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Over the Back Fence By HANK HENRY Wrestling still stirs the blood A ll the publicity about Minnesota Gov. Jessie Ventura, a former pro wrestler, reminds me of my relatively brief contact with wrestling in Roseburg more than half a century ago. One bout I remember was between the Mad Scientist and Gorgeous George. The Scientist wore a doctor's white coat with a stethoscope attached that he left in his corner before the fight began. George had long blond hair that attracted the ladies. Before the fight began, he would run around the ring, tossing costume jewelry to the women. Pro wrestling, which attracted all-male audiences in prewar days, now had become a family event. The matches had all the subtlety of an old black-and-white movie. The local radio described the end of the bout: "The Mad Professor has Gorgeous George on his back. The referee is flat on the canvas, feeling under George to make sure that both shoulder blades are on the canvas. Suddenly, Gorgeous flips his opponent off him and the tables are turned. One, two, three! The Mad Scientist has been counted out! Gorgeous George wins!" That's the way it went in 1948, 51 years ago, when, of all things, I became on Saturday nights a wrestling broadcaster. Mind you, this was radio, not television. The station had been broadcasting Saturday night wrestling for many years. The shows were sponsored by local businesses and were actually quite popular. The play-by-play (or should I say, fall-by-fall) man was Allen Cordon, the son of Oregon Sen. Guy Cordon. I became his assistant, a position that broadcasting now calls a "sports color man." Such a person's job is to fill the time when there is no action on the field, the boards, the diamond or what have you. All I knew about wrestling was what I picked up by sitting alongside Allen as he described the action. He moved on about a year later, leaving me, a man with no background or training in professional wrestling, to try to make verbal sense of something the audience couldn't see. The promoter of most of the wrestling matches in Oregon south of Salem was Elton Owen, then a man of about 35 years who refereed his own matches. Elton had an older brother who promoted the bouts in the Portland area, so wrestling in Oregon then was something of a household affair. My wife, Nora, grew up in the Klamath Falls area and attended wrestling matches at the armory with her father. She remembers that vendors would sell peanuts in the shell, and she would get so excited that she would toss out the peanuts and eat the shells. Nora was a true believer. I haven't watched much wrestling over the years, but when I happen to flip past a match on TV, I may stop for a few minutes to see if the scripts have changed in half a century. They haven't. But there is one big change. Where Gorgeous George and about half of all wrestlers of the 1940s were cast as heroes, that whole scenario has now changed. Practically no one, they tell me, wrestles as a good guy any more, as Gorgeous George did. Rather, almost all seem to be working for the title of the most hated man on the circuit. They now have outlandish costumes and weird names, but the same old routines. Just the other night I flipped past a match on the tube, then turned back when I saw one wrestler holding an old, brown metal folding chair with which he proceeded to hit his opponent. That was a real chair, and it had probably been used in matches for decades, yet it still hung together. They don't make chairs like that anymore, but wrestlers still use that chair as sort of a metaphor for an old wrestler who hangs on because he loves the performance. Back when I was broadcasting wrestling matches, head butting was shtick for some. The script called for one wrestler to apparently knock his opponent silly, then, holding his hands around the opponent's head, he would use his own forehead to butt his opponent's, like two rams butting each other until blood came. Skeptics would note that the attacker's thumbs were on his opponent's forehead so that the two foreheads were cushioned, and that a tiny package of blood could be palmed from its hiding place in the wrestler's elastic waistband. The blood looked real enough, and sometimes the blood was really real when a wrestler would lose his temper. Someone has said that professional wrestlers are probably in the best shape of any athletes in any sport. I wouldn't dispute that. (Hank Henry is a retired Jackson County commissioner and a former radio and television announcer. Call him at 772-9055.) Prime Times front page Mail Tribune front page Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA