1957
Edouard Carpentier vs Lou Thesz, 16 August 1957, Chicago (NWA)
This match stems from Edouard Carpentier's disputed win over Lou Thesz for the NWA World Heavyweight Championship two months earlier. The dispute was real: Some NWA territories recognized Carpentier as the Champion, and others did not. leading regional organizations to name their own local "world" champions - a historic turn in North American wrestling.
As I have said previously, several times, I can't account for the allure pre-Sixties professional wrestling has for me. I admit it's fake nostalgia. It held no interest for me until about 12 years ago. WWE offers more spectacle, and the current indie promotions provide younger, fitter eye candy. I began to fantasize about this world shortly before I started this blog.
Along with YouTube videos and eBay 8x10s, books have influenced this infatuation, most particularly Gorgeous George: The Outrageous Bad-Boy Wrestler Who Created American Pop Culture (2008) and The Queen of the Ring: Sex, Muscles, Diamonds, and the Making of an American Legend (2009).
The appeal is not entirely academic, though. I like the old days of wrestling because, first, holds were clasped tighter and longer, far longer than modern audiences feel comfortable with. I'd argue that the slowness of this 54-minute match is a reason to love it. Second, the sells were more convincing then because they HAD to be - it was 30 years before kayfabe was dumped in favor of sports entertainment. Sells back then tapped into the Torah, Euripides, and Dante for inspiration. Kid-friendly pro wrestling nowadays has the weight of a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Third, pre-Sixties pro-wrestling fans were different - they dressed up in their church clothes, and irony was not yet an ingredient of spectatorship.
A fourth reason, related to all three reasons above, is how evenly matched Thesz, 41 at the time, is against Carpentier, in his prime at 31, a mere 5 pounds difference in weight, yet how strongly they contrast - dark trunks vs light, hairy and balding vs smooth and big-chested, and Thesz quick with the kidney punch vs Carpentier, who sticks with textbook grappling till he is pushed.
I wish somebody would make a movie about 1950s wrestling along the lines of Scorsese's Raging Bull. Either Carpentier or Thesz would be a good subject.
My personal masturbatory obsession with wrestling stems, in part, from stealing (well, accidentally failing to return) a book on amateur wrestling from my high school library. The book was from the sixties (30 years old when I got it), and was filled with pictures of 2 beefy hairy men demonstrating various wrestling moves and tactics, accompanied by brief descriptions of the maneuver. It was not particularly sexy taken straight. But those grainy black and white pics were my portal to a wonderful world of aggressive masculinity writ large. I still get hard thinking of that book; I wish I still had it. In short, i fully understand your liking of matches like this!
ReplyDeleteFunny you should say that because for me it was a book from the 50's that I used to take out of the public library in the late 70's. I found the book a few years ago on Ebay so I bought it. The hottest section was indeed the "illegal holds" pages.
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