The Grunt and Groan Business

The WAWLI Papers by J Michael Kenyon

THE GRUNT AND GROAN BUSINESS
Canadian Business, January, 1948
by Andy O'Brien
Reprinted in The WAWLI Papers, Volume 2, Number 30

For better or for worse, the hilariously maligned science of Grunt and Groan has been parlayed into big business in Montreal.   Local enthusiasts there contributed more than $300,000 to wrestling during 1947.   This all-time record box office gross, amassed during 40 shows at the Forum and exceeding even the previous turnstile feat of $240,264 in 1946 at the same Forum, has firmly entrenched the Canadian metropolis as wrestling mecca of the world and a reformed Boston taxi-driver as Pachyderm Promotional Peer.
Executives of more prosaic business enterprises are often surprised to learn that Grunt and Groan Inc. operates more by guide than by guess.
The combination of cauliflowered cavorters' sweat, blood and tears and promoter Eddie (Vesuvius) Quinn's violent showmanship has swollen attendance to 15,000 in Montreal while his Ottawa Auditorium sideline has seen Bytown boomed from a $600 town to one grossing $5,500.   All in all, his array of some 150 wrestlers now appear in a chain of 35 clubs extending from Ottawa to Halifax, over which Quinn beams as Muscle Mahatma for a ten per cent cut from all shows.   He schedules the talent and takes in the checques without ever having to go near the minor spots.
As this issue of Canadian Business goes to press, Quinn expects to be in Paris to work an international exchange deal with ex-Montreal mat idol Henri DeGlane, who now rules the Palais des Sports.   French Canada has always gone for French grapplers in a big way, as three $20,000 gates testified in recent years in Montreal.   Quinn feels he definitely can do with more of same "if some guy will only put me straight on this dollar mix-up.   My wrestlers won't go over there if they can't take the francs out."
Mahatma Quinn is pressed for the secret of his success -- evidenced by his $30,000 home in the Town of Mont Royal, a half-acre of Cadillac, ownership in the $100,000 El Morocco night club and a net yearly income of approximately $50,000 -- but will tell you:
"Mob hysteria on a mass production basis does the trick."
If you attempt to insinuate that this very tactic tends to remove wrestling from the sphere of legitimate business, Quinn will forthwith light a fuse.
"Whattayoumean?" he will bark.   "Even the National Hockey League relies on mob hysteria whenever it has a chance to use same.   Just look at the rhubarb kicked up by hockey executives last season Canadiens' Elmer Lach was allegedly felled by a Toronto player.   The only difference is that wrestling doesn't wait for the old mob appeal to be injected by chance.   We create M.H.   by insisting on slam-bang thriller shows for every card."
A prime example of mob hysteria in action is a histrionic meanie, Henry (Kulky) Kulkovich, who earns almost four times the salary of a Canadian Senator simply by being hated.
"I owe my $15,000 annual income," Kulkavich once told me, "to the general repugnance with which the sporting public regards me."
The fact that he lost or tied the vast majority of some 8,000 bouts fails to create an inferiority complex in this matdom Bad Man.
Note that this professional crowd-disaster is not only superb company personally but a man of considerable intelligence and impressive background.   By losing three bouts and drawing one in one week for a $135 fee in Montreal, $75 at Ottawa, $75 at Quebec and $150 as headliner at Burlington, Vermont, he feels the average fan places himself in the role of the hero and the more decisively he, Kulky, is beaten, the happier the fan will be.   That's good business because the fans will insist Kulky be brought back again to be defeated some more.   Meanwhile, entirely unhappy about her son's success, Mrs. Kulkavich enjoys social prestige at Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y.   She keeps Henry in the doghouse on a more or less permanent basis, releasing him only during visits home -- occasions on the infrequent side because this year he added movie-making in Hollywood to his United States, Canada and South America wrestling engagements.
And, still talking about business, I was once asked by Kulkavich not to mention the fact that he had served with the U.S. Navy.   The unusual request came as a result of my hearing that the wrestler had won a "served with distinction" tag for anti-submarine action in the Caribbean.
"This might be hard to understand," he shrugged, "but being detested means money in the bank to me.   In fact, it's the only way I can make such money and have so much travelling fun, because I'm not the classiest wrestler in the world and could probably never get to the top on my mat ability alone.   So being hated gets me bookings.   Once the public learn I was a sailor and did a fair job in the war, nothing I do in the ring will make them made at me.   Instead of shrieking that I'm a heel, they'll grin and say: 'That gob sure is a tough baby.'   Actually, the only time I wrestle cleanly is on service fund shows."
Whereas you and I treasure little trophies of triumph -- a silver spoon from bowling, a little statuette from golfing, a college letter, an illuminated address from admiring co-workers -- the professional baddie Kulkavich points with pride to the pop bottles, ladies' shoes, men's rubbers and canes, tons of paper programs and even a pair of false teeth that have been tossed by raging customers.
"I try to tell the indignant ones that if justice hasn't triumphed this week it might do so next week, so why in hell are they getting all het up?" he says.
Does all this make wrestling a racket?
Most of us sport writers have taken so many cracks at the game that perhaps it would be more interesting to hear how Big Business Man Quinn answers the charge.
"We admit there's showmanship in wrestling," he says.   "By showmanship I mean that one wrestler may be able to beat another in ten minutes but it takes him twenty to do it.   Yet is that so different from horse racing, where the best horse doesn't go out front and stay there all the way?   No, a smart rider often tucks his oatburner into place position and lets somebody else set the pace to the stretch, when he comes in with a winning burst of speed."
