The Man Who Held the Records

Bruno Sammartino 1935-2018

In the Pittsburgh neighborhood where I grew up there was a drugstore a block from my house where a kid could hang out.  There was a fountain at the front where the guy made great milkshakes, and some magazines and comics at the back that were off to one side, so the pharmacist couldn’t see you.  One day I found our paperboy sitting on the floor reading comics as if it were the reading room of the public library.  “Just catching up on Alley Oop,” he said, with an air of rapt concentration.  Another day, when I was looking through the magazines—one of my favorite pastimes—I stumbled across an issue of Strength and Health.

I was a fat ten year old kid, but longed to be otherwise, to be strong and well-muscled like the guys in the magazine.  At the local Y, however, the weight room was in the basement, and was forbidden to kids my age, as if it were a bar, or a whorehouse.  You had to be eighteen to enter.  One time the door opened, and I saw a huge guy moving away from the squat racks, getting ready to squat with what looked like four hundred pounds.  He glanced at me as if to say, Get away from here kid.  My longing to enter that room was almost erotic.  I wanted to be strong, and able to take care of myself.  I wanted to be a weightlifter.

Eventually I talked to my father, who talked to my uncle, who brought me an old set of weights he had around.  We put them in my basement and I started to work out.  It became a habit of my youth.

I still had a fascination with that larger world of weightlifting, and one Saturday at the Y there was a Power Lifting meet I wanted to attend.  They charged admission, I found out to my disgust.  They charged an amount that I didn’t want to pay.  But if I stood at the top of a stairway, where the guy taking tickets couldn’t see me, I could see through the door to what was happening down on the gym floor.  Every time they announced a new lift, in a new weight class, they said, “Record held by Bruno.”  They didn’t bother with his last name.  Everybody knew who they were talking about.

Bruno Sammartino was the proverbial 97 pound weakling (actually, he began at more like 87) who made himself into a new man.  He had grown slight because he nearly starved in Italy during the Second World War, after which his family moved to Pittsburgh.  He took on the task of building his body the way everybody else did, but he really did it.  By the time he graduated from high school he weighed 235 pounds.  He held records in all the weight classes he’d passed through.

It wasn’t long before Bruno appeared on “Studio Wrestling,” the local show in the Pittsburgh area, then moved on to wrestle in New York and other places.  Talk about a local boy making good.  The guy who had once walked into the Y to lift in the Bantamweight class was now selling out Madison Square Garden.

Everybody knew professional wrestling was rigged; it may have been on the level in its earliest days—those of Strangler Lewis—but on-the-level wrestling was boring beyond belief.  Strangler Lewis applied a headlock and kept it on for 45 minutes.  Guys made a lot more money when they began to bounce off the ropes and do flying drop kicks.  It was a high class acrobatic act, which required talented athletes to do it well (there were also a fair number of stumblebums whose job was to get battered around and lose every match).  But for young people who wanted to be strong and fierce and invincible, for fans who wanted to see the traditional Good vs. Evil motif enacted on a broad stage, for people who hoped to see ethnic and political struggles played out before their eyes, it was irresistible.

Pittsburgh was a mass of ethnic mixing—the term Melting Pot was made for that city—and there was an ethnic undercurrent to many matches.  When a “Hungarian,” for instance, a man named Ace Freeman, wrestled a “Russian”[1]during the height of the Cold War and after a Russian invasion of Hungary, he won the emotional match and then cried as he waved a Hungarian flag.  A Polish wrestler like Killer Kowalski was an obvious villain, constantly breaking the rules and punching people instead of wrestling, ranting so vociferously that spit flew from his mouth, but when another Polish villain, Crusher Lisowski, came to Pittsburgh, he eventually became a local favorite.  They once played a polka as he entered the ring.  (Grandma’s Pierogies was a sponsor.)

Pittsburgh’s Italian contingent was huge—so was New York’s—but everybody loved Bruno.  He was a legitimate strongman (my memory is that he once body-slammed Haystacks Calhoun, who weighed over 600 pounds, but I may be making that up), he wrestled clean until a villain provoked him so much that he went out of his mind, and he was a humble, soft spoken man, a gentleman.  People loved him not because of a particular ethnicity, but just because he was ethnic, one of those men who had come to this country from Europe and made it an industrial giant.  Pittsburgh was proud of its strong humble workers.  He seemed to stand for all of them.

My father, a Pittsburgh physician, thought everything I’ve described here was a load of crap.  He thought weightlifting made you musclebound and no athlete should ever do it[2]—many people felt that way in those days, though they were soon to be proven wrong by the many athletes who trained with weights—and thought professional wrestlers a bunch of oafs who weren’t athletes at all.  They were a joke.  Fortunately, however, I had a friend at school, Dante Cicchetti[3], whose father was a dedicated weightlifter and who liked to go to all kinds of sporting events, including wrestling at Pittsburgh’s Civic Arena.  Mr. Cicchetti took us to our first few matches together.  Once my brother began to drive, he started to drive us, and stay himself.

