Found Footage Friday: HONEST JOHN~! SOCKEYE JACK~! LEVIN~! SEPEDA~! PAZANDAK~!

Main Event Wrestling from the Hollywood Legion Stadium - Early 1950s

Bill Cody vs. Honest John Cretoria

MD: They say this is Cody's first match and he was an amateur and navy champion. Also 23. I'm not sure I buy that but who knows. Back to him in a minute. You have to like Cretoria's act. He was short and stout, full of inside shots and complaining to the ref, with a goatee and a twinkle. Just a carny bad guy. He moonlighted as an arab sometimes (Haji Baba) or a Turk (Turhan Bey) but here he was like a proto-Jim Neidhart without the power moves. Cody did not come out there untrained, that's for sure. He looked very good chaining one hold into the next and had a solid short-arm AND short-leg scissors. He was able to get top wristlock and single leg takedowns pretty much whenever he wanted, included a double leg out of nowhere for the half crab (called that) finish. His fiery comeback shots needed a little work, especially compared to Cretoria being able to lean on him. This was an okay preliminary match where both guys got to show off who they were to a receptive crowd. Oh, it's worth noting that Pete Mehringer, former gold-medalist (1932), was the ref here.

Sockeye Jack McDonald vs. Dave Levin

MD: We really don't have a ton of Dave Levin footage and he's an important figure of the 30s, having multiple claims to different world titles. Obviously he's older here, but he's still interesting to see. McDonald has a lumberjack gimmick with a lot of bodyscissors and bearhugs, that sort of thing, and fairly blatant cheating. The first half of this has Levin work from underneath and he's effective in that role, sympathetic, technical, but it's not the most exciting wrestling the world. The last few minutes it opens up and they really start scrapping with headbutts and big shots. Levin had a great European Uppercut and they're really going at it at the end until McDonald gets a lucky shoulder block and wins. You look at the high points of this match and absolutely get how Levin could have been a champion but maybe also why he still wasn't.

 
Juan Sepeda vs. Joe Pazandak

MD: Pazandak is another historically interesting character we don't have a ton of footage of. He was the first "Beat the Champ" Television Champion and was Verne Gagne's trainer (being from Minneapolis). He was a short, bald, stocky guy. Sepeda was taller, apparently had great body slams though he didn't use them here, and a judo gimmick that he also didn't use here. What they did have here was a ton of struggle on every hold from the first lock up all the way to the end. Pazandak had some interesting stuff, Breaks-ian finger manipulation on wristlocks, a sort of "Australian crucifix" double arm-bar he leaped into, and his trademark hold which was a plunging backbridge deathlock that you wouldn't expect he'd be agile enough to do just looking at him. Sepeda won the second fall with a pretty gnarly Fujiwara style armbar with the foot driving down into the shoulder as he pulled up. Pazandak, when he eventually got clubbering, came off as pretty dangerous too. Past some of the entrances into holds, none of this was particularly slick or felt cooperative. Even the spots seemed to come off at weird angles and with a lot of grit and very little polish but that just added to the overall feel of struggle.