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Comin' & Goin'. As wrestling styles have changed, so has wrestling's audience. The joints are filling up with women fans. "It's natural, ain't it?" asks Mondt. "Women like to look at well-developed fellas." They seem to like to crowd close to ringside, curse the villains, cheer the heroes, and punctuate the performance with strategically planted hatpins. In Manhattan, where wrestling fans bought out Madison Square Garden seven times last year and caused two small-scale riots, the most popular musclemen make up the tag team of Antonino Rocco and Miguel Perez. Rocco does so well that he is the highest paid wrestler now in the racket. He owns a ranch in Argentina and earns close to $180,000 a year. At least ten others, Mondt insists, make $80,000 or more; the majority earn between $18,000 and $25,000.
Even the bush-league hams who stick to the tank towns eat high on around $12,000 a year. Everywhere the violent routine is just about the same: drop kicks that could snap a man's neck if the act were honest and they really landed in the face, bullet heads pounded boomingly against unyielding ring posts, ear biting, eye gouging, hair pulling, and plain, old-fashioned strangling.
The elaborate pretense that all this nonsense is on the up-and-up is carried into all levels of wrestling. The actors themselves insist that no one writes a script for them. Carried away with enthusiasm for the cash they rake in, agents and matchmakers join the chorus. "You oughta see the casualty list," says Mondt. But there are a few practitioners who have escaped to higher arts, and they are prone to tell it straight.
"Many years have passed since my rasslin' days," said the late Herman Hickman, who tried grunt-and-groan for a while before he graduated to football coaching, "but I know there have been few legitimate professional matches since Theseus laid down the wrestling rules in 900 B.C. I even have my doubts about whether that historic match between Ulysses and Ajax was a shoot. I still don't think you can get a better night's entertainment than you will by seeing your favorite hero tangle with a villain. This plot has had the longest run in show business, so it must have something."