In the last years of the nineteenth century, the third-strongest man in the world was said to be a Turk named Yusuf Ismail, known in his homeland as Yusuf the Great or Yusuf the Large, and known everywhere else as the Terrible Turk. He was the first of a line of legendary, savage, monstrously large wrestlers all called, one after the other, the Terrible Turk.
It’s true some of the Terrible Turks were fakes, not actually Turks at all. And though later some would say Yusuf Ismail was a French dockworker in a fez with nothing more than an out-of-control appetite and the ability to spike men into the ground so hard they could not rise without help, he was indeed a Turk, a sultan’s favorite, born in a corner of the then-immense Ottoman Empire, and though he was in the end perhaps a showman, maybe even a stooge, he also once was a hero and a champion.
When he was six years old, Yusuf could pin twelve-year-olds to the grass in less than a minute. When he was twelve, he could pin full-grown men using just his legs, and by the time he was thirteen, nobody in his village would spar with him. He had to strengthen his fingers by kneading balls of mud, his legs and arms by pushing on walls of stone, and his shoulders by hoisting fallen trees. By fourteen, he was never seen without a large and heavy object in his hands.
By then he was already the village champion, and he traveled regularly to competitions at weddings and other festivals, where he was matched against other village champions, all older and more experienced, and they would lean on each other for hours, testing for the smallest sign of weakness. It was then, when Yusuf was not yet the biggest or the strongest, and his matches seemed as if they would never end, that his skills and his fame grew. He had great patience then. He knew how to push men muscle by muscle until finally they fell.
By the time a French manager found him and imported him to Europe, he was already the head wrestler of the Ottoman Empire, thirty-seven years old, six foot two, 250 pounds. Not so big now, but big then. Twenty pounds heavier than his average opponent.
It took him four seconds to win his first European match, in which he lifted the French champion, Sabès, by the throat, then turned the Frenchman upside down and held him at arm’s length while he twisted and turned.
It’s said the Turk had no neck and that was why Strangler Lewis, the American heavyweight champion, could not defeat him. It’s said it took six men, three on each arm, to stop the Turk from killing one of his opponents.
It’s said he promised to cut his own throat if he was ever beaten.
It’s said he had a dagger in his turban even when on the mat.
It’s said that he had a cruel face, that he ate ten times a day and never paid for a meal, that he had a childish love of finery, that he had a sluggish Oriental brain, that he did not understand paper money, that he liked the shine and clink of gold coins. That he was once a bandit.
It’s true he wore his gold belted around his waist. Eight thousand dollars on the day he died. Or maybe ten. Or maybe five. At least forty pounds in weight, anyway.
And it’s true he drowned, just months after the fight at Madison Square Garden, along with nearly six hundred other passengers and crew, when the French ocean liner La Bourgogne hit the British ship Cromartyshire on the American Independence Day, just on the edge of the nineteenth century, July 4, 1898. They died, all of them, off the coast of Nova Scotia, in the North Atlantic, while the ship was on its way to Le Havre, where Yusuf was to join his wife and two children, so that they could travel home together.
It’s said the Terrible Turk refused to remove his belt full of gold when the ship went down, and he leapt, dagger in hand, onto a lifeboat full of mothers and children, dropping it deep into the sea.
It’s said he wailed from the ship’s rail begging Allah to save him.
It’s said he fell into the water and tried to lift himself onto a lifeboat, rocking the craft so severely with his great weight that a crewman first tried to push him away with an oar and, when that failed, took an axe and cut off each of the Terrible Turk’s grasping hands, the Turk’s grip so tight that his hands remained clinging to the lip of the boat while his body and his gold sank into the sea.
WHEN YOU WERE A CHILD, did you find that story credible?
When I was a child I didn’t know what “credible” meant.
It means believable.
I know what it means now.
Did you find the story believable as a child?
I think most people would do anything to save their lives.
Did you think that when you were a child?
I have no idea.
So now, you think Yusuf Ismail was just trying to save his own life?
I was referring to the crewman. Who cut off his hands.
You think the crewman cut off Yusuf Ismail’s hands in order to save his own life?
—
You don’t think the crewman was trying to save the lives of the women and children on his boat?
—
So, did you find the story believable as a child?
I don’t recall.
But you find it believable now?
I think it’s possible.
Probable?
Possible.
Does the probability of the story’s veracity—its truth—influence its effect on you?
I know what “veracity” means. And I said, it’s possible, not probable.
Does the possibility of the story’s veracity influence its effect on you?
The story has no effect on me.
Why not?
Why should it?
Some would find that a sad story. Or a story from which something could be learned.
Well, I don’t.
Why do you think that story is told to children?
Because it’s entertaining, I suppose.
