Stanley Elkin - Boswell

Sallow wasn’t very active in the thirties, though he fought some during the Depression, but he came out of his semi-retirement during World War II when many of the younger wrestlers were in the service. One day he would beat them, too, just as he had defeated the older champions. It was phenomenal to see the old man work. The crowds loved to watch him, loved to gape, fascinated, at his wily, ancient movements. He was curiously lithe; watching him, you had the impression that he was detached, that the body which moved so gracefully before you was somehow something which he merely inhabited, oddly like clothes which move always a split second after the agent inside them has already moved. This gave the impression of an almost ruthless discipline of his limbs. His face carried this even further. It was impassive, totally without expression, without the familiar landmarks of either love or hate. Nor did he fit conveniently into the traditional role of hero or villain in his matches. True, he never employed the obvious techniques, the blatant eye gougings, hair pullings, finger bendings, chokeholds, which sooner or later could bring even the most sophisticated crowd to its feet, but there was latent in his movements, always slow, always oddly prim, a sure viciousness, an indifference to consequences to bone and muscle. If he pulled a punch it was ultimately strategic, and although he submitted to the terms of his contracts, winning or losing according to some higher plan, wrestlers hated to fight him. He hurt them even when he lost. They could not account for his steady strength. Some said he was insane, but if he was his irrationality never extended to his activities in the ring. Indeed, he seemed to have a rational body. His movements were so naturally deft and logical that it was impossible to imagine him ever stubbing his toe accidentally or ripping his clothes on a nail. Outside the ring, in street clothes, he was unremarkable, a tall, pale, almost gaunt man, with preternaturally black hair. He looked like a farmer, in town perhaps to visit by a bedside in a hospital. He did not speak much (you could tell that by looking at him), but he must have had an extraordinary facility with languages. Once, when I was on a card with him, I heard him explain to two Japanese Sumo wrestlers who had come over for a special exhibition what arrangements had been made for them. The Sumos, delighted that they had found someone who could speak their language, tried to engage him in further conversation, but Sallow simply turned away.

It was a relief the year before when I discovered I would not have to fight him. I could abide the clowns, good guys and bad guys alike, but to have to struggle with Sallow’s naked dignity, to have to believe that somehow the match really was of consequence, was something I was not eager to endure. I would have fought him if I’d had to (actually I had been scheduled to win), but not to have to was much simpler for me.

In the year I had been making my reputation, Sallow had been remaking his. I heard talk of him wherever I went. Wrestlers spoke in awe of his phenomenal strength, of his ability simply to rise under the weight and pressure of any hold. He was now wrestling constantly, wrestling everywhere, winning everywhere. It was said that suddenly he had simply refused to throw any more matches. He had never been the champion, after all; perhaps now, before his career had ended (surely it was almost over; how old was he? fifty? sixty? more?), he was eager at last to have the belt. At any rate he had been winning steadily.

Knowing Bogolub (who was his manager as well as my own now), I could not believe that Sallow would do anything which did not meet with Bogolub’s approval, so I doubted the story that he won fights he had been meant to lose. Still, there was something odd in the persistence of the rumors, something odder in his quick, bright fame, the queer fascination of the crowds that came to watch him. They didn’t like him. They never cheered his victories. Indeed, his fights were quiet, almost restrained. I had been in stadiums when he fought and there was no more noise than there would have been had the crowd never gathered, had it stayed in its individual homes, watching its individual television sets in its individual silences. They came to watch age beat youth, not to see it, to watch it, to be there when it happened if it had to happen, witnesses at some awful accident, not personal, not human, a disturbance in nature itself, some lush imbalance of nature. Even old people in the crowds watched with distaste his effortless lifts of men twice his size and half his age. He was not their hope, as in the South I had been; they wanted nothing to do with his victories. They refused to be cozened with immortality. Yet, oddest of all, though they never cheered Sallow, neither did they cheer his opponents. Again, they simply watched, as one watches any inevitable struggle — a fox against a chicken, say— fascinated and a little afraid.

The papers, of course, enjoyed it all tremendously. They never let the public forget the Grim Reaper theme, equating John Sallow with death itself. “Last night, before a crowd of 7000 persons, in Tulsa’s Civic Auditorium, John Sallow, the Grimmest Reaper, danced a danse macabre with a younger, presumably stronger man. With a slow inevitability the dark visitor”—this was the journalist’s imagination; Sallow is pale—“choked all resistance from the helpless body of his opponent.” They pretended fear and made John Sallow rich.

In November, 1948, however, someone actually died while fighting John Sallow. In the very beginning of the fight Sallow lifted Seldon Faye, the Olympic champion, off the ground, slammed him down and pinned him. He was declared the winner and left the ring, but Faye did not get up. If Sallow heard the mob he gave no indication, for he went down to his dressing room, showered, dressed and was out of the town before a doctor declared Faye officially dead. It turned out that Faye had a bad heart. He shouldn’t have been wrestling at all, but after this “The Grim Reaper” ceased to be merely a catch phrase and took on the significance of an official title. Some zealous reporter dug up the information that a wrestler named Jack Shallow had killed another wrestler in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1920. Were Sallow and Shallow the same person? In the myth, of course, they were.

I saw him as the crowd saw him, as the papers pretended to see him. I saw him as the Angel of Death.

Now I had to fight him. Bogolub wanted me to lose but I couldn’t. Fixing beyond fixing. It would be the first honest match of my career. Well, it was back to the barroom days, one against four, the old odds, the odds that make causes, that make heroes and victims out of winners and losers. That was all right. Come on, Sallow, old enemy, Boswell the Big goes against the Angel of Death to save the world. That the public would think me The Masked Playboy was fitting, too. Its heroes are never known to it, anyway. Masks beyond masks. No matter; I would save it anyway, anonymously, nom de plumely. In St. Louis I would whip old death’s old ass.

Maybe others think it strange that an overgrown man like myself can believe such things. I say only this in my defense: Why not? If God, why not the Angel of Death? Why not ghosts and dragons? If Jesus, why not Satan? Anyway this is the Angel of Death I’m talking about. Ah. You don’t believe in him? You think you’re the one that’s going to live forever? Forget it. Forget it! In the meantime don’t snicker when somebody fights your battles for you.

When I arrived in St. Louis two days before the match I went to Sandusky’s hotel.

“Is The Great Sandusky in?” I asked the clerk. He was the same fellow I had seen behind the desk two years before, probably the same man I had talked to on the phone. (I never forget a face either, but it constantly astonishes me when I recognize people in public places— to see the same waiter in a restaurant when I return to a city after five months, the same stewardess on two flights, the same woman who sells tickets in a movie, the same clerk at a desk. It astonishes me, but I know that these are the exceptions. The turnover in the world is terrific. Usually the waiter no longer waits for anything; the stewardess is grounded; the woman in the cashier’s box files no nails; usually the clerk has checked out.)