Ballyhoo: The Fight For Wrestling's Real History
A new book joins the battle against WWE for control of wrestling's past.
At one point wrestling history was basically non-existent. If the promotions didn’t ignore it completely, they made it up with gusto. The magazines weren’t much better, often stuffed with great photographs and, unfortunately, stories that were little more than fiction. Many promoters even erased tapes of their old programs to save money, sending a clear message—wrestling was something for the moment, not for posterity.
Still, we persisted.
If you were lucky enough to have someone turn you onto it, the golden goose was Fall Guys, Marcus Griffin’s incredible, occasionally accurate, history of the sport’s pioneer years. Further down the rabbit hole you might find Joe Jares’ Whatever Happened to Gorgeous George, which picks up the story in the television era with the golden-haired superstar who reinvented the game.
Other than that, it was slim pickings, a morbid wait for someone to die so the incomparable Dave Meltzer would get a chance to stretch out his typing fingers and create magic with one of his famous obituaries. Beyond Meltzer, there were a few diehards raiding the microfiche collection of libraries around the country, mostly keeping their information close to the vest, a hidden world within a world, entry purchased by rolling up your sleeves and doing some research of your own.
By the end of the 1990s, all that had changed. Rob Feinstein had cornered the market on shoot interviews, allowing wrestlers to tell their individual stories in their own words, each of them the main character in their specific alternate universe. Then Mick Foley took it a step further with his best-selling autobiography Have a Nice Day. All of a sudden the floodgates were open. WWE got into the act, producing books, documentaries and video features, carefully working around any inconvenient truths or uncomfortable realities. This stuff was often slickly produced, heartstring pulling and occasionally really, really interesting, offering just enough of a glimpse behind the curtain to appease fans happy for any access at all.
Wrestling, for the first time, was building a past—one wrestlers and assorted grifters were happy to fill in line by line. The problem? There was no one to vet any of it. And wrestlers, famously loose with the truth, are going to wrestler. Soon shelves and VHS tapes were filled with mostly self-aggrandizing nonsense. WWE doesn’t really produce any wrestling history. Neither do most shoot interviews or podcasts. I like to call them wrestling lore. That’s something different than history, though related in many ways.
History-adjacent, if you will.
In the past few years, however, something interesting has happened. Running parallel to all these tall tales and mythology, some legitimate historians have taken up the cause of wrestling history. Scott Teal, Steve Yohe, Al Getz, Brian Solomon and Tim Hornbaker (among many others) are trying their best to preserve the real, accurate, documentable history of the sport. It’s a losing battle most likely. The WWE machine, in particular, is strong, capable of convincing people of obvious falsehoods.
But, by God and Terry Funk, they are trying. And you can add Jon Langmead’s name to this growing list of literary heroes. His new book Ballyhoo: The Roughhousers, Con Artists, and Wildmen Who Invented Professional Wrestling, is the best history of the sport’s formative years I’ve ever read, detailed and comprehensive without being so stuffed full that there’s no room for a narrative to emerge.
The book is a survey of wrestling’s pioneer days— but one cleverly disguised as a biographical sketch of legendary promoter Jack Curley. As a promoter, Curley did it all. Starting as a young man talking the ear off legendary wrestling tough guy Frank Gotch, Curley was the through line connecting disparate eras and performers as wrestling transformed from something that looked like a contest to, well, wrestling.
The hardest battles were often fought outside the ring, with conniving and scheming promoters striving to control important venues like Madison Square Garden and critical wrestlers like Strangler Lewis and Jim Londos. If promises, alliances or bones were broken along the way, so be it. Langmead lays out all the famous double crosses, backing up the lore with factual detail from contemporary sources. Ballyhoo flows nicely, something that isn’t always guaranteed with this kind of book. They often end up being listless and stiff recitations of fact, but Langmead avoids that trap. He has a gift for finding the right anecdote, bringing these old chestnuts to life. Just as importantly, he knows what to leave out, admirably keeping his eye on the main narrative whenever possible, a real challenge when dealing with decades of mostly untold stories.
The result is something pretty spectacular. It’s the best book about this era I’ve ever read and comes highly recommended to anyone interested in the history of our favorite pseudo-sport. I sat down and talked with Langmead about wrestling fandom, his fantastic work and the challenges inherent in telling this kind of story.
Jonathan Snowden: I’m really excited to talk to you about this book. I'd gotten this review copy a long time ago, but I didn't want to do an interview before I actually read the thing. You know, a lot of times someone will want to talk to you about your book and it becomes obvious they haven't even really read it. I didn't want to be that guy. So I completed the book and wow, what a tour de force. I was really, really impressed with it.
