The Telephone Booth Indian - Abbott Joseph Liebling [109]
There are three small rooms in Pfefer's suite of offices. While he was telephoning to a couple of city editors who, he felt, had underplayed the news of the assault upon him, I went into one of the outer rooms and talked to two wrestlers who were sitting there. They were looking at their own pictures in a copy of Ring. Both of them were in their middle twenties, a couple of solid young men wearing slacks and sports shirts. Both had the fantastically mangled ears which mark their trade. They were heavily tanned, because, one of them explained, they were living at Coney Island for the summer and exercised on the beach every morning. One introduced himself as the Italian Sensation. He came from up Boston way, he said, and had started wrestling ten years ago in the Cambridge Y.M.C.A. “The girls like these ears,” he said selfconsciously. The other wrestler, blond and jollylooking, said he was the Mighty Magyar. He came from St. Louis and had begun wrestling in a boys' club there. “Both my parents were born in Hungary, though,” he said.
People of foreign birth provided the chief support for wrestling during the preLondos era, before the general public became interested. It was a popular form of vicarious suffering in Europe before boxing was known there. Now that the public has abandoned the industry, it again depends largely on the foreignborn, and to excite the small clubs a performer must claim some European affinity. “You can't get rich wrestling nowadays,” the Mighty Magyar said, “but you can afford to drive a car.” After a while the boys went out to eat. I was to see both of them wrestle later in the evening.
Not long after the Italian Sensation and the Mighty Magyar left, Pfefer said it was time to start for Ridgewood. Al Mayer, Pfefer's factotum and publicity man, came with us. Mayer, a short, plump man with graying hair and mustache, carried a large framed picture of a wrestler named King Kong, the Abyssinian Gorilla Man, which was to be hung in the lobby in Ridgewood. The picture restored Pfefer's spirits. “Look at him,” he said to me, pointing to King Kong with his cane, “a great funny maker!” King Kong wears a full black beard, and the picture showed him in a kind of regal robe, with a crown on his head, looking a little like Haile Selassie. “He's a Greek,” Pfefer said, “but during the Fiopian war I made him for a Fiopian.” We took the B.M.T. under the Times Building and rode down to Union Square. En route, I asked Jack how the wrestlers knew who was supposed to win each bout. Jack Curley used to evade this question with a grin. Mr. Pfefer, however, is forthright. “I tell them,” he said. “I treat them like a father, like a mother beats up her baby. Why should I let some boys be pigs, they should want to win every night yet?”
Pfefer said that the Italian Sensation, whom I had met in the office, was to wrestle in the feature event of the evening against a fellow known as the German Superman. They would divide ten per cent of the house, which on a warm night like this would probably mean twentyfive or thirty dollars for each of them. In the next show, Jack said, they would both wrestle in preliminaries, while two other members of the troupe appearing in preliminaries tonight would meet in the feature attraction. Performers in supporting bouts receive ten dollars each, a minimum fixed by the Athletic Commission. A wrestler working five nights a week, including one feature exhibition, can count on about sixtyfive dollars. Ridgewood is a neighborhood where a great many GermanAmericans