Catch as Catch Can: Where the Holds Came From

Her coach gives the short answer most rooms give. Old Lancashire wrestlers. Carnival men. Frank Gotch. Three names, no story, and the next round starts. She leaves knowing a hold built by people she cannot picture, in a wrestling culture that prized the ride, the pin, and the finish in one unbroken argument. The holds have a history. It explains why they are shaped the way they are.

Catch wrestling is the one art in this library whose past usually arrives as decoration inside technique pieces: a conditioning deck here, a toe hold there. Told whole, the story runs from industrial Lancashire to Wigan, across the Atlantic to Iowa farms and Chicago title matches, through the carnival tents where the record turns murky, and out into Japanese rings and modern submission gyms. This article labels its claims as it goes: documented, reported, or tradition. Catch needs that discipline more than most arts, because part of its history was performed for paying crowds by men paid to blur it.

Section 01The Name Is the Rule

Start with the name, because the name is a ruleset. Catch as catch can means catch any hold you can: take the grip, limb, or position that is available, rather than the one a stricter style assigns. Documented: Lancashire wrestling in the nineteenth century allowed a wider range of holds and falls than the collar-and-elbow and Cumberland and Westmorland styles it sat beside, and that openness is what the name describes.

That single rule shaped the art's character for good. A wrestling style that permits nearly any hold rewards the wrestler who can ride, turn, pin, and finish, because every position connects to every other one. There is no clean border where control ends and submission begins. The double wristlock is a finish, a turnover, and a ride in one grip, and that is not an accident of one clever man's imagination. It is what a permissive ruleset selects for over thousands of matches.

Section 02Lancashire: Mills, Miners, and Wager Matches

Documented: catch wrestling's roots are in Lancashire, in the industrial north of England, during the nineteenth century. Wrestling there was working men's sport: miners, mill hands, and tradesmen wrestling at fairs, on public house grounds, and in matches arranged for wagers and side stakes. Matches drew crowds, money moved on the results, and a local champion carried real standing in his town.

The conditions explain the technique. These were not academy wrestlers following a syllabus. They were strong men with limited training time, wrestling often, on grass and rough ground, under a ruleset that let a match be won by fall or by a hold an opponent could not escape. Reported: some accounts describe Lancashire men wrestling in clogs, the working footwear of the region. Treat that detail as colour from period retelling rather than a rule of the style.

What Lancashire built was an attitude as much as a technique list: stay on top, keep the other wrestler's shoulders in danger, work a hold until it finishes or opens the next one, and never give a position away for free. Every catch room that teaches the ride as a weapon is spending Lancashire money.

Section 03Wigan and the Snake Pit

If Lancashire is the art's birthplace, Wigan is its most famous address. Documented: Wigan produced leading Lancashire wrestlers across generations, and in 1948 Billy Riley opened his gym in the town, the room that became known as the Snake Pit. Riley had wrestled professionally in the Lancashire style, and his gym taught the old catch holds to a new generation at a time when the style was fading from public view.

Tradition: the Snake Pit name itself. Students and later writers explain it in several ways, usually that the training was so hard, and the holds so unforgiving, that the room earned a reptile's name. The gym's existence, its coach, and its students are documented. The naming story belongs to gym folklore, and it is printed here as folklore.

Documented: the lineage out of Riley's room is the spine of modern catch. Karl Istaz, who wrestled professionally as Karl Gotch, trained there before building a major career in professional wrestling and later teaching in Japan. Billy Robinson, another Riley student, became a leading professional wrestler and, decades later, one of the revival's most sought-after teachers. A small gym in a Lancashire town, founded after the style's public peak, turned out to be the bridge that carried the holds across the century.

Section 04The American Line: Farmer Burns

Catch crossed the Atlantic with British immigration and took root in American farming country, where it met a sporting culture of county fairs, travelling shows, and challenge matches. Documented: its first great American champion-teacher was Martin Burns (1861–1937), an Iowa farmer known across the country as Farmer Burns. Burns won American catch-as-catch-can honours in the 1890s, wrestled leading men of his era, and then did the thing that mattered most for this story: he taught, in person and through a famous mail-order course, and his students carried his system across the country.

Reported: Burns was celebrated for extraordinary neck strength, and the best-known story has him surviving a staged hangman's drop as a publicity demonstration, his trained neck taking the strain. The stunt belongs to the showman's record of his era: it was retold by Burns's own publicity and by later admirers, and no neutral record settles exactly what was rigged and what was not. Read it as a window into how Burns sold himself, which is itself a historical fact about the era.

Documented, and plainer: Burns understood conditioning as a wrestler's foundation, built his teaching around it, and trained the student who would take the American line to its peak.

Section 05Frank Gotch: The Line Reaches Its Peak

Documented: Frank Gotch (1878–1917), born in Humboldt, Iowa, and trained by Burns, became the dominant American wrestler of his generation. He won the world heavyweight championship from the Estonian champion Georg Hackenschmidt in Chicago in 1908, and he beat Hackenschmidt again in the 1911 rematch, also in Chicago. Those two matches made Gotch a national celebrity in the United States and stand among the best-documented contests of the era: large crowds, heavy press coverage, dated results.

Reported: the 1911 rematch carried a complaint that followed it ever after. Hackenschmidt's camp claimed his knee had been injured before the match, and versions of the story add claims about foul tactics in the first fall. The result is documented; the excuses and counter-claims are reported, from interested parties, and this article leaves them in that column where they belong.