Jon Langmead: That means a lot to me and I appreciate that. Coming from you especially, it means an awful lot. And I appreciate the time you took to read it. It means a lot.
Snowden: I'm interested in your background and how you came to write a book about the early days of pro wrestling. It's kind of an esoteric topic. Did you come into this as a wrestling fan? How did you find yourself immersed in this book?
Langmead: I am not an active fan. I tried to get kind of back into it multiple times and have just never managed to do it. But growing up I was a big fan around 1983, 1984, living in Baltimore. We were getting a lot of the different promotions down there—WWF, Mid-Atlantic. If the antenna happened to be pointed in the right direction you could get Texas.
And the cool thing with Baltimore, they kind of competed with each other, all the different promotions. So we would get really cool matches. We got like the Crockett Cup one year. Stuff like that. I think it was just the drama of it. It was almost like a comic book in some ways for me, but so much more awesome than that.
Snowden: My ears perked up immediately when you started talking about the Crockett Cup. I'm thinking about Dusty Rhodes and the stoppage. Baltimore is famous for having the weirdo rules where they stop the matches because of blood and all this kind of stuff. It's definitely one of those towns that had a unique place in the territory days. To tie it into your book, it's maybe what it was like for some of these towns when competition would come in back in the olden times. Like someone coming to Boston to mess around with legendary promoter Paul Bowser. The last vestiges of that era.
Langmead: Totally, totally. And we got such a variety too. I can remember the moment, I can remember the match when it really hit me. It was Barry Windham and Mike Rotunda against Iron Sheik and Nikolai Volkov when Windham and Rotunda won the world titles. For some reason, I still don't even know why, that hooked me.
Then, getting exposed to Mid-Atlantic and Ric Flair, Magnum, TA, like the early days of like Nikita Koloff—I'm so glad I got exposed to that stuff because it had all the good stuff about WWF, sort of the characters and the personalities and larger than life stuff, but it was like rougher, you know what I mean?
Snowden: Oh yeah, so I grew up in the South and we had Jim Crockett Promotions and then we had Georgia and then eventually WWF came on television everywhere and it was very difficult for us to accept it. We called it Yankee Wrestling. It didn't feel right. Now I can go back and look at it and actually really kind of enjoy the over the top nature of it. But at the time, it's like ‘this isn't wrestling. What are these guys doing?’
I lived in Columbia and the Township Auditorium was one of Crockett’s regular stops. We could actually pick up channel 17, which was WTBS. You could pick that up on your television if the weather was right and you prayed hard enough. Then eventually everybody got one of those boxes on the top of the TV that had 13 channels, and one of the channels was wrestling and the Braves and Andy Griffith.
The first wrestler I remember is Dusty Rhodes. You know, Ole Anderson turning on him in the cage and him bleeding all over the place. Like that's the wrestling that I remember. Ric Flair rubbing Ricky Morton's face on the concrete.
Langmead: Yeah, I remember that. I remember that very well.
Snowden: Really visceral stuff. We got way sidetracked on 1910s wrestling…so you went from classic 80’s wrestling to writing this book about people we’ve mostly only seen in pictures, right? You know, like there's the occasional film of like Jim Londos, there’s a Joe Stecher match, but we're mostly just imagining what it was like to watch Frank Gotch or Hackenschmidt.
What about that inspired your interest? There's been these attempts at writing the history of wrestling—Ringside by Scott Beekman and some others, these kind of overviews. You took this a different approach where you decided on Jack Curley as your through line. How did you come up with that? That's an interesting way to go about it.
Langmead: Well, I've read all those books and I love all those books, but I wanted to do something a little different, right? Because that's all been done, right? Scott did that book, Tim's done his books. I kind of did feel like the one thing that maybe hadn't quite been done was this kind of a book, a narrative sort of nonfiction book with a central character that you were able to kind of carry through the whole story and focus on. And I struggled for a long time with that piece of it.
I hoped to write something that'll stick around for a while and be for people that don't even like wrestling. Like maybe people are just interested in the era. They're interested in sports generally. I'm not saying I accomplished that but that was my goal. So, I felt like I had to find a way for it not to be so inside baseball all the time. Even I get lost in some books about wrestling which don’t do a good job of focusing on the details that matter. I think it's important to include all details. We've got to get them down on paper. But sometimes, when you're writing a book, you can lose people. I was really sensitive to that.
