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THE JIM LONDOS STORY

Even if you didn’t know about wrestling, you knew about Jim Londos. More than anyone, he was responsible for keeping wrestling alive during the Depression and representing achievement to immigrants, underdogs, and women, all of whom he attracted in record numbers. He was the first wrestler to draw crowds of more than 10,000 fans to dusky arenas in five different decades, pulling in 60,000 to the ancient Olympic stadium in Athens, and culminating with a record crowd of 14,000 in Sydney, Australia in January 1959 when he was 65.

 

His reserved, understated approach added an air of respectability to wrestling, bringing it to the pages of otherwise skeptical publications such as the New Yorker and reaching a new female demographic. In professional wrestling, there was “Jeemy,” and then there was everybody else. As the late journalist J Michael Kenyon wrote, no other idol in the annals of wrestling became known simply by his first name. Even when Londos was well into retirement, sportswriters who ridiculed the sport — if they paid any attention to it at all — invoked his name in almost reverential tones. “I shook Jimmie’s hand and said his people can be proud of him,” David Condon of the Chicago Tribune said in 1974, a year before Londos died. “Shucks, I shivered to be with the great Golden Greek. He is a page from history.”

“Jim Londos: The Golden Greek of Professional Wresting” is the great untold sports story of the Depression era. It weaves interviews, primary sources, dusty clippings, government data, and personal correspondence to tell the amazing story of how Londos crossed the Atlantic in steerage class as a 15-year-old boy, not knowing a word of English, to become one of the legendary athletes of the 20th century. It traces his long search for respectability in the wrestling business alongside the Greek immigrant desire for respectability, often denied to them in 20th-century America. It serves as a case study of the persistence and single-minded focus that separates great athletes from other competitors.

 

The book is also, in part, a father-son story of a prideful man who disavowed any connection with his youngest son because of his choice of a career, only to be won over when he saw him perform in front of the largest wrestling crowd in history. “The Golden Greek” is a captivating story about a unique man and the times in which he lived that goes beyond the sport of wrestling into these themes.

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WHY LONDOS?

WHY SHOULD WE CARE ABOUT JIM LONDOS?

There’s a scene in the The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy’s house lands with a thud. When she opens the door, she is no longer in a world of sepia and black and white, but in a world of color, suggesting boldness, freshness and imagination. That’s what Londos brought to wrestling. He transformed it from a dull, gray sport to one of color, flair, showmanship and engagement. And he did it when wrestling was down and out, just like most of the country in the Depression era. He transformed wrestling within the confines of the match though — no top rope spins, no blade jobs, no bleached blond locks — just good, hard wrestling with enough style to attract and maintain fans in record numbers. He did it on his own, not with a big federation or TikTok or TV or the internet.

WHY HAS HE BEEN FORGOTTEN?


History has missed the boat on Londos, in part because of his line of work. During his first championship run, you’d find page-width headlines about wrestling in the New York Times, the Boston Glove or the Philadelphia Inquirer, and magazines like, yes, the New Yorker. Some of it was tongue-in-cheek, of course, but he carried himself with bearing and dignity and the press treated him and his sport that way.

But the business fell apart in the late 1930s because of promotional in-fighting and double-crosses. It was like a never-ending game of Clue – which promoter would whack his opponent with a candle stick in the laundry room? The character guys started — the hillbillies and lords and dukes — and the press treated it as a joke and wrestling lost credibility.


DID AUDIENCES BELIEVE IT WAS REAL?

Ticket takers at Madison Square Garden were not handing out ballots asking, "Do you believe tonight’s matches are real or fake?" so we really don’t have an empirical measure of that. Wrestling deniers have always existed and in another book I wrote, I described how the top promoter of the late 1800s described his shows as athletic entertainment about 100 years before Vince McMahon conceded the point. There was plenty of skepticism out there, if you want to go that way.

A better way to describe it is not whether you believed, but whether you cared. Here is where Londos excelled — making people care. Part of it was his innovative style and showmanship. Part of it was his appeal to Greek fans, to women and to blue-collar fans. They could identify with him, a smallish guy who had to use his wits against larger, nearly impossible foes. What a great lesson for the downtrodden during the Depression.

The art of wrestling is to make it look real, or convincing. Make no mistake, Londos could wrestle straight up. He had a great amateur record but he also was smart enough to know long, drawn-out, amateur-type contests did not fill the seats.

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