George Hackenschmidt & Me - A Historical Moment
Back in August, it was my immense pleasure to be in one of London’s finest old theatres, one of the few original music halls where George Hackenschmidt wrestles that is not only still standing, but that still hosts professional wrestling. While I can’t talk too much about the specifics of why I was there, suffice to say that Hackenschmidt was a topic of conversation, with particular focus on the tantalising possibility of there being surviving footage of him out there somewhere.
Timing is everything. As I left the theatre, and my phone signal returned, I was beset with notifications and messages - the eminent Phil Lions, who knows more about the history of European wrestling than I know about my own family, had Tweeted about a ground-breaking moment in professional wrestling history, exactly what I had just been discussing; one of wrestling's holy grails, actual footage of George Hackenschmidt wrestling had been screened at the Estonian Sports and Olympic Museum. Thanks to a significant increase in funding, and a remodelling and relaunch over the last few years, that museum has been a boon to the world of Hackenschmidt research, leading to the release of a hitherto unreleased autobiography and now this.
The footage in question is of George Hackenschmidt vs. Joe Rogers, from January 30th 1908, at London’s Oxford Music Hall. The prospect of this match surviving has been known for a while - it has existed, on decomposing old nitrate film stock, in New Zealand’s Nga Taonga archive since the mid-1980s, and its contents were confirmed back in 2011.
Finally, this month, the cleaned up and digitally restored film was made available to watch on the Nga Taonga archive website. Taonga, incidentally, is a Maori phrase, that loosely translated means “Treasures”, and that’s exactly what they’ve given the world here.
I had a few friends and colleagues who were either keeping an eye out for, or actively pushing for the public release of, the film, and it was a message from wrestling writer and one of those tireless historians I mentioned, Dan Rice, that brought it to my (and the world’s) attention, along with an email from Joaquin Poblete, whose own efforts in bringing Hackenschmidt’s story and the prospect of lost footage to light have been positively Herculean.
When you research one subject for any period of time, you begin to see it everywhere. In terms of wrestling history, I’ve found new and unexpected avenues of research, or answers to questions that wrestling-specific literature could not answer, in the unlikeliest of places, because everything is connected once you are so thoroughly immersed in the world of your research. But when the subject of your studies is an individual, that immersion takes on a different, almost intimate, quality.
I have spent so much time “with” George Hackenschmidt over the last four or five years that I felt almost like I had come to know him. I pored over the pages of his scrapbook, I scoured newspaper archives for every mention of him after the end of his wrestling career (which led to my exploration of “Counterfeit Hackenschmidts”; those wrestlers who sought to profit off his name), I plotted his family tree, I spent afternoons in the British Library working my way through his quite frankly impenetrable works of philosophy, I bought historic postcards only tangentially connected to him, scoured the Arolsen Archives to determine the whereabouts of his family during World War 2, worked my way through the writings, letters and correspondence of the great and the good of the early 20th Century to find mention of his name, and I put in freedom of information requests to get hold of every bit of information the government was prepared to release about him (some, tantalisingly, is still inaccessible on grounds of national security for another ten or more years). I read practically every word ever written about the man, sometimes painstakingly sat with Estonian books and magazines and Google Translate, unpicking the likely errors in translation as I went. I bought long out-of-print autobiographies of theatrical managers who once worked with him, and of an eccentric bookseller who had aided the publication of his earliest written works, and who decades later wrote to his local newspaper to complain of how a previous writer had referred to wrestling as a “sport” when in reality it was all a fix, and none of the wrestlers of the day could match up to the great George Hackenschmidt.
The life and times of George Hackenschmidt absolutely consumed me. Not merely as a list of places, dates, and opponents, but in the sense that I began to feel like I knew the man, that his life, not the relatively brief period of it that he spent wrestling, was important to me. There were times in my frustration working on Kayfabe: A Mostly True History of Professional Wrestling - what could there possibly be left to say about the Montreal Screwjob? - that I gave serious thought to scrapping the whole endeavour, and instead working on a biography of Hack instead. Now, as I begin tentative work on what may or may not ever become a novel, George Hackenschmidt is a central character in that work.
And yet still, there remains the knowledge that so much more is hidden off, in foreign archives that I hardly have the budget to travel to and explore, and in private collections closed off to any curious eyes. There are unpublished writings, photographs unseen for a hundred years, radio interviews and TV appearances long since recorded over for God only knows what. There was the lost film, “Houdini Throws Hackenschmidt”, the existence and content of which I once helped Houdini historians to track down evidence of (and to debunk a couple of hoaxed images flying around the internet), but which no trace of exists anywhere. Most importantly of all, there were his matches - George Hackenschmidt was one of the biggest names of his day, not merely in wrestling, but as a bonafide headline attraction and household name, and so his biggest matches were recorded for newsreels and for theatrical reproduction; both his bouts against Frank Gotch, and his infamous encounter with Ahmed Madrali were recorded, and all are long lost. That a 1908 clash with Joe Rogers survived, and that I might one day be able to see it was a tantalising prospect - it is, let’s face it, absurd to have spent years obsessed with a professional wrestler who you have never, and for a long time thought you would never, actually see wrestle. But, at last, here we are.
