Column by Stu Pospisil / World-Herald staff writer
Imagine sitting in a temporary wooden grandstand on the Fourth of July, watching two heavyweight professional wrestlers “bunny-hug.”
For one hour, then two. Three and four hours pass.
Now dusk is falling. No lights, still no action. Some in the crowd, likely already losers on bets on their home-state favorite, get restless and toss cushions into the ring at the wrestlers.
A few lanterns are rounded up. An auto, maybe a Model T, is pulled up ringside so its headlights can help out.
Finally, after nearly five hours, the bout is declared a draw. No winner.
But this match — Joe Stecher of Dodge, Nebraska, against Ed “Strangler” Lewis — 100 years ago on July 4, 1916, at the old Douglas County Fairgrounds in Benson became legendary.
In 1983, World-Herald columnist Wally Provost said it was Omaha’s most famous Fourth of July sports event. In 1966, Dynamo Dennison, whom Provost called “a sports historian nonpareil,” said upon his 65th birthday that Stecher-Lewis had been Omaha’s greatest sports attraction.
And Stecher-Lewis was included in the “Giant Book of Strange But True Sports Stories,” written in 1976 by Howard Liss and Joe Mathieu. It was a book I read as a 14-year-old, and I developed a fascination with this story, perhaps the only sporting event in the city’s history at that time to rate mention.
