Champion of the World (45 page)

Moira forked some chicken into her mouth. “This isn't bad,” she said.

Pepper smiled at her, and a moment later he was eating and laughing with his mouth full like nothing had happened. Nothing
had
happened, she reminded herself. Still, she felt like a gavel had dropped in her mind, a verdict rendered. He had spoken just one word, barely moved, but she suddenly felt slapped in the face by a truth that had been traveling with them since they left New York. They were not normal people. They would not take the money and squirrel it away for a rainy day. They would not live simply in a cabin by the lake, making babies and strolling through the trees. It was not in them.

A
week later she woke in the dark of early morning to find him gone, his side of the bed cold to the touch. She sat up in her nightgown, rubbing sleep from her eyes, and went out to look for him. He was not at the kitchen table or in the front porch rocker, where he sometimes sat when he couldn't sleep. The outhouse stood
empty, its door swinging in the breeze. She was about to pull her boots on and hike up to the lake when he emerged from the woods, shirtless and grinning from a run.

It gave her a charge to see him moving again, and for a few days she rode it like a hot streak at cards. In the mornings they sat out on the porch and let the sun restore them, watching tiny lizards chase each other across rocks at the edge of the woods. They made love in the afternoons with the windows flung open and took evening dips in the lake, shouting from the cold, Moira feeling the occasional fish brush against her legs.

Then one evening she caught him doing tackling drills in the backyard, wearing the ridiculous two-tone wrestling shoes Fritz had given him before they left Montana. Leaving little S curves in the dirt with his back foot as he glided across the open space, his brow furrowed and his mouth tight. Looking good and quick and full of life. He didn't notice her standing in the window and she backed away, sinking into one of their two kitchen chairs.

He tried to laugh it off when he came in, saying he was just staying fit, knocking the cobwebs out of his muscles after so much time doing nothing. She knew better. Wrestling was back in his blood after the match with Lesko. It was still part of him, and he couldn't ignore it any more than a horse could ignore the urge to run. He announced he was going to the lake for a soak, and she smoked three cigarettes in fifteen minutes before going after him.

As she hiked, she wondered if it had been a mistake to tell Pepper about Lesko's visit. At first she had no intention of sharing it with him, but in those first days he just seemed so low. Finally she came out with it, hoping it might help him spring back to life. She recounted it as they rode the train south from Baltimore, Christmas wreaths hanging in all the windows. She left out the part about Lesko offering him a job, and Pepper listened to her as if he didn't
quite believe any of it. When she was done, he settled back into his seat looking content for the first time since after their match, and for a while she believed she'd done the right thing.

She reached the lake and found him sunk to his chin, twenty feet from shore, his arms making little circles just beneath the surface. His boots and tights were piled on a rock and she sat next to them to pull off her own shoes. The gravel of the bank was cool under her bare feet and she stayed there a moment, listening to the cackling and knocking of unseen birds.

“I thought I'd be better at this,” she said, keeping her hands folded on her knees, but saying it loud enough that her voice wasn't lost in all the wilderness.

“Better at what?” he said, treading water, tipping his head back a little to keep his mouth above the surface.

“I'm not sure,” she said. “Doing nothing? Sitting watching the sunset like a couple of old codgers?”

He showed her the grin she loved. “Is that what we're doing?” he said. “Rattling around like a couple of beans in a tin can?”

She got up and stood with her feet in the shallows. Sand and green moss twisting around her toes. “I know what you're up to,” she said.

He took two strokes to a place his feet could touch and crept out of the water, pulling on his tights so he could stand beside her. His skin cold against her arm. “There's got to be another promoter that would take me on,” he said. “Curly or Pfeffer, somebody. There's no shortage of guys who want to do Lesko and Stettler harm.”

It occurred to her that, since she'd kept the news clippings from him, he didn't even know how right he was. He was more famous now than he'd ever been as champion. All it would take would be for them to drive into town and give some local reporter the scoop of a lifetime. In a couple of days—a week, maybe—the big promoters from New York and Chicago would come calling.

