Some Notes on Big-Time Wrestling

NOT SO ENORMOUS as one supposed ... Haystack Calhoun, the ever-popular 601-pounder from Four Corners, Arkansas, may be able to break four inch thick planks with his "Big Splash" submission hold, but he is no match for Johnny Alee, the 1132 pound man who fell through the floor of his North Carolina log cabin one hundred years ago. Nor can he compare to El Topicon, the Brazilian wrestler who is reputed to weigh an incredible fifteen hundred pounds, who is so enormous that he can engulf a two hundred pound opponent in his rolls of fat...

Don't you like opponents who can swallow you up like giant clams sucking down helpless Hawaiian pearl divers? Prince Ieukea, the Hawaiian nobleman who has given up his crown to become a big-time wrestler, can take on two Howless (Hawaiian variant of honky) at one time and turn them into bloody papua. Ieukea eventually had to be banned from the sport after he attacked Don Ho, who was in he audience in Honolulu that evening. Don Ho had called him a "tin horn sport." Ieukea dislocated Ho's shoulder before the ring police stepped in to "quiet him down."

There are many men, like Ieukea, who speak a truth that is louder than words. Prince Mephisto, the middle Eastern Sheik foresook his kingdom to come to America to fulfill his life's burning ambition--to beat America's greatest matmen. The Prince uses extra-professional tactics which some whimpering idiots claim to be unethical. Before a match, for example, he sometimes goes into a trance and puts a spell on his hapless opponent. Other times he makes balls of fire emanate from his fingertips. He has been known to burn the eyes out of the sockets of his helpless victims...

Or Waldo Von Erich, the all-German Champ, who parades around matches in Buffalo, his home-away-from-home, in full Nazi regalia, including hobnailed boots, Iron Cross medallion, World War II helmet, and leather whip. He has developed a hold which translates into English as "The Claw." When applied to the soft underbelly of the soft underbelly of an inexperienced grappler, von Erich's steel hard grip can gouge through ordinary flesh and grasp ever-so vital internal organs. Von Erich is equipped with a device which was developed late in the War--a sort of belt which wraps around his genitalia. It is electronically attuned to his body smell. When he begins to lose, and starts secreting the smell of fear, the electronic "pod," situated in his testicles, is activated. The shock drives him into a state of mindless frenzy in which he has been known to bite off his opponents entire cheeks. Von Erich has lost very, very few matches...

But von Erich, in all his savage fury, is nothing to compare with Abdullah the Butcher. The Butcher was found in the jungles of the Sudan by a American explorer, who came across him battling wild mountain lions. Realizing the man's fantastic potential as a professional wrestler, they sent out a party to capture him. Although few in the party survived, the Butcher was captured, and shipped to America in a cage. Many of his opponents wished he had remained therein. Abdullah has been photographed attacking his adversaries with the severed leg of a sheep, with metal pipes he must have ripped out of the walls of stadium lavoratories, and with fruit canning equipment; at one match, angered by the disparaging remarks of fans who questioned his sportsmanship, he decided to inflict terror on his audience by perpetrating random violence, and deliberately crippled a sixty-four year-old veteran in a four-dollar seat. This man knows no mercy--he can't even speak English....

In big time wrestling there are anomalies and curiosities of medicine unknown to the Guinness Book of World Records. Bobo Brazil, for example, the ever-popular champ, has a skull that is reputed to be four inches thick. He inflicts a torture known as the 'Coco-butt' upon his terrorized victims. By smashing his oversized cranium against theirs, he is able to shatter loose bits of bone which drift into their brain over succeeding months. The lucky ones become basket cases. Others bleed from their ears and lose all control over their bowel function...

Not all wrestlers, however, have Brazil's claim to normalcy. Clark Freeman, known as "The Nevada Skuzz-bomb" is a young man breaking into the West Coast conference--if man is the proper word. A victim of the aftereffects of and atomic blast at Nevada, New Mexico, Freeman's metabolism has been radically changed. He appears to the unaided eye to be composed of loose shale and flies, and is surrounded by a constant hissing noise. He is having trouble rising on the list of contenders because many of the contenders who have higher ranking than him are afraid to get in the ring with him. No one knows what happened to his parents. Before it was revealed in the popular press that Howard Hughes had died on the way to a Texan hospital it was believed among wrestling cognoscenti that Hughes was engaged in a nuclear deterrent project with Clark. Since the "Skuzz-Bomb" can actually generate nuclear radiation through the process of exhausting his half-lives, Hughes believed that sensitive Russian radiation equipment would mistake Freeman's emanations from nuclear explosions. The possibility of deceiving the Russians about our nuclear arsenal's strength, and thereby ramming more favorable terms for detente down their throats, was obvious...

Pound for pound, of course, the midget wrestlers are the strongest and most proficient in the business. It would be a fruitless intellectual exercise to speculate about which of these spunky little fellows could outdistance a normal human in a physical competition. Sky Lo Lo, Little Brutus, The Jamaican Kid, and a dozen others are arm wrestling champs in their own home districts. Others, less proficient in their sport, have had to humble themselves in the off-season by working on circus side shows, collecting disability insurance (achondroplasm, legally, is a disability), or working in the kind of factories whose owners secretly build oil drilling equipment into prosthetic limbs...