What I watched: A NWA World Title match held in the National Wrestling Alliance’s Chicago affiliate on March 17, 1950 between champion Lou Thesz and challenger Ruffy Silverstein. While I’m not sure exactly when this would have aired on television, given the amount of wrestling on TV during this er it likely was broadcast at some point. Russ Davis is the colour commentator. The match is available to view via the Chicago Film Archives’ YouTube channel.
What happened: This match is for the NWA world title. Davis runs down both men’s legit backgrounds before they’re introduced, and the ref pats them down for “excessive oil”. Kinky. Thesz and Silverstein lock up and push each other around the ring. Ruffy takes Thesz down with a wristlock before being caught in a headscissors. They continue trading holds in the early stages of the match.
This is so evenly matched they have identical bald spots
Davis refers to Ruffy as having an “ungovernable” temple, which makes me think we’ll see Tetsuya Naito at ringside soon. We see a bit of it as Ruffy gets angry in response to a headlock, and Thesz throws a closed fist in response and dumps Silverstein over the top rope. Lou continues roughing him up while holding him on the mat with another headlock.
Ruffy starts giving it to Lou with some hard shots in the corner before taking it to the mat again. Russ makes fun of one guy in the crowd cheering for Ruffy. Thesz breaks out of a hold, leapfrogs over Ruffy, and hits him with a dropkick for the first fall. In the second fall, Ruffy snapmares Thesz over and clocks him with a dismissive-looking knee. Thesz misses a dropkiick ,and Ruffy takes him down for a two-count, then pins him quickly afterwards with a body press.
In the final fall, Ruffy starts working the arm, going for what would today be recognized s a MMA-style ambar. When they get back to their feet, Silverstein catches Thesz in with a forearm which causes the ref to put a knockout count on the champ. Thesz responds by angrily elbowing Ruffy in the face and knocking him out of the ring. Lou hits him with his signature flying body press and gets the three count in a surprisingly clean finish, with Thesz holding the pin for a few seconds afterwards to add insult to injury.
What I thought: When watching old wrestling, the contrast in atmosphere with today’s modern, hyper-media-saturated American wrestling can be striking. The WWE often takes credit for moving wrestling out of smoke-filled bars and into the mainstream, which isn’t really true, but when watching Southern wrestling from the 70s and 80s there’s a sense of regional rowdiness you don’t really get anywhere these days.
But before even those days, there was 1950s wrestling, which had a level of mainstream exposure that even the modern WWE would envy, and still maintained at least the pretensions of being a legitimate sport. This bout, from 1950 Chicago, has the atmosphere of a classy nightclub, with tables on the floor and men in suits and tails. At ringside were future president Lyndon B. Johnson, former presidential candidate Thomas Dewey, and actor Dick York. This was not the hillbillies-and-kids crowd that wrestling would become associated with.
1950s wrestling could certainly be goofy and cartoonish, but this match is wrestled with a kind of realism, looking to at least give off the appearance of real sports. The announcer references things as mundane as mat burns, while much of the opening fall consists of a series of headlocks. The realism goes slightly off the window when Thesz starts throwing dropkicks, but by that point enough atmosphere had been created that the audience bought into it.
The physicality of the match wasn’t entirely fake. Silverstein reportedly had a reputation as a legitimate tough guy who could win a real wrestling match – a “shooter”, in the language of kayfabe. This caused Thesz to be somewhat guarded around him. The threat of being in there with someone who might not follow the script was a real one in this era of wrestling – more than a decade later, Bruno Sammartino would win the WWWF World Heavyweight Title by using his legitimate toughness against a recalcitrant Buddy Rogers.
In this case, however, Silverstein does the job – a surprisingly clean loss too, compared to many of the big matches I’ve seen from the territorial days. Thesz was already making his name synonymous with wrestling, and was a major attraction, both for TV and the live audience. We’ll see him again. Not sure about Ruffy, though.
The Eternal Couch Potato 