Searching for Killer Kowalski
Rassling and the hidden meaning of life
HighGrader Magazine May/June 1998
by Charlie Angus
"The fans love the costumes, not so much because fancy clothes make the action more convincing, but because the glitter and the boots and studs and rugs make a farce of any pretension to there being a fair fight in the ring. They come because they know its fake and what a shame it is too, to see a mockery of fair play and at the same time how sweet it is to hurl one's ripened fury at the forces that corrupt a decent chance in life for decent men."
Jim Freedman, Drawing Heat
1973. The height of the Arab oil boycott. Vietnam has been lost. Inflation and Trudeau are running rampant. The Israelis are blowing Syrian MIGs out of the sky. To add to the gloom, the Club of Rome issues its dire prediction that we're running out of oil, water and good times. 1973 also marked the first time I ever stepped foot in Maple Leaf Gardens.
There is a common myth that boys growing up in English Canada dream of a Saturday night pilgrimage to watch hockey at Maple Leaf Gardens. Not me. I dreamed of going to the Gardens on a Sunday night. That was when Frank Tunney, the impresario of the rabble, held his wrestling extravaganzas.
Hockey was a game. Wrestling was about life. One didn't have to look any further than the canvas at the Gardens to know why, in 1973, our way of life was being undermined. There, under the glare of bright lights, an evil looking little man pulled something from his boot. I saw it. The whole Gardens saw it the clear glint of a foreign object. The only one who didn't see it was the man charged with ensuring that the rules were followed the referee.
The man on the ropes was the Sheik. "Out of the fiery sands of the Syrian desert came a man who would prove to be one of the most inhuman monsters ever to invade the rings of professional wrestling." Or so the wrestling version of history goes.
The more pedestrian version is that the Sheik came out of the Detroit circuit in the early 1960s, wrestling under the name "The Sheik of Araby." By the early seventies he was the undisputed king of Maple Leaf Gardens. Week after week he made a mockery of fair play and sportsmanship.
I had made my pilgrimage to the Gardens in the hopes of seeing the Sheik vanquished. Justice had come in the form of a tall, muscular black athlete Bobo Brazil. The crowd cheered as Bobo cornered, pummeled and humiliated a man who appeared twice his age and half his size. Now the Sheik was pinned on the ropes, within a hairsbreadth of the final three count.
But then it happened. From outside the ring, the Sheik's manager, Abdul "the Weasel" Farouk (decked out in red fez and sunglasses) reached through the ropes and tripped Bobo with his cane. This brought the referee rushing over to warn Farouk that, if he interfered with the match, the Sheik would be disqualified.
What a rube falling for the oldest trick in the world. I was on my seat, shouting myself hoarse along with 10,000 other indignant fans: "Turn around! Turn around!" But oddly, the ref seemed unable to hear us. It only took a moment. The Sheik whipped out the dreaded foreign object and drove it into Bobo's face.
When the ref turned back around, Bobo was rolling around in pain on the canvas. The foreign object had been discarded and the Sheik had Bobo in the dreaded Camel Clutch. Evil once again reigned triumphant.

"There it was. The ring. The podium of free enterprise preaching the gospel of its own excess. The lady in the polyester sash and blouse rose to the alter of her conscience. She bore her folding chair with her. It collapsed in mid air. She brandished it as a firebrand and proclaimed at Johnson and his buddy and the referee: ASSHOLE OF THE UNIVERSE. Here was her world in miniature and for once she stepped into this world of right and wrong as an actor, she did something about it and she got a round of applause."
Jim Freedman

Regional Identity
It's virtually impossible to engage anyone in a serious discussion about wrestling anymore. About the only place you'll see the once proud tradition of Roman and Greek youth is on the television screen in sports bars, usually in the late afternoon. This seems to be the time slot reserved for white trash extravaganzas monster truck rodeos, stock car racing and roller derby.
Wrestling today is completely bereft of tension. Big oversized monsters shake their fist at the screen in pithy displays of fury. The matches continually descend into a chaotic free-for-all as good guys and bad guys come rushing in their street clothes to pummel each other while the ref makes a pathetic attempt to keep order. It all seems so silly a bunch of over-sized clowns trying to drum up rage in a television audience.
It was not always so. Wrestling originally came out of the carnival circuits and was a reflection of the regional identities of North America. It was a stage-managed morality play where good versus evil, local versus outsider, played itself out before a crowd who felt that their participation was as integral to the event as those who were doing the throwing and the grunting.
Early wrestling promoters learned quickly that the audience wasn't interested in the sport, they wanted to be entertained. The more flamboyant the characters, the more the crowd responded. Sure, there were a few big name stars, but for every over-muscled Hulk Hogan type, there were 100 guys with beer guts, dirty beards and pimply backs local strongmen. They gave themselves names like the Crusher and the Avenger and hailed from blue-collar towns like Hamilton, Buffalo and Cleveland.
Until the rise of video, these travelling road shows remained a crucial part of the wrestling experience. Life-long fans were never made by flipping television channels. You had to see it for yourself. You had to take part in the action. And then you were hooked.