If you have an hour or so to spare, the Mahatma will expound this theme at length, stressing that you'll find "experts" on Wall Street and in the newspapers who are still convinced World War II wasn't on the level.
"Besmirch the wrestling profession as much as you like," desk-thumps Quinn, "but what other form of sporting entertainment gives as much to its fans? There have been 26 wrestlers -- including Stan Stasiak, Jim Browning and Charley Hanson -- who died from ring injuries.   Mike Romano's collapse in a ring at Washington caused a riot as fans shrieked: 'Fake!' After they carried him to the dressing room, the medicos found Mike was dead.   In the same ring in Washington in 1937, Montreal's spectacular Yvon Robert called it quits after seven minutes of wrestling with Cliff Olson, the toehold king.   As he was carried out of the ring the
fans hissed him, one shoved a lighted cigarette into Yvon's back.   X-rays showed Yvon suffered a quintuple fracture of the left leg.   The same wrestler suffered a broken back, two fractures of the arm and ..."
This could go on to the end of the article but the showmanship argument plus the entertainment provided cannot be disputed.
Quinn has been undeniably shrewed and has established himself not only in Canada but through affiliation with the International Wrestling Association down as far as St. Louis, by avoiding ice cream, smelt and mud matches.   He abhors freak spectacles, stressing wrestlers who at least act like athletes.   Even Primo Carnera and "The Angel" went about Montreal shows a la wrestler.
Whenever there are signs of waning enthusiasm in the gentle art of gouging, poking and heaving opposition out of rings, the Montreal public has had bigger spectacles tossed at them.   The result has invariably been bigger business.   For instance, Quinn introduced team wrestling -- two wrestlers versus two others -- a couple of years ago.   The Forum was quickly sold out.   Then Quinn apparently decided to make those who hadn't tried to get tickets feel they had been very foolish indeed.   He added ex-heavyweight world's boxing champion Jack Sharkey as referee.   Then, as an apparent afterthought, he 'confessed' to the newsmen that he feared even Sharkey couldn't instil law and order into the impending battle.   So he added Jack Dempsey as co-referee.   The fact that Dempsey and Sharkey would be appearing together in a ring for the first time since their one million dollar fight years ago and that they had been alleged enemies ever since, needled the public into a frenzy.   For the first time in local history, wrestling tickets were being scalped along Peel Street.   And subsequent shows boomed.
The custom of importing a 'name' referee, whether or not he knows any more than Mother Machree about wreslting, is in itself rather slick showmanship.   It is designed primarily to give waning publicity a shot in the arm.   If, during the course of mat action, an ex-world's boxing champ hangs a brisk right hook on the chin of a particularly obnoxious pachyderm, that's also all to the good for subsequent publicity.   As long as the fan's concept of justice rules, everybody remains uproariously content.
Financially, all wrestlers on the major circuits do all right for themselves, largely because they have little or no overhead beyond a few pairs of shorts, a dressing gown and ring shoes.   They don't have to worry about bookings or cutting in managers on their earnings.
Take, for instance, a team match of a year or so ago in which Montreal's French-Canadian favorites, Yvon Robert and Larry Moquin, were sent in against the storm Dusek brothers from Omaha.   Sharkey was pressed into service as referee.
About 50 per cent of the gross gate was divided among the grapplers.   Robert, whose income hits the $40,000 bracket and Moquin, a former $12-per-week RCA Victor handyman and now garnering $25,000 per annum, achieved increased local prestige as well as $1,750 apiece by winning over the notorious Riot Squad of Wrestling.   Sharkey drew $800.   After paying the Forum rental, supporting performers and publicity expenses, Quinn took home a few thousand for his own efforts.
Last September on Old Orchard Beach I met a knarled old-timer emerging like a graying walrus from the frigid Atlantic where, at the ripe young age of 73, he had just done his daily three-mile swim.   He was Stanislaus Zbyszko, who was a world's wrestling champion in the days when they made 'em one at a time instead of by the gross.
A veteran of 3,000 bouts all over the world, he admitted that he still feels the terrible strength of Strangler Lewis's crushing holds.   It was 26 years ago, when he was 46 years old, that Zbyszko took the title from Lewis but lost to him the next year.   In 1925, a few months later, Wayne Munn trimmed Lewis and the same year Zbyszko tossed Munn to regain the crown, only to lose it for the last time to Joe Stecher.
In forty years of mat warfare, Zbyszko told me he had grossed over two million dollars and had managed to retain a goodly slice of it.   He has a farm up north, a home on the beach at Old Orchard and lots of pleasant friends.   It made one wonder how many major business executives could say the same, if any of them live to 75.   Even if they do, how many could romp into the cold Atlantic for a marathon swim daily?
"There was a day when wrestling was honorable, before the comics overran it.   However, I honestly believe the sport will come back."
But if it does come bazck, there is every reason for suspecting wrestling won't be the Big Business it is today.   Without the stress on showmanship, it is hardly likely that Montreal, for example, would support the game as it does.   Whether it's funny or phoney, rugged or riotous, seems beside the point.   The emphasis is now on entertainment and wreslting is just that, in a frenzied sort of way.   Without a rule book, such goings-on are possible and entirely plausible financially.

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