"Public wise to Curley's tricks"
by Frank G. Menke
King Features Syndicate, March 18, 1922

NEW YORK CITY -- Heavyweight "rassling" has become a lost art in the matter of filching dollars from the pockets of a sportive nation.

The game is dying throughout the United States -- a victim of men who never loved it as a sport but merely used it as the means to bunk the public and to enrich themselves.

Jack Curley, "master mind" in more hippodromes and more "phoneys" than the game ever knew before his time, has passed out of the picture -- or, to be brutally frank, has been barred out.

The trust of heavyweight wrestlers which he created and dominated, and which afterward tossed him out into the cold, has floundered on the rocks of internal strife; the cities which once were "gold mines" have turned to dross

And a long-suffering public, which thought for a long time due to skillful press work and countless reams of publicity that the game the "trust" wrestlers played was on the level, knows now that it was horswoggled and hoodwinked -- as well as fleeced.

Earl Caddock, once one of the most conspicuous of the "trust wrestlers," is reported to have "got religion." It is said that he has announced permanent retirement from the mat to devote the rest of his life to evangelical work.

Joe Stecher, who cast his lot with Curley when the other members of the "trust" oozed out Curley, is said to be disgusted over the fact that he no longer can get money-making matches and that he is going to gallop off to one or another of his farms and stay there ad infinitum.

Stanislaus Zbyszko, the bald-headed, who first started wrestling along about the time Grant took Richmond, but who hippodrome last year as the "trust champion," is about through. Chances are he'll go back to that dear old Poland -- if he hasn't already started.

John Pesek picked up some loose change in the west for a while -- after he was barred from mats in New York. John had his mind all made up to mix it with Strangler Lewis, the "champion." But after it was discovered that John and the Strangler were managed by the Baumann brothers, Billy and Max, the effect was like dropping cold water upon the backbones of the public.

The other conspicuous member of the old combine -- Wladek Zbyszko -- is fussing around in New York meeting "German Oaks," "Austrian Bears," "Terrible Turks" and the like. Wladek is a ham grappler at his best, but the others are so terrible that Wladek must exercise all his acting skill to make it seem like a fairly close match during his first ten minutes with those slabs of humanized pork.

Curley, barred from getting a promoters' license in New York, became the "man behind" in several shows staged in Gotham this winter. Apparently he failed to realize that he had killed the game as a sport; that the hippodromes and the burlesques which he had engineered for several years at last had nauseated.

The "outpourings" for the few bouts they've staged in New York this winter have been pitiful to an extreme. Only a trifle more than 300 cash customers appeared one night for an all-star card. Thousands were expected. The "gate" was hardly more than enough to pay the electric light bill.

Other showers were failures almost as complete. Curley saw the handwriting on the wall -- and took the air. A few brave souls remained in the hope of putting on a show that would be a big money maker. Their hopes have turned to draughts or wormwood.

In Chicago, some of the wrestling folks decided they could run things to suit themselves. The result was that city officials introduced measures in council designed to kill professional wrestling in the Illinois metropolis.

Cleveland, Boston, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington -- those, plus a score of other cities of size in the nation, are practically closed to grapplers.

And so rigor mortis is about to set in upon "the crookedest sport of them all." When it does, there'll be none to mourn beyond the few who used it as a medium to fleece a nation of sport lovers -- and fleece them to the absolute limit of their bankrolls.