Television changed everything. And wrestling, in the form of Gorgeous George Wagner, changed television. In the early 1940s, George Wagner was just a mediocre wrestler from Nebraska. But then he grew his hair long, dyed it platinum and kept the locks in place with gold-plated bobby pins. He changed his name to Gorgeous George and became television's first superstar.
Gorgeous George was the man audiences loved to hate. His entrances into the ring were long, drawn-out affairs as George, decked out in flowing robes, minced up to the mat behind his personal valet Geoffrey. Before each match began, the valet sprayed his charge and the opponent with a liberal dose of sickly sweet perfume.
George was a cheat, a flagrant abuser of the rules. The crowds flocked to hurl abuse at him. People bought television sets so they could follow the antics of Gorgeous George. According to the Wrestling Hall of Fame, "Gorgeous George single-handedly established the unproven new technology of television as a viable, entertaining medium that could reach millions of homes across the country. Pro wrestling was TV's first real hit with the public, the first programs that drew any real numbers for the new technology and Gorgeous George was responsible for all the commotion."
But poor George has never been given his due from sociologists and cultural writers. David Halberstam in his book The Fifties completely overlooks George. Halberstam would have us believe that it was the drama of the Kefauver Senate hearings on Organized Crime that proved the drawing power of this new medium. In light of the subsequent development of American viewing habits (Jerry Springer, Hard Copy, et al) it seems hard to believe that early viewers were drawn by high brow news and not by the low brow antics of Gorgeous George.

