William Muldoon

The newspapers relentlessly outed it from about the 1870s onward, especially Greco-Roman wrestling.

And so these guys who they begat, by the way, William Muldoon, Professor William Miller especially was the person who really broke.

Training is kind of not the right word.

We've done a lot on this 1,000-hour series about William Muldoon.

Go back and listen to some of those shows.

I don't want to get too deep into that.

But William Muldoon, the most famous name of the pioneer era of wrestling, that's where he came from, was that Greco.

He was the Greco-Roman champion and professed it throughout.

My name is Ken Zimmerman Jr. and this is the podcast dedicated to the history of professional wrestling from the 1860s until 1940.

And in this episode, I will be discussing the 1883 World Heavyweight title match between World Heavyweight Greco-Roman Wrestling Champion William Muldoon and former American Heavyweight Wrestling Champion Edwin Bibby.

But first, as I had promised last week, I need to catch up on some email.

I have not had a chance to look at social media, which is pretty much down to a public Facebook page.

I'm just going to recommend a couple things on YouTube.

And then share my thoughts on some of the latest news coming out of professional wrestling.

So in September 1883, current world heavyweight Greco-Roman wrestling champion William Muldoon defended his title against skilled English catch-as-catch can wrestler Edwin Bibby.

Now Bibby was also skilled in Greco-Roman wrestling.

So welcome back to this week's episode of It Was Almost Real.

And to start off the episode, I wanted to talk about one of the earliest books that I had written because I was thinking about William Muldoon the other day as he's going to be the focus of the main content for next week's episode.

And One of the things that always has struck me odd about Muldoon is even though he was the undisputed heavyweight wrestling champion from 1880 to 1889, in reality, his other accomplishments really overshadowed what he did in the ring because despite the fact that he was very successful and he helped to popularize professional wrestling in the United States, he didn't have that many matches because he spent a lot of time touring with minstrel shows and vaudeville productions, pre-vaudeville productions is probably more accurate to say.

He also, early on, was thinking about his life after professional wrestling, so he would also give these demonstrations of his physical training system.

I thought most people that were reading the book, though, would be interested in his wrestling career.

And I had given a pretty thorough coverage of his wrestling career.

If you read William Muldoon, The Solid Man Conquers Wrestling and Physical Culture, and then maybe read the 18th century wrestler book that I just put out, which was Scuffler Shooters and Workers, Pioneer Wrestlers of the 19th Century.

I think you'd have a pretty good retrospective of his wrestling career between his book and then the chapter on Clarence Whistler.

Anything above $10, uh, we'll get an hour of the show, uh, added to it.

You can, you will be, um, credited with that and we can all learn more about the pioneer era of wrestling recently we've been diving through Scott Beekman's new William Muldoon book we've just finished up that excellent book we talked about the death of William Muldoon on the last episode and today I thought would be a naturally good day since we're now transitioning in uncharted territory okay we've gone through my book we've gone through other books and And now it's time for some new and interesting research and some focus on individual people from that era.

And today, since we just wrapped up talking about William Muldoon, I thought it would be a good opportunity to talk about his pupil.

The person most associated with being, I guess, Elio del...

William Muldoon being his protege, Ernest Robert.

So today's kind of a deep dive for sure.

Many people probably never heard of Ernest Robert.

So he's after the heyday of Colonel James H. McLaughlin and John McMahon and Homer Lane and those collar and elbow guys.