Grappling exhibit explores labour’s mutual love affair
Punching The Clock: Working To Wrestle in Hamilton life affirming
What other place would wrestlers come from, en masse, but a hardbitten industrial city where the very paradigm of life, culture and work in the local economy seemed a mirror of the stylized, archetypal agon and adversarialism of the ring?
Always a fight, ever a struggle, with workers, unions, management and politician’s trading roles in a musical chairs of hero, villain, antihero. Underdog one minute, on top the next and then back, with the referees too often looking the wrong way.
No wonder Hamilton was wrestlecrazy in the ’50s and ’60s, the heyday of this city’s “Factory” system.
That’s what it was called, The Factory (in Hamilton, what else?), and we were renowned continent-wide, along with New York City, San Francisco and a few other centres, for the grapplers we produced out of our gyms and workout clubs.
Places run by men like Al Spittles and Jack Wentworth.
It’s this very period — overlaid with a veil of reverence to contemporary wrestling (yes, it still thrives in Hamilton, but more on that in a minute) — that is the chief focus of a new exhibit at the Workers Arts and Heritage Centre.
“Punching The Clock: Working To Wrestle in Hamilton” examines stories of wrestling’s past and present, through the lens of an industrial workplace. From union drives and the camaraderie among pro wrestlers, to the chronic pain associated with exposure to punishing working conditions.
It was working class, it was conflict and it was all of a piece: The football, the athleticism, the factories, the crime, the struggle and rigour of life in a steel town, the fixed-ness of it, lurching from flagrant unfairness to some kind of roughed-out justice.
Maybe football was the “real” thing, but what wrestling had going for it, unique unto itself, was a narrative, quasi-moral
ritualism, unembarrassed by spectacle. It was sport plus theatre; skill plus hokum; randomness, creativity and improv, plus formula and pre-determined script.
But make no mistake, it was work. If the outcomes were sometimes pre-ordained, the injuries weren’t and were/are very real.
“Wrestling is often underestimated as a working class art form,” says curator Tara Bursey. “Wrestling could be a way to express oneself.” In some cases, it was an escape from the factory. And, she adds, wrestling even in the ’50s and ’60s speaks to some of our realities today.
Wrestlers assumed a kind of celebrity status; but the reality even then was that some of them had to hold down other jobs.
Some worked as police officers or at Westinghouse. That is certainly true of today’s Hamilton wrestling scene, as suggested by the posters in the exhibit, one identifying a contemporary female wrestler as an early childhood education worker.
The exhibit features the design work, art and research of David Kuruc, graphic artist and owner of Mixed Media (now at the old Bryan Prince Bookseller location in Westdale), who was a big wrestling fan growing up in Hamilton, even though his father poohpoohed it. His younger brother, Mark, actually works as a wrestler in the city, under the name Mark Wheeler.
Dave says the exhibit was inspired by the series of articles by Jon Wells that appeared in The
Hamilton Spectator in 2009. Entitled Mat Men, the series took a close look at the wrestling culture in this city, chiefly as it flourished in those same golden decades, and featuring some of the greats of the era, like Reggie Love, as does the exhibit.
“Wrestling and work were really lived experience and a release,” says Dave. “They (the personae of the wrestlers) were extreme versions of themselves.” And of ourselves.
“I was really into it (watching wrestling) as a kid, in the era of Hulk Hogan. But it got me interested in an earlier time when CHCH had a long history of televising the local matches and Hamilton was pumping out professional wrestlers.”
It’s a lively and thoughtful
exhibit that finds the fascinating in a subject that is all too often dismissed as unworthy of our attention and somehow “phoney.”
But while I talked to Dave in his store about the exhibit, one customer said, aptly, “which aspect of their lives was more real?”
We all put on masks, whatever our work.
As Dave says, the wrestling history of Hamilton could fill the wing of a museum.
It could. It doesn’t, but here is a fine start.
The exhibit opens Friday, Sept. 14 with a reception from 7 to 10 at WAHC, 51 Stuart St., Hamilton. It runs to Dec. 21.