Ballyhoo!: The Roughhousers, Con Artists, and Wildmen Who Invented Professional Wrestling

I am a lifelong fan of professional wrestling. For me, this is not a deeply held secret, not a dark item to confess, and certainly not a guilty pleasure. It is rooted rather in a decades-long fascination with a true American pastime, a form of sporting theatrics (or theatrical sport?) that functions as a morality play and real-life comic book/soap opera/athletic display that, as a form of popular entertainment, deserves to make a claim for being the best there is, the best there was, and the best there ever will be (hat tip to my childhood hero, Bret “The Hitman” Hart).Where does it fit, though, in the history of sport? That is a thornier question. Is professional wrestling athletic? Of course. Is it entertainment? Undoubtedly. Is it art? I think so. But is it sport?Regardless of one's opinion on that last question, all readers with an interest in the history of twentieth-century American sports and popular culture should make a point to read Jon Langmead's outstanding Ballyhoo!: The Roughhousers, Con Artists, and Wildmen Who Invented Professional Wrestling. Langmead's monograph will be the gold standard for future scholarship on professional wrestling.Langmead has broken new ground by focusing on the formative years of professional wrestling in the first decades of the twentieth century. The author takes a fresh approach by situating his narrative in an era when wrestling was just beginning to gain its reputation as professional and when the line between works and shoots (that is, scripted finishes and nonscripted finishes) was far more unclear than it would be in later years.Langmead frames this larger history using the life and career of Jack Curley, an influential sports promoter for nearly three decades, who staged boxing and wrestling bouts to massive audiences and shockingly high profits. As a wrestling promoter, his business savvy and Barnumesque ability to continue to draw in an increasingly skeptical public effectively established the blueprint for wrestling as sports entertainment in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Curley and his contemporary promoters—Toots Mondt, Jack Pfefer, and Billy Sandow, for example—pioneered the talent-sharing arrangements that would become the norm with the formation of the National Wrestling Alliance in later decades, developed worked match finishes and booking practices, and carefully cultivated babyfaces versus heels as the central drama of professional wrestling angles. As Langmead argues, “The template [Curley] helped to build has proven remarkably durable. By the end of the 1920s, the matches he was putting on were different only by a matter of degrees from the professional wrestling matches of today” (235).Ballyhoo! rests on an impressive primary source foundation. Langmead mined the University of Notre Dame's Jack Pfefer Wrestling Collection (compiled by its namesake wrestling promoter, a sometime rival, sometime partner of Curley's for several years), which surely must be one of the most significant professional wrestling archival collections available to the public. The author also made great use of published and unpublished memoirs by early twentieth-century wrestlers and undertook extensive research in newspapers from across the United States, which served in an era before television as the principal means of promoting and reporting on wrestling.Through it all, the personalities of the wrestlers and promoters shine vividly. Langmead is an exceptional prose stylist, and the accounts he brings to life are simply amazing. From experts in catch wrestling (meaning legitimate submission fighting), such as Frank Gotch and one of his contemporaries, early barnstormer Farmer Burns, to the arrival of European wrestlers like brothers Stanislaus and Wladek Zbyszko, and the emergence of superstars Jim Londos and Gus Sonnenberg, professional wrestling in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s appears, in Langmead's hands, much more similar to the twenty-first-century spectacle of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) than scholars may have previously realized. Additionally, the appearance of seemingly downright modern and larger-than-life personalities like The Masked Marvel, Lord Patrick Landsdowne Finnegan, The Great Mephisto, and Man Mountain Dean further underscores this resemblance. Consider, for example, that champion Jim Londos “sailed home to his native Greece” in 1923 “and performed for a crowd of more than 80,000 people” (194). In 1935, Danno O'Mahony and Ed Don George wrestled for the heavyweight championship at Boston's Braves Field. Boxing heavyweight champion James Braddock was the special guest referee, and amazingly, Langmead writes, “The final attendance of close to 40,000 people [was] bigger than the crowd that had seen James Braddock defeat Max Baer” (202). This sort of attendance and international notoriety of American wrestling would only be similarly replicated in the heyday of Hulkamania and the Rock ’n’ Wrestling Connection in the 1980s, during the Monday Night Wars between World Championship Wrestling (WCW) and the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) in the 1990s, and again today following the WWE and Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) merger in 2023.One topic I would have liked to see more of is international professional wrestling. Langmead indeed discusses Curley's first promotional trip to Europe in 1910, which included his promotion of a match between American wrestler Dr. Benjamin Roller and Indian wrestler The Great Gama, and the 1911 Comiskey Park match in Chicago between American wrestler Frank Gotch and Estonian wrestler George Hackenshmidt. I was curious to know more, however, about how professional wrestling continued to flourish in Europe in the following decades. On a similar note, I also wonder about the place of Mexican professional wrestling in this history. How did early lucha libre interact with Curley's era of American professional wrestling?Questions like these, however, should not be seen as criticisms of Langmead's work. If anything, they point to new vistas for research the author has opened. Ballyhoo! was obviously a labor of love for Langmead. His respect for the subject and his careful research are always apparent. I have no hesitation in recommending Ballyhoo! to historians and popular audiences seeking a deeper understanding of a form of entertainment that has continued to captivate fans for over a century.