What I watched: Two matches from the September 9, 1950 wrestling event at the Chicago International Ampitheater. In the two matches, both posted on the Wrestling from Chicago YouTube page, Johnny Balbo wrestled Bozo Brown and Bob Geigel faced Buck Weaver. Russ Davis was the colour commentator. As I’ve previously noted, I’m not entirely sure how or when these matches would have aired on television, but they likely did.
Bozo Brown vs. Johnny Balbo: Man, back in the day you could really just call a wrestler Bozo Brown. (Although I shouldn’t give Vince McMahon ideas.) Balbo gets a big cheer from the crowd before the match begins. Taylor makes some snide jokes about Brown coming from California. He has a striking resemblance to John Belushi.
The two do some technical wrestling until Brown loses patience and starts throwing Balbo around. But Balbo can also play at that game, and hits him with a series of headlock takeovers. He makes Brown look like, well, a bozo by jumping out of the way and letting him throw himself out of the ring. Brown retaliates by going to the hair.
The match continues in this fashion, with Balbo gaining the upper hand every time there’s serious wrestling to be done. Brown throws him to the outside, but Balbo ties him up in the ring ropes to beat up on him. In the end, things escalate until Brown is disqualified for choking Balbo on the ring ropes, which is kind of a limp finish to a very entertaining match.
Bob Geigel vs. Buck Weaver: These two are both junior heavyweights with different types of male pattern baldness. Geigel spends a while trying for an early pinfall, and Weaver tries some form of cheating to get out of it, establishing him as the heel. They fight over competing toeholds, with Geigel coming out on top by applying a toehold on both feet.
After some more fighting over the legs, Geigel puts Weaver in a spread-eagle hold and starts headbutting him in the “tummy.” (10:00) Weaver ends up applying a chinlock to Geigel, who submits surprisingly cleanly. This might be the first match I’ve seen where a chinlock finishes things.
What I thought: Having watched some fairly dry 1960s and 70s wrestling, I was a little trepidatious about what would be going on in 1950, but these two matches were both plenty entertaining. There’s sort of a caricature among wrestling fans of older matches (meaning anything pre-Hulk Hogan) as being technical and serious, more like real sports than the current WWE variety show, and there’s certainly some of that in the Geigel/Weaver match. But this episode, and especially the Brown/Balbo match, show how comedy and flair were also important in postwar wrestling.
Brown and Balbo have a very clear divide between the face and the heel (or hero and villain, in non-kayfabe.) Bozo Brown is a clown-like figure, a buffoon whose meanness makes us feel it’s okay to laugh at his pratfalls. He embraces one of my favourite traits in a wrestler, the willingness to throw oneself around the ring with wild abandon and no regard for one’s own safety. He’s also very expressive, resembling 50s comedy stars like Jackie Gleason and Sid Ceasar. In other words, I’m now a big Bozo Brown mark.
Comedy in wrestling is something that can go wrong quickly — much of the “humour” in modern WWE, for example, is either an array of empty references or sub-sitcom character bits. On the other hand, professional wrestling has its roots in the circus, and the art of selling (or pretending to be hurt) in an entertaining way is not that far from classic clowning and its pratfalls. The Brown-Balbo match is an example of how thin the line between pro wrestling and silent comedy could be.
None of the four wrestlers featured in these videos went on to live in cultural memory like Lou Thesz or Gorgeous George. Bob Geigel would become a wrestling promoter, running the NWA affiliate in Kansas City, and continue wrestling until 1976. This match is apparently from his first year in the business, making his performance pretty impressive. Buck Weaver, by contrast, was towards the end of the career, having begun back in the 1930s and passing away in 1956. (This is according to the very reliable-looking wrestlingdata.com.)
Johnny Balbo would become known not for his wrestling, but as the head of Lions Club International from 1974 to 1975. Bozo Brown is a fairly obscure figure, having wrestled under a variety of colourful names such as Great Bozo, Space Man, and Super Zebra Kid, as well as masked personae like Golden Mask, El Diablo, and Night Terror. He was unmasked on five separate occasions, each time donning the hood again the next night in a different town. That was wrestling: everyone was ephemeral, appearing for just one night on film or in the memory of a spectator before vanishing into the night.
Coming up next: Gene Autry rides back into town
-Camera zooms in so you can see Geigel’s back hair (2:15)
The Eternal Couch Potato 