Wrestling Book Reviews

THE STRAIGHT STRAITJACKET

THE LAST WRESTLERS by Marcus Trower

published by Ebury Books, London 2007 387 pages Ł10.99

MARCUS Trower studied history at Leeds University and as an antidote to the bookishness of his studies took up weight-training. From weight-training he graduated to judo, then to martial arts (first Tae Kwon Do, then Wing Chun kung fu, then Filipino stick-fighting and boxing, then Thai boxing) and later to wrestling and, as he was by that time in London, he hied himself to the British Museum to read all their books on wrestling. This was because, he says, in Britain in 1995 “wrestling had fallen into dereliction and obscurity”.

It was at that point that I felt a certain kinship with Mr Trower as our paths seemed to intertwine. When I had first come to London at the end of 1960 one of the first things I did was to hie myself also to the British Museum to look up all their books on wrestling. Our experiences were similar but different. He managed to find a selection of books on wrestling there whereas in 1960 every request slip I made out for a book on wrestling that was listed in their catalogue was returned to me marked “DESTROYED BY ENEMY ACTION”. All except for one book The Inn Play which was not about theatricals or hostelries as one might expect, for the full title was The Inn Play, or Cornish Hugg Wrestler and I had a choice of editions published in 1713, 1714, 1727 and 1800 so it must have been a popular read at that time.

In my own book Wrestling for Gay Guys published coincidentally in 1995 I opined that I had noticed a decrease in the number of Olympic freestyle wrestling clubs in London but there were still at least about 4 clubs extant which Mr Trower must have had the choice of though he does not mention them.

Instead he placed an advert for wrestling opponents in the weekly magazine Time Out. This was something of a U-turn for Time Out because when I tried to place an advert in their classified section some years before my advert was refused.. Not only was it a U-turn for them but, he claims, his advert was published in an edited version that gave it a salacious slant that he had not intended. He managed to select one respondent and they were forced to wrestle in “a dingy basement”. It is not clear whether, by this, he meant the Martial Arts room at the Queen Mother Sports Centre in Victoria where he also wrestled, as that room is in the basement and windowless. When I visited the same Martial Arts room to wrestle, the wrestling class failed to congregate at the times I visited it but I managed to meet up with some other wrestling stragglers, one of whom might well have been Trower himself.

Although he hated being behind a desk in an office he was working as a journalist and sub-editor for different magazines and struggling with himself for what he wanted from martial arts and wrestling. Obsessed with wrestling as he was and disillusioned by the lack of proper wrestling in Britain Trower then looked abroad for countries with indigenous wrestling to trace wrestling to its roots. He remains oblivious to indigenous British wrestling such as Cornish wrestling, the Cumberland and Westmorland style though, to be fair, the Lancashire style also known as Catch-as-Catch-Can had by that time transmogrified into Olympic freestyle wrestling on the one hand and professional All-in wrestling on the other hand but become extinct as a wrestling style in its own right.

Armed with his lap-top computer and a tape recorder he flew to India to reach a town on the Ganges called Varanasi as this had been a hot-bed of wrestling in the past. He talks to past wrestlers and sons or relations of famous past wrestlers who recall the exploits and achievements of their forebears. Many wrestlers he discovers were celibate because sex saps the sportsman’s strength. (He does not mention that even in the 1950s bodybuilding magazines were warning their readers of the need to abstain from sex. It was only in the 1960s that vitamin E became the means to have sex and still retain strength in sports.)

Next he visits Mongolia where every boy wrestles and the sport offers fame that everyone aspires to. He discovers that the wrestling takes place during the dry period after the harvest and before the next farming season begins. He makes a brief visit to Australia with the purpose of seeing the Olympic Games in Sydney but decides to return to Britain before they open.

On page 181 Trower discovers testosterone and at last it seems he is onto the thing he has been searching for from the beginning. In Richmond Park in London he watches the rutting of the reindeers and realises that competition between males is normal, that it is Nature’s way of transferring the genes of the strongest males to the next generation as it is the winner who mates with the females and the losers who lose this prerogative. Perhaps humans since the Ancient Greeks have been copying the animals in their stylised sports competitions to find the strongest genes to pass on to the future generations.

His next visit is to Nigeria but an anthropologist in Britain has wrongly advised him that the wrestling takes place at the time of year when the people are farming. As in Mongolia the wrestling takes place after the harvest during the dry period. Once the yams are harvested Trower is able to attend a festival that includes wrestling. He finds that being a champion at wrestling gains rights to marry the most beautiful women. He goes down with malaria in spite of taking anti-malarial drugs and on his return to Britain has another bout of disease which the doctors this time are unable to identify.

A magazine sends him to Rio de Janeiro to investigate the mixed martial arts (MMA) sport that originates from the style of jiu jitsu developed by Carlos Gracie and his family. Trower trains with some of the great names of MMA and records the pet jealousies and in-fighting that occurs between the different clubs. He risks his life to visit the favelas. Even on his return to Britain he witnesses a grudge fight on Portsmouth Pier between two Brazilians.

In the end it transpires that Trower’s upbringing taught him that it was bad to express anger and that, as a child, he consequently took several beatings from his peers without being able to retaliate or defend himself. In his moment of realisation he still believes that anger and aggression are two different things whereas they are actually the same in different guises, so he never reaches an understanding of the psychological law that says if someone represses an emotion he will be attracted to others who express it, which is really the driving force that underpins his obsession with wrestling as it underpins my own obsession with wrestling. Trower’s attraction to wrestling is never homo-erotic, rather he wants to bond with other men and be accepted into their club. Though he never mentions his own girlfriend it is interesting how girls crop up in his metaphors as when he compares his time spent with bodybuilding, judo, martial arts and then wrestling to time spent with different girlfriends.

In search of the roots of wrestling he takes us to India, Mongolia, Australia, Nigeria and Brazil. In the last two countries he is protected by his interpreters and friends from the horrific violence.

The years spent behind a desk editing other people’s copy pay off for him as his own prose is terse and muscular – every word has a strength that contributes to the narrative. The detail he is able to recall makes it fascinating thanks to the help of his tape recorder. He has moments of picturesque speech as in “Small boys play with simple kites that butterfly high above the Ganges” and “(we) are accompanied in our escape from the city by electricity pylons and telephone poles hurrying ahead.”

I look forward to his book on the roots and origins of Cornish wrestling, catch-as-catch-can and Cumberland and Westmorland style.

Donald Black