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  2. 341: "Pro" Wrestling's Origin Story - With Jon Langmead

341: "Pro" Wrestling's Origin Story - With Jon Langmead

Mar 18, 2024

We squint hard this week for a look into the story of American "professional" wrestling's formative years - with pop culture writer Jon Langmead (Ballyhoo! The Roughhousers, Con Artists, and Wildmen Who Invented Professional Wrestling).
 
Langmead takes us inside the raucous period roughly between the mid-1870s to the early-1940s - where genuine competitive wrestlers and opportunistic amusement-minded promoters (both heavily influenced by the country's booming carnival circuit) together codified the now modern-day conventions that transformed a legitimate, physically demanding sport into melodramatic mass entertainment. 
 
Central to Langmead's narrative is the life and career of Jack Curley - a fledgling turn-of-the-century boxing promoter whose fortunes turned when he began touting wrestling matches in big US cities like Chicago and New York - where by the late-1910s, his monthly shows regularly sold out Madison Square Garden.
 
Join us for a look back at the foundational years of "professional" wrestling, - before Vince McMahon and the WWE, and even prior to the "golden era" of the National Wrestling Alliance on early television - where colorful athletes like “Strangler” Ed Lewis, Frank Gotch, the “Masked Marvel,” Jim Londos, “Gorgeous George” Wagner, “Farmer” Martin Burns, and “Dynamite” Gus Sonnenberg ruled the day - and defined the "sport."
 
 
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