Which is maybe why you haven’t heard of him, because we’re talking 100 years ago.
But to Mechanicsville-based author Steven Johnson, who spent several years researching his biography on Londos, Jim Londos: The Golden Greek of Professional Wrestling, Londos is the connective tissue between wrestling’s early carny days and the multibillion-dollar business that we know today.
Londos was “Michael Jordan and LeBron James and Muhammad Ali rolled up in one,” said Johnson, who has a master’s and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, and before launching a career chronicling the history of pro wrestling, was a U.S. Senate aide and newspaper editor.
Quick aside there: Steve was my editor early in my career, when I was a cub reporter at The News Virginian in Waynesboro, just a couple of years out of UVA myself, and I credit Steve for giving me a solid grounding in the foundation of the news business in the year that I worked under his direction.
We never talked wrestling during our working days, which I regret, but understand – even today, you don’t advertise far and wide to other smart people that you’re a wrestling fan, at the risk of being assumed to be a low-brow.
Johnson’s books on wrestling – including an investigative look at the life and death of former WWE champ Chris Benoit – are what you’d expect from a guy with a Ph.D. who was a congressional aide and newspaper editor.
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Benoit: Wrestling with the Horror That Destroyed a Family and Crippled a Sport
With the Londos story, the work that Johnson put in included scores of interviews with scores of people who’d had contact with Londos, who died in 1975, including Londos’s daughter, Christine, visits to libraries and historical societies across the country to track Londos’s travels across the wrestling landscape, and deep research on the grappler’s tours of Greece, where he was a living legend.
Londos made his way from Greece to the States at the age of 15, eventually landed in San Francisco, transformed himself from a skinny, nearly starving teen into a freakishly strong bodybuilder, then broke into the wrestling business, turning pro in 1914.
He wouldn’t win a share of the world title until all the way out in 1930, then as the champ turned the business on its head, embarking on a grueling schedule that had him defending his title 120-130 times a year, breaking box-office records everywhere he worked – and keep in mind, his prime coincided with the depths of the Great Depression.
“One example of what he meant to the business: promoters ran Madison Square Garden just five times with tiny crowds in the two years before Londos won his first title. With Londos at the helm? Four straight sellouts of 20,000. His last match there was in early 1935, and only one of the subsequent 21 cards at the Garden hit the 10,000 mark before it went dark to wrestling in 1938,” Johnson said.
Among Londos’s innovations: the sleeper hold and the airplane spin, in ring, and perhaps more importantly, he was “an educator and a psychologist who told a story in the ring, one that audiences took to heart,” Johnson said.
“Wrestling is about making people care — care on an emotional basis and on an intellectual basis about the men, women and contests they are watching. With a variety of novel methods and techniques, Londos did that better than anyone before and few since, drawing fans who would not have crossed the street to see a couple of guys in black trunks lock up,” Johnson said.
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