The Tunney Circus
Television changed the way wrestling was presented and who presented it. The action became concentrated on the promoters who managed to secure television rights. Eastern Canada had two main wrestling centres Toronto and Montreal. Toronto was by far the bigger draw, one of the premiere destinations on the continent. If you wanted to wrestle anywhere in Southern Ontario or upstate New York, you had to go through Frank Tunney.
Tunney had been a fixture at the Gardens since the 1930s. The mainstay of the Tunney circus was Whipper Billy Watson an athlete who personified the values of Toronto "The Good" in the 1950s and 60s. He was Upper Canada's great righter of wrongs. It was Watson who ended the career of Gorgeous George. In 1959 this good guy versus bad guy drama was heightened by Gorgeous George's promise to shave off his golden locks if he lost the bout. In a highly publicized television extravaganza, Watson shaved off Wagner's hated bouffant.
Unfortunately, Watson's reign over Toronto was prematurely ended by a car accident. This put the pressure on Tunney to find a big enough draw to keep the fans from slipping away to lesser promoters biting at his heels in suburban and small town arenas. He found this draw in the Sheik, who reigned supreme at the Gardens through the early seventies.
Besides the Sheik, Tunney ran a number of Watson-like clones Whipper Billy Watson Jr., Billy Red Lyons and even Tiger Jight Singh. Against these decent chaps he had local bad guys: Angelo "King Kong" Mosca, the aging Gene Kiniski and wrestler, turned country singer, Sweet Daddy Sikki.
For tag-team mayhem you couldn't beat the Love brothers. Hartford and Reginald Love cashed in on the peace and love era with their psychedelic pants and love beads. According to the Canadian Wrestling Hall of Fame, the Love Brothers "were, of course, vicious heels."
On top of the local flavour, Tunney kept the fans coming with a steady stream of star-studded events. North American championships were often settled in the Gardens. Some nights both the NWA (National Wrestling Association) and AWA (American Wrestling Association) title belts passed hands in the Gardens ring.
The Tunney circus was always officiated by that stalwart of Upper Canada decency, Lord Athol Layton.
The Montreal circuit was cheesier, the characters a reflection of the rougher Montreal streets. Every Saturday, a show, shot in Verdun, was fed to television stations across Quebec and Northern Ontario. The characters were a colourful collage of Habitant clichés: Mad Dog Vachon, Gilles "The Fish" Poisson and those honourable lumberjacks, Joe and Paul Leduc. There was a smattering of second string bad guys, claiming to be from every corner of the globe (such as Tarzan "the boot" Tyler, allegedly from the Florida Everglades) but when they were interviewed the accents betrayed the quaint guttural hacking of blue collar Rimouski, Chicoutimi and Rouyn.
Real bad guys tended to be English rascals imported from Ontario or the United States. Wladek "Killer" Kowalski was a 6' 8", 320 lb monster who first arrived on the Montreal circuit in 1952. For the next 20 years he delighted in subjecting the purlaine grapplers of Verdun to his own nasty brand of sportsmanship.
Kowalski, says the Canadian Wrestling Hall of Fame was "one of the meanest, most vicious and unrelenting villains the sport has ever known." The biography goes on to tell what a great guy Killer is and how much he's done for the sport.
My personal favourite was Gilles "The Fish" Poisson. Whenever this consummate bad guy entered the ring, the announcers would make the point of reminding the fans in hushed, reverent tones, that whatever they did, not to antagonize Gilles by calling him "the fish". Right away the chant "poisson" would arise from the stands and Gilles would clasp his head in pain and scream vainly in his thick Quebecois accent, "don't call me the fish."
It was low rent participatory theatre and the fans loved it. But these local markets with local stars began to undergo major changes in the late 1970s as the big promoters fought to expand their market share. Small touring operations were put out of business by the majors, who in turn began taking each other over.
University of Western anthropologist, Jim Freedman, chronicled the demise of vaudeville wrestling in his book Drawing Heat. Freedman followed Dave "the Wildman" McKigney's wrestling road show as it worked its way through the tobacco belt of southwestern Ontario and the mining towns of northeastern Ontario. At the time of writing (1985), McKigney's carnival of the ugly midgets, the lady wrestlers, the tag-team match was fighting a losing battle to the Tunney empire.
Freedman saw wrestling as a "running commentary on society" and the ring a metaphor for the free market economy.
"Labourers and consumers lose daily to monopolies and mind bending advertisements, union busters, politicians, prejudice and favoritism. How does this happen? Just ask the fans. How come the number of good men and good intentions who win are as few and far between in wrestling as in real life.....it shatters the conceit of the middle class who applaud themselves for their accumulations, who protect the valour of their careers when they complain that wrestling is phony, when they claim that they did it the hard way and the honest way without tricks and gags and inside information. The wrestling fans know otherwise. For them what's phony is the promise they ever had a fighting chance."
Freedman's free market metaphor helps explains the incredible change that overcame wrestling in the 1980s. Just as operators like Tunney worked at pushing smaller competitors out of business, the more centralized operations were working to push out the regional lords. Vince McMahon's World Wrestling Federation out of New York had become the top dog, either shutting down smaller centres or turning them into second-rate franchise operations. Even the great Tunney himself was swallowed up by Vince McMahon.
For a short period of time, Toronto was run as a franchise to the New York operation, even managing to host some of the big WWF shows. But, in what could have been a perfect precursor of the future NAFTA agreement, the WWF operators found they could make more money by simply shutting down the wrestling branch plants and feeding a single "pay per view" show out of one city. The result was "Wrestlemania", which marked the apotheosis of wrestling's earning power in spin-off video sales and merchandising.
Ironically, Wrestlemania also represented a dead-end for the carnival culture of wrestling. Having shutdown the access to local heroes and local markets, McMahon and his boys found that big video extravaganzas did little to hold the fans over the long haul. Wrestlemania quickly became little more than a farce acted out for fewer and fewer hardcore fans.
Which brings us to where we are today. The monopolization of the sport by the richest has taken the soul out of the spectacle. The local markets have dried up. The fans have taken their interests elsewhere. What remains are a bunch of hairy, oversized clowns shaking their fist at a viewer who no longer believes. But maybe even as it stands today, wrestling remains a morality play about real life. When I watch these yahoos going through their spiels, I think of the outspoken pundits of neo-con globalization. May the same demise afflict them.

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