The Tiger Man of Nebraska
If you drive through Ravenna, Nebraska, you'll pass a bronze statue of a man standing with two greyhounds, tucked between the bank and the gas station and slightly hidden behind a Veteran Memorial wall. Most people don't slow down. They should.
The man was John Pesek, and for a good stretch of the early twentieth century he may have been the most feared wrestler on earth.
He grew up on the prairie near Ravenna, one of seven children of Bohemian parents. His father died in an accident when John was twelve. He wanted to be a boxer, but the carnivals that rolled through the Midwest pulled him toward wrestling instead. He wasn't a giant. He was quick, strong, and smart about leverage, and he moved with a looseness that earned him the nickname "The Nebraska Tiger Man."
By his twenties he was beating some of the biggest names in the sport. Then came the part that defined him. Professional wrestling was drifting toward pre-arranged finishes, with promoters deciding winners in advance. Pesek wanted no part of it. He believed wrestling was a contest, and he wrestled like it was one every time he stepped through the ropes.
That made him valuable and dangerous. Promoters who needed a real fighter to deal with troublemakers hired him. In 1921 at Madison Square Garden, he went after a rival so roughly that the crowd nearly rioted and New York banned him for life. The New York Times credits Plestina with "intensified fairness" in the face of Pesek's continued fouling. This is the reason Pesek was banned from wrestling for life in New York. In 1926 he was filling in for another champion when he locked the reigning world champion in a hold and appeared to win, so the referee disqualified him on a pretext. A man who wouldn't follow the script kept getting written out of it.
In 1929 he got tired of the politics and took his act to Australia and New Zealand. Crowds of twenty to thirty thousand packed the stadiums, and he won 47 straight bouts there. His grandchildren say the best part of his career may have been that trip.
Back home he turned to another passion, greyhounds. On his 800-acre Nebraska farm he built one of the best racing kennels in the country. A dog he brought back from Australia became the foundation of American greyhound breeding, and by the 1970s its bloodline was in about 95 percent of U.S. greyhounds.
In his later years, he drove a huge gold Cadillac around Ravenna at five miles an hour. When he spotted someone, he'd pull up, call them "boy," and buy them a soda. His family says he couldn't remember names, so everyone got the same one.
He died in 1978 at his home in Ravenna. The statue was being made when he passed and was unveiled that May.
He is in the Professional Wrestling Hall of Fame, the Nebraska Sports Hall of Fame, and the Greyhound Hall of Fame. His own granddaughter says she regrets not asking him for more stories. That may be the real lesson here, because the stories vanish when the people do.