Modern professional wrestling is more of a show-business attraction than a sport. But it wasn’t always that way. Many years ago pro wrestlers really competed. In those early matches a wrestler had to pin his man to win.
Ed “Strangler” Lewis was one of the greatest wrestlers of all time. His best hold was a tough-to-break headlock. Equally great was Joe Stecher. When he clamped on a leg-scissors, his opponent began to hurt.
In 1916, these giants of the mat met in the ring at the Omaha Fair Grounds. The match started at four o’clock in the afternoon under a hot sun. For the first hour neither of them went down, but they locked hands and shoved, pushed, pulled and grunted. Then they began flying all over the ring, throwing each other around like sacks of potatoes.
It grew dark and a few cars were driven up to ringside and their lights turned on. On and on they struggled. Finally, at nine o’clock, after five hours of tremendous effort, the match was called a draw.
Strangely enough, a couple of years earlier, these same two wrestlers had slammed at each other for two hours, and the match was called a draw. And a couple of years after their five-hour match, they went at it again, also for two hours. Once more the match ended in a draw.
From Strange But True Sports Stories by Howard Liss. Illustrations by Joe Mathieu.
Were these the only times they wrestled each other?
From what I can find online (mostly in Wikipedia), it looks like they wrestled each other quite a bit, trading victories here and there. It looks like Stecher finished with the title over Lewis in the ’20’s.