Martial Arts Of The World - Webs

736 Wrestling, Professional
In Ireland, popular styles included collar-and-elbow. The name referred
to the initial stances taken, and in this style, almost anything went,
as the initial grips were intended as defenses against kicking, punching, and
rushing. Collar-and-elbow wrestling became widely known in the northern
states during the American Civil War, and afterwards it became one of the
roots of the Amateur Athletic Union’s American freestyle wrestling.
In France, styles included Ar Gouren, which was similar to Cornish
wrestling, and La Lutte Française (French wrestling). In the latter method,
holds were permitted from the head to the waist. The goal was to throw or
twist the opponent’s shoulders to the ground, without attacking his legs. In
this style, head-butts, choke holds, and joint locks were not allowed.
In Germany and the Low Countries, wrestling was associated with
three groups. The first was professional entertainers who wrestled bears
and each other in traveling circuses. The second was young men who wrestled
for the honor of their trade guilds during Carnival and other festivals.
And, after the 1790s, the third were patriots who built up their bodies for
the Fatherland in gymnastic associations called Turnverein. There were a
variety of German and Dutch styles, including some all-in methods that
bear a passing (and doubtless coincidental) resemblance to jûjutsu.
All these national styles met in North America, where they combined
with African wrestling, which was known as “knocking and kicking.” The
elements of knocking and kicking were passed along through observation
of matches in which slaves were pitted against each other in what the few
surviving descriptions characterize as human cockfights.
There was also some influence from Native American styles. Into the
early nineteenth century, both slaves and indentured servants in the northeastern
United States often ran away to live with Woodland Indians, who
used wrestling as a way of settling their personal disputes. To the horror of
Protestant missionaries, Woodland Indian wrestling had no rules except prohibitions
against pulling hair, and so it began to be suppressed after 1840.
From these diverse roots developed a distinctively North American
style that involved considerable eye gouging and ear biting, and a crowd
that yelled for more.
Standard venues for mid-nineteenth-century wrestling included music
halls and saloons. The entertainment in the better clubs included dance revues,
comedy acts, and wrestling matches. The wrestlers were there for the
money rather than to hurt one another, and as a result they began “working”
the crowd to give them a good show. However, if betting was involved,
then sometimes wrestlers and promoters went so far as to prearrange
results. A typical scam here involved a wrestler spending several
months in a town, beating everyone in sight, and then losing to a partner
who drifted into town pretending to be a scrawny, underfed unknown.