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"Only Shooting Match at Garden After Curfew" That was a real shooting match at the Garden Monday night -- not the stale Verne Gagne-Antonino Rocca histrionics which the curfew stopped at 11 p.m., as predicted, after each had scored a fall, but the passage-at-arms between Pedro Mrtinez and Toots Mondt. It was a two-blow affair. Pedro hit Toots and Toots hit the deck. This unbilled feature took place in one of the dressing rooms after the curfew had tolled the knell of parting jays. Thus, with the 15,071 guys, gals and gulls spared the horror of witnessing an authentic brawl, the integrity of The Game was preserved. Martinez, a Rochester promoter, is trying to collect $20,000 he says Toots owes him but doesn't consider his one-punch kayo a paid-in-full receipt. In wrestling the promoters always have furnished more genuine battles by fighting eadch other than they ever purveyed to their clients. They are always in a turmoiled, fighting for control of their phony empire. Television has stepped up the civil warfare in redcent years. The dominating figure in the quasi-sport just now is Fred Kohler, a German-American of Chicago, who, before going into business as a promoter at the Rainbo Arena there, was an obscure middleweight wrestler. Kohler's shortcut to the top was a Saturday night television show, now beamed from the Marigold Gardens, the small club, in which Barney Ross got his start as a professional boxer. Kohler's contract with TV brings about $100,000 a year in royalties besides providing a priceless outlet for publicizing his synthetic mat marvels. Playing along with the act, without protecting himself with the tongue-in-cheek drolleries with which Dennis James rode to fame, fortune and a higher TV echelon, is Jack Brickhouse. The former boxing commentator has been deified by the believers, converted by television, as a St. George ready to fight all dragons of the press who so much as hint that wrestling is not the most honest of sports. What his straight-faced commentaries on the patent but harmless pretending of the heroes and villains whose antics he describes every Saturday night will do to Jack's rating for credibility if he ever brandches out into a legitimate sport is something Mr. Brickhouse himself will have to worry about as I have shouldered all the burdens I can handle. However, as a salesman for The Game, Brickhouse has no equal. Whenever he is introduced at a wrestling show here, he is cheered like a fellow who has announced he will give away $100 bills to all comers. Living so happily in this false little world of his own making, Brickhouse probably asks himself between boys, "Why should I level with these squares?" Just as the I.B.C. has used TV to build up boxing idols whose feet and entire bodies (save for their glass jaws) turned out to be made of clay, Mahout Kohler and his associates have taken advantage of their far-reaching video outlet and prize hucksters to mould mastermen out of mediocrities. For example, Guy Le Rose of the La Vie En Roses, is a French Canadian wrestler who never got anywhere playing straight mat roles around New York where he developed resin burns on both shoulders from being pinned like his namesake. But, converted overnight into Hans Schmidt, a German who, as reports from the German language press found out, couldn't sprechen a void of Deutsch, Hans has become one of the best villains in the business, whose success is measured by the amount of hatred he has engendered. Yukon Eric, the Klondike sourdough, one of Montreal Eddie Quinn's creations, is really a nice lad named Eric Holmback whose theme song is "Tanks for the Memories." Tanking was Eric's role until Explorer Quinn discovered the Yukon for him. Before Kohler's star performer, Gagne, became the superman and American champion, he was a junior heavyweight whom the likes of Danny McShain, a 180-pounder, threw with the greatest of ease. Now, because of Kohler's television-acquired power, Gagne is played up on a par with Lou Thesz, the St. Louis shoemaker, who is the world's champion. In fact, Brickhouse announced to Monday night's crowd that Gagne was the world's champion. Actually, Thesz has thrown Gagne five times. Sam Muchnick, Lou's manager, is also president of the National Wrestling Alliance and at the moment he is campaigning to have the Burpers' Academy Award, a triple Mickey Finn in an old tomato can, given to Jack Pfefer, as the man who has done most to help The Game. Another Kohler performer is Pat O'Connor, a New Zealander. Whether he is related to the bewhiskered gentleman of the same name who was billed as a sculptor in his incarnation in the wrestling world, I couldn't say, but if this Pat doesn't become a carver of statues, it won't be because he isn't associated with the finest bunch of chiselers extant. Killer Kowalski, who couldn't kill a cricket, and Barefoot Boy Rocca round out the cast of headliners. Cutting in on Kohler's pork pie are Monsieur Quinn, the pseudo-Canuck from South Boston and Frank Tunney of Toronto. Kohler's Man Saturday, a newcomer named Jim Barnett, accompanies the Chicago baron's wrestlers wherever they go to see that nobody, especially K.O.'d Mondt, pays them off in the Russian rubles of the Czarist regime he always gives greenhorn wrestlers in $500 bundles when they put the bite on him. The roubles can be converted into Toots' new issue of Barren Island Gold Mine stock printed in purple ink with yellow borders and bearing a likeness of Pedro Martinez, the par value of which is minus 10. Watchdog Barnett is already putting on the dog by staying in a Waldorf suite instead of at the Holland where Toots and the local wrestling mob make their headquarters. Kohler's crowd takes 60 percent of every show. Toots is now reduced to the role of booker and cuts only Rocca's purses. Rocca, whose 15 per cent share of the gate is split equally by Mondt, Kohler and the wrestler, has had to post $10,000 to guarantee that he will tank when ordered to, which will be often from now on. In Montreal a few weeks ago, he had to "take a lose" to Killer Kowalski. The Killer "belongs" to Thesz, who leases him out to Kohler for a consideration. That's how the Chicago gang has The Game sewed up. All the wrestlers and promoters not in on the deal are up in arms over conditions and a revolt impends that should produce more shooting matdches like Pedro's one-punch kayo of his stout friend, Toots, which the customers missed Monday night. |
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