Above everything else, wrestling fans in those days were disgusted by wrestlers they perceived as effeminate.  The surest way to become a villain was to bleach your hair blond and strut into the ring.  Gorgeous George was the first to do that—I believe he had someone spray him with perfume while he stood there—and many others followed, Johnny Valentine, Fred Blassie.  But the greatest such wrestler by far was the man who won the World Championship around this time, Nature Boy Buddy Rogers.

Rogers was everything everybody hated.  He was blond, he was arrogant, he scorned the fans, scorned his opponents; he refused to shake hands, took every opportunity to cheat, and in general violated every tenet of Peace, Justice, and the American Way.  He was a perfect foil for Bruno.  (He was also a hell of a physical specimen.  If I could have switched bodies with someone, I would have chosen him rather than Bruno, though I would have done without the blond hair.  He was more acrobatic than Bruno, a greater showman.  He took the basic Gorgeous George shtick and made it into an art form.)

I feel sure I saw Bruno wrestle Rogers on at least one occasion, probably more than one.  Rogers always won on some technicality, like Bruno went wild and put him in a bear hug while he was outside the ropes, something like that.  That was another infuriating thing about Rogers.  He constantly won on a technicality.  He lost the match but somehow retained his title.  I knew that the World Championship would never change hands in Pittsburgh.  It could only happen in New York, or maybe Chicago.

The psychology of the wrestling world, along with the sociology, fascinated me.  On the one hand, it was a good thing to have a champ like Buddy Rogers, because it kept the fans infuriated and kept them coming back.  On the other hand, if the good guy never won, fans could turn sour (and of course if you have a good guy as champ, you can always trot out the villains).  I was always trying to figure out how the promoters thought.  So I was stunned, in 1963, when Bruno defeated Rogers in Madison Square Garden in under a minute.  It was apparently a one fall match, while a championship was traditionally two out of three.  The promoters could have milked that match for all it was worth.  It could have gone on for hours.  What happened?

There was some suggestion in Bruno’s New York Times obituary that that match was on the level.  Bruno decided he was going to win the title and that was that.  Pu-lease.  Professional wrestling matches are never on the level.  As someone once said, you know they’re fake because, if they really did that stuff, they’d kill somebody.  If you read Roger’s bio you find that he had had a mild heart attack shortly before the match with Bruno.  He suddenly didn’t have the stamina to wrestle long matches and may have been worried about his health in general.  So I’ve always thought the promoters decided to let Bruno win in a quick match and let the hated Rogers fall.  Rogers remained a great showman in defeat; if you look at the photos of him in Bruno’s backbreaker, he looks like the crucified Christ.  He retired soon after that.  Bruno held the title for years, a wildly popular champion, defending against all comers.

My dreams of being a strongman fell rather short of what Bruno accomplished.  (My best bench press, my senior year in high school, was 230.  Bruno benched 565, with no elbow or wrist wraps, and he paused for two seconds after he lowered the bar to his chest.)  My fascination with pro wrestling faded too (though years later my son got the bug, and we went to a match at Raleigh’s Dorton Arena featuring Rick Flair, a Buddy Rogers clone.  There was no Bruno to take him on, alas).  Bruno became a hero in Pittsburgh not really because he was a great athlete, but because he was a true strongman, a genuinely humble man, a man who never forgot his roots, a hero who stayed in the city.  He was one of those people in Pittsburgh who doesn’t need two names to identify him.  Roberto.  Franco.  Bruno.  (And Mr. Rogers.  He doesn’t need a first name.)

His passing seems to be one of those moments that stands as a historical marker.  Roberto Clemente’s shocking death marked the end of my childhood and youth.  Bruno’s—as I’m about to turn 70—has me staring at the void.  Somebody just gave me the Atomic Drop and I’ve fallen on my back in a daze.  Old Man Time is about to slam the canvas three times.

I hope my foot’s outside the ropes.

[1] Whether these men actually had any relationship to these ethnicities is up for grabs.  Ace Freeman used to speak in the halting way of someone who had only recently learned English, but my friend Dante Cicchetti once saw him arguing with a cop about a traffic ticket, and he had no accent at all.

[2] He had, however, done the Charles Atlas Dynamic Tension system when he was young.  It included a lot of conventional exercises like pushups and also a primitive form of isometrics where you pitted one muscle group against another.  You pushed your palms together, for instance, in an effort to strengthen your triceps and pecs.  You also, according to him, were instructed to go to bed at night with a cold washcloth on your balls.  I was forever glad that I hadn’t sent in that coupon.

[3] He went by Joe in those days.