Vote Ted Boy
Why Ted Boy Marino deserves your vote for the Wresting Observer Newsletter Hall of Fame.
Ted Boy Marino is among the most unique Wresting Observer Hall of Fame candidates ever, and he deserves your vote.
If Ted Boy appeared on your radar for the first time within the past few years, you may rightly ask yourself how someone you’ve never heard of belongs among the elite of the elite. But here’s the thing – that was our issue, not Ted Boy’s.
Ted Boy is not the reason there is so little extant footage of him wrestling. Ted Boy is not the reason Brazil sank into military rule at the height of his popularity. Ted Boy is not the reason so few wrestling historians – myself included – read fluent Portuguese.
But now that the time has come to evaluate Ted Boy Marino, let us sift through the circumstantial evidence and see that even when deducing conservatively, Ted Boy Marino deserves his place in the Hall of Fame among the regional stars.
In-Ring Performance
There isn’t much Ted Boy Marino left to watch today, which can be an easy reason to discount his nomination. Some voters have this notion that a tape library is a prerequisite, that casting a vote requires them to watch and watch and watch a candidate.
To those doubters, I raise three points in rebuttal:
This has never been a complete bar to admission. There were zero George Hackenschmidt matches in circulation until a quarter-century after his induction.
What we do have is pretty good. He sells well as a babyface in peril, so well that he ran that program nearly his entire career, and has fiery comebacks with strings of athletic moves that looked flashy for the time. When reviewing Ted Boy’s wrestling film Dois na Lona, critic Joseph Montecillio observed Ted Boy had “stunningly clean headscissor takedowns that can’t help but recall the finest of Mexican luchadores”.
For some candidates, a voter could watch hours upon hours of wrestling footage before casting a ballot. Not so with Ted Boy. You can watch every recorded oeuvre in an afternoon and boom, you’re as qualified as anyone else. That’s liberating.
A brief digression about liberation: Ted Boy Marino is in the category where voters are least likely to have overlapping knowledge. For example, someone watching current wrestling television sees nearly all the Modern Performers candidates because there are only two domestic promotions offering Hall of Fame-level talent. But in Ted Boy’s category, someone would have to be familiar with wrestling in Britain, Greece, Germany, Australia, and so on. I don’t think many of those voters exist. Therefore if you’re holding off voting for Ted Boy because you feel unqualified to compare him with other wrestlers in his category, feel liberated in the knowledge that other people voting in that category are likely no better informed than you.
Drawing Power
Ted Boy’s drawing power is exhibited in two ways. One is the traditional measurement of fan attendance. Exact attendances are generally unavailable but we have plenty of useful information.
Ted Boy taped wrestling at the TV Excelsior studios weekly, but this was not “studio wrestling” in the way we might understand it now. In Rio the wrestling studio shows were recorded inside the former Cine Astória movie theater in the Ipanema neighborhood. One magazine reported weekly crowds around 1,800. That’s within the ballpark of Korakuen Hall’s capacity, if you need a visualization.
No available photos give a true impression of a rowdy wrestling crowd inside the huge TV Excelsior studio but we’d probably be close if we looked at this photo of the Cine Astoria and imagined that room filled with the type of fans that throw shoes at the heels.
And this studio show was smaller than his studio show in Sao Paolo, which were both smaller than the arena shows!
Tracking down attendance numbers for other shows has been more difficult because reports rarely include them. In Rio, he was drawing 11,000 to an indoor arena adjacent to the famous Maracana stadium. In smaller cities, he drew smaller crowds, like a 1,400 crowd in the southern city of Porto Alegre.
Decades after he was on nightly television, Ted Boy still drew 8,000 to a retirement match at the Acadêmicos do Viradouro samba school in Rio. Consider that Ted Boy’s retirement match drew twice the house Terry Funk drew in Amarillo for his 50 Years of Funk retirement match with Bret Hart.
Returning to the two ways of measuring drawing power mentioned above, this is Ted Boy’s career using a traditional method of determining drawing power. Butts in seats. But if “drawing” means making money off one’s own popularity, as it seems to have transformed into in recent years, Ted Boy’s case is even stronger.
Historical Significance
Drawing 8,000 to a huge samba arena long after he was forced off TV by a military censor shows the comet tail of Ted Boy’s popularity lost little in density or radiance, a testament to how significant Ted Boy Marino was to the country’s pro wrestling fans and broader popular culture. In some ways, it should be no surprise.
Ted Boy Marino is the only professional wrestler scheduled to appear on network TV seven nights per week. Entire television shows were built around him, just to get him in front of an adoring public. While we can’t point to specific mega-ratings like Rikidozan produced, was Rikidozan on television seven nights a week?
To the cynics: this was not manufactured popularity. The magazine Revista Intervalo held a 1967 poll to determine the country’s favorite television star and Ted Boy came in third, and TV Excelsior’s offices would receive approximately 2,000 pieces of Ted Boy fan mail per week. It was real.
The broad commercialization of his persona is another tangible way of representing his popularity. At a time when television was the hottest entertainment in the country, Ted Boy Marino regularly appeared on the cover of Brazil’s equivalent of TV Guide.
Aside from television and drawing crowds, Ted Boy was the star of his own movie. His singing was pressed and sold on records. Teen magazines ran profiles on him. Companies sought him out to endorse the latest camera or dress shoes. He was the focus of several sticker books, a Brazilian kid’s equivalent of baseball cards. This is the other way Ted Boy could draw - because his fans were ready to pay for his appeal, Ted Boy could draw huge at the bank whenever he wanted.
Even after retirement, Ted Boy remained a cultural figure. When TV Gazeta celebrated its eighth anniversary with a huge week of programming, the station advertised appearances by global celebrities and, “finishing the anniversary programming in grand style, Ted Boy Marino.” The years rolled on and Ted Boy remained Brazil’s main eventer.
Earlier this year, I visited Leme Beach in Rio de Janeiro. Ted Boy retired to this part of Rio, spending his days playing volleyball and talking with his buddies at Mariu’s Restaurant. At the end of the beach, there is a fisherman’s path that winds around one of the enormous rocks that jut out from the ground like fossilized teeth of a mythical boar.
There is a plaque drilled into that huge rock where the path meets the beach. The sign dedicates that path, and officially names it, after the memory of Ted Boy Marino. Long after a military censor found him to be too hot for TV, Ted Boy was over with the government too.
Whether Ted Boy Marino is inducted into the Wrestling Observer Hall of Fame should not depend on whether his legend was written on their hearts and not yours, in their nation and not yours, in their language and not yours. Counterintuitively, Ted Boy is more available to the wider wrestling world than he ever was at his peak, and some of us have already helped illuminate the path.
Just like most historical candidates, there is additional research to do but what we already uncovered shows that Ted Boy’s drawing power and influence were as great as any regional star in the Hall of Fame, and his in-ring ability was, at minimum, certainly not so poor as to warrant exclusion. Viewed in that way, Ted Boy Marino meets the criteria and is worthy of induction.
Great article. If I had a vote, he'd get it