| A catlike young pincher named
Joe Louis won the world's heavyweight boxing
championship in 1937, and out in St. Louis a young
unknown named Lou Thesz became world's champion
wrestler.
Louis retired as boxing's king
in 1949 after the longest heavyweight reign in history.
Thesz flew into Houston the
other day to defend his wrestling title for about the
270th time. He no longer keeps an exact count.
"I've held the title six
different times," he said. "I've been in
wrestling for 30 years now and have been champ for about
18 of those 30 years.
"The number of title
matches would be about 15 a year for the 18 years."
A lot of sports fans sneer at
wrestling as hammy offshoot between tiddley-winks and
hopscotch on the scale of serious athletics.
Be that as it may, the
49-year-old Thesz' tenure at the top has rarely been
equaled -- either in sports or show business.
Before his Houston match with a
masked challenger called the Destroyer, Thesz talked
some about himself and his bruising way of making a
living.
"Oh, there's a lot of
showmanship, sure," Thesz said.
"The guy who started it
all was Gorgeous
George, and he was a
good wrestler without that baloney. Bob Hope helped him
put the gimmick together. Unfortunately, a lot of
fellows copied him. And, unfortunately, a lot of them
couldn't wrestle.
"They're just histrionic
idiots. We call 'em gimmick wrestlers."
Thesz gave a wicked leer and
continued:
"We discourage these
characters. We give 'em a bad time. When we get a
chance, we tear their tails off. That's one way of
trying to eliminate them -- and we do eliminate some of
them.
"Now this fellow I'm
wrestling here, the Destroyer, he runs around and
screams a lot. But he can really wrestle, that's all
right.
"The gimmick wrestlers,
though, they're on the way out. The only fellows drawing
big money now are the wrestlers."
Thesz was in his Rice Hotel
room, lounging in a navy blue robe and socks. He was
waiting for a lost bag to get in from the airport so he
could shave and clean up for the match.
His fingers and hands are a
study in knobs and strange angles. His cauliflower ears
look like pastry puffs. His eyebrows are like fat black
caterpillars, and his jaw is a blue-shadowed anvil.
"Do the ears hurt? At
first they do, not now. It's calcified -- as hard as a
rock," he said. "I can get them fixed up when
I quit. My only problem is going to be the hair."
His hair is thinning on the
top.
"The body's in good shape,
but the face is beginning to tell. The face is what
catches it. There's an old joke in wrestling, asking a
fellow how many faces he's gone through with that
body."
Thesz said he weighs 232 pounds
now, only about eight pounds more than when he first won
the title.
The son of a Hungarian
immigrant who did some amateur wrestling, Thesz grew up
around St. Louis. A lot of top wrestlers, Ed (Strangler)
Lewis for one, trained there in those days. And Thesz
worked out with them, and with a first-class wrestling
coach from the University of Missouri.
"At the end of two years
of this, Everett Marshall came to town. I was just a
kid, and they didn't pay much attention to me. Marshall
had been barnstorming and he was tired, and I was ready
for that match, and I took the title from him."
The new 21-year-old champ lost
his title after a few months, regained it again in 1938,
then lost it again in Houston in 1939 to Bronko Nagurski.
"I got a broken knee in
that match and had to lay off for a year," Thesz
said.
His longest stretch as
champion, he said, was about 7 1/2 years, from the late
1940s into the '50s. He has held the champion's belt
this time for three years.
"I had sort of
retired," he said. "We were living out in
LaJolla, and I was enjoying myself, sailing and skiing.
Then I got the bug again and started training and beat
Buddy Rogers in Toronto."
Thesz now lives in Phoenix,
where he owns a winter resort, the Casa Siesta Lodge.
His wife, Fredda, an interior decorator and painter,
runs the lodge while Thesz is off wrestling -- about 100
matches a year.
They have two sons, Jeffrey,
13, and Bobby, 20 months.
Jeffrey is keen on amateur
wrestling, and Thesz has been showing him some little
tricks. But he plans to stop and turn his son's training
over to an amateur wrestling coach.
"I'm going to show him
some things he's going to get disqualified for,"
Thesz said with a grin.
Thesz has shown some things to
opponents around the world -- and learned some himself.
He has gone against sumo wrestlers in Japan, counted the
house at Albert Hall in London, wrestled Olympic and
Grego-Roman style against Europeans.
"It really takes you 20
years before you know what you're doing," he said.
How many more years he has
left, he isn't sure.
"As long as I feel good,
I'll keep going," he said. "Of course, if I
broke a knee again and had to lay off for a year, that
would end it.Falling out of condition at 49, it'd be
tough to get back."
Thesz noted that Strangler
Lewis wrestled when he was pushing 60. That is one
record Thesz is content to let stand, but there is one
thing he wants to do before he quits.
"I've carried the
championship around the world twice, and I'd like to do
it one more time, and wrestle in India," he said.
"I've never wrestled there, but they have some
great wrestlers, India and Pakistan both."
The wrestling there is a
modified form of sumo, Thesz said, and he believes he
could pick it up in a month.
"What about training? I
just work, I wrestle," he said. "No secret
yoga exercises. These guys with their secret training,
that's all baloney.
"Archie Moore -- I used to
work out with him in St. Louis, too -- you know what
that secret diet of his is, the one he says he got from
the aborigines?
"Don't eat; that's
it."
Thesz, a hunk of polished
menace inside the ring, is a relaxed and amiable man in
his hotel room. He doesn't bounce visitors against the
wall for asking about that widely accepted story that
wrestling matches are rehearsed down to the last groan.
"That's a popular
notion," he said, "but our livelihood depends
on our records. If I have a decent record, I have
bargaining power. Otherwise you end up a palooka."
Another base canard pinned to
the mat.
Unlike the wrestlers coming up
now, many of whom are college graduates, Thesz got only
a grade school education. But he seems to know his way
around when it comes to mathematics.
"You know the story of
most athletes -- they end up broke," he said.
"I plan to end up a bookkeeper, counting my
money."
To ease the heavy income tax
bite on his wrestling purses, Thesz and his wife
invested in real estate -- hotels, apartment houses, and
now the resort lodge.
They own a little ranch, a
hideaway, in Apple Valley in California where they are
next-door neighbors to Roy Rogers.
What kind of wrestler does
Thesz try to be?
He answered the question by
telling of a wrestling jaunt to Mexico several years
ago. The wrestlers down there, he said, go more for
gimmicks than grappling.
"They have the Batman and
El Miracle Kid and so on," he said. "So when I
showed up at one match just wearing my trunks, the
promoter asked me where my gear was."
What gear? the puzzled Thesz
asked. He told the promoter he had it on.
"No, no, I mean where's
your mask and your hillbilly overalls?" the
promoter asked. "What's your gimmick?"
"I told him, 'My gimmick
is wrestling,'" Thesz said. "Then I went in
the ring and ate the other fellow up."
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