Catch Wrestling
“A wild and wooly look at the early days of pro wrestling in America”
Mark S. Hewitt, 2005, Paladin Press, $20
Let me start by making a confession, I really like pro wrestling. Always have. My wife does too. One of our first conversations was about seeing Cactus Jack and Terry Funk fight in a Death Match in Japan…she was asking if I had seen it! In our video library my we have select tapes dating back to the 50’s showing the greats of the sport.
Now, you can say what you will. Call us hillbillies. I really don’t care. To me, pro wrestling is as much a part of the great and essential American Experience as fried chicken, Detroit muscle cars, and fireworks (especially the old M-80’s).
So, you can imagine the excitement when I saw Mark Hewittttt’s new book on the history of Catch Wrestling in America!
Physically, “Catch Wrestling” is a chunky little tome; 18 chapters plus several appendices in 280 pages, with lots of really high quality photographs, drawings, and newspaper clippings of the time reprinted to bring further life to the stories.
Hewitt starts with wrestling accounts from the late 19th century and goes well into the late 20th century. Each chapter tells the story of a different fight and is chock-full of details on the wrestlers, the events around the match, and the match it self. There is a lot of interesting history that surrounded these barnstorming wrestlers and many wild places and situations.
Even just the names of these old time pros were great; the Strangler, the Little Demon, the Baltimore Strongman, the Terrible Swede, the Bluegrass Giant, the Nebraska Tigerman, Cyclone Billy, and more grace the pages of this work. It is interesting to see how many of them stay in the game for years, training the next generation of wrestlers as they traveled the country. Could you imagine touring with Farmer Burns, while learning all the “tricks of the trade” from him? Going town to town, earning a living by fighting and beating the best, biggest, toughest men that lived there…that’s one heck of an education for a young wrestler.
In addition to telling the tales of many wrestling “shoots” (real matches as opposed to a fixed matches or “works” that people are used to seeing today) the book also digs into the history of the many Wrestling versus Jujitsu and Wrestling versus Boxing matches that took place over the years. Hewitt includes a 10-page appendix listing the dates and fighters in many of these fights, showing how this was clearly not a “one time thing”.
(On a side note, another wrestling against jujitsu match not mentioned that I know of from back in the day pitted Icelandic Glima wrestling champion Johannes Josephson against Otagawa in NYC; though the newspaper account of the match, which ended with Josephson leaving the ring to calm his crying daughter, made it sound like a work to me.)
If you like wrestling history, fight stories, training accounts, and all the back-room dealings behind the matches then this book is absolutely for you. Though by no means a complete account of the entire history of the sport (you would need many more volumes to accomplish such a Herculean feat) Hewitt’s Catch Wrestling is an action packed ride that is sure to please. The photos and posters that they reproduce are wonderful, and worth the price of the book alone. You have to see John Pesek doing the body-scissors on a large hog to believe it!
Get Catch Wrestling
Directly From Paladin Press HERE
Or Call Them 24-Hour Toll-Free At 1-800-392-2400 To Order!
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