“Is that what you want?” she said. “Is that what
we
want?”

The breeze rippled the water against their legs. Freezing but nice. “You saw me against Lesko,” he said. “I was right there.”

She tried to smile back at him but didn't quite make it. She'd watched the match from a balcony seat, a handkerchief crushed in one hand. During the bout, the whole arena roiled and churned like some great animal, and once an usher had to come down the aisle to tell her to please sit down, though she had no memory of getting out of her chair.

It was electric joy to watch him wrestle again after all those years. Running hard and heavy each step of the way with the world's heavyweight champion. She was still bursting with pride over it, but she'd also seen enough to know she never wanted to see him wrestle again. Despite the things Lesko had said and the glowing accounts in the papers, Moira knew Pepper wasn't the same man he was as champion. No one in the world had watched him compete more than she had. She knew his every move by heart. She understood the easy grace with which he moved around the ring. His bottomless strength and wind. The man she saw in New York that night was good, but he wasn't Pepper. She could tell his leg had never quite come back after Fritz broke it. He was just a step slower, a second more tentative. He was okay for busting up railroad toughs and fieldworkers in nickel challenge matches, but he wasn't young or quick enough to compete with the best professionals anymore. If he went back, even to carnival wrestling or the crooked stuff Fritz and Stettler were pitching now, eventually some rough, headstrong kid would come along and hurt him.

It broke her heart to tell him all that now, but she did, and when she was done she kissed him. They pulled apart and he was quiet for a long time.

“You talked to O'Shea,” he said finally, “and I bet you made him tell you everything.”

“I did,” she said.

At first she couldn't believe the things the gangster had told her about her gambling debts, but in time she knew it was true. It was she who had broken them. She was a good gambler, one of the best, but nobody won all the time. Those days when Pepper was champion were such a whirlwind, there was nobody keeping track of the ledger. At some point she supposed she'd fallen into the same trap as all the wrestlers, imagining they would all stay young forever and the money would just flow and flow. She wasn't furious with herself over it anymore, or furious with Pepper for keeping it from her for so long. Now she just felt sorry. For who, she'd couldn't decide.

“All that money you lost,” he said, “I never asked you to stop playing.”

“No,” she said. “But maybe you should have.”

She felt a tear sprout at the corner of her eye and she touched her face to stop it. He saw it and slipped an arm around her waist, pulling her close. “Hey,” he said. “It doesn't mean a thing to me. It never did. All I'm asking for is the same treatment. If I've got one shot left, I'm just saying we should think about it.”

It wasn't the same thing, and she told him so, but she knew she couldn't stop him. If this was what he wanted to do, no one could keep him from it. The wind kicked up another notch, whipping her dress against her legs. “I'll think about it,” she said. “So long as you promise me you'll think about it, too. I mean, really think.”

He nodded, squinting one eye at her, looking boyish and sad and annoyed with the breeze all at once. “In any case,” he said, “I don't think we're going to figure it all out standing here in the cold. You know what I'm thinking of
?
That little speakeasy we found right when we got here. That little shack on the edge of town. You know?”

She said she did.

“I bet that place is open,” he said. “I bet they've got a card game going, too.”

“It's possible,” she said.

“How about we take a ride into town?” he said. “See what's happening.”

“Would that be smart?” she said.

“It would be fun,” he said.

Standing hip to hip, they turned and were about to walk up out of the water when they heard a low growl coming out of the north. Lifting their faces, they watched as an airplane skirted over the tree line on the opposite side of the lake, dipping its wings slightly as it righted its course along the water. The sight of it stopped her breathing and she took Pepper's cold, callused hand in hers. The plane's body was painted sunny yellow, and it flew so low it seemed to shake the ground with the great slapping of its propeller. She shaded her eyes and as it got closer she saw the sleek, slippery mole head of the pilot slung low in the cockpit. As the plane zoomed over top of them, trees quaking and water trembling, the pilot turned, fixing the gaze of his figure-eight goggles down at them. There was an awkward moment, like they were all surprised to see each other there, before Pepper raised his hand and waved.