Not to teach them a lesson?
Yes, I suppose to teach them a lesson.
And what is that lesson?
To be ashamed of themselves.
You think that is the intended lesson?
Maybe not intended, no.
But that story makes you feel ashamed of yourself?
—
As a child, did it make you feel ashamed of yourself?
No, it gave me nightmares.
Why?
Because of the hands, of course. The way they cut off his hands.
Why does that story make you feel ashamed?
It doesn’t.
It doesn’t make you feel ashamed?
No, it doesn’t.
But you think its lesson is to make children feel ashamed when they hear it?
Not all children.
Which children?
Turkish children, of course. The terrible Turkish children.
You don’t think Yusuf Ismail was a hero?
I don’t really care one way or the other.
The Fight at Madison Square Garden
New York City, 1898
Four months before he died
At the time, Madison Square Garden could seat eight thousand and stand a thousand more. On the night Ernest Roeber fought the Terrible Turk, perhaps another two hundred crowded their way in. There were five matchups, but it was clear that all nine thousand, two hundred men and women of the crowd were there for the main event. They each had the air of fighters, sweating, shouting, impatient, and often indignant. Fights broke out, men screamed, women fainted, some were nearly trampled.
The Terrible Turk was believed to be honest, unwilling to lose, and therefore unwilling to fix matches. It was meant to be a return to glory for the oldest sport among men.
No holds were barred. American Greco-Roman rules.
The Turk wore a turban of plaid.
A fall had to be made on the mat to count. The best two out of three falls would earn the winner five hundred dollars and half of the gate.
There was no rope, no posts, no ring, really. Just a mat on a stage, six feet above the crowd, only that height separating the fighters from their audience.
The Turk was six inches the taller.
They shook hands at the start.
Reporters lifted their notebooks, the referee took his stance, trainers and managers and people all across the arena planted their feet as if the fight depended on their ability to keep their balance.
The Turk could throw a man to the mat with such force that the fall alone knocked him out.
He wrenched men’s necks so badly that for days they could not look straight ahead.
But Roeber was one of the most popular champions of the past twenty years. A handsome man. A crowd favorite.
On the first move, without ceremony, seemingly without effort, Roeber was dropped, so fast that to the people seated at the top of the arena, who could not see where he lay, it was as if he had vanished. But just as fast, Roeber leapt to his feet and then off the mat and out of the field of play. If there had been a rope, a ring, Roeber would have been outside it, and if the Turk dropped him there, the fall wouldn’t count.
There Roeber stayed, orbiting the mammoth Turk, still in the center. “Fight!” one man in the crowd yelled. “Fight!” But nobody took up his chant. Periodically the Turk leaned forward and tried to swat Roeber back onto the mat, but the champion stayed on his feet, just out of reach. Finally the Turk, too, stepped off the mat, grabbed Roeber’s face in his two hands, and tried to lift him back into the field of play. But Roeber wiggled and writhed, and soon he was free, orbiting again. It was only seconds later that the Turk grabbed him once more, harder this time, and pushed him, threw him really, off the platform, so that Roeber dropped six feet to the ground below, landing first on his shoulder and then on his head, unconscious.
The audience thought he was dead. A madness overtook them. Words frothed out of their mouths. “Kill him!” they screamed.
The Turk looked out at them, used his long fingers to mimic Roeber’s running around the ring, pointed to his own chest, then pantomimed two men wrestling. He seemed to hold a match in his own imagination. Not my fault, his fingers seemed to say. Police surrounded the platform, and the Turk was led away, saying in Arabic and then French, “I only want to fight.”
The Turk was in his dressing room when the match was declared for Roeber.
The New York Times called him “almost frenzied with anger.”
“Kill the Turk!” “Lynch him!” the New York Times said the crowd called.
“We cannot allow the triumph of brutes,” one man said.
The Turk’s strength was called Herculean, but he was never the hero.
Not long after, in a rematch with a proper ring, the Turk lifted Roeber into the air and threw him first at one post then another until finally all four were broken, Roeber punched the Turk in the face, and the match was ended by the police. This time a draw.
YOU DON’T LIKE my asking you questions, do you?
You’re just doing your job.
Yes. But you don’t like it.
It’s not what I expected.
What did you expect?
Different kinds of questions.
What kind?
About my work. About where I’ll live. About, I don’t know, paying taxes, obeying the law.
We’ll get to those.
Do you tell everybody these stories?
I tell everybody stories.
But not these stories.
No, not these stories. Do you think Roeber could have beaten Yusuf Ismail in a fair fight?
I think it was a fair fight. Why are you telling me these stories?
Roeber bent the rules, you might say.
Why are you telling me these stories?
You really think Roeber fought fair?
