The Beginnings of Wrestling
in Illinois High Schools
By ROBERT PRUTER
Wrestling was a late bloomer in interscholastic sports, and it was not until
the mid-1920s that Illinois high schools began taking up the sport. In the
1890s, there was no wrestling in the secondary schools, but it flourished in
athletic clubs and in colleges, which included wrestling matches as part of
their athletic carnivals. After 1900, wrestling grew as a separate sport, under
sponsorship of YMCAs, settlement houses, and ethnic clubs such as Sokols and
Turners. In the colleges, the Eastern schools led the way, and in 1903 the first
intercollegiate match was held between Yale and Columbia. In Illinois, the
University of Chicago first competed in intercollegiate wrestling in 1910,
Northwestern University in 1915. On the high school level, there was
considerable intramural activity, but in terms of interscholastic competition,
the Eastern schools were slower to adopt the sport than their Midwest
counterparts. Iowa was the first state to conduct a high school state
championship, in 1921. Oklahoma, especially in Tulsa, became another early
hotbed of the sport, launching its state tournament in 1922. Indiana was another
early pioneer, when in 1922 Indiana University began sponsorship of a state high
school meet. Ohio Wesleyan University began sponsoring a state meet for Ohio
schools in 1927.
In Illinois, the first conference to adopt wrestling as an interscholastic sport was the Chicago Public High School League, in 1926, but the sport had two decades of incubation outside the schools in playground and amateur competition. As early as 1910, grammar school and high school boys were participating in city playground and park district tournaments. The older participants in these tournaments had further opportunities in Amateur Athletic Union and American Athletic Federation meets. In 1918, the Playground organization began an annual meet that grew tremendously during the 1920s, featuring competition in both grammar school and open events. Many other programs were developed during the decade, including an annual meet conducted by the settlement houses.
The high schools saw a glimmerings of wrestling activity long before formal interscholastic competition was inaugurated, but the wrestling programs never lasted beyond a few months. As early as 1904, a wrestler representing North Division High was competing in amateur matches against representatives of the Chicago Athletic Association. In 1911, a team of Lane Tech wrestlers competed under its school's name in the local annual Amateur Athletic Federation meet. Then in 1914, University High had an intramural team, but could find no other high schools to compete against. Briefly in 1916 Hyde Park, Harrison, and St. Cyril all organized teams and competed again one another, but the competition was not sustained after that year. In 1923 Tilden Tech and Bowen conducted a wrestling exhibition between halves of a basketball game.
Finally, in 1926, saw the beginning of a sustained high school wrestling program in Illinois, when several Chicago public schools inaugurated a season of dual-meet wrestling leading to a conference meet. The season began with a dual meet held between Harrison Tech and Tilden Tech, in March 1926. Harrison prevailed 38 to 6. The Harrison team was coached by a wrestling neophyte, James MacGowan, who was the school's soccer coach. The Scottish-born MacGowan was definitely no neophyte in soccer. He grew up in Canada and there played on the amateur Guelph team. After serving in the Canadian army in World War I he moved to Chicago. In 1922 he joined the Harrison faculty. Members of the first year's team probably knew more about wrestling than MacGowan, all whom had previous experience either in the American Amateur Federation (AAF) and or in playground competition. Harrison drew upon a heavily Czech-Slovak and Polish population and the type of wrestlers that MacGowan got were strong hardnosed kids. He also got a lot of them, as 80 would-be grapplers answered the call for candidates that first year. Tilden Tech's team was coached by the school's football coach, Charles Harvey.
In the following weeks more dual meets were held not only by Harrison and Tilden Tech, but also by Lindblom, Lane Tech, Crane Tech, and Schurz. On April 10 the league conducted its first championship tournament. Twelve schools and 166 wrestlers participated in the meet, which was held at Schurz High, and the school prevailing was Harrison. Tilden took second. Other participating schools included Lindblom, Crane, Bowen, and Schurz.
Harrison repeated as league champion in 1927 in a meet that had grown to 244 wrestlers. In 1928 Tilden Tech won under the guidance of first year coach, Bob Hicks (1900-1987). Hicks was trained as a gymnast and was serving as Tilden's basketball coach during the first two years that Harvey was in command of the wrestling team. In 1928 he assumed duties as wrestling coach. For the next several decades the story of Public League wrestling was that of Bob Hicks and his fabulous Tilden Tech teams. His teams dominated the sport like no other. From 1929 until his retirement in 1958, Hicks won 27 of 30 city titles and two state championships. He might have won another state title during the war years, but in 1941 and 1943 was prevented by wartime restrictions on gasoline from taking two powerful teams to the state tourney. Tilden produced future NCAA champions in Arnold Plaza, Joe Patacsil, Walter Romanowski, and Bill Weick.
