CATCH WRESTLING

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by kELLy CRIGGER // PHOTOS FROM THE BOOK CATCH WRESTLING - ROUND TWO by MARK S. HEWITT

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CATCH WRESTLING

Anywhere you find bored blue-collar men, you’ll find competition. It’s in our blood. Some whittle

away their disinterest with camel rac-ing, some with soccer, but the more combative types box or wrestle. In 19th century Lancashire, England, the lads who worked the local mines oftentimes found themselves with enough energy to wrestle for bets af-ter a long day of grinding out coal (try finding that in West Virginia to-day). In the Queen’s odd English, it was called catch-as-catch-can wres-tling, meaning catch any break you can to win. Along with Irish collar-and-elbow wrestling and Pehlwani (modern Indian) wrestling, catch-as-catch-can made its way to America, probably with some of the thousands of immigrants who came to fight in the U.S. Civil War in the 1880s. So what do wrestlers do after a war when they’re suddenly unemployed? Join the traveling circus, of course.

come see the strongman

Rather than scare away tourism from American shores, the “War Between the States” attracted fighting men from around the world for various reasons. Joining the ranks was an easy way to secure U.S. citizenship. For the Irish in particular, the Civil War provided an opportunity to learn new fight-ing skills they could use back in their home country where their own Civil War was brewing. After Robert E. Lee surrendered, though, jobs were difficult to find, especially as the South tried to rebuild from a crushing defeat. Thou-sands of men used the combative skills they learned as youths and joined car-nivals and traveling circuses as wrestlers and strongmen, blending their arts in a caldron of sweat and sawdust. It was the carnival, with all its colorful mystery, that introduced many grappling styles to America, including judo and jiu-jitsu.

Traveling carnivals offered cash re-wards for anyone who could defeat the carnivals’ own champions. It was called catch wrestling because the lo-cal challenger would try to catch any break he could, like the miners back in Lancashire. In general, a pin (forcing your opponent’s shoulders to the mat) was an accepted method of victory, but a submission was more certain, which could be anything from a toehold to

forcing an opponent to roll onto his back. Sometimes a choke was a sub-mission, though they were frequently barred depending on the wrestler and the venue since the rules were anything but consistent. Just as the Japanese MMA promotion Dream allows knees to a downed opponent and the UFC does not, the rules of catch wrestling differed from carnival to carnival. Gen-erally, catch wrestling rules were more lax than the most popular wrestling of the day—Greco-Roman, which did not allow holds below the waist. The term “no holds barred” is credited to catch wrestling, referring to those rare carni-vals that resembled Brazilian Vale Tudo fights that allowed everything from the Boston crab to Forrest Griffin’s Kyoko-shikin (see the last page in his book).

Predictably, aggressive and ambitious men from all across the land would travel hundreds of miles to take up the challenge carnival wrestlers provided. Naturally, these challengers went to great lengths to achieve victory, so wres-tlers had to prepare for anything a lo-cal hooligan could dream up. And since submissions ended a fight quickly and convincingly, the carnies became very adept at them. Catch wrestlers were ag-gressive, and the casual onlooker might mistake them for being unrefined and primitive. Catch wrestling historian and practitioner Kris Iatskevich disagrees.

“The system is based on domina-tion and pain compliance, but also on leverage, physics, and control,” says Iatskevich. “The use of pressure points

also is encouraged to set up techniques and keep opponents on the defensive. Catch wrestling has a wide appreciation of body mechanics and demonstrates a flexible and innovative mindset when it comes to submissions. Not only does it use the typical submissions you see across styles, but also flows freely from one technique to another, oftentimes improvising submissions to better take advantage of whatever the opponent leaves open during a scramble. Hence the name catch-as-catch-can wrestling.”

You might be saying, “That sounds like jiu-jitsu,” and you wouldn’t be too far from the truth. But there are differ-ences. For one, the traditional catch wrestler almost never had clothing, such as sleeves and collars, to use to his advantage, so his attacks focused on ex-posed limbs. But the big difference was in the mentality of the catch wrestler, who had a Patton-esque mantra of “At-tack, attack, attack!” A catch wrestler’s greatest advantage was the offense. He was trained to seize the initiative and maintain it, never letting his opponent have a moment to recover. Jiu-jitsu tournaments reward points to the ath-lete who achieves and holds positional control, so they oftentimes get to a cer-tain position and hold their opponent down to win a match. Catch wrestlers, on the other hand, never stopped at-tacking until they won.

It’s easy to see how the carnivals be-came the test beds for wrestling tech-niques, where certain methods became tested and approved, while others got

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tossed aside as impractical. But catch wrestling wasn’t solely bound to the traveling circus. Nearly anywhere bored, blue-collared men congregated, you could find conflict resolved by a con-test of skill, especially if it was spiced up by the prospect of financial gain. Coal mines, logging camps, Army bivouacs, and farms were hotbeds of man-on-man competition and betting.

