Yusuf İsmail
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1894, a giant (6’2", 250 pounds) Turk named Yusuf İsmail takes up professional wrestling in France. According to the published accounts, Yusuf lost just once in his career, and that due to a foul that the other wrestler (Ernest Roeber of New York) probably faked. The original "Terrible Turk," Yusuf died in July 1898 during a famous shipwreck and from here the story gets confused. For example, the New York papers said that Yusuf was dragged to the bottom by the weight of some $8,000 in gold coins that he wore in a money belt. Moreover, the journalists said that in his haste to reach a lifeboat, Yousouf threw women and children overboard. However, while it is true that Yusuf preferred coin to cash, he probably did not have $8,000 on him. After all, his pay in New York was only $20 per week, and he had been spending that much on clothes and food. Furthermore, although the crew of the SS La Bourgogne tossed women and children overboard in their haste to reach the boats, there are no contemporary reports of giant passengers from steerage tossing women and children overboard. Consequently, these are probably tales spun by Yusuf’s promoter William Brady, a man best known for producing melodramas for stage and screen. In A Pictorial History of Wrestling the English wrestling writer Graeme Kent wrote that Yusuf İsmail was not Turkish, but French. This is not correct either. According to Scottish wrestling historian William Baxter, Yusuf İsmail was born in Bulgaria (then part of the Ottoman Empire) in 1857, and thirty years later he won the Kırkpınar tournament. In 1894, the French promoter Joseph Doublier brought him to Paris, and in 1898, Antonio Pierri took him to New York. The golden years of professional wrestling, around the beginning of the twentieth century: the era of Hackenschmidt, his sensational arrival in London, and his eclipse by Frank Gotch a few years later; of Pons, Zbyszko, Padoubny; of the great Indian wrestlers: Ghulam, Imam Bux, Gama; and the Turks: Cour-Derelli, Ahmed Madrali, Youssuf Ishmaelo (Kurtdereli, Madrali Ahmet, Yusuf İsmail)– names which can still stir the true chronicler’s blood.
Youssuf Ishmaelo, the Terrible Turk: the original, in fact, of all the "Terrible Turks" who invaded western wrestling arenas over the past century. An athlete considered by Alan Calvert, the pioneer of American weight training, to have been one of the three strongest men of recent history, and of whom Edmond Desbonnet wrote, "For many years he has left in the world of wrestling and wrestlers the memory of someone irreplaceable."
According to Desbonnet in his book Les Rois de la Lutte (The Kings of Wrestling), (Paris, 1910), the Turkish invasion began in 1894 after a wrestler named Doublier was defeated by a rival, Sabès. In a search to find someone who could defeat Sabès, Doublier visited Turkey and brought back three wrestlers: Kara Osman, Filiz Nurullah, and the 6’2", 250-pound Youssuf Ishmaelo.
