Before Gorgeous George, wrestling had heels. After him, it had stars. George Raymond Wagner was a middling wrestler from Nebraska who bleached his hair, grew it long, carried a valet and a mirror to the ring, and had himself sprayed with perfume before the bell. The gimmick was absurd on paper. On television it was irresistible.
Gorgeous George, out of the robe. CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
The timing mattered. When wrestling arrived on local television in the late 1940s, promoters discovered something they had not anticipated: the audience at home did not want a contest, it wanted a character. George gave them one, complete with an entrance set to Pomp and Circumstance, a robe he would hand to a second, and a routine of stalling that made a crowd want to see him lose.
In the ring, where the stalling was the point. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
He was, by every account, the highest-paid wrestler of his era at his peak, and the first to understand that the camera magnified personality in a way the back of a hall never could. He was also the first wrestler to draw a crowd that came specifically to hate him, which is a different and more profitable thing than a crowd that came to see a match.
The crowd came to watch him lose. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Muhammad Ali said he borrowed from him. That claim has been repeated so often it has become its own piece of wrestling folklore, but the underlying point holds: Gorgeous George was the first American athlete to build a career on the proposition that being disliked, loudly and on purpose, was a business model.
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Israel Joffe edits the Monday Night Wrestling history series. More of the archive is at israeljoffe.com.
More from the series: the 1908 match that made professional wrestling · Mildred Burke wrestled for a living · Ed Lewis held the title for twenty years · Jim Londos filled buildings in the worst years