There will be a special event in St. Joseph this Friday night honoring late, great professional wrestling promoter Gust Karras. I almost feel like I should be there.
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Growing up on the farm, with few opportunities to see "live" professional sports (an occasional A’s game and one or two Chiefs games), I rarely missed a pro sports event on television, and that included Karras’s weekly wrestling program on Channel 2.
Every Saturday night, if my brother and I weren’t at the theater watching a flick, we would park ourselves in front of the TV, and pick sides when guys like Sonny Myers, Bob Geigel, "Bulldog" Bob Brown, The (Mongolian) Stomper and The Viking (watch out for that thumb in the throat), squared off against each other.
Usually each wrestler was either a "good" guy or "bad" guy, and had his own signature hold, or move. Take the case of "Cowboy" Bob Ellis and the "spinning toe hold."
Ellis, who was one of the good guys, would get his opponent on his back, grab him by the foot, straddle his leg and start spinning around and around in a circle. It took me a long time to figure out that Ellis was doing a lot of spinning in circles, but his opponent’s leg wasn’t doing anything. It never moved.
Thinking back, I wonder how the sound The Stomper made, stomping on somebody’s head, also sounded a lot like his foot making contact with the canvas.
Karras’s main referee, known only by his last name, Moody, had his own persona. I remember thinking he had to be just about the dumbest human being on the planet. Whenever a wrestler would execute an illegal (and painful looking) move, he would always be looking the other way. Bob Geigel was adept at grabbing the back of an opponent’s trunks and pulling him to the mat.
There for a while, you just knew that before the night was over, someone would get put to sleep with the infamous "sleeper" hold. Don’t ask me how that was supposed to work. Something to do with cutting off the blood supply to the brain, I suspect.
I remember at least once going to the old auditorium in St. Joe for a night of wrestling. The cigarette and cigar smoke was so thick inside the building that you could barely see the ring. And the noise!
I’m sure a lot of people also remember those two elderly sisters that sat there every Saturday night, front row and ringside. They always rooted for the good guys, and never cut Moody any slack when he screwed up and let the bad guy win.
I have another memory of Karras bringing his wrestling troupe to Gallatin’s Dockery Park. They set the ring up in the middle of the infield, and pitched a tent nearby for a dressing and staging area. I remember getting to shake hands with both Karras and Myers, and thinking it didn’t get any better than that.
Another time, a wrestling promoter…don’t remember if it was Karras, brought a group to Hamilton to perform on the football field in front of the old grandstand. Us boys road our bikes out to the stadium, and during a break…maybe while the women were wrestling…we rode up to the school locker room where the wrestlers were dressing.
Hoping to find some wrestlers outside where we could approach them and get some autographs, we were shocked to find everybody hanging out togther, laughing and smoking cigarettes. I thought, come on…these guys are supposed to be enemies. What’s going on here?
Anyway…I’ll always remember Gust Karras as one of those odd guys that passed in and out of my childhood, leaving a bunch of good memories…ones that I wouldn’t trade for gold.