Discerning wrestling fans likely noticed early on that this book plays fast and loose with parts of the sport's history. Certainly, the novel shouldn't be read as a strict historical account. Just as the principal characters and events are fictional, certain details of wrestling's place during the early twentieth century had to be fudged a bit. For example, in the real world it seems unlikely that by 1921 Pepper Van Dean would be quite so naïve about a group of wrestling promoters conspiring to fix a world title bout. However, given modern professional wrestling's on-again, off-again relationship with the truth, I hope
Champion of the World
can be forgiven for taking a few liberties.

Readers interested in exploring nonfiction accounts of wrestling's murky past should peruse Scott M. Beekman's
Ringside: A History of Professional Wrestling in America
or Mark S. Hewitt's wonderfully detailed
Catch Wrestling: A Wild and Wooly Look at the Early Days of Pro Wrestling in America
. Marcus Griffin's 1937 book
Fall Guys: The Barnums of Bounce
is also required reading, providing a fascinating look at the grapplers of the time. In addition, Jonathan Snowden's fine
Shooters: The Toughest Men in Professional Wrestling
offers character studies of America's toughest wrestlers, from Frank Gotch to modern stars like Brock Lesnar and Kurt Angle.

Even the most scholarly tomes, though, leave ample gray areas. The truth is, nobody knows for sure exactly when wrestling crossed the line from legitimate athletic contest to scripted performance. Certainly, wrestling's early American practitioners were exceedingly skilled, exceedingly ruthless men who wouldn't take that kind of transformation lightly. For much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries their reputations were as fearsome, authentic men of sport. Many of our early presidents—including George Washington and Abraham Lincoln—were avid wrestlers, and some credit victory in a high-profile 1831 match with helping launch Lincoln's political career. Later, Theodore Roosevelt and other proponents of “muscular Christianity” backed it as healthy exercise in the face of increasingly sedentary lifestyles.

As America's modern sporting culture took shape during the Industrial Revolution, wrestling shifted from a largely rural, working-class pursuit to a nationwide powerhouse appealing to middle- and upper-class consumers. The rise of sports-minded national publications like the
Spirit of the Times
and the
Police Gazette
helped establish wrestlers as popular stars from coast to coast. Constant barnstorming tours made the sport immensely profitable and helped expand regional grappling styles like New England's collar-and-elbow, the brutal rough-and-tumble style of the Wild West, European Greco-Roman and British catch-as-catch-can (usually shortened to
catch wrestling
today).

Wrestling was a popular leisure activity in the Union army camps of the Civil War, and the gatherings served as a melting pot for grappling techniques. There, American wrestlers from far-flung towns mingled with each other and with European imports, who brought their own disparate styles with them across the Atlantic. By the late
1800s, mixed-style bouts were common and the marathon push-and-pull sessions of the collar-and-elbow and Greco-Roman styles began to wane in popularity. With its faster pace and more visceral appeal, catch wrestling took the lead, borrowing the most effective techniques from other Western forms and incorporating aspects of Asian martial arts as well.

Most likely, a certain amount of chicanery was always afoot. Owing to its carnival roots and a tradition of showmanship dating back to ancient Rome, the wrestling business was perpetually flush with con men. In an era of limited media and lax government oversight, the truth was frequently stretched in the name of making a buck. The barnstorming tours and circus troupes wrestlers used to make their money were rife with fixed matches. By 1905 the
Police Gazette
trumpeted that the outcomes of “90 percent” of professional wrestling bouts were predetermined, though at the time that may have been hyperbole, written in the magazine's notoriously over-the-top style.

If wrestling had indeed morphed into such a widespread (and public) swindle so early on, it's hard to understand why sportswriters continued to report on it with more or less straight faces for at least another twenty years. A glance at newspaper wrestling results in the late 1910s reveals the appearance of cartoonish characters like the Masked Marvel, but staid written accounts differentiating some matches as “obvious fixes” and others as “on the level”—not to mention the fact that wrestlers could be arrested on fraud charges for participating in faked bouts—imply that at least an expectation of legitimacy persisted well into the 1920s.