“Catch-as-catch-can matches were some of the first modern mixed martial arts matches,” says wrestling historian Jake Shannon. “In the late 1890s when boxer Bob Fitzsimmons challenged Eu-ropean wrestling champ Ernest Roeber, Roeber took Fitzsimmons to the mat and applied an arm lock, making Fitz-simmons quit.”

By the early 1900s, catch-as-catch-can wrestling had split off into a number of wrestling styles, including amateur ver-

sions such as Olympic, freestyle, and folk-style, though these styles had the danger-ous submissions or “hooks” removed to make it safer for competitive athletes. Many men were able to make a decent living off of their grappling skills, which gave birth to the professional wrestler.

the haggard Faces

As the sport of catch wrestling grew, so did its legends and contests of infamy. The legendary Mitsuyo Maeda, the man who brought jiu-jitsu to Brazil, also was a carnival performer who made his liv-ing traveling the world showing people his skills, much like the originators of catch wrestling.

Evan Lewis was an American wres-tling champion between 1882 and 1919 who earned the nickname “The Strangler” by perfecting the early form

of the rear naked choke. Many years later another Lewis, this time Ed, was a successful catch wrestler with the nickname “Strangler,” a nickname that confused historians for decades.

Mitchell “Farmer” Burns is al-leged to have wrestled roughly 6,000 matches during his career, which he won mostly by pin fall (forcing both of the opponent’s shoulders to the ground) or by submission. Some of the contests, however, as noted in the book Lifework of Farmer Burns, were still decided by a throw. In 1893 Burns opened a gymnasium in Rock Island, Illinois, where he trained several hun-dred students as well as local Iowa high schoolers. Iowa has long been the proving grounds of amateur wrestling, with hundreds of champions originat-ing there, and Burns is credited with starting that trend.

Ad Santel was a catch wrestler who picked a fight with the entire judo world in 1914 when he defeated Tokugoro Ito with a powerful body slam and pronounced himself the World Judo Champion. Ito immediately returned

CATCH WRESTLING

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the favor by submitting Santel in their next match, but the feud didn’t end there. In retaliation of Santel’s continued claim to the title World Judo Champion, judo’s founder, Jigoro Kano, ordered sev-eral judokas to fight Santel, but none of them could defeat the legendary wrestler. Finally in 1921, Santel gave up the title in order to pursue a professional wrestling career, which was gaining in popularity, while traditional catch wrestling was fad-ing into history.

Professional wrestling had a brief moment in the sun just before World War I. But by the 1920s, real wrestling matches were replaced by staged con-tests. One reason was the inherent cor-ruption in individual sporting events of the time, as it was all too easy to fix a match. Another was time restraints. Real pro matches were too long for people to watch. One match between Ed Lewis

and Joe Stecher went on for an extraor-dinary nine hours. Besides, the phony stuff with its theatrics and acrobatics was an easier sell than the real thing and made more money for the promot-ers. Making money was the theme, just as in the days of the carny attraction.

Keeping the Faith

By the 1940s, “pro” wrestling was a commodity placed on a stage to make money, and catch wrestling was rel-egated to dilapidated gyms being passed down from one generation to the next by a handful of enthusiastic students. The art of the catch was being replaced by body slams and backbreakers, but a few hotspots kept the catch alive.

“When I was about 19 years old I ran into a professional lady wrestler who was telling me that pro wrestlers worked

out up above the Dutchman’s Bar in St. Paul,” says catch wrestling legend Billy Wicks. “I went down and met carny guys like ‘Crusher’ Bob Massey, Gene Shredder, and Marv Watson. Billy Carl-son was in the ring and this guy named Massey said, ‘Get in the ring with him Wicks, and wrestle him.’ So I got in there and took Billy down and pinned him like nothing. I had an amateur background and Billy was just a well-built kid. That’s how I got started.”

Wicks’ first teacher was Henry Kohlen, a disciple of Farmer Burns who taught him the value of individual training regimens.

“Each wrestler has to develop skills on their own,” Wicks says. “There is wrestling and then there are wrestling holds. You have to learn to wrestle be-fore you can apply the holds. You know you have three basic styles of wrestling: let’s go out there and pin the other man, let’s throw the other man—which is ba-sically Greco-Roman, or let’s submit the other man. So amateur wrestling is the basic thing you need to know as far as I am concerned.”

CATCH WRESTLING

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CHUCk LIDDELL

Another catch wrestling hotspot was Wigan, near the sport’s trinity site of Lan-cashire, England, where a moulder named Billy Riley lived. Riley had a talent for sub-mission wrestling and made a great deal of money wrestling local miners and breaking many of their arms. In 1950 Riley opened The Snake Pit with a Spartan training regi-men, a low threshold for whiners, and no tolerance for women and children. It would become one of catch wrestling’s greatest historical fixtures, turning out some of the best wrestlers to ever live, including a man who would eventually be known as Karl Gotch.

