#viro small

[10bellpod]

The story of the "first" black pro wrestler: Viro "Black Sam" Small

[closetofanxiety]

I’m reading the superbly-titled book “The Magnificent Scufflers,” about the origins of pro wrestling in the 19th century United States. There’s a lot of interesting stuff there, but given that this is February, it’s worth mentioning Viro Small, possibly the first African-American wrestling champion.

He was born into slavery in South Carolina in 1854, and escaped with his mother and sister in the chaos of the Civil War. They both died of an illness, and for two years Small survived on his own, trapping rabbits and picking wild vegetables. 

He eventually made his way to New York, where he got a job as a bouncer at Geoghegan’s, an establishment nicknamed “the Bowery Bastille” and owned by an Irish immigrant and retired boxer named Owney Geoghegan. Along with Harry Hill’s, Geoghegan’s became one of the main spawning grounds of pro wrestling in the United States, regularly holding matches in a back room (this a huge establishment, and the “back room” was the size of a small theater), even women’s matches. 

One night, a wrestler scheduled to compete was a no-show, and Small offered (or Geoghegan insisted; it’s not clear) to take his place. It was a two-out-of-three falls contest, and Small lost both falls in minutes. After the match, he asked his opponent where he learned to wrestle so well: “Franklin County, Vermont,” was the response. 

It seems weird now, but in the 19th century Vermont was synonymous with collar and elbow wrestling, which had come over with Irish immigrants. Almost all of the first truly successful professional wrestlers who toured the country (often as part of P.T. Barnum’s circus) were Vermonters, and anyone who wanted to learn collar and elbow wrestling knew they had to go to Vermont.

Small moved to northern Vermont for two years, and when he left he was the state’s collar and elbow champion. Working under the name Black Sam, he went back to New York and collected some of the many titles and championships that sprang up in the 1880s as the sport became widely popular. Some of these matches were worked, but many of them were on the level, and Small was a legitimately tough person: he once got shot in the neck by a defeated opponent, and was wrestling again within a week. 

Unlike many of his contemporaries, he never got to travel as widely as his fame and skill should have allowed, thanks to the resurgence of white supremacy in the South and the virulence of white racism elsewhere in the country. He got favorable coverage in the National Police Gazette, the periodical that was largely responsible for spreading wrestling’s popularity around the country, and was able to work the bar and carnival circuit around the Northeast, but that was about it. His last known match was in 1885, when he was just 31. After that, he steps out of the historical record