bombmaniac, it wasn’t assur back then. The historical record is very clear. Jews were known for enjoying wrestling and for being quite good at it. Plenty of sources, Jewish and Gentile, report this. Wrestling wasn’t a Greek/pagan thing any more than wearing clothes, bathing, fishing or cooking.
BS”D
“Jews” did and do a lot of things that are ossur. We are not what is left of “all” the Jews who lived during the last days of Jewish rule over EY. We are the remnant of those who stayed true to Torah – and not of the ones who watched or participated in the wrestling matches. Sadly, there were many Jews of the second “ilu hu haya sham, lo haya nig’al variety in every generation, and in those days when there was a beis hamikdash, these were reshoim, not tinokois shenishbeu. We are not their descendants no matter how far we have strayed, and we don’t copy or justify what they did.
After all, historians of the modern Jewish era will write about all the intermarriage, total disregard for mitzvah observance and the lack of knowledge (and of course about the “movements”) – and sadly for 80% of Jews they will be right.
However, in this lowest of generations that precedes the Geula, a boxer who comes from a time and place where for a Jewish man to be the father of an halachic Jew as Salita’s father indeed is, and is coming back to Yiddishkeit as he maintains his sports career, is a kiddush Hashem.