Indigenous Ability

  Let’s talk Tough. Tough with a capital T. No, let’s make that two Capital Ts. John Pesek was TTough, no ifs, ands or buts. The man was a notorious taleteller, a yarn-spinner par excellence, so there is always a little separating the wheat from the chaff to get at the truth. And by the way, the truth is Tough enough without the man’s exaggerated additions. Pesek was something of an autodidactic anomaly. His wrestling is primarily self-taught augmented here and there by tips, tactics, and tricks he picked up from travelling carnivals and AT shows moving through Nebraska in the first decade of the 1900s. [Pesek’s autodidacticism bodes well for all hard-chargers who buck the dogma of “the necessity of lineage.”] This self-taught Nebraskan was not merely “good” for self-taught, he was simply, well, excellent. He held the esteem of most old school early wrestlers of the Golden Age both in the pro circuit and of those in the top tier of the amateur world. Robin Reed ...

  January 15, 1925 Lightweight Champion, Benny Leonard announced his retirement from boxing. At that date, Leonard had already been boxing for 14 years, had been champion for almost 8 years and had engaged in 181 professional fights. 181 fights in 14 years averages to one professional fight per month. The actual calendar shows that to be around the correct mark—with some tics on the little more than a month side of the ledger, and some tics in the more than 2 fights inside a month side of the ledger. Now, stop for a moment and think about what you just read. We’re not talking 1 sparring session a month. We’re talking about 1 bona fide professional fight per month in an era packed with hot and heavy talent. There were no multiple boxing organizations to spread the titles around and water down the talent pool with “ So and so is ranked 3 rd in this organization, but only 11 th in this one and…” Nope, none of that statistical tweaking noise. Each weight class h...

  [Start with the boxing film review, stick around for the behind-the-scenes gossip. Trust me, it’s wilder than most any film the man made.] John “The Duke” Wayne. Should require no introduction, but if he does…well, I’m not really sure what to make of you. For those who haven’t checked him out in a while or allowed the memory to dim, allow me to say, at his best he was a larger-than-life presence on the screen. He possessed a toughness mixed with a gentle charm. Those who knew the man and worked with him said, what you saw on the screen wasn’t too far off from the truth. Let us look to a little-viewed 1936 boxing picture titled Conflict . [aka The Abysmal Brute.] A low-budget affair produced by Universal, Wayne may be the star here, but this is before he become THE John Wayne. He’s still a hopeful hand at this point. Directed by David Howard, with a screenplay by Charles A. Logue and Walter Weems based on Jack London’s famous boxing story The Abysmal Brute. The scr...