The same year that the Chicago Public High School League introduced wrestling, in 1926, the University of Chicago began sponsoring a Cook County tournament open to both Chicago and Suburban schools. The university's wrestling coach and former national champion, Spyros Vorres, undoubtedly saw the meet as a recruiting tool. Few suburban schools participated, however, as the sport was virtually unknown in the suburbs at the time, but Bloom, New Trier, and Morton at one or more of the meets entered a team. Tilden Tech and Harrison were the only two schools to win the tourney. The university put on its meet generally a week after the city tournament, around mid-April. Harrison won the first three titles, and Tilden won the next five. The opposition of educators to university sponsorship of the event ended the team competition after the 1932 meet, but the tournament continued for two more years in which the competition was limited to Chicago public schools and championships awarded to individual wrestlers only.
Meanwhile, in 1929, Northwestern University added a national wrestling interscholastic to its tournament program of a national indoor track and field meet held since 1910 and a national swimming meet held since 1914. The meets were held in the third week of March. The following year saw the last national wrestling tourney, because Northwestern thereafter ended its sponsorship of all interscholastic tournaments under pressure from the National Federation of State High School Athletic Associations. Given the early preeminence of Iowa and Oklahoma in wrestling, it was not surprising that an Oklahoma school, Tulsa, won both of the meets, and an Iowa school, Fort Dodge, took second in both.
Of the Chicago school place-winners, Harrison took third in 1929 and Tilden third in 1930. The Harrison third-place finish was primarily due to getting two national champions in heavyweight Clarence Janecek (also an AAF Senior champ) and 165-pounder Rudolph Smatlak. Tilden wrestlers in 1930 advanced to three championship matches, but the school garnered no national titles.
By 1929 the Public League had 23 schools competing, organized into three sections, North, Central, and South. In 1930 the league instituted a dual-meet championship. The Chicago Public League was clearly the leader in the state in adoption of wrestling. With the onset of the Depression, however, many schools were forced to drop the sport, and for much of the 1930s only from ten to fifteen schools participated.
Meanwhile, a new power in wrestling emerged in 1931, Proviso, from suburban Maywood. Under the guidance of Coach Lou Slimmer the school searched wide and far for competition, regularly competing against the city and downstate schools. In the search for competition, Proviso, as well as Tilden Tech, regularly crossed the state line to compete against such Indiana wrestling powers of East Chicago Roosevelt, East Chicago Washington, and Hammond. In 1935, Proviso, for example, split a pair of dual meets with Hammond High, which was the Indiana state champion at the time. In 1934 another new wrestling power emerged, Granite City, which competed regularly with schools across the Mississippi in St. Louis and with fellow Southwestern Conference members, which included East St. Louis and Collinsville. The Southwestern Conference, in fact, became the second conference in the state after the Public League to adopt wrestling for league competition, in 1934.
Other suburban and downstate schools that launched wrestling programs in the early 1930s were Cicero (Morton), Urbana (University), Lawrenceville, Champaign, and tiny Lewistown. Under Coach Donald V. Duncan, Lewistown, in Fulton County in west central Illinois, pioneered the sport among the small schools in 1934, and regularly competed with the big schools on an equal basis. Duncan would take his grapplers all around the state, competing in Maywood against Proviso and in Chicago against Lindblom.
The downstate schools held various invitational tournaments beginning in 1933. That year a meet at Champaign drew nine schools. The following year Urbana sponsored a meet that drew 12 schools. In 1934, the board of control of the Illinois High School Athletic Association (IHSAA, now IHSA) rejected several petitions to start a wrestling tournament on the ground that there were too few schools in the state that sponsored the sport and that such a tournament would lose money. In 1935, the since-consolidated John Swaney HS sponsored an invitational state meet. In 1936, a meet was held at Arcola. Proviso was the only Chicago area entry in the Arcola meet, which it won.
An important early advocate of the sport was Harold E. "Hek" Kenney, wrestling coach at the University of Illinois, and he encouraged the IHSAA to sponsor the sport. In 1937, the IHSAA had finally deemed there was sufficient growth in the sport, with 28 schools around the state sponsoring teams, to establish a state championship tournament. The first meet, held at the University of Illinois, saw 20 schools with wrestlers competing. Proviso won the meet, and the school stayed on top for seven out of the next eight years. Among the outstanding Proviso wrestlers produced during this period were Fred Bishop (an NCAA runner-up), Chuck Farina (long-time Leyden H.S. coach and member of the National High School Sports Hall of Fame), and Jack Marino (long-time Proviso coach).
Harrison 1926 team, Chicago Public League champ.
Harrison 1929 team, Northwestern National Wrestling 3rd place finisher.
Proviso 1936 team, Arcola Invitational winner.
Revised version posted April 1, 2005.
Footnotes available upon request. Published with permission. All rights are reserved by the author.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of the Illinois High School Association.