Still, anybody willing to work a rigorous schedule and put on a memorable show could make bank. One state even insisted promoters classify these faux fights as “exhibitions”.
Politicians and journalists in 1930s America suffered periodic bouts of indignation about the brazen fakery involved in the “sport” since most contests were decided well in advance. The money was so good that he remained in the ring for years after graduation, some newspapers referring to him then as “The Boston Medico”, others preferring the more traditional “man with the cast-iron toes”. Labelled Dropkick for delivering two-footed shots to opponents’ faces before landing in an upright position, the honorific of doctor was appended because he used wrestling to pay his way through medical school during the Great Depression. Christened plain old John Eugene Murphy by his parents, Jimmy, a gas fitter, and Cicelie, a tobacco stripper, in blue collar Medford, just north of Boston, in 1912, he gained enduring fame through his various monikers and fascinating second life, all of which is detailed in this book. He has also written the foreword to Dropkick Murphy – A Legendary Life, Emily Sweeney’s evocative new biography of the true original from whom his mighty band took their name. Ken Casey composed the song, inspired by an unpublished fragment of a Woody Guthrie lyric. Not to mention just about everybody watching had heard this stadium staple at some sports event or other over the past two decades. For a man battling legit concerns he’s too old to run for re-election, being soundtracked by an Irish-American folk-punk anthem took years off him. Making his ring walk to the stirring strains of the Dropkick Murphys’ I’m Shipping up to Boston was clever theatrics and smart politics. There was something of the WWE pantomime about the way President Joe Biden strutted on to the stage outside St Muredach’s Cathedral in Ballina last month. In a very different context.ĭr John "Dropkick" Murphy at Bellows Farm in Acton, Boston As for Dropkick Murphy? Well, you might have heard his name mentioned far more recently. Like so much about wrestling then, that value was no doubt exaggerated. A giant from Ballydehob, he sailed to America, was sold to the public as a broth of a boy and returned in triumph as heavyweight wrestling champion of the world in 1936, brandishing a diamond-encrusted championship belt supposedly worth $10,000. The Irish whip again prevailed for the ex-world’s champ in the third and rubber session.”ĭanno will be known to Irish fans, one of those quasi-mythical, sepia-tinted names from the sporting long ago. Danno took the first fall by the Irish whip but the dear doctor won the second with a dropkick.
“Considerable hair-pulling, strangling and what-not kept Lloyd Stewart, referee, diligently employing himself as human crowbar to pry Danno from the rough stuff. “In the main slambang of the evening, it was a rough performance, for Danno is no longer the good-natured Celt of his first appearance in this country,” went one report. On this early summer’s night in 1940, the Corkman came out on top. Billed as a rematch pitting “a pink-cheeked son of the Emerald Isle and czar of the mat behemoths” against “one of the fastest workmen in the ring”, the contest followed an epic contest in which the pair had grappled for over an hour up in Halifax, Nova Scotia. In the second half of both their careers, Cork’s Danno Mahony and Boston’s Dr John “Dropkick” Murphy remained box-office enough for a showdown between them to top the bill at the Sports Arena in Lynn, Massachusetts.
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