Coleman was active in pro wrestling in the days when people, rightly or wrongly, treated it as a legitimate sport. He weighed 220 pounds, stood 5 feet 3 inches and boasted moves that included the flying head butt and the airplane spin.
But his pièce de résistance was the drop kick, a still-common tactic in which a wrestler turns himself into a human missile. Coleman said he learned it from kangaroos on a 1930
trip to Australia...
It was an era when an athlete was promoted by his ethnicity... When Coleman wasn’t the Hebrew Hercules, he was presented as the Jewish Tarzan.
The Jewish Daily Bulletin in 1934 hailed him as “a past master of the art of grunts, groans and grimaces.”
Coleman was born as Abba Kelmer on Sept. 20, 1905, in Zychlin, Poland, where his father sold coal. He was one of 16 siblings, some of whom died in the Holocaust. He moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba, in 1923 before settling in New York and making do with odd jobs.
In an interview with The New York Times in 1995, Coleman said that a promoter saw him in a gym and asked, “Hey, boy, want to make $25 tonight?”
Soon he was a favorite of fans in New York, then elsewhere.
Abe Coleman, a squat powerhouse of a professional wrestler, billed by promoters as the Hebrew Hercules and known to opponents by the two-footed kick he copied from kangaroos, died Wednesday in New York.
