In 1964 Michael Gabbert, an investigative journalist, revealed the soccer betting scandal which led to ten players being jailed for match fitting. In 1966 he turned his attention to professional wrestling, with a five week series in the Sunday newspaper, The People.
As an eleven year old with an insatiable thirst for knowledge I lapped up the revealing backgrounds of these strange and mysterious creatures that he revealed whilst retaining an ability to totally ignore the substance of the pieces, i.e. that matches were fixed.
This was not the first wrestling exposure, and wouldn't be the last.Every four or five years it seemed the Sunday newspapers could cash in on their new discovey.
It may surprise many to learn that today is the anniversary of one of those Sunday paper "Wrestling is Fixed" declarations way back in 1956, that's over sixty years ago.
In one of the earliest Sunday newspaper investigations into the legitimacy of professional wrestling the Sunday Dispatch reporter Jacqueline Mackenzie asked "Is wrestling fake?" As would be expected she found it hard to get a straight answer. There was an admission that not everything was genuine. Francis St Clair Gregory told of the time he had been reprimanded by a referee in Belgium for grimacing as if he was in pain when his opponent got a hold on him. One man did talk. He was former boxer and wrestler Jack Doyle. Doyle told the reporter that the result of all his wrestling matches were pre-planned and explained how blood could be produced on demand. By the end of the piece the reporter did have a grudging admiration for the men she had met.
Newspaper exposure may have contributed to the decline in populaity but newspapers have themselves faced a steep decline with only a small percentage of the population regularly purchasing a paper