Thesz obit from nytimes

[Guest areacode212]

I thought this was a pretty good article:

 

Lou Thesz, Skilled Pro Wrestler, Dies at 86

 

May 8, 2002

By FRANK LITSKY

 

Lou Thesz, the most celebrated professional wrestler of the

mid-20th century and one of the last who relied on physical

skills rather than show business gimmicks, died on April 28

in a hospital in Orlando, Fla. He was 86 and had undergone

triple-bypass surgery and aortic valve replacement three

weeks before.

 

In the late 1940's and the 1950's, when professional

wrestling was a mainstay of early television despite, or

perhaps because of, preordained outcomes, Thesz was a hero

even to his peers. He knew amateur wrestling holds, and

unlike his colleagues who bleached their hair or pranced

around the ring or taunted the crowd, he really wrestled.

 

He once said: "I am a wrestler. Not a wrassler, not a

clown. A wrestler."

 

He competed in seven decades, starting his professional

career in 1932, at age 16, and finishing in 1990, at 74.

His last match was in Japan, where he was an icon. At 215

pounds, he wrestled Masahiro Chono, who was 27 and weighed

260. Thesz lost after his artificial hip buckled.

 

Why wrestle at age 74? He told The Virginian-Pilot of

Norfolk, Va., "I was old enough to know not to do it, but I

did it anyway."

 

He was the six-time world champion of the National

Wrestling Alliance, the most important governing body of

the era, winning his first title at 21. He held the title a

total of 13 years, a record. In a time when pro wrestlers

sometimes fought legitimate bouts, he won 936 consecutive

matches from 1948 to 1955.

 

He sometimes wrestled 200 to 250 times a year, often after

driving all night from one site to the next. By his count,

his career encompassed 6,000 matches, 200 broken bones and

16 million miles.

 

Aloysius Martin Thesz was born April 24, 1916, in Banat,

Mich. He grew up in St. Louis, where he was taught to

wrestle by his father, Martin, a cobbler who had been an

amateur champion in his native Hungary.

 

The handsome youngster grew to 6 feet 2 inches and 225

pounds and became a quick success. He wrestled in memorable

matches against such stars as Gorgeous George, Killer

Kowalski, Gene Kiniski, Verne Gagne, Pat O'Connor, Baron

Michele Leone and Bronko Nagurski. Thesz was the kind of

superior wrestler known as a hooker, one of the few who had

command of the most difficult and potentially crippling

moves.

 

To the critics who dismissed pro wrestling as merely show

business, and bad show business at that, he said one

essential point linked wrestling to other pro sports.

 

"They're all entertainments with an economic bottom line,"

he said in "Hooker," his autobiography, "and they're staged

for no other reason except to give the paying customers

entertainment. Once you sell a ticket to an athletic

contest, it stops being a sport and becomes a business.

 

"The `winner' wasn't always the wrestler whose hand was

raised, but the one whose performance stuck in the mind of

the fans as they headed home after the matches, the one

they would pay money to see again, regardless of whether

they hated or admired him."

 

Still, he did not like what his sport had become. In the

90's, he said that contemporary pro wrestling was

"choreographed tumbling, a clown act, a circus, with no

dignity."

 

In his autobiography, published in 1995, he wrote: "The

reality, or substance, of professional wrestling is the

ability to perpetuate a fantasy. I never distinguished

between fantasy and reality. I made my fantasy reality for

over 60 years."

 

Thesz helped create a national wrestling hall of fame in

Newton, Iowa, near Des Moines. Until his last illness, he

worked out in a gymnasium three or four times a week near

his home in Winter Garden, Fla.

 

He is survived by his wife, Charlie; three sons, Jeff of

Las Vegas, Robert of Vero Beach, Fla., and Patrick of

Cambridge, England; three sisters, Ann Rode and Kay Schmidt

of San Marcos, Calif., and Helene Haack of St. Louis; and

10 grandchildren.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2002....df7c737

[Guest Mark4steamboat]

wow im suprised how well done that is. very good.