The idea of Curley came up just because I knew the characters—Jim Londos, Gus Sonnenberg, obviously Frank Gotch. I wanted to talk about all of them. So I'm like ‘Well, how do you do that?’ Because they don't necessarily overlap with each other. The name that just kept coming up was Jack Curley. He's there for all of it. He's sitting ringside at Hackenschmidt-Gotch, you know? He's there on the witness stand at the Columbus trial in 1937 where the interpromotional feuds are exposing the sport. He's fighting with Jim Londos. So Curley, the more and more I was able to think about it, was the only guy who worked as a through line because he was present for all of it.
Snowden: There's probably a couple others you could try to use, like Ed Lewis, but definitely Curley works. And, from a practical point of view, he had this series of long retrospectives in The Ring Magazine at one point where he kind of like relived his entire promoting career. I'm sure that kind of stuff was helpful. Because I know I'm struggling with this myself as I'm working on a Frank Gotch book. Obviously you can't interview these people or any of their contemporaries. So how you go about bringing them to life? How did you try to make Jack Curley a living, breathing person in your narrative?
Langmead: That's a great question. I'm by no means an experienced writer. But from everything I understand, when people go into these projects, books, we all know and we all love, one of the first questions they have to ask is ‘how much material is there?’ How much is there to work with? Because you can't write a book if there's nothing, if there's no raw material. Curley, you’re right, had The Ring memoirs, which helped a ton. But he shows up everywhere. I mean, thank God for things like newspapers.com Not just Curley, but a lot of these guys, they were in newspapers all the time back then. These days you’re not going to see wrestling people interviewed in The New York Times regularly. But you used to. So there was a lot of material.
And it took a long time. Years of pouring through all the old newspaper clippings to find enough material to kind of work with. You know, the challenge I had, and this gets into a whole other kind of bag of worms, is you inherently had to discuss ‘was it real or was it fake?’ I struggled with that for such a long time.
Snowden: Spoiler alert, it was fake. Or at least pre-determined.
Langmead: If you don’t grapple with that, it's a challenge to write a sports narrative because every sports narrative is about overcoming adversity. In wrestling, that's tough, because what does that mean if there isn’t any adversity because it’s fixed? That was a challenge I couldn't get past. Eventually, I just decided to lean into it. How did it become like that? And what roles did these guys play in it?
Snowden: I’m not sure people understand how big wrestling has been and for how long. Someone like Gotch is not just in the newspapers, but he's really traveling thousands and thousands of miles every year. They were playing in front of thousands of people prior to 1910, prior to Hackenschmidt. This is a big business for a long time.
Langmead: Totally. That was one of the things I think I really wanted to convey. At WrestleMania 3, they had 90,000 people in a stadium right? But it just didn't seem all that different to me than 1911 when they're selling out Comiskey Park with Gotch-Hackenschmidt or all the building Londos sold out. When you talk to wrestling fans, everybody thinks big time wrestling was invented the first time they saw it. They thinkVince McMahon invented it, or Ted Turner invented it, or Triple H invented it. It's been around forever, effectively for most of modern American history. But because they don't talk about it when you read sports histories or anything like that, people don’t seem to realize it.
Snowden: The thing about wrestling history is that there's a big, powerful, billion-dollar machine that wants to convince you that Vince McMahon invented wrestling. So there’s two kinds of wrestling history. There's the great produced stuff that WWE does, which is lore and myth and then there's stuff that we try to do on the margins with some actual facts thrown in.
It is interesting that people think everything was invented in their time. Like, I've read legitimate articles at ESPN and CNN presenting the idea that Stephanie McMahon and WWE popularized women's wrestling. Meanwhile I'm consuming the 1908 newspapers right now for my Gotch book and Cora Livingston is in dozens of newspaper articles as the women's wrestling champion and she’s playing theaters all over the country. Wrestling history is vast and I think that there's huge swaths of it that people don't know anything about.
I think that you do a good job here of filling in some of those gaps. There's a lot of work left to be done but, wow, the amount of material you covered was kind of breathtaking. Plus you met the challenge of holding it together as a narrative. Because I know that I find myself down rabbit holes all the time. So there must have been a real challenge for you, deciding to leave out stuff that you love, right? How did you decide what goes in and what stays out? Is that a dumb question?
Langmead: No, it's not a dumb question at all, believe me. I mean, it's a huge challenge. I was always kind of keeping an eye on who and what would be interesting to wrestling fans. Obviously I wanted wrestling fans to read this because without wrestling fans, there's no point in writing it. Nobody is gonna buy the book. But I did want it to appeal broader too—something like Seabiscuit. I don't watch horse racing, but I can read Seabiscuit and enjoy it. That's what I was aiming for. So you have to be like, ‘what is going to lose people here?’ What stuff is going to completely send this off into left field, where it's going to be hard to bring people back.
