Pull up a barstool, grab a cold one, and let us get real about the wildest era in pro wrestling history. If you think the New World Order or the WCW invasion in 2001 were the peak of booking chaos, you need a serious history lesson. The real OG invasion happened way back in the late 1890s, and it was far more chaotic and dangerous than anything Eric Bischoff or Vince McMahon ever dreamed up.
Before promoters were scripting every breath, a group of absolute monsters from the Ottoman Empire showed up on American soil and proceeded to wreck every local hero in sight. They did not need microphones, writers, or flashy entrance music to get over. They just used raw, terrifying power and traditional wrestling techniques to scare the living daylights out of the public.
A wild new book has officially dropped to document this insane, forgotten chapter of the sport. It is titled Only Built for Turkish Links: The Turkish Invasion of American Pro Wrestling, written by historian Ian Douglass. You can read the review of this release on the main page of PWInsider to see what the historian community is raving about.
To show you how serious this project is, the authors got some serious wrestling royalty to sign off on the text. Former WWE Champion John Bradshaw Layfield wrote the foreword, which is probably packed with his usual loud-mouthed authority. Meanwhile, the modern grappling specialist and former UFC fighter "Filthy" Tom Lawlor handled the afterword to bring some legitimate shooter credibility to the project.
You can order this new book right now on Amazon. But before you open your wallet and buy a copy, let us talk about the sheer madness of the history these pages are trying to dig up. Because this is not your typical dry, boring history class.
The MSG Riot and the Ring Toss
The spearhead of this whole historical movement was a man named Yusuf İsmail. Promoters billed him as the Terrible Turk, and he was built like a stone fortress. In an era where the average American wrestler looked like a guy who worked at a local blacksmith shop, Yusuf was a massive, intimidating specimen who did not understand the word mercy.
His American tour in 1898 was a trail of absolute destruction. The peak of this madness happened on March 26, 1898, at Madison Square Garden. He was matched up against a German-American champion named Ernest Roeber, a highly respected grappler who thought he knew how to defend himself.
During the match, Yusuf got annoyed with Roeber's defensive tactics and decided to end the contest. He picked Roeber up like a sack of garbage and literally threw him out of the ring. Roeber went crashing down into the orchestra pit, and the crowd in Manhattan absolutely lost its collective mind.
The spectators believed Roeber was either dead or permanently crippled. A full-scale riot broke out in the arena, with fans screaming for blood. The police had to rush the ring to prevent Yusuf from being lynched by a mob of angry New Yorkers. Yusuf was disqualified, but the legend was officially set in stone.
Choking Out Strangler Lewis and a Gold Belt Tragedy
If you thought the MSG riot was a fluke, Yusuf proved his dominance a few months later in Chicago. On June 20, 1898, he faced the original Evan "Strangler" Lewis. Lewis was famous for his deadly neck holds, but Yusuf was completely unfazed by the threat.
Yusuf dominated the match from the opening bell. He used his traditional training to counter every hold Lewis tried to apply. In the end, Yusuf won the American Heavyweight Championship and proved that the top American athletes were not ready for international competition.
But the story of the Terrible Turk ends in the most tragic way possible. Just a few weeks after his big win in Chicago, Yusuf boarded a French ocean liner to head back home. The ship collided with another vessel off the coast of Nova Scotia and sank on July 4, 1898.
Legend has it that Yusuf refused to take off his championship belt, which was stuffed with gold coins from his American earnings. The weight of the gold reportedly dragged him straight to the bottom of the ocean. It is a wild, cinematic ending to a career that burned incredibly bright and fast.
A Skyscraper Named Nouroulah and the Promoter's Lies
The death of Yusuf did not stop the invasion. Promoters realized there was a fortune to be made by importing giant foreigners to play the heel. The next wave included a massive wrestler named Nouroulah Hassan.
Nouroulah stood 7'2" tall and weighed over three hundred pounds. He was a walking skyscraper in a time when nutrition was basically bread and beer. Alongside Kara Osman and Adali Halil, Nouroulah kept the Turkish invasion going until 1901.
But here is where we have to be critical of how this whole era was managed by the people behind the curtain. The promoters, led by a French guy named Joseph Doublier, were not interested in presenting a legitimate sport. They wanted a freak show.
Doublier and his associates worked the American press into a frenzy of xenophobia. They marketed these athletes as uneducated savages who did not understand English or civilized rules. It was a cheap carny trick that ignored the deep athletic tradition these men came from.
In Turkey, these guys were national heroes who practiced Kirkpinar oil wrestling. They were highly disciplined athletes, not the mindless monsters the American newspapers made them out to be. The business chose cheap heat over actual athletic respect.
The traditional style they practiced, known as yağlı güreş, required incredible balance and endurance. Wrestlers covered themselves in olive oil, making it almost impossible to get a grip. They had to fight until one got a hold of the opponent's leather trousers. When these guys transitioned to Greco-Roman and catch-as-catch-can in the US, their grip strength and balance were superhuman.
The dominance of these Turks even created a national security panic. American sportswriters and public officials started questioning if American soldiers were too soft for global combat. It is hilarious to think that professional wrestling once caused a military crisis in Washington.
Roasting the Wu-Tang Pun and the flowery prose
Now, let us talk about the book itself. Douglass does a great job of digging up these old newspaper archives and restoring the records. But the title, Only Built for Turkish Links, is a Wu-Tang Clan reference that feels incredibly forced and silly.
It is the kind of dad joke that makes you roll your eyes at the bookstore. Furthermore, the writing sometimes gets a bit too romantic about the majesty of the Ottoman Empire. We do not need flowery language to explain a guy getting thrown into the orchestra pit. Just tell us how hard he hit the floor.
The book also sometimes struggles to separate the real athletic records of these men from the fake news of the 1890s. The yellow journalism of that era was just as bad as modern wrestling dirt sheets. They lied about heights, weights, and match outcomes constantly, and the book sometimes accepts these tall tales as fact.
Still, these are minor complaints for a book that covers a massive gap in wrestling history. If you are tired of reading the same old stories about Montreal or the Monday Night Wars, this is the history you need. It shows that wrestling has always been a beautiful, chaotic mess.
