les and jumping kicks. Bronko Nagurski and “Jumping Joe” Savoldi, re-
spectively, were famous practitioners of those techniques. Mud wrestling
also dates to the 1930s; here Paul Boesch was a pioneer. But of course the
biggest draws continued to be matches that left the audience (known to the
wrestlers, using carnival language, as the marks) believing that the
wrestling was real rather than prearranged, or that featured ethnic rivalry.
Sometimes the two story lines were combined. A. J. Liebling described how
this worked in the New Yorkeron November 13, 1954: “A Foreign Men-
ace, in most cases a real wrestler, would be imported. He would meet all
the challengers for the title whom [reigning champion Jim] Londos had de-
feated in any city larger than New Haven, and beat them. After that, he and
Londos would wrestle for the world’s championship in Madison Square
Garden. The Foreign Menace would oppress Londos unmercifully for
about forty minutes, and then Londos... would whirl the current Menace
around his head and dash him to the mat three times, no more and no
less.... [After] the bout, the Menace would either return to Europe or re-
main here to become part of the buildup for the next Menace.”
During World War II, wrestlers often ended up in the service. Here
some of them found employment as hand-to-hand combat instructors. Ex-
amples include Kaimon Kudo and Lou Thesz. To meet the demand for
wrestling on the U.S. home front, women’s wrestling became popular. Stars
included Mildred Burke, Gladys Gillem, Clara Mortensen, Elvira Snod-
grass, and Mae Young. The wartime audiences were about half men and
about half women and school-age boys. The performers were working-
class women who viewed wrestling as a way of earning good money—up
to $100 a week for a champion, as opposed to $20 a week as a secretary—
while staying physically fit. Nazi newspapers picked up on this, and used
the story to show how corrupt and immoral the Americans were.
In 1948 five North American wrestling promoters organized the Na-
tional Wrestling Alliance (NWA), the idea of which was to reduce competi-
tion between territories and thereby increase the promoters’ share of the fi-
nancial pie. There were problems, however, most notably that, in the words
of the NWA champion Lou Thesz, most of the promoters were “thieves, and
the one quality all of them shared was suspicion of each other” (Thesz 1995,
107). Another problem was that every promoter wanted the world cham-
pion working for him. So there were soon nearly as many world champions
as wrestlers. Nonetheless, by 1956, thirty-eight promoters belonged to the
NWA, and between them they controlled professional wrestling in North
America, Mexico, and Japan. This arrangement led to another scandal, as
the U.S. government eventually ruled that it was an illegal restraint of trade.
To many wrestling fans, the period from the early 1950s to the late
1970s represents the Golden Age of Wrestling. In part, this nostalgia is740 Wrestling, Professional