The Telephone Booth Indian - Abbott Joseph Liebling [110]
When I returned, the crowd was beginning to arrive at the Grove. Most of the men were in shirt sleeves, and about half of them wore stiff straw hats. They moved forward heavily, with the experienced air of men going to church on Sunday and prepared to criticize the sermon. There were a good many women with them, most of them shapeless and wearing house dresses.
Pfefer had given me a workingpress ticket, which calls for a seat directly at the ringside. The ushers looked surprised when I sat down there. No newspaperman had covered a wrestling show at the Grove for years. The only other person in the first row at my side of the ring was one of the judges, an old boxing referee whose legs have gone bad. Although the Athletic Commission concedes that wrestling exhibitions are not contests, it insists on the presence of two licensed judges and an inspector, as well as a referee and a doctor. The referee gets fifteen dollars and the others ten dollars each.
The first exhibition brought together the Polish Goliath, a vast and bulbous youth who, according to the announcer, weighed 310 pounds, and the Italian Idol, a strongly built fellow weighing a mere 195. As soon as the Goliath appeared, wearing a dingy bathrobe with a Polish eagle sewn on the back, the crowd began to boo. This was partly because he had such an advantage in weight and partly because of Poland's antiGerman foreign policy. When the bout began the Italian Idol clamped an arm lock on the Goliath's left arm and started to twist it. The Goliath contorted his face in a simulation of agony. A fellow in the crowd shouted to the Italian Idol, “Break it off!” Soon the rest of the audience took up the chant, “Break it off! Break it off!” The Italian Idol seemed to put a great deal of pressure on the arm, but when the Goliath merely waved his wrist the Idol not only lost the hold but fell flat on his back. From what I could recollect of a few painful experiments in college wrestling, this seemed a remarkably easy way to break a hold, but it convinced a man behind me. “Jeez, he's strong!” the man exclaimed in an awed tone. I could hear variations of the same comment all over the hall. But the Pole seemed as stupid as he was powerful. He just stood there glaring at the prostrate Idol instead of pouncing on him. Then he turned to the audience, raised one fat fist, and solemnly thumped it against his nearly hairless chest. The crowd exploded in fury, booing and whistling. The Goliath turned toward the Idol and waddled slowly forward. He put his feet together and made as if to jump on the Idol. The Italian wriggled out of the way and got to his feet, and the referee, a lively young man, shook a finger warningly at the Goliath. The putative Pole demanded loudly, “What's the matter with that?” He said it in good clear Brooklynese, for, as I later learned, he is a native of South Brooklyn. But the crowd, convinced in spite of their own ears that a Polish Goliath talks with an outlandish accent, shouted back mockingly, “Vot's der mottur vit dot?”
While the Goliath was talking to the referee, the Italian Idol, miraculously revitalized, rushed across the ring and butted his opponent in the