was perceived to be the best shooter and hooker, because if push came to shove, the guy who knew best how to push and shove was going to walk away with the belt. Choreographed outcomes, which became standard operating procedure as the Gold Dust Trio’s influence grew, needed two willing participants. If the guy tabbed to drop the belt didn’t follow the plan, or if wrestlers went off script, a price needed to be paid.
Mondt, a legitimate hooker, was brought into Lewis’ camp based on the Farmer’s recommendation in 1919. The pair sparred and worked out, leaving Lewis to feel that when he needed a “copper,” a pro wrestling euphemism for “enforcer,” Mondt along with tough guys Stanislaus Zbyszko and “Tiger Man” John Pesek could ably handle the job.
Pesek preferred wrestling for sport over show, but was vicious in defense of the Gold Dust Trio when required. After a match on November 14, 1921, at Madison Square Garden, Pesek and his manager Larney Lichtenstein of Chicago had their licenses revoked by the New York State Athletic Commission, then chaired by William Muldoon. Pesek mauled a reputed “trustbuster,” Marin Plestina, who was known for spotty cooperation when it came to laying down to promotions and their champions. Pesek butted and gouged Plestina in his eyes before being disqualified. The big Serbian was laid up in his room at the Hotel Lenox for several days nursing an abrasion of the cornea, and Pesek never wrestled in New York again.
Pesek and many of the wrestlers under contract to Sandow came and went, yet finding a place to work during this time wasn’t a problem. If the consolidation of talent was troublesome for anyone, it was promoters used to doing business with their controlling interests and mechanisms in place. As the trio cobbled together a set of wrestlers, booked venues, and promoted across the country, the “Strangler” Lewis business grew strong—though not so much the industry as a whole. Lewis held on to the title that mattered, except when it suited the business not to, and since fans might grow weary of the same man as reigning champion month after month, year after year, it sometimes made sense for him to drop the belt. Everything was predetermined, mostly due to Mondt’s handiwork. Groups of promoters got the message, and because fans passed through turnstiles to watch, this new brand of wrestling was widely adopted. Even with Mondt dictating matches and outcomes, and Sandow controlling talent, the trio wouldn’t easily own a field that had been crafted by some of the hardest men of the last hundred years. This is the stock folks like Joe Stecher came from. Stecher, a pig farmer who subdued his animals like many of the men he beat, by scissoring them between his legs, was every bit as dangerous as “Strangler” Lewis, and had the backing of entrenched powers the trio sought to overtake.
“Strangler”
