The Stanley Buresh Scavenger Hunt

     While I was working on my first book on the history of wrestling in Alabama, I was fortunate enough to track down family of some of the wrestlers that appeared in the state in the 1930s.  One of those family members was David Buresh, the youngest son of the Kangaroo Kicker, the Australian Bushman, Stanley Buresh.   As with most things in the wrestling business, the truth was somewhat different than the gimmick.  The moniker seems to have been given to him by a promoter in Texas, attempting to add some pizzazz to the young light heavyweight, due to his ability to throw a dropkick, hit his opponent and land on his feet.  Kind of like kangaroo do.

     Stanley Buresh was not, in fact, an Australian, he was born on the 13th of March 1903 (or 1901 according to family records) in Bohemia, which would shortly become part of Czechoslovakia, and what is now the western half of the Czech Republic.  When he was still a young boy, his family emigrated to the United States, in 1909, and settled in the area of Dodge, Nebraska.  As many Bohemia immigrants had done, Stanley's father Josef brought his family to eastern Nebraska and set about farming.

     If someone wanted to learn wrestling, there is quite possibly no better place they could have landed in the 1910-1920 time period than Dodge, as that just happened to be the home town of one Joe Stecher, wrestling's heavyweight champion of the world, and his brother Anton, or Tony.  The Stecher brothers trained a great many boys to be wrestlers at the Y.M.C.A. in Dodge, among them the Buresh brothers, Stanley and his older brother, Frank.  Both would go on to wrestle professionally for many years, Frank wrestling for some 20 years before giving up the mat to focus on farming, and Stanley for some 30 years before finally retiring from the business in the early 1950s.  In the course of that 30 year odyssey, Stanley would make it as far as New Zealand in 1931, but he never actually made it to Australia.

     After chatting with David, he sent me several photos, some newspaper clippings and this listing that detailed the first 64 matches of Stanley Buresh's career.  As the list is undated, I decided to attempt to track down the details of each of these matches to see what I could chronicle of the young wrestler's just entering the professional game.

   The record states that Stanley "started professional wrestling in the month of March, at Omaha, Nebraska, state tournament, at the age of 19 years.  That tournament took place on March 26, 1921.  The Omaha World-Herald listed Earl Caddock, Wayne Munn and Farmer Burns as referees, though the results only mention Munn (heavyweights) and Burns (middleweights) working the event, along with Walker Barnaby (lightweights).  Among the participants, aside from both Buresh brothers were one Andrew Lutzi of Lincoln, who would go on to a long wrestling and promoting career as Paul Jones, and Rudy Hason, who would also have a long wrestling and promoting career as Rudy Dusek.  Both future heavyweights won their divisions, Hason already a heavyweight, and Lutzi the light heavy bracket.

    Of the 64 matches listed, thus far, I have found newspaper records for 32 of them, while also finding another 9 matches that were not listed.  There are also a few that may not have actually happened, or at the very least garnered absolutely no mention in the local papers.  I did find that Buresh briefly wrestled under the name Ernest Misek, possibly due to a shortage of viable opponents once he had built a reputation in Kansas and Nebraska in 1923.

    During his homesteading in Wolf Point, Montana, in 1925, Stanley participated in a three day wrestling tournament as part of the Wolf Point Stampede.  From Thursday, July 9 to Saturday, July 11, he defeated Elwood House, Jake Armand and Dick Daviscourt.  While the list ends with his 24 March 1926 victory over Bill Pappas, Buresh would continue to appear in Wolf Point through November of that year.  In December 1926, he moved on to the Pacific Northwest and connected with Ted Thye, and it was through Thye that Buresh would join a tour of New Zealand in 1931.

     You can view the wrestling record of Stanley Buresh at WrestlingData.com.  While not complete, it is ever-growing as I, and other researchers, fill in more wrestling cards each day.

Stanley Buresh @ WrestlingData.com

 I am compiling the information as I find it to a Google Docs spreadsheet.