I had a couple things like the Jack Johnson vs. Jess Willard fight that I did a whole chapter on. It’s not wrestling at all, but like I felt like I couldn't credibly talk about Jack Curley's life without including that. It's not really what the book is about though. He actually got into bicycle racing and dance marathons that I didn’t focus on much. I hope I found a way to kind of make it all sort of a lead back to wrestling.
Snowden:  At one point a wrestler could theoretically control his own destiny. For sure, someone like Frank Gotch was calling all his own shots about when and where he wrestled and with who. Later, a series of powerful promoters would take control of the sport. That's really kind of the story of your book. It’s that story. It's really cool. The book that I thought about a lot as I read yours, of course, was Fall Guys. That's really what interested me in wrestling history, reading that book and being introduced to the concept that the real battles were the ones being fought behind the scenes by guys like Curley.
While that book is kind of actually filled with a bunch of half-truths, it turns out the underlying premise was right on. The most interesting stories in wrestling at the time are about the promoters, right? What a wild bunch. Curley was up against like just a collection of really savage and mean business guys. All the stories of the double crosses and skullduggery you have in this book amazed me. It feels like these are not nice people, right?
Langmead: They are not—and I don't think any wrestling promoter over the history of time would win a lot of like kindness awards. There was so much dirty business we don't even know anything about and it just continued that way for a long time. One of the newspaper writers, Paul Gallico, compared them to beer barons during Prohibition, battling each other block by block for control of these cities where they could run their business. And that's what they were doing.
People talk about the Monday Night Wars and they talk about Turner and McMahon. It was way worse back in the 20s and 30s. And it was even maybe worse when Vince McMahon in the early 80s was putting everybody out of business. I mean, wrestling was cutthroat business.
Snowden: It does seem very similar to those 80s wars where a lot of the battles were behind the scenes. Ed Cohen and guys who work for McMahon getting exclusive deals on buildings around the country. The wrestling wars you write about were like that too at times. Who has access to Madison Square Garden or the equivalent in all these other places?
Langmead: I think you're right. The real wrestling wars during the 30s were also about who had access to which wrestlers, control over which wrestlers. Fall Guys is incredible because Marcus Griffin really did have the inside draft. He was friends with Toots Mondt. He worked in the offices. So he definitely knew those guys and was there for it. His stuff before that, you kind of have to take with a grain of salt. But the 1930s stuff seems pretty dead on.
Snowden: Even when he’s wrong, it's interesting because you realize that this is what the guys thought. This is what they had heard. It feels like very secondhand at times, but what we're doing as historians is removed even further than that from the original source, right? At least he was around the guys who were around the guys. And that has value.
Where you have the advantage is in modern research tools. And you really worked them here. The challenges were very different even when I wrote Shooters or when Beekman wrote his book. The tools didn't exist that exist right now. We're uniquely blessed and you really made the most of it. This is a great book and I can’t recommend it strongly enough.
My last question—one of the things that really kind of struck me when I was reading the epilogue, where you kind of like take all the major characters and fast-forward through their lives, is that there's not a lot of happy endings in pro wrestling. It's a lot of ‘this guy died at 37’ and ‘he was destitute and complaining about the business.’ And it's kind of still like that today with wrestlers. It just strikes me that this is and was a really difficult industry to be a part of.
Langmead: I agree completely. I think it's like any performing art, honestly. If you're an actor, if you want to get into Broadway, if you want to get into a band, if you want to be a painter, it's going to break your heart. Because only one out of hundreds of thousands of those people are successful. Financially successful. You can be artistically successful, and that's a different thing.
Wrestling was like that too. Having financial success is very, very difficult. So I don't know that wrestling is different than any of the other performing arts, where you're trying to kind of create something artistic and get paid to do it. All the wrestlers, they struggle with that. I do think back then a lot more guys made money than they probably do nowadays. They could make livings at it. Now there are just a handful.
Snowden: I hope you have a lot of success. But you know, as I know, writing about wrestling is like wrestling. There's a couple of big successes financially and everyone else ends up broke and in the gutter. Metaphorically I hope. But we do it because we want to do it and are called to it. There’s likely no huge pot of gold at the end of the rainbow—but if there is one for a wrestling book, I hope that you find it. This was really a special piece of work.
Langmead: Well, I thank you very much.
Ballyhoo is available wherever books are sold. I received a review copy from the publisher.
Jonathan Snowden is a long-time combat sports journalist. His books include Total MMA, Shooters and Shamrock: The World’s Most Dangerous Man. His work has appeared in USA Today, Bleacher Report, Fox Sports and The Ringer. Subscribe to this newsletter to keep up with his latest work.
Well that interview sold me on the book. I'll be picking up a copy, it sounds super interesting.