Frank Gotch - Wrestler

Wrestler

Gotch competed in an era when a championship wrestling match was the same as a championship prize fight: i.e., it was a major event for which the wrestlers went into training and which promoters publicized for weeks. Thus, he did not have a long career in terms of the number of matches wrestled. His mentor, Farmer Burns, and later champions Ed Lewis, the "Strangler," and Lou Thesz, each engaged in more than 6,000 matches in their careers. Gotch engaged in only 160, finishing with a record of 154 wins and only 6 losses. Of those six losses, however, two were in the first year of his career – to Dan McLeod and Farmer Burns – and three were to Tom Jenkins. His last defeat was to Fred Beell on December 1, 1906, when he had crashed head-first into an uncovered turnbuckle and been rendered nearly unconscious. He defeated Beell in seven rematches and never lost again until his retirement in 1913.

Gotch was, by all accounts, a superior wrestler possessing tremendous strength, lightning quickness, genuine agility, cat-like reflexes, impeccable technique, superb ring generalship, a mastery of the use of leverage, and a full knowledge of wrestling holds, counterholds and strategy. He was always in the best of condition and possessed both enormous courage and an indomitable will to win, ever ready to match his heart, his gameness, against any man in the world. He was highly aggressive but always kept his cool. Critics saw in him both the strength of the old school of wrestling and the skill of the new, “as agile as a cat in his manoeuvers” and having “the grappling sport down to such science that he had assumed a rank all by himself.”

Gotch's measurements for his 1911 victory over Hackenschmidt were: Age - 33; Weight - 204 pounds; Height - 5', 11"; Reach - 73"; Biceps - 17.5"; Forearm - 14"; Neck - 18"; Chest - 45"; Waist - 34"; Thigh - 22"; Calf - 18".

Gotch was among the first elected to the Iowa Sports Hall of Fame and was the first inductee to both the Professional Wrestling Writers Hall of Fame in Latham, New York and the Lou Thesz/George Tragos Professional Wrestling Hall of Fame in Waterloo, Iowa.

There is another side to this story, however. When Lou Thesz was just starting out in the early 1930s, there were a good many wrestlers still active who had known Gotch and were not reluctant to talk about him. “The picture that emerged of Gotch from those conversations,” Thesz recalled, “was of a man who succeeded at his business primarily because he was, for lack of a kinder description, a dirty wrestler. That’s not to say that he wasn’t competent, because everyone I ever talked with said he was one of the best. But those same people described him as someone who delighted in hurting or torturing lesser opponents, even when they were supposed to be working out, and he was always looking for an illegal edge when he was matched against worthy ones. One of the old-timers I met was a fine man named Charlie Cutler, who knew Gotch very well and succeeded him as world champion…; according to Cutler, Gotch would gouge, pull hair and even break a bone to get an advantage in a contest, and he was unusually careful to have the referee in his pocket, too, in case all else failed.”

Referee Ed Smith, who officiated several of Gotch’s bouts, including both of the Gotch-Hackenschmidt contests, had observed after the second match that “to my mind…he wasn’t just exactly through one hundred percent on the courageous side. Two or three times I saw needless acts of absolute cruelty on his part that I did not like. Always will I think that the really courageous man, no matter how ferocious and filled with the killing instinct and eager to win he may be, is willing to let up on a beaten foe and not punish needlessly or wantonly.”

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