Documented: Gotch's name attached itself to the toe hold that still bears it in this library, a finishing hold he was famous for applying. He retired in 1913 and died in 1917, still a young man, and American professional wrestling after him slid steadily toward arranged entertainment. Gotch's retirement is a fair marker for the contest era's peak passing.

Tradition: Abraham Lincoln's wrestling legend belongs to this American soil, a generation before Burns. Lincoln wrestled as a young man in Illinois, and his 1831 bout with Jack Armstrong is documented as an event in his early life. Tradition: the larger claim, repeated for two centuries, that he lost only once in some three hundred matches. No records support that count. It survives because a wrestling country wanted its president to have been one of its own, and it is worth printing only with its label on.

Section 06The Carnival Decades: Contested Ground

Here the record changes character, and honest history has to change with it. Documented: from the late nineteenth century into the twentieth, travelling carnivals and athletic shows employed wrestlers who took on local challengers, and catch wrestlers worked these circuits as part of the wider professional game. A show needed a wrestler who could handle an unknown local strongman safely, quickly, and night after night. Catch, with its rides and holds, was built for exactly that work.

Reported: the carnival vocabulary that catch still uses with pride. The house wrestler who could legitimately defeat challengers is remembered in the trade as a hooker, a man whose holds could hook a challenger into a finish before a contest could turn dangerous or dull. The term and the role are widely reported in wrestling memoirs and oral histories. Documented records of individual carnival matches are scarce, because carnivals kept gate money, not archives.

Reported: prize offers framed many of these bouts, with money promised to any local man who could beat, pin, or simply last against the show's wrestler. The offers were advertising as much as sport, and the house wrestler's job was to make sure the prize stayed in the box. That broad picture is consistent across many independent accounts. The specific scores, streaks, and feats attached to individual carnival men are another matter.

Tradition: the heroic carnival legends, the champion who defeated dozens of challengers in a single week, the hooker who crippled a famous strongman's arm in a tent and was paid to leave town. Stories of this shape attach to several real wrestlers' names. None should be taught as results. What they honestly show is the reputation the work carried: these men were feared by people who wrestled for money, and fear leaves stories behind it even when it leaves no scoresheets.

The deeper problem is the worked match. Documented: as the twentieth century advanced, professional wrestling's business moved toward arranged outcomes, and genuine contests became the exception inside a performer's career. That shift poisons the well for historians. A carnival-era result may record a contest, a performance, or a contest that turned into a performance halfway through, and the accounts rarely say which. This library's rule for the era is simple: label the claim and let the murk stay visible.

Section 07The Quiet Years and the Japan Line

Documented: as a named, taught system, catch wrestling nearly disappeared in the middle of the twentieth century. Its techniques survived inside professional wrestling's training rooms, in amateur wrestling's folkstyle cousins, and in the memories of the men who had learned them young. A student in 1970 who wanted to learn catch as catch had almost nowhere public to go.

Documented: one road out ran through Japan. Karl Gotch worked in Japanese professional wrestling and became a revered teacher there, training Japanese wrestlers in the holds and conditioning he had learned in Wigan. Billy Robinson also wrestled and taught in Japan. Japanese professional wrestling's submission-heavy branches grew partly from that Lancashire teaching, carried by men the Japanese business treated with a respect the Western business had stopped offering.

Reported: the claim that modern Japanese submission wrestling, and through it part of early mixed martial arts, descends directly from Riley's gym. The teaching links are real and documented at several points: named Lancashire-trained men taught named Japanese wrestlers. The stronger version, a single unbroken pipe from Wigan to every modern submission gym, is reported and argued by lineage holders rather than settled by records. Both halves of that sentence matter.

Section 08The Revival

Documented: from the 1990s onward, catch wrestling returned as a taught art. The growth of mixed martial arts sent wrestlers and grapplers looking for the old holds, and teachers with genuine Lancashire lineage, Billy Robinson prominent among them, found students again. Wrestlers such as Josh Barnett carried catch training into top-level mixed martial arts, and Barnett's catch background under Robinson's teaching is a documented part of his career. Old gyms were honoured, new organisations formed, and the Snake Pit tradition in Wigan was revived as a living training place rather than a memorial.

Documented: the revival also changed the art's address. Catch now lives in submission wrestling and mixed martial arts gyms, taught beside Brazilian jiu-jitsu and judo, tested in grappling competition rather than in wager matches and carnival tents. The holds survived because the ruleset that created them still produces them: give a wrestler permission to catch any hold, a ride worth keeping, and an opponent whose shoulders matter, and the old game rebuilds itself on modern mats.

That is the honest shape of the story. Lancashire made it, Wigan kept it, Burns and Gotch proved it in America, the carnivals blurred it, Japan sheltered a line of it, and the revival brought it home.

Section 09The Companion Guide

This article gives you the knowledge. The companion guide is the version you keep. Catch Wrestling Timeline prints the whole story as a dated reference: Lancashire roots, Riley's gym and the Wigan line, Burns and Gotch in America, the carnival decades marked as contested ground, the Japan line, and the revival, with the claim status, documented, reported, or tradition, marked on the entries themselves rather than gathered into a disclaimer. Around the timeline sit the lineage charts, the people and places files, a guide to reading carnival-era claims, and a further-reading list. It is for any student who repeats this history in their own room and wants to repeat it straight.