The Telephone Booth Indian - Abbott Joseph Liebling [108]
In the trade, Pfefer is believed to have retained money despite the debacle. He was one of the four partners who controlled the wrestling business in New York in the golden era, and when the money was rolling in he lived frugally. His present enterprises, although on a very small scale, are often mildly profitable. He is a tiny, slight man, weighing about a hundred and twenty pounds and possessing the profile of a South African vulture. His eyebrows rise in a V from his nose, and he wears his hair in a long, dusty mane— a tonsorial allusion to a liking he has for music. On the walls of his office, among pictures of wrestlers, he keeps a death mask of Beethoven and signed photographs of opera singers.
He never opens a window in this office and wears a vest even in summer. In the street he always carries an ivoryheaded cane presented to him by an Indian wrestler named Gafoor Khan. Pfefer's entire office staff consists of a worried, middleaged exnewspaperman named Al Mayer, at one time a successful manager of prize fighters. When the wrestling business was in its majestic prime, the partners in the local syndicate, besides Pfefer, were the late Jack Curley, a promoter named Rudy Miller, and a former wrestler called Toots Mondt. Miller and Mondt are among the little man's competitors. In the good days, it was Pfefer who had charge of the department of exotica—he was responsible for such importations as Ferenc Holuban, the Man without a Neck, Sergei Kalmikoff, the Crashing Cossack, and Fritz Kley, the German Corkscrew. Most of the foreigners were built up into challengers of Jim Londos, the syndicate's perennial champion, who would throw them with his spectacular “airplane whirl.”
Pfefer blames Londos' rapacity for the decline of the wrestling industry. After the syndicate had for several years informed the public that Londos was the greatest wrestler on earth, the Greek began demanding most of the gate receipts. The promoters had but two equally unpleasant alternatives. They could become virtual employees of Londos or destroy the edifice of legend they had built around him by declaring he was not much of a wrestler after all. They chose the second course. Within a year the country swarmed with champions, each group of wrestling promoters recognizing its own titleholder. At last reports, there were in different parts of the United States fifteen wrestling champions, including Londos, who has been performing for at least twentyfive years. The New York State Athletic Commission acknowledges no world's champion, and for that matter refuses to admit that wrestling is a competitive sport. The commission refers officially to all wrestling bouts as “exhibitions,” and will not allow them to be advertised as contests. Pfefer says he is glad the commission doesn't permit a champion, because it saves hard feelings among his wrestlers. When they perform, they know it is just a night's work and they can concentrate on their histrionics.
I went up to Pfefer's office late one Wednesday afternoon a couple of summers ago, having made a date by telephone to go out to the Ridgewood Grove Arena with him and see his current band of wrestlers in action that evening. He was in a bad mood when I entered. A rival promoter had hired a wrestler to hit Pfefer in the jaw on the previous evening, as Jack sat in a restaurant on Fortyfourth Street. Evidently, to judge by the absence of facial wounds, Pfefer had been able to fall down before being seriously damaged, but it wasn't the blow that had hurt—it was the insubordination the blow had implied. “A wrestler