—
Do you really think Roeber fought fair?
Fair enough.
Do you think that’s a particularly American way to win?
No.
Do you think Yusuf Ismail knew what was happening?
Yes.
So you think it was fixed? The Turk agreed to throw the fight? To throw Roeber off the mat? To put on a show?
I don’t know. You’re the one making this up, you tell me.
I’m not making it up.
Why did you tell me Roeber was a handsome man?
He was a handsome man. That’s what people say of him. I didn’t make that up.
But it’s subjective, don’t you think? How do you know what I find handsome?
Generally speaking, many people considered Roeber a handsome man.
But you told me that for a reason.
I’m telling you everything for a reason.
You’re trying to get me to reveal something. This is some kind of weird game. A psychological test. That’s it, isn’t it? You are evaluating me on some kind of psychological test.
This isn’t a test.
I’m going to call my lawyer. I don’t believe this is legal.
Of course it’s legal. I’m just doing my job, as you say.
Then ask me the proper questions.
The Fight at Cirque d’Hiver
Paris, 1894
Four years before he died
He was nervous with his hands all of the time. He opened and closed them, wiggled his fingers, he should have been a piano player with those fingers. All of the time, he moved his hands.
He spoke so frequently in pantomime that even when another Turkish fighter was on the bill, he often forgot to speak aloud. When he clapped his hands together it meant he was ready to fight. When he held his hands out in supplication it meant he did not understand. When he rubbed one hand on his stomach it meant either he was hungry or he was full. When he pointed his finger to his eye then stared hard at his manager it meant he didn’t trust him, and he better watch himself. When he pounded his hand on his heart it meant he was grateful.
It was said to be the most horrific, the bloodiest, the most savage bout ever wrestled on a mat. Brutal. Brutes. Turk versus Turk. Yusuf Ismail versus Ibrahim Mahmout. Yusuf was bigger but Ibrahim was stronger, just as tall, and more muscular.
It was said only another Turk could challenge Yusuf, who, by then, had won all of his European bouts in a matter of minutes, most often in a matter of seconds.
They were to fight Turkish-style, no holds barred.
They approached without speaking, their faces unemotional—trancelike, some would say later.
The first time blood streamed from Ibrahim’s nose, the referee stopped the fight to examine him. “It is nothing,” Ibrahim said.
In the end, Ibrahim’s nostrils were torn, his ribs broken, his arms turned in their sockets, and his clothes were streaked with his own blood. The Parisian women in the crowd wept at the sight of him. But he was the first wrestler in all of Europe to last longer than five minutes against the great Yusuf, the other, more terrible Turk.
Three times Tom Cannon, the referee, had tried to stop the fight, but neither man would release his hold, until finally Cannon, a fighter himself and no small man, beat at Yusuf with a stick. Yusuf paused long enough to glare at him, and Cannon retreated to a corner of the ring, as if he were the one conceding the match. A police inspector summoned six of the largest spectators he could see, and they approached Yusuf from two sides. Three to an arm they pulled at Yusuf, as if the only way to stop him wrestling was to split him in two. As they pulled, all six off-balance and leaning backward as if in a tug-of-war, the great fighter spun like an angry dervish so that all six men holding him lifted into the air. Ibrahim backed away suddenly, like a man just awakened. He stared down, confused, at the mat, which was covered in his blood.
“Would you like us to arrest him?” the police inspector asked Ibrahim. Ibrahim drew back, straightened, and with one hand resting on his damaged ribs, said, “But we were only wrestling.”
WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THAT?
I think it’s nonsense.
Why?
Because it is, it’s nonsense. The policemen, the great nobility of the savages, it’s all nonsense.
So you think it’s made up?
—
Do you think it’s made up?
—
You don’t want to answer?
Ask me the proper questions and I will answer.
The Fight at Kirkpinar
Turkey, 1887
Eleven years before he died
It was nothing but an enormous empty field, really. No arena, no grandstands, no statues or plaques to memorialize the hundreds of years of tournaments that had been held there already. But even empty, when the grass was no longer matted down in a hundred makeshift rings and the oil and sweat of the fighters had been absorbed into the earth, it had the feel of a battlefield. Men had wrestled there, the summer hunting grounds of the sultan, since 1690. Back then it was the sultan’s renowned guard, the Janissaries, who had stripped down, greased each other with oil, fought for days, then celebrated for days more.
By the 1800s, the wrestlers wore ox-hide shorts down past their knees, and it was those that provided most of the holds. The only rule was that one man could not invade another’s rectum with his fingers. They all kept their hair short so that it could not provide a hold. There was no cover from the sun, and the matches took place only feet apart, so that sometimes one pair of men tumbled into another pair’s fight. In that case, all four would separate, step back, then begin again without argument or complaint. If one man got grass in his eye, it was his opponent who ran for water and a rag and then wiped at the afflicted area until it was clear.
