The Street Fighting Life of Abraham Lincoln

[TomSea]

February 21, 2017
Sarah Kurchak
The Street Fighting Life of Abraham Lincoln

The current incarnation of Republicans don't have the greatest track record when it comes to accurately representing Abraham Lincoln (or, one could argue, emulating his ideals). Earlier this month, in fact, the GOP celebrated the 16th President's birthday by misattributing a quote to him.

So when collegiate wrestler-turned-former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld dropped a passing reference to Honest Abe's love of wrestling in a 2013 Washington Post op-ed about the future of the sport in the Olympic Games, the fact-checking website Politifact set out to determine the veracity of that claim. It didn't take them long to confirm Lincoln's fondness for the sport, as well as the ultimate testament to his prowess in it: a spot in the National Wrestling Hall of Fame. They also found this '00s-era Mountain Dew commercial on the topic because America, bleep yeah.

"It's not mythology," Lincoln expert and best-selling author of A. Lincoln: A Biography, Ronald C. White Jr., told WWE.com in 2012. (Side note: this interview is really worth reading both for the actual information it contains, and for the number of references to wrestlers like The Rock, Hulk Hogan, and Captain Lou Albano shamelessly shoehorned into the prose.) "Lincoln definitely wrestled."

Continued: https://sports.vice.com/en_us/article/the-street-fighting-life-of-abraham-lincoln