Steven Johnson. Jim Londos: The Golden Greek of Professional Wrestling. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2025. Pp. 232. Paper $39.95.

“In my opinion, Jim Londos is the greatest wrestler of all time” (1). So writes World Wrestling Entertainment hall-of-famer John “Bradshaw” Layfield in the foreword to this excellent biography. He might have some arguments from wrestling aficionados favoring Frank Gotch or George Hackenschmidt. But Steve Johnson’s marvelous history makes a compelling case for Londos. This is the best of what McFarland & Company publishes in sports history. Research is formidable, for the most part in almost 200 English-language newspapers and in more than 20 Greek-language and other-language newspapers. But in addition, Johnson has conducted dozens of relevant interviews, studied enormous numbers of published sources from the early twentieth century forward, and combed through manuscripts and archives at the University of Notre Dame Wrestling Collection, George Mason University, the Library of Congress and elsewhere. Illustrations in the book, including several photographs of Londos, are magnificent. If all that weren’t enough, Johnson writes with wonderful humor and flair, as when he notes that Londos “was as guarded about his age as a Parisian fashion model” (21).

Born Christos Theofilou in Koutsopodi, Argos, Greece (1894), Londos changed his name a handful of times. His period of greatest popularity as a professional wrestler was from World War I to the mid-1940s. He may well have been the first immigrant to the United States to gain a massive sports fan following. Londos left Greece at age 15, travelling in steerage to Ellis Island. He settled soon after in Chicago where he began wrestling. He did manual labor in Utah for a while, then moved to San Francisco where a cousin had established himself and where he continued to work in a variety of occupations that included electrician’s apprentice. Before turning pro, Londos wrestled out of the YMCA, a center for amateur combat sports across the United States and Canada. On becoming a professional in 1914, his father was contemptuous of what seemed to him a base pastime and was not shy about letting Londos know it. After winning a world championship in 1930, Londos competed up to 150 times a year before enormous numbers of fans. He pioneered and refined several wrestling moves and in 1933, fought in Athens before a crowd just shy of 100,000. Revered by boxing fans, he died in 1975.

There is fascinating material on Londos’ work outside the ring at the height of his success. In the 1930s, he gave regular wrestling and fitness exhibitions on stage across the country. Unlike swimmer Johnny Weismuller and figure skater Sonjia Henie, Londos turned Hollywood down for movie roles. Moreover, he had had enough of the vaudeville acrobatics he performed as a young man and disdained hard-posing musculature demonstrations on stage as unreasonably tiring between matches. “I would destroy the muscles I needed to wrestle,” he stated. “So, my theatrical career went up in smoke very soon” (119). There are many curious political snippets in the book. “If Londos was Hercules or Jason in Greece,” according to Johnson, “he was Digenes Akritas in Cyprus, the great hero of an epic medieval story who slayed dragons and displayed prodigious feats” (163). In 1933, Londos wanted to wrestle in Cyprus, but British colonizers denied him permission. Even in Londos’ absence, he became famous. There were poems and pamphlets written about him. When he finally reached the island in 1937, “he was greeted as the second coming of Digenes” (163). There were cheers and music when he arrived on the Limassol waterfront. Londos’ likeness was on all sorts of goods hawked in the streets of Cyprus. Seven thousand people watched his match with Theofilos Tomazos, who had fought at the 1928 Olympics before turning professional. Londos won in the fifth round. During his visit, Londos spoke to children, gave exhibitions, and graciously accepted the accolades of sports associations.

As rich and as detailed as this book is, there is much it is not. There is almost no attention to the problem of ethnicity and sport (particularly boxing and wrestling) beyond this case, nor is Londos placed in that context more than sparingly. There is no consideration of a vast scholarly literature on sport and ethnicity. At one point, Londos changed his name to “Jim Wilson for the sole and temporary purpose of wrestling in Southern Oregon” (45). From there, he was “hailed as the ‘eighteen-year-old wonder’ from Syria” (45). What that meant as a function of the wrestling business or the question of ethnicity and discrimination is never explored. While there are many important examples of the significance of Londos to Greek Americans and to Greeks, passages mention but never delve in depth into what exactly Londos meant to Greek Americans or to Greeks at various points of political crisis in the early twentieth century. Johnson writes that “Londos was still a Greek citizen trapped in a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment that followed World War I” (67). There is a long paragraph addressing the violence, but nothing on how Londos might have been trapped or victimized.