Hundreds of men came to compete, and thousands more, men and women, came to watch. The field was surrounded by tents for sleeping, for eating, for drinking, for dancing. Before each fight, each pair of combatants would pray and then loosen their arms and then help oil each other—including their ox-hide shorts—a ritual as old as the tournament.
Yusuf did not look ahead to the end, when a champion would be named, nor did he watch any of the matches, some happening just a few feet from his own, nor did he participate in any of the surrounding festivities. He wrestled one match and then another and when he wasn’t wrestling he entered a timeless state in which all he did was wait for his next match.
He was noticeable because of his size, and there was always a moment as he approached each new opponent when the opponent took him in all at once and then tried not to react. By the second day many of them knew Yusuf’s name, though he was young and had never wrestled at Kirkpinar before. By the time he reached the championship match, everyone knew him by name. His opponent would be the most popular wrestler the empire had ever had, a wrestler who had won the tournament for each of the past twenty-six years, a record unmatchable now or then. Kel Aliço.
As Yusuf poured oil onto his hands to rub onto Kel Aliço’s back, he noticed his hands trembling, and he clapped them together as if to wake them up. Kel Aliço smiled.
They wrestled five hours with only one fall.
At the end of the fifth hour, Kel Aliço leaned toward Yusuf and said, “I cannot beat you.”
He stepped back and made a half bow to Yusuf, then a half bow to the spectators, who were first silent and then in an uproar. The renowned champion had named his successor. Yusuf was instantly beloved.
DO YOU THINK, in choosing to immigrate, the Turk made a mistake?
—
Do you think in choosing to immigrate he made a mistake?
He didn’t immigrate, he went on tour.
Do you think in choosing to go on tour he made a mistake?
—
He could have remained the Ottoman champion.
Yes, I get it.
A hero like Kel Aliço.
—
He could have spent his whole life in Turkey, never gotten on a boat.
I get it.
Do you think in choosing to go on tour he made a mistake?
He could have died anyway.
True.
I mean, he would have. Eventually. He would have died anyway. Just differently.
So do you think he made a mistake?
—
He was already a champion.
—
Do you think that should have been enough for him?
—
WHEN THE TWO SHIPS HIT, there was a sound like the clash of swords.
When two men hit, there is the slap of skin, the slide of hands trying to find purchase on greased and sweaty skin, a reverberation of force that ripples first through their outer layers of flesh and then through their organs. Their collision displaces energy into their two bodies, and each tries to use that against the other. It becomes an energy they share.
There was a tremor through the two ships as well, but each passenger had to bear it on their own.
I imagine that before the collision, on the boat, Yusuf must have thought often of reaching home. He was ready to retire. But I imagine, too, that he was afraid. He had some money, he had a family to return to, but it was all unknown; he had spent his life wrestling, traveling. He was famous, of course, but he had daughters he barely knew and a wife who had grown accustomed to living without a husband. He had things to be ashamed of. He had never had much of a life outside of wrestling, so what would it be like to no longer have wrestling?
It would be nice to imagine that in the water he did not think of his fights with men but, rather, of how he used to train against nature, and how though he never defeated it, nature always made him stronger. How beautiful if he was able to remember his home with the cypress trees, the wind from the east, and the fields full of filberts and pistachios and chestnuts, later to be roasted in a fire.
As a boy Yusuf often flew into rages, but he burst into tears nearly as often.
As a boy he was terrified of quicksand, and in the end, the water held him, pulled him down, just as he had long ago imagined the earth could do.
It is said his bloated body washed up on a shore of the Azore Islands where it was found by a Catholic priest, who had him buried in the church garden.
His belt of gold was never found.
His family received nothing when he died.
WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THAT?
Nothing.
It doesn’t make you sad?
No.
I think you’re lying to me.
Ask me the proper questions.
I just want you to reconsider. I don’t think you should make any decisions now. Stay where you are. You don’t have to decide now. We’ll just hold off on the paperwork. You might be better off where you are, don’t you think?
I want to speak to your supervisor.
I won’t approve you, not yet. Not until you’ve thought about what we’ve talked about.
I want to speak to your supervisor. Or you’ll be hearing from my lawyer.
Just go home and reconsider. Then, if you want to, you can try again.
This isn’t right. It’s not for you to decide.
But it is, isn’t it?
Either you ask me the proper questions or I speak to your supervisor or I speak to a lawyer.
—
—
All right. If you insist. Though I think you are making a mistake.
—
—
—
All right then. Here we go. I’ll stamp it. But you’ll see.
—
You’ll remember my words. I assure you, you will.