That Was Then, Is This Too? 10.06.09: Olympic Edition

Posted by Jasper Gerretsen on 10.06.2009

In today's edition of That Was Then, Is This Too?, we go back all the way to the seventies to take a look at the oft-forgotten first Olympic gold medalist in professional wrestling history.

Welcome to yet another installment of That Was Then, Is This Too?, the column that looks for parallel lines in all the right places. As usual, we have comments:

Well Im the Fuj and I hate horses,
Im come from WCW Special Forces.
To say this column sucks, is so ficitious
Cuz Jasper and The Fuj is Wrestlicious!!!

Posted By: The Fuj (Guest)  on September 29, 2009 at 02:34 PM

Thanks, dad.

I think this guy would have been better off blowing his money on the big mansions and fast cars. He's using his 17 million (hopefully not all of it on this) on living breathing CAW's.

Posted By: Hip Hop Jorge (Guest)  on September 29, 2009 at 03:29 PM

That's what I thought at first, but apparently he's only spending a percentage of his first payment on the product. He seems to have a good head on his shoulders, or at least some decent financial advisers.

This situation seems to arise every decade or so... Someone with little or no experience in the wrestling business comes along and tries to promote a female only wrestling company on the national stage. There is always some initial buzz and interest in the product, but as the lack of quality soon becomes readily apparent, viewership wanes and the company folds shortly there afterword. G.L.O.W. in the late eighties. W.O.W. in the late nineties. Wrestlicious is just the next in line of attempted women only promotions, that I feel, is destined to follow in the path of its predacessors. It may even be more of a gigantic failure considering that the two aforementioned promotions tried to make there mark during times when wrestling was experiencing unpressidented popularity. People will only eat up the cheescake for so long before realizing it's all empty calories.

Posted By: Demo-Darsow (Guest)  on September 29, 2009 at 06:53 PM

Actually, both GLOW and WOW were created by the same guy, David McLane, who has been working in professional wrestling since his teens. Both promotions received great syndication, and WOW was even sponsored by some major companies like Mars and the United States army. WOW even received an endorsement from the Parents Television Council for creating positive female role models and managed to draw a crowd of almost 10.000 for their first and only PPV.
      
Wait...so most of the G.L.O.W. women were virtually untrained, aside from 6 weeks training?? Presumably Tina Ferrari/Ivory (who was hot back then) was already trained.

You do bring up the interesting point, though, that a number of the women being used are accmomplished on the indy scene. A few (Daffney, Madison Rayne) are TNA Knockouts. I wonder if the likes of Daizee Haze and Lexie Fyfe will get the showcase their talents.

Posted By: Guest#5011 (Guest)  on September 30, 2009 at 11:39 AM

It certainly would create some exposure for the women involved, and with the promotion being located in Florida it seems like the perfect way to make the jump to TNA.

Banner! 2.0!



Although this column has historic elements, the furthest I've gone back in history so far is the early nineties, when I compared Amazing Kong to Vader. This is partly due to my lack of knowledge on pre-1990s wrestling, and partly due to my lack of interest in truly 'old school' wrestling. I can appreciate matches like Steamboat/Flair and Steamboat/Savage, but it's simply not my cup of tea. However, I'm making an exception here for the sake of patriotism.

There have been many professional wrestlers that can legitimately claim participation in the Olympics as part of their résumé. Mark Henry participated as a weightlifter in both the 1992 and 1996 games, Ken Patera did the same in 1972, Giant Gonzalez was at part of the Argentinean basketball team during the 1988 games in Seoul and Riki Choshu participated in freestyle wrestling at the 1972 games in Munich.

Of course the most famous professional wrestling Olympian of all is Kurt Angle, who won the gold medal at the 1996 games in Atlanta, beating his Iranian opponent with, as he likes to remind us all, a broken freakin' neck. After a false start in the professional wrestling business when he walked out on an ECW show following the mock crucifixion of The Sandman by Raven. Eventually he signed an eight-year deal with the WWF, training at their Memphis-based Power Pro Wrestling developmental territory and making some rounds on the house show circuit before making his debut at the 1999 Survivor Series.

After eight years under WWF contract he made the jump to TNA following a dispute over Angle's dependence on painkillers. Once there he quickly raced to the top, becoming the company's second ever Triple Crown champion and the first man in the company's brief history to hold all three-title belts. TNA frequently announces him as either 'the only Olympic gold medallist in TNA history', or 'the only Olympic gold medallist in professional wrestling history'. The former is true, the latter is most definitely false.

That Was Then...

At 6'6" and 320 lbs, Antonius Johannes Geesink had the measurements professional wrestlers are made of. Born in 1934 in the city of Utrecht, Geesink grew up with a healthy interest in various grappling sports. He was a national champion in Greco-Roman wrestling three years in a row, but his main interest had always been Judo, a sport that he is considered a legend in.

Geesink's record of 21 European championships is unbeaten to this day, but his first success on a global stage came at the 1961 world championships, when he became the first non-Japanese judoka to win the world championship in the open weight division. During that time there was heavy lobbying from both Jigaro Kano, the creator of the sport and member of the International Olympic Committee, and various European national Olympic committees.

The push to get Judo recognized as an Olympic sport was long and hard, as the IOC generally considered the sport to be 'unfair', due to a traditional absence of weight classes. Tournaments in both Europe and America had been fought with weight limits since the 1950s, but the Japanese wanted to maintain the traditional format. It was actually Geesink's dominating performance at the 1961 world championships that provided the breakthrough, as the Japanese were worried that only holding an open weight tournament would provide a serious risk to the host nation's chances of capture a gold medal in 'their' sport at 'their' Olympics. Geesink's road to the tournament continued to be bumpy, as various Japanese officials lobbied to enforce strict rules of professionalism that would have excluded Geesink (as well as various Japanese judoka) because they worked teaching Judo, with the reasoning being that even second rate Japanese judoka could sweep the gold as long as Geesink wasn't participating. Under the same logic, the Dutch national Olympic committee actually excluded Geesink from the Dutch wrestling team for the 1960 Olympics.