Few wrestling writers question the rise of Frank Gotch as anything but authentic. It was Gotch's mentor, Martin “Farmer” Burns, who popularized the hangman's drop carnival trick performed by Pepper during the early part of this book. Popular legend says Burns was so incensed about a loss via chokehold early in his career that he
embarked on a vigorous physical fitness regimen focused on strengthening his neck muscles. The 165-pound Iowa native eventually sported a 20-inch neck and began performing the hangman's drop while on carnival tours across the United States. Burns could reportedly withstand a six-foot drop from a platform with a noose around his neck, hang for three minutes and whistle “Yankee Doodle” before finally returning to earth.

Also renowned as a wrestling coach, Burns plucked Gotch out of obscurity after defeating the young heavyweight in a challenge match in 1899. Under Burns's tutelage, Gotch came quickly to national prominence, winning the American heavyweight championship from Tom Jenkins in Bellingham, Washington, in 1904 and the world title from Estonian strongman Georg Hackenschmidt in 1908 at Dexter Park Pavilion in Chicago. Known for his brutal catch wrestling style, Gotch capitalized on his celebrity as world champion better than perhaps any wrestler before him. He launched a number of successful exhibition tours at home and overseas, sold workout brochures and wrestling manuals and starred onstage in “All About a Bout,” a play that ended nightly with a worked match between Gotch and his manager, Emil Klank.

Newspapers portrayed Gotch as a patriotic American hero in the wake of his victory over Hackenschmidt, and that image only intensified after African-American fighter Jack Johnson won the world heavyweight boxing championship near the end of 1908. Long cast as villain in the press, Johnson's title reign touched off significant turmoil nationwide. White Americans turned away from boxing and the sport's temporary decline helped lift the fortunes of both wrestling and football. There were even some public calls for Gotch to don gloves and fight Johnson. The wrestler steadfastly ignored those cries, though he did help get Jim Jeffries in shape for his 1910 loss to Johnson in the “Fight of the Century.”

Like boxing, the elite levels of wrestling remained strictly
segregated for much of the early 1900s. Nineteenth-century Greco-Roman champion William Muldoon—perhaps America's first true wrestling star—was close friends with boxing titlist John L. Sullivan, and both men steadfastly adhered to each sport's long-standing “color bar.” So did Gotch, though reports indicate he took on African-American grappler Silas Archer during a barnstorming tour of Alaska early in his career. It should be noted that on that trip Gotch wrestled under an assumed name.

From 1908 to 1911, Gotch set about expeditiously expunging the heavyweight ranks of all its top (white) talent. His dominance was so thorough and credible challengers so scarce that promoters began to fear wrestling's popularity was in decline. In late 1910, Gotch announced he wanted a rematch with Hackenschmidt, who had complained loudly in the European press that Gotch had greased himself with oil during their first bout. The rematch—held at Chicago's Comiskey Park in front of thirty thousand spectators on September 4, 1911—is largely considered the end of professional wrestling's early golden age.

In that bout, Gotch defeated Hackenschmidt via straight falls after less than thirty minutes of disastrous action. On the heels of a massive promotional buildup, Hackenschmidt's performance was so poor that it spawned numerous match-fixing accusations. Later the European champion said he entered the ring hobbled by a knee injury and unable to give his best. There were also rumors that Gotch paid one of Hackenschmidt's training partners to cripple him during a pre-match workout, but those stories have been largely discounted by wrestling historians.

In any case, the public had seemingly had its fill of wrestling. When Gotch retired in 1913, the sport slipped into disarray as a gaggle of different promoters rushed to prop up lesser champions in his place. It took nearly a decade for wrestling to find its legs, and by the time it did, the action in the ring had become almost completely
scripted. Gotch periodically appeared in comeback matches, but nothing major materialized before his sudden death in 1917 at age thirty-nine. The official cause was uremic poisoning, but speculation persists that he had syphilis.

