Professional wrestling, as detailed by Tim Corvin, Gerald Mortion and George O’Brien, and Scott Beekman among others, emerged in the nineteenth-century United States as a combination of legitimate grappling styles, from collar-and-elbow wrestling, popular among Irish immigrants serving in the Union army during the Civil War, to the misleadingly-named Greco-Roman style (developed and popularized in France), to catch wrestling (from “catch-as-catch-can,” with an emphasis on submission holds such as armlocks, leglocks, and chokes) from Lancashire. Many early matches, such as those involving Greco-Roman grappler William Muldoon, the top star in American pro wrestling in the 1880s, appear to have been a mix of works (predetermined matches) and shoots (legitimate contests). Contemporary newspaper accounts frequently questioned the legitimacy of professional wrestling matches, with regular accusations of “hippodroming” (fakery). For example, a November 14, 1877, article in The Brooklyn Eagle claimed of professional wrestling that “there has scarcely been an important contest in which the result had not been known beforehand.”
A pair of Muldoon’s matches against Clarence Whistler illustrate one likely impetus for wrestling’s shift toward predetermined matches. In 1881 (exact date unknown), the two wrestled to a grueling eight-hour draw in New York City, a likely shoot match the New York Herald referred to as a “torture marathon” (p. 65) that left both competitors bloodied and bruised, and spectators exhausted and frustrated. According to an account in the Sacramento Daily Record-Union, their rematch in San Francisco on November 1, 1883, was a far more entertaining affair. The two-of-three falls match featured several spectacular elements, including a quick Muldoon pinfall after a slam in the first fall and a second-fall tumble out of the ring, during which a “desperate gang of toughs” attacked Muldoon, supposedly because they had bet money on Whistler. When the undersized Whistler pinned Muldoon in the second fall, after a series of exciting near falls, the crowd “[jumped] into the main floor, cheering and throwing their hats in the air.” The match was stopped in the third fall after Whistler broke his collarbone when slammed by Muldoon, but the latter agreed to split the $2,000 purse with his opponent as a gesture of respect. While determining the match’s work-shoot ratio is difficult, the contrast with their earlier bout is striking, and implies that the two may have, at the very least, agreed to cooperate to make the match more exciting, even if the outcome was not predetermined.