Eventually it was decided that teaching would not be considered to be banned under the professionalism rule, and with weight classes in place the first Olympic judo tournament was scheduled for the 1964 games in Tokyo. For the open weight classes, the local favourite was Akio Kaminaga, who in his last year of high school beat 19 straight opponents to earn three dans at once. Kaminaga had fought Geesink and lost in the qualifying rounds, but made it through to the elimination round thanks to repêchage group.

In the finals the odds seemed to be against him, as he was nursing a knee injury. Meanwhile, Geesink had won both his qualifying matches, skipped the repêchage group and put away his semifinal opponent in a mere twelve seconds. Going into the match he was definitely the fresher man. Still, with the other three gold medals already won by Japan and a huge crowd support behind him, the pressure was on Kaminaga to complete the sweep. In front of thousands of rabid fans, Kaminaga put on the fight of his life and almost took Geesink to the ten minute time limit before being pinned by kesa-gatame with less than a minute left on the clock.

Geesink had already cemented his place in judo history thanks to his world championship win in 1961, but he truly became a star in Japan by beating their hero in front of the home crowd at the heart of the martial arts world, the Nippon Budokan hall. He would win another world championship, this time in the heavyweight class, in 1965, before retiring from competitive judo in 1967. He had become a true legend in the spot, being the first European to achieve the ninth dan, and is currently the only living judoka to have achieved the tenth dan, the absolute peak of the judo sport.

It was this status of judo legend that caught the attention of Giant Baba, the legendary owner of All Japan Pro Wrestling and the personal protege of Rikidōzan, the man who had brought professional wrestling to Japan. After founding the promotion late in 1972, Baba realized that he needed to bring in some serious starpower to combat Antonio Inoki's New Japan Pro Wrestling. Anton Geesink was perfect for this role, as his judo career not only gave Geesink the star status he was looking for, but also an affinity with Japanese culture.

For his professional wrestling training, Geesink was sent to Amarillo, Texas, to receive training from professional wrestling legends Terry Funk and Dory Funk Junior. It was there that he received his finisher, an incredibly painful looking Boston Crab that mostly reminds me of Chris Jericho's Walls of Jericho, as used during his first WWE run. For the next five years, he would be one of the most popular gaijin in the fledgling promotion, wrestling part-time from 1973 to 1978. He was everything that Baba could have wanted in a special attraction: the exotic quality of being a gaijin, the star status that came with being an extremely successful martial artist, experience in amateur wrestling and a towering physique that would dwarf most opponents. Interestingly enough, Geesink was always booked as a babyface, despite the fact that he was responsible for several humiliating moments in Japanese sports history. This was mostly due to the cultural differences between Japan and the United States, as the Japanese didn't consider Geesink's triumph as an insult, in stead lavishing him with awards such as the Imperial Order of the Sacred Treasure.

During his brief professional wrestling career, Geesink, often teaming up with Giant Baba, took on some of the biggest names in wrestling history. He wrestled Bob Remus (the future Sergeant Slaughter), WWWF legends Bruno Sammartino and Gorilla Monsoon, NWA legends Dick Murdoch and Dory Funk Jr and Japanese legends like fellow Olympian Jumbo Tsuruta. Geesink made good money whenever he wrestled, and could be considered one of the top stars of the promotion's early days.

Throughout his professional wrestling career, he also worked as a judo teacher and ambassador for the sport, something that was perfectly compatible with his professional wrestling career due to its status in Japan. Eventually he retired from professional wrestling to fully devote himself to promoting sports on a global scale. In 1987 he became a member of the International Olympic Committee, a position he holds to this day.

...Is This Too?

Obviously there are huge differences between Kurt Angle and Anton Geesink, starting with the Olympic discipline they won their gold medals in. The influence of judo in professional wrestling is limited at best, compared to the various amateur wrestling styles. Kurt Angle's 'story' is also much more appealing to the American audiences, as he beat an Iranian, second only to the Soviets in hated nationalities, in the finals, after overcoming a broken neck. Yet at the same time I can't help but wonder if, had Geesink been an American, he couldn't have reached at least some star status in America, as beating the Japanese at their own sport in their own stadium is an interesting story in and off itself.

And then there's their actual careers, which would be comparing apples and oranges. Geesink and Angle wrestled in different times and on different continents. Geesink was a perfect fit for Japan in the seventies, but would have been a fish out of water in America in the nineties. His heavy Dutch accent would have made promos incredibly awkward, and while he weighed in at 320 lbs at the peak of his career, his weight distribution was far from optimal for today's wrestling standards. Meanwhile Kurt Angle had almost unprecedented charisma, as evidenced by the ease with which he turned himself heel despite his status as Olympic wrestling hero, and he had a far more athletic build than Geesink.

Of course both men's approaches to professional wrestling were very different too. For Geesink, professional wrestling was a way to make some money on the side, as he continued to teach judo and promote the sport worldwide, something that the tour system of All Japan Pro Wrestling was perfect for. For Kurt Angle meanwhile, professional wrestling would become a fulltime career, which I think we can all consider to be a bigger success than anyone ever expected. However, after years of legal problems and with the general perception of professional wrestling as low brow entertainment that's prevalent in America, it's hard to imagine Kurt Angle being taken seriously as an ambassador for amateur wrestling or sports in general.


Giant Baba & Anton Geesink vs. Stan Hansen & Bobby Jaggers