Wrestler Libelled

Of all professional sport performers none receives less respect from the Press than the wrestler. Sportwriters think nothing of calling wrestlers stupid, shady, corrupt. But any who might have assumed that a wrestler could not be libelled learned the contrary last fortnight when famed Stanislaus Zbyszko was awarded damages from Hearst's New York American.

Stanislaus Zbyszko's reviler was not the American's sports page, but the Sunday supplement American Weekly. One Sunday four years ago it presented a double-page feature headlined "How Science Proves Its Theory of Evolution." Dominating the spread was a huge picture of a gorilla with sloping brow, massive chest, treelike arms and legs. Alongside the gorilla was a picture of Stanislaus Zbyszko in wrestling stance, showing his sloping brow, massive chest, etc., etc. Read the caption: "Stanislaus Zbyszko, the Wrestler, Not Fundamentally Different from the Gorilla in Physique."

Outraged by the implication that he. a graduate of the University of Vienna, represented "the next thing to a gorilla scientists have been looking for," Zbyszko hired Lawyer Arthur Garfield Hays, sued for $250,000. Defense lawyers insisted that the American's caption meant only that the wrestler was as strong as a gorilla. But Wrestler Zbyszko was able to show that his wife had learned to call him "gorilla" as a term of contempt. The jury found libel, awarded him $25,000.

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