New York impresario Jack Curley established himself as the most successful post-Gotch wrestling promoter. Forging business relationships with the best midwestern talent, he made Joe Stecher, Earl Caddock, and Ed “Strangler” Lewis the top draws at Madison Square Garden as they traded the title back and forth during the years surrounding World War I. It's theorized that Stecher's victory over Lewis in 1916 was wrestling's last wholly on-the-level championship bout. Soon, though, Lewis fell out with Curley, won the title back from Stecher and took it with him when he joined up with promoters Billy Sandow and Joe “Toots” Mondt.

Lewis, Sandow and Mondt were known as the Gold Dust Trio and, though the business was likely already mostly rigged, are regarded as the architects of modern professional wrestling. Together they implemented many staples of today's histrionic business, including its wild “slam-bang” style, frequently controversial outcomes and wrestlers working a series of matches with increasingly dire stakes. Under the new system, championships weren't awarded to the best, most skilled wrestlers but to the men capable of generating the most revenue. Still, promoters kept on hand a number of able catch wrestlers—called “shooters”—to sort out athletes who balked at doing their bidding in the ring. In April 1925, wrestler Stanislaus Zbyszko conspired with Curley to steal the heavyweight title away from the Gold Dust Trio, and with it control of much of the industry. By the 1930s the hard-nosed, no-frills professional wrestling popular at the turn of the century was gone for good, replaced by the scripted theatrics and ballyhoo of the modern hustle. Along with a cadre of promoters east of the Mississippi, Curley instituted the territory system that would serve as wrestling's organizational structure
until cable television and Vince McMahon's powerful World Wrestling Federation usurped it during the 1980s.

Legitimate wrestling became the domain of amateurs, though the art of catch-as-catch-can survived and has even experienced a renaissance during the last few decades. Today, submission wrestling tournaments are common, but still appeal only to small, niche audiences. The best modern analogue to early American wrestling—and the wrestling that occurs in this book—could be mixed martial arts fighting. Catch wrestling practitioners like Josh Barnett, Frank and Ken Shamrock and Kazushi Sakuraba all became MMA stars during the 1990s and early 2000s. Many of these contemporary grapplers trace their lineage back to the wrestling legends of the late nineteenth century.

Montana bootleggers were smuggling alcohol across the border from Canada as early as the 1870s, when they began bringing whiskey into the northern town of Fort Benton via steamboat to trade with local Native American tribes. Understaffed border agencies and Canadian Mounties had trouble monitoring the comings and goings in the rugged, isolated terrain, so for decades liquor, opium and illegal immigrants (mostly Chinese laborers) trafficked across the border more or less unchecked. The illicit trade went both ways, as western U.S. states and Canadian provinces each experimented with various ways to regulate alcohol during the early 1900s. In addition, Canadian farmers often found it less expensive to buy cars and field equipment in America and then brave the region's remote roads to secretly drive them back across the border.

Statewide prohibition took effect in Montana at the beginning of 1919, after most neighboring states had already gone dry. Rural
counties overwhelmingly approved the move in a 1916 vote, while its three most urban counties (Deer Lodge, Lewis and Clark and Silver Bow) all voted against. At the time of the alcohol ban, the state's largest city of Butte—near where much of this novel is set—had a population around 60,000 and was known as a hardscrabble, “wide-open” town that boasted some 250 taverns. The county government there collected more than a quarter million dollars annually from license fees and property taxes for drinking establishments.

Montana women had earned the right to vote in 1914, and the state's well-organized wing of the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was instrumental in the passage of statewide sanctions. Just as it did nationwide, Prohibition ushered in a decade of sweeping social change in Montana. Before Prohibition, saloons were regarded as the domain of men, while women did their drinking at home. The new laws changed that, as law-abiding bars were shuttered and more clandestine spaces took their place. Moonshining was common, and Montana's speakeasies, blind pigs and nightclubs welcomed women and ethnic groups that had previously been shunned. Women took to bootlegging alongside male counterparts and on their own. For some Montana women, Prohibition served as an introduction to the working world, providing a crash course in how to successfully run a business.