Wrestling 1959
by Bryce Martin


With only two television channels to chose from, I sometimes dug in on the couch to view the lesser of two evils. Wrestling was not my idea of entertainment. Late in the year in 1959, a regular wrestling show from Chicago was a weekly filmed feature. Individual matches were the norm, and contests included tag team, women, and midget wrestling. I had read in the Globe that KMAC-TV out of Kansas City, Mo., telecast live wrestling, attesting to its surge of popularity. The wrestlers from the Chicago Amphitheatre were the same ones who occasionally came to Joplin to perform. I did like the theatrics involved, their non de plumes, and their chief gimmicks. The Great Bolo wore a full head mask. That helped draw attention away from his soft-body and minimal physique. He head-butted regularly. His opponent would hold his forehead in pain and excitedly demand that the referee remove his mask to see what kind of foreign object hidden there was doing the damage. Fat chance. Haystack Calhoun was a mammoth hick in overalls. Danny Hodge was a clean-cut college wrestling champion from Oklahoma. Wild Red Berry was a veteran from Pittsburg in nearby Crawford County who looked too old. Lou Thesz was old. He somehow exuded class in this classless excuse for a sport. Antonio Rocca had thighs like beer barrels. If he got his man in a leg scissors it was all over. Others were Mighty Atlas, Sandor Szabo, Oni Wiki Wiki, and Gorgeous George. The latter was on the Johnny Holmes sports segment in Joplin promoting a match for that night. "I've noticed the women since I've been here," he told Holmes. "They all look like they came out of a book... a bad book." He likely received the intended response that night, a crowd of irate women yelling for his hide.

The title for the wrestling tapes from Chicago locally was, The Wrestling Show. It was a title that did not go unnoticed by some of my classmates. We often discussed something we had watched recently on television. Odds were, if you watched television at all you witnessed what everyone else did. We discussed how phony the whole thing was. "Did you notice it is called The Wrestling Show?" Someone asked, emphasizing the word Show.