Part of the problem here is a tendency in McFarland sports biographies to the excessively celebratory. Regarding a famous 1926 bout on the occasion of the Philadelphia Sesquicentennial, for example, Johnson quotes the Philadelphia Daily News in stating that, “Tonight Londos is wrestling for the glory that was Greece” (16). It’s not clear what that meant for Greece, Greeks, or Greek Americans. At the same time, that sort of hyperbole was typical of sports writing at the time—what the writer Roger Kahn described in a different context as a triumph of imagery over accuracy. There are two fascinating paragraphs on Londos’ having put together “the next best thing” (68) to an association of Hellenic wrestling promoters, the latter of which did not exist. Johnson writes that this came in response to a discriminatory inability for Londos to break a glass ceiling in the profession. “No Greeks need apply,” he writes (68). Londos worked with the promoter John Contos for four decades and together they “rewrote the book” (69) on wrestling promotion. There is tremendous detail on the matches that were organized, but no analysis on the nature of discrimination bans in wrestling, the specific roles Londos and Contos played, why their business was so successful, or how it worked.

There is remarkable detail but little depth on Greek Americans and Greeks that came in and out of Londos’ life. This includes the wrestler George Kotsonaros who was with Londos early in his career for an appearance in C. W. Parker’s carnival show in the town of Philipsburg, Kansas (population 1,300). Londos shared billing with Sultan, the Arabian wonder horse. Now touted as “Jimmy Sampson” or “Young Sampson” Londos joined Kotsonaros in fighting all comers, each of whom earned a dollar for every minute past four that they lasted in the ring. This and many other fascinating fragments of Londos’ life raise all sorts of unanswered questions about ethnicity, identity, performance, match promotion, and wrestling.

The book covers Londos’ several trips to Greece with equivalent attention, but with an adulatory approach replicated in newspapers cited, to the point where we learn little about the ways in which his impact influenced leading government officials or neighborhood communities—what exactly people felt. Beaming faces, joyous hearts, and boisterous applause greeted Londos when he arrived in Koutsopodi on October 28, 1928, for the first time since childhood” (89). “Eyes welled up at the very sight of Londos” (90).

The more famous and successful Londos became during the 1930s, the less we read of Greek Americans in his wrestling world. To be sure, there are ongoing terse references to his importance to Greek Americans and his own sense of a Greek identity. But Londos lived out the sort of Americanization that many twentieth-century immigrants experienced, slowly distancing himself from his ethnic communities of origin. That changed again as he continued wrestling in the late 1940s and his Greek identity was again promoted extensively, but his career became more performance and less dynamic skill in technique and athleticism. It seems likely that as Londos’ skills declined, promoters turned back to drumming up ticket sales by emphasizing his ethnicity—a common approach by promoters for many ethnic American fighters. Johnson adopts the media’s reverence for the now legendary athlete. He describes the opponents for a 1949 match between Londos and George Wagner (also known as George and Gorgeous George), as “the one-time Greek Adonis and the guardian of the old order, and Geroge, the new pretty boy and lead character of modern wrestling” (185). By the time Londos fought former world champion boxer Primo Carnera (now wrestling long after the end of his boxing career) the following year, according to Johnson it was a case of “a savant against a behemoth, a traditionalist against a novelty, a wrestler against a boxer” (185). Johnson argues that Londos was “trying to thread a needle” (186). Neither George nor Carnera were worthy opponents or credible wrestlers, and Londos knew it. Johnson holds that he gave these “offbeat characters” (186) credibility by fighting them, “even if only to prove the superiority of his style” (186). In fact, Londos’ career was coming to an end and like many of the greatest combat athletes, including Carnera, his final matches should likely never have been fought.

February 06, 2025

David M. K. Sheinin is professor of history at Trent University (Canada) and a member of the National Academy of History of the Argentine Republic. He has published twenty books, the most recent of which is Statues and Legacies of Combat Athletes in the Americas (2024), co-edited with C. Nathan Hatton. His current projects include books on memory and history in Argentina; Michigan State University economic development projects during the Cold War; and former Toronto mayor John Sewell.

Editor’s Note: On Greek American pro wrestling see, Steve Frangos, “Greeks Left their Mark on Pro Wrestling.” The National Herald, November 4, 2006, pp. 1, 5.