In the crowded field of American sports historiography, there are surprisingly few figures who genuinely connect the literature’s major strands. William Muldoon (1852–1933) is one of them. Wrestler, physical culturalist, and regulator, Muldoon moved across the worlds of spectacle, health reform, and governance at a moment when modern sport was still being assembled. Scott Beekman’s The Last Gladiator argues that Muldoon was not simply a colorful Gilded Age character but a foundational figure in that process. The book’s real achievement lies in showing how these domains, often studied separately, were, in practice, deeply entangled.
Beekman structures the narrative around three phases of Muldoon’s life: his rise as a professional wrestler, his career in physical culture, and his later role as chairman of the New York State Athletic Commission (NYSAC). This tripartite structure is effective not just as a biography but as an argument. Muldoon’s life becomes a vehicle for tracing the shifting boundaries of American sport from the 1870s to the interwar years, as wrestling moved from saloons to staged entertainment, physical culture from moral reform to commercial enterprise, and regulation from ad hoc intervention to formal governance. The early chapters situate Muldoon within the rough world of New York’s sporting subculture. As a police officer in the Tenderloin District and a regular at venues like Harry Hill’s saloon, Muldoon inhabited a milieu where masculinity was performed through drinking, gambling, and physical prowess. Beekman is particularly strong on Muldoon’s self-fashioning. Drawing on letters, census records, and contemporary reporting, he dismantles the wrestler’s carefully constructed mythology, claims of Civil War service, battlefield heroics, and frontier toughness, showing instead a more prosaic, if no less ambitious, figure. This attention to self-invention is one of the book’s key strengths. Muldoon did not simply compete in sport; he understood early on how to narrate himself into significance.
As a wrestler, Muldoon exemplified the ambiguous status of late nineteenth-century sport. His dominance in Greco-Roman wrestling and his carefully staged public persona (minimal attire, classical imagery, the moniker “The American Gladiator”) highlight the extent to which athletic competition and theatrical display were already intertwined. Beekman’s treatment here aligns with recent scholarship challenging the supposed legitimacy of early professional wrestling. Rather than a fall from grace into spectacle, Muldoon’s career suggests that spectacle was always central. His training of John L. Sullivan for the 1889 Kilrain fight further cements his place within a broader sporting ecosystem, linking wrestling, boxing, and emerging celebrity culture. The bout itself, Sullivan’s last bare-knuckle world championship contest against Jake Kilrain, was one of the most significant prize fights of the nineteenth century, widely reported and marking a transitional moment between bare-knuckle and gloved boxing. Muldoon’s role in preparing Sullivan situates him at the center of this shift, underscoring the porous boundaries between sporting codes and the growing importance of physical culture expertise.
It is in the transition to physical culture that Beekman’s argument becomes most compelling. At his Olympia Institute in Westchester County, New York, Muldoon catered to elite clients seeking relief from neurasthenia and the pressures of modern life. Here, the body became both object and instrument of reform. Beekman places Muldoon alongside figures such as John Harvey Kellogg and Bernarr Macfadden, two of the most prominent health reformers of the period. Kellogg, a physician and superintendent of the Battle Creek Sanitarium, promoted regimented diets, exercise, and hygienic living as cures for modern ailments, while Macfadden emerged as a leading popularizer of physical culture, building a mass movement around bodybuilding, diet reform, and self-improvement through his magazines and public campaigns. Crucially, however, Beekman distinguishes Muldoon from both. Whereas Macfadden built a broad, populist following, Muldoon cultivated exclusivity. Olympia was less a popular health crusade site than a controlled environment for disciplining elite bodies. In this sense, Muldoon reveals a strand of physical culture that was neither purely reformist nor fully commercial, but something in between: aspirational, selective, and deeply tied to class. At the same time, Muldoon’s limitations are clear. His resistance to new ideas—whether vitamins, changing exercise practices, or broader shifts in medical thinking—left him increasingly out of step by the 1920s. Beekman handles this matter well, presenting Muldoon not as a visionary undone by circumstance but as a figure whose authority depended on a particular cultural moment. When that moment passed, so too did much of his influence.
The book’s strongest and most original contribution comes in its treatment of Muldoon’s tenure as chairman of the NYSAC. Appointed in 1921 to bring order to boxing and wrestling, Muldoon wielded significant power over two of America’s most popular sports. Beekman shows how this authority was exercised in ways that were at once modern and deeply personal. Muldoon imposed strict rules—famously banning smoking at Madison Square Garden—but he also used the commission to enforce racial exclusion. His obstruction of the Black boxer Harry Wills’s attempts to secure a heavyweight title fight with the white Jack Dempsey stands as a stark example. Here, Beekman moves beyond biography to engage directly with the legal and cultural history of sport under Jim Crow. The NYSAC emerges not as a neutral regulatory body but as a site where personal prejudice and institutional power intersect. This section alone marks a significant intervention. Histories of American sport have often treated regulation as a stabilizing force, a necessary step in the transition to modern professionalism. Beekman complicates this narrative, showing how governance could reproduce and intensify existing inequalities. In doing so, he extends the historiography on race and sport beyond its usual focus on baseball, demonstrating that boxing and wrestling were equally important arenas for the exercise of segregation.
Methodologically, Beekman’s handling of sources is careful and effective. Muldoon’s own accounts are treated with appropriate skepticism, and where possible, corroborated against independent records. The result is a biography that is both readable and critically grounded. At times, however, the reliance on Muldoon’s perspective remains visible, particularly in the earlier chapters where alternative viewpoints are limited. Similarly, the book’s strong focus on New York occasionally narrows its scope. Given Muldoon’s national reputation, a fuller engagement with wrestling circuits beyond the city would have strengthened the analysis. These are, however, relatively minor limitations. More significant is a missed opportunity in the epilogue, where Muldoon’s life is framed through the familiar lens of Horatio Alger-style self-making. While not inaccurate, this reading sits somewhat uneasily with the more critical account developed elsewhere in the book. A deeper engagement with questions of class, ethnicity, and Irish-American identity would have added another layer to an already rich study.
The Last Gladiator ultimately succeeds because it treats Muldoon not as an isolated figure but as a point of connection. Through him, Beekman shows how modern American sport was not built within neat institutional boundaries, but through individuals who moved between the worlds of saloon and stage, gymnasium and clinic, ring and regulatory office. Muldoon’s career captures a moment when sport, spectacle, health, and governance were still being negotiated, and when the meanings of masculinity, authority, and legitimacy remained unsettled. If Muldoon has been neglected, it is not because he was unimportant, but because he does not fit easily into the categories historians have constructed. Beekman’s achievement is to make that difficulty productive. In recovering Muldoon, he forces a reconsideration of how American sport developed and of the figures who shaped it. It is, in short, a joy to read.