To finally watch the match was a genuinely emotional experience, as I knew it would be. It’s difficult to explain to someone who hasn’t ever been down in the mud and the weeds of research, thrilling at finding a new photograph of George’s wife Rachel Hackenschmidt, or gasping at a translation that reveals more than expected about the mysterious fate of his brother, Bruno, how utterly overwhelming it can feel to be confronted with something like the totality of the subject.
No, it’s unfair to say that wrestling was the totality of George Hackenschmidt. It was something he did for thirteen years out of ninety. Beyond that, he was a husband, a writer, a philosopher, a university lecturer, a Socialist, a lover of Shakespeare, a fitness instructor to the House of Lords. His wrestling career was a small part of that; roughly as long as that of some of today’s wrestling stars, like Swerve Strickland. At the time of writing, it’s strange to say that I have spent the same amount of time in the professional wrestling business as George Hackenschmidt did.
He contained multitudes. But to history, to posterity, he was a wrestler, he was a strongman, the almost platonic ideal of both. And now, at long last, I got to watch him work.
Well, “work”, that’s a heavily weighted term in these circles, isn’t it? To work, in wrestling lingo, is to cooperate, to fix, to kayfabe, to fake. And among all the historical curiosity behind this match, that’s one question that has to hang over it - is this all, you know, real? George Hackenschmidt engaged in “exhibitions” on music hall stages, but went to his grave detesting “hippodromes” and fixed fights, and looking down on American promoters and wrestlers who expected him to throw fights to line their pockets. While his London manager, theatrical impresario Charles B. Cochran, reportedly had to convince Hack to go easy on his opponents and drag out the inevitable rather than finishing matches in record time, so that the audience felt they got their money’s worth, that’s a conceit to the idea of entertainment, not an admission that the whole thing was predetermined. It’s my opinion that George Hackenschmidt never entirely faked what he and Cochran described as a “serious match” - that is to say, where titles or title contention were the stakes, as was the case here, even with a side bet on the go. The problem, though, is bar any obvious indicator of cooperation and fakery, we just don’t know what a worked match would have looked like in 1908. That, and “work” and “shoot” are less distinct and inseparable categories as they are points on a continuum; my instinct is to deem Hackenschmidt vs. Rogers a “cooperative shoot”, a description somewhat born out by contemporary news accounts of Hackenschmidt admitting to toying with Rogers somewhat.
The story behind the match itself is an interesting one, though only a footnote in Hackenschmidt’s career - Jonathan Snowden has covered it expertly on his Substack, so I won’t repeat his work here.
There were some surprises to the footage, too - it’s always delightful to see an old-timey wrestling audience, in full three-piece suits and, in some cases, top hats, and the referee dressed just as impeccably, but I wasn’t necessarily anticipating that the match would be wrestled on mats. It’s a curious thing about the history of pro-wrestling that something so simple as “when did we start wrestling in a ring” remains an open question - Hackenschmidt’s fateful match with Frank Gotch later that same year would be in a ring, but this music hall bout was not.
It makes sense that music hall matches largely weren’t held in rings - this was a genre built on variety, on one act following another and then another, and that doesn’t lend itself to the timely construction and deconstruction of a wrestling ring for a single bout. I would hazard a guess that wrestling first moved into wrestling rings once it became big business in the United States, in part because so many of America’s top wrestling promoters also worked in boxing, but also because the large open-air events in sports fields or the smaller shows in carnival backlots would have both benefited from a ring out in the open air in a way that music hall shows sheltered from England’s unpredictable and inclement weather wouldn’t.
Another surprise is to see the footage book-ended by footage of both Rogers and Hackenschmidt posing for the camera, like an Edwardian attempt at a PS1 character select screen, or the animated match graphics favoured by WWE and TNA in 2003. Rogers is a hulking specimen by the standards of the day, at 6’2” and billed at 245lbs, compared to the 5’9” and 220lb Hackenschmidt, but the footage of Hack posing and flexing is breathtaking by comparison. I have seen just about every photograph of Hackenschmidt posing that you can see, and yet to see him in motion is an entirely different proposition - to see every ripple of his muscles, everything in such clear definition, is an astonishing sight even today; to put yourself in the shoes of the average malnourished Brit over a century ago, some years before the start of the First World War, would be to think yourself in the possession of a God. His is a physique that would turn heads in the steroid-pumped bodybuilding height of the 1980s WWF, let alone fifty years before the advent of anabolic steroids.
