A book rescues the "grandparents and great-grandparents" of the Titans in the Ring

Long before Martín Karadajian toured Latin America with his troupe of wrestlers and more than a century before one of his grandsons trained alongside the heirs of the Titans, the catch was on the rise in Argentina and excited a mostly adult audience that it filled the Casino Theater (Maipú 300, CABA, and demolished in the 1960s) and also Luna Park.

Who has followed the clues of the birth of wrestling in the country is the writer and journalist Daniel Roncoli in his book "Impossible history of catch in Argentina 1903-1963", recently published by Ediciones Al Arco.

Roncoli is a journalist, writer, playwright, actor and author, and had already explored wrestling with a biography of the greatest figure in sport-show business in Argentina: "El Gran Martín: vida y obra de Karadagián y sus Titanes".

But in this new text he sets out to trace the background of the troupe and finds it in an incipient 20th century. “There was an idea that those beginnings were wrestling or Greco-Roman, linked to an Olympic activity, but I discovered that it always had an artistic side. The aim was to give it a spectacle framework”, points out the author.

As an argument, Roncoli recounts that the first fights were held in a very box-office theater: the Casino, at the initiative of a Swiss who had lived in France and motorized the catch as a variety show: "It was one more element among several things that they happened during a function; in it they coexisted from a dancing woman with an exuberant physique, to an orchestra and a trained animal. There was no ring, just a mat on the stage”, describes the writer, who characterizes the incipient activity as “sports fiction” or “sports show”.

"I see those athletes as dogs barking at the Moon, giving the metaphor that drive they had to challenge something unattainable, an idea of glory -analyzes the author- It was a title that appeared to me right away and I like the magnitude poetry that he has in his popular knowledge through the tango that contains the phrase”.