A Youtube History of the NWA World Heavyweight Title - Lou Thesz vs Tom Rice (1951)

With my sincerest apologies for being late with this one, Lou Thesz vs Tom Rice. It's a little out of order; the original date I had for this was 1954, but I think '51 is more likely. If you've got better information, by all means share. With no further adieu...



 

 

As you can tell by the crawl, this is taken from a Japanese video, though they keep the English commentary. The play by play guy's insistence on calling Thesz "Louie" doesn't sit well with me, but otherwise he's not bad. Better than the regular Chicago guy, anyway. I don't know who this ring announcer is, but I love the shit out of him. He reminds me somehow of The Wizard of Oz, but in a good way.

This is the only footage I've ever seen of Rice, and I don't know the first thing about him that isn't presented here. He looks a little like Gene Kiniski or Fritz Von Erich. Pretty athletic, as you see when he takes that leap over the top. 

Is this the first time we see the Thesz press not get a fall? That feels like it's been money for Lou thus far, but Rice doesn't give him much off of it. It did come awfully early in the match, though, and that would've been a quick fall. 

That Thesz elbow never, ever gets old. And bless Rice for giving it that little dizzy sell. You can practically see cartoon birds circling his head and chirping. I love Thesz cheap shotting on the break, too, later in the second fall, and Rice's payback knee.

Thesz takes a ludicrous back-of-the-head bump off a Rice tackle, and Rice dives on him in a pseudo-cradle position, but doesn't seem to know what to do with him. I kind of wonder if Lou didn't ding himself pretty good, and Rice just didn't trust him to be able to get out of a pin. Just trying to kill time so Thesz can recover, or genuinely lost? No idea. 

Or maybe that non-pinning cradle is just a standard Rice rest hold, since he does it later in the match, too. If so, it is terrible. Rice will go from an outstanding offensive move to that momentum killer of a hold, which doesn't look like it hurts and doesn't move towards a pin. Really out of place compared to what we've seen so far, and it would have been very easy to put just a little more work in, make it look like he's trying to turn Thesz and Thesz fighting it, and suddenly you've got a fun spot instead of dead time.

I never really thought of Thesz as a flier before I started this, but he can get up there on that leapfrog. Between this, the dropkicks, and the press, Thesz is more of an aerialist than I'd ever credited him. The dropkick's starting to grow on me. It looks odd, but he makes some good contact. He also doesn't look like a muscleman, but taking Rice over out of that front headlock is quite the feat of neck strength. (We'll see that spot again, too, and it'll look even better. Trust me.) Just a much better all-around athlete than I've tended to think of him as being.

This one didn't do much for me on first viewing, but I liked it more the second time around. Rice's brawler/cheater act wasn't really compelling, and there wasn't enough consistency to his offense, but his stooging is kind of fun if you let yourself get sucked in. Based on how little I've heard of him, and the two straight falls for Thesz, I'd assumed Rice was never a major player. A quick perusal of Wrestlingdata suggests he was much more of a tag worker, with a host of West Coast tag titles to his credit in the 50s. Maybe he's better in that context. I did get a kick out of the post-match, where Rice is trying to act tough and Ed Lewis gives him this wave off like "son, don't even think it".

For more on Lou Thesz, read his autobiography Hooker. For a cross section of Thesz and the other legitimate pro wrestlers of the past and into the present, you can do no better than Jonathan Snowden's Shooters: The Toughest Men in Professional Wrestling. For an in-depth look at the NWA, I recommend Tim Hornbaker's National Wrestling Alliance: The Untold Story of the Monopoly That Strangled Pro Wrestling.