The final surprise, then, is that of a 24 minute video, only 14 minutes actually depict the two falls of Hackenschmidt vs. Rogers. Sandwiched in the middle of the video, unheralded, is another match, without billing or explanation. Phil Lions identified this match as between Peter Gotz and Joe Carroll.
Readers of my book might dimly remember the name Joe Carroll - under that name, and as Ole Marsh, J.C. Marsh, George Marsh, Joe Ollie Marsh, or William Marsh, Carroll was a mischief maker, an agent of chaos, and a perennial thorn in the side of wrestling as a legitimate sport; arguably the villain of my first two chapters. He was a co-conspirator of Frank Gotch in his dubious adventures in the Yukon, he was manager to the trust-breaker Marin Plestina, he was the wrestling point-man for the Mabray Gang’s most ambitious cons, a dissenting voice to the wrestling press, and a devil on the shoulder of an aggrieved Jack Pfeffer. And if none of that means anything to you, I recommend you read the book and find out more - they’re some wild stories, and Carroll/Marsh is the Forrest Gump of early wrestling wrongdoing, so it seems almost poetic that he would once again unexpectedly re-emerge into the narrative, even a century later.
Of the match itself, obviously one would be foolish to expect even a hint of the shape of wrestling today - this is, it’s fair to say, one for the purists - but it still has elements that strike me as surprisingly modern; always be wary of any fighter or coach who makes claims to have “invented” a hold or a technique - there’s only so many ways to manipulate another human being’s body, and someone had it figured out before you did. There are few better illustrations of that than watching George Hackenschmidt, a century and change ago, performing groundwork and takedowns that wouldn’t look out of place in the UFC.
And that brings me on to why, beyond the pure historical curiosity of the thing, I think that this footage is so important. For decades, wrestling historians have mostly presented one of two duelling narratives surrounding the infamous Frank Gotch vs. George Hackenschmidt bouts - one is that they were fakes, and caused wrestling’s dissent into widespread fakery, the other is rather more complicated. So let’s start with the first point.
I won’t exhaust you with the details because, once again, I’ve written a book that looks at all of this in great detail, but suffice to say, I don’t believe that either Gotch/Hack fight was a fake. Not exactly. I think they were each in their own way a fix, and that’s a separate matter altogether. But popular opinion was that they were fakes, particularly the second match, and that perception was always more important than the reality.
The other narrative that surrounded Gotch vs. Hackenschmidt is the one that, having become so attached to dear old George over the years, I take the most exception to. It was a narrative created by Frank Gotch’s biographer, Ed W. Smith, and repeated by a generation of professional wrestling and catch wrestling historians who either never looked further into the matter, or were fully paid up worshippers at the Church Of Gotch. The story was that George Hackenschmidt was the old guard, a privileged son of old European high society, schooled in the obsolete discipline of Greco-Roman, and no match for young Frank Gotch, the fitter, healthier, hard-scrabble son of the American soil, the farmer’s boy who fought for everything he ever had, and who, as the leading exponent of the faster, more unruly style of modern catch-as-catch-can, simply outfought and outclassed the slower, more complacent Hackenschmidt who had no defence against this new and dynamic discipline.
To that charge, I have long called bullshit. George Hackenschmidt was no old man ready to be put down - in fact, he was only four months older than Gotch, and would outlive him by more than fifty years - nor was he some effete arch-traditionalist wedded to an outdated style of wrestling long after it had begun to fail him. Quite the contrary - in Hackenschmidt’s writings, he encourages fighters to study as many disciplines and styles as they can, and sings the praises of Jiu-Jitsu, while in his own career he had begun insisting that all his matches be contested under catch-as-catch-can rules from the moment he recognised that it was the emergent, and most effective, style of wrestling of its time. That’s not the attitude of someone resting on their laurels, stuck in their old ways.
So where did that story come from? From Frank Gotch, and from Ed Smith. Smith was Gotch’s biographer - his book on the history of American wrestling was little more than a paean to Gotch’s greatness, and he spoke of him as the perfect epitome of American manhood - but, crucially, he was also the referee of both Gotch/Hackenschmidt bouts. Hackenschmidt never stood a chance. Gotch was, doubtless, one of the most skilled catch grapplers of his, or any, day, and George Hackenschmidt was always going to have his work cut out against him, but Gotch was also an under-handed businessman, and a dirty, ruthless fighter. Against Hackenschmidt, he oiled his hair and body to make himself impossible to grapple with, he bit, clawed, punched and headbutted, all without admonishment from his pet referee, and against the protests of George Hackenschmidt.
The fix was in, and the victors wrote the narrative for the ensuing century, with Frank Gotch’s legend only growing in stature the years after this death. But with this footage, the tide may finally begin to turn in George Hackenschmidt’s favour once again.