Gotch wrestled in the 1948 Olympics under his birth name of Charles Istaz. Af-ter eight years at The Snake Pit, perfecting the art of the catch, he became Karl Kraus-er and dominated the European wrestling scene. In 1959, he came to the United

States as Karl Gotch and quickly estab-lished his legacy as one of the greatest true wrestlers to ever step on the mat. It was Gotch who would use catch wres-tling to sow the seeds of MMA, but not in America.

Burgeoning pride

Jim Miller invited Gotch to teach his skills in Japan. Starting in 1972, Gotch spent a decade instructing and influenc-ing a slew of who’s who in Japanese wres-tling, including Antonio Inoki. In 1976, Inoki promoted a series of mixed mar-tial arts bouts against the champions of other disciplines (including Muhammad Ali), which were hugely popular and gave him a stage to showcase some of Gotch’s favorite moves, like the sleeper hold, cross arm breaker, seated armbar, Indian

deathlock, and keylock. Much like Wres-tlemania in the 1990s, these matches spread like wildfire in Japan.

During and after his time in Japan, Gotch was a boon to Japanese wres-tling, personally teaching many of the greatest wrestlers there, who in turn embraced wrestling the same way Brazil embraced jiu-jitsu. Twelve years after Gotch began his work in Japan, a handful of his students formed the original Universal Wrestling Federa-tion and Shooto, which gave rise to shoot-style wrestling matches and eventually paved the way for MMA in Japan. Catch wrestling is the base of Japan’s martial art of shoot wrestling and has found a home in an ironic case of reverse immigration. Japanese mar-tial arts have been exported through-out the world for centuries. Catch wrestling is the first western martial art to establish a following in Japan.

“Everyone thinks Japanese marital arts are so mystic, but catch wrestling had so many more techniques,” says Shooto champion and MMA trainer Erik Paul-son. “We were learning the north-south choke, the D’Arce choke, the anaconda choke, and the head and arm choke, all those way back in the ’80s. Nowadays everyone knows them and thinks they come from MMA, but they were really some of the basics of Shooto.”

In the late 1990s, Yuko Miyato estab-lished the UWF Snake Pit in Tokyo, Ja-pan, in order to keep the sport of real wrestling and catch-as-catch-can alive. The head coach was Billy Robinson, a wrestling legend who trained at the orig-inal Snake Pit in England and who was widely feared and respected in the wres-tling community. At the UWF Snake Pit, Robinson trained MMA legend Kazushi Sakuraba and current top-ranked heavy-weight Josh Barnett.

“[Catch wrestling] is a root on the tree of MMA,” says Barnett. “Catch went to Brazil with Mitsuyo Maeda, formed the basis of New Japan pro wrestling and lat-er Japanese shooting through Gotch and Robinson, and was an art based on bat-tle testing. It’s aggressive and explosive and has a deep history throughout the world and was my first major exposure to submissions. I see many top amateur wrestlers who go to BJJ gyms because that’s what they think you have to train to learn submission. Most of the time though, those BJJ trainers train the wres-tlers in ways that are counter-productive to a wrestler’s skills and strengths.”

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“Today’s MMA, modern Olympic wrestling, WWE-style pro wrestling, and even the reality-based self-defense system of Krav Maga are all derivative of catch-as-catch-can,” adds Shannon, whose Web site (www.scientificwres-tling.com) is an Internet shrine to catch-as-catch-can. “The father of the founder of Krav Maga, Imi Lichtenfeld, was a carnival acrobat and wrestler who went on to win championships in wrestling before developing the Krav system for the IDF. Even Frank Shamrock credits learning his submissions from Minoru Suzuki in Pancrase, who learned them directly from Karl Gotch.”

Back at the trinity site of catch wres-tling, Billy Riley’s original Snake Pit sur-vives today as Aspull Olympic Wrestling

Club under Roy Wood, an original dis-ciple of Riley. Were he alive today (Riley died in 1977), Riley would be astounded at how prominent catch wrestling has become in the proving grounds of MMA. Unlike many martial arts, catch wrestling was not born out of a necessi-ty to defend oneself. Its purpose was en-tertainment and conflict resolution, but that doesn’t diminish its impact on modern fighting. In fact, catch wres-tling is the basis of all submissions, and along with Muay Thai, jiu-jitsu, and western boxing, catch wrestling has ris-en to the top of the mixed martial arts heap as one of the disciplines critical to the success of every fighter. Makes you want to check out a traveling circus to see what else they’re cooking up.

Have you ever seen a lone guy in a gym using the head crank machine to build up his neck muscles? What were your thoughts? Did you pass him off as silly? Legendary Iowan wres-tler Farmer Burns made a liv-ing from those exercises. Burns purposely increased his neck size using weights and pulleys.

Burns did it to perform an ex-tremely risky stunt at carnivals, during which he would hang himself to prove how strong his neck was. Burns repeatedly performed the stunt, subjecting his neck to the full force of hav-ing his body dropped from the gallows and never once got hurt. And you thought base jumping was scary.

IN THE

NOOSE

100 FIGHTMAGAZINE.COM | FEBRUARY 2010