Russian wrestler Ivan Poddubny, claimed the women’s world wrestling
championship.
During this period, contests often emphasized ethnicity and national-
ism. For example, in 1869 a Danish strongman named Frederik Safft de-
feated a German named Wilhelm Heygster in Copenhagen. As the Prus-
sians had defeated Denmark in a war in 1864, the victory made Safft a
Danish hero. Following the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, jûjutsu
acts became popular in the United States, Europe, and Latin America.
Noted performers included Katsukuma Higashi, Tokugoro Ito, and Taro
Miyake. And during 1909–1910, the Bengali millionaire Sharat Kumar
Mishra sent four Indian wrestlers (the Great Gama, Ahmed Bux, Imam
Bux, and Gulam Mohiuddin) to Europe as part of a scheme to prove that
Europeans could be beaten using Indian methods.
At the turn of the century, popular European champions included
George Hackenschmidt, Paul Pons, and Stanislaus Zbyszko. These men
worked in the music halls of Paris and London, and did turns with part-
ners, lifted weights, and accepted challenges from the crowd. These chal-
lengers were often shills, because champions had nothing to gain and
everything to lose by wrestling unknowns. Thus the draw was matches that
the crowd believed were real, but in which the results were actually pre-
arranged. As Hackenschmidt put it in an article published in Health and
Strengthon March 20, 1909, “Wrestling is my business... [While] I am
certainly very fond of the sporting element which enters into it, [I] should
be absurdly careless if I allowed my tastes in that direction to interfere too
seriously with my career in life.”
In North America, wrestlers worked in saloons, Wild West shows, and
vaudeville. Prominent turn-of-the-century wrestlers included Martin
“Farmer” Burns, Tom Jenkins, and Frank Gotch. This was also the era of
yellow journalism, and so, with the support of jingoistic sportswriters,
there arose a clamor to see whether European or American wrestling was
best. This in turn led to two well-publicized matches between the North
American champion Frank Gotch and the European champion George
Hackenschmidt. Gotch won both times, and so the U.S. newspapers gave
him the title of “Champion of the World.”
Following Gotch’s retirement in 1913 (he received more lucrative of-
fers from a Chicago movie company), wrestling went into decline. Part of
the problem was World War I ruining the business in Europe. But scandals
also played a part. For example, in March 1910, John C. Maybray and
about eighty others (including Gotch’s former manager, Joe Carroll) pleaded
guilty in Iowa to charges of using the U.S. mails to fix wrestling matches.
Toward reducing the appearance of corruption, after World War I the
National Boxing Association began recognizing “official” wrestling cham-738 Wrestling, Professional