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A catlike young pincher named Joe Louis won the world's heavyweight boxing championship in 1937, and out in St. Louis a young unknown named Lou Thesz became world's champion wrestler.

Louis retired as boxing's king in 1949 after the longest heavyweight reign in history.

Thesz flew into Houston the other day to defend his wrestling title for about the 270th time. He no longer keeps an exact count.

"I've held the title six different times," he said. "I've been in wrestling for 30 years now and have been champ for about 18 of those 30 years.

"The number of title matches would be about 15 a year for the 18 years."

A lot of sports fans sneer at wrestling as hammy offshoot between tiddley-winks and hopscotch on the scale of serious athletics.

Be that as it may, the 49-year-old Thesz' tenure at the top has rarely been equaled -- either in sports or show business.

Before his Houston match with a masked challenger called the Destroyer, Thesz talked some about himself and his bruising way of making a living.

"Oh, there's a lot of showmanship, sure," Thesz said.

"They're just histrionic idiots. We call 'em gimmick wrestlers."

Thesz gave a wicked leer and continued:

"We discourage these characters. We give 'em a bad time. When we get a chance, we tear their tails off. That's one way of trying to eliminate them -- and we do eliminate some of them.

"Now this fellow I'm wrestling here, the Destroyer, he runs around and screams a lot. But he can really wrestle, that's all right.

"The gimmick wrestlers, though, they're on the way out. The only fellows drawing big money now are the wrestlers."

Thesz was in his Rice Hotel room, lounging in a navy blue robe and socks. He was waiting for a lost bag to get in from the airport so he could shave and clean up for the match.

His fingers and hands are a study in knobs and strange angles. His cauliflower ears look like pastry puffs. His eyebrows are like fat black caterpillars, and his jaw is a blue-shadowed anvil.

"Do the ears hurt? At first they do, not now. It's calcified -- as hard as a rock," he said. "I can get them fixed up when I quit. My only problem is going to be the hair."

His hair is thinning on the top.

"The body's in good shape, but the face is beginning to tell. The face is what catches it. There's an old joke in wrestling, asking a fellow how many faces he's gone through with that body."

Thesz said he weighs 232 pounds now, only about eight pounds more than when he first won the title.

The son of a Hungarian immigrant who did some amateur wrestling, Thesz grew up around St. Louis. A lot of top wrestlers, Ed (Strangler) Lewis for one, trained there in those days. And Thesz worked out with them, and with a first-class wrestling coach from the University of Missouri.

"At the end of two years of this, Everett Marshall came to town. I was just a kid, and they didn't pay much attention to me. Marshall had been barnstorming and he was tired, and I was ready for that match, and I took the title from him."

The new 21-year-old champ lost his title after a few months, regained it again in 1938, then lost it again in Houston in 1939 to Bronko Nagurski.

"I got a broken knee in that match and had to lay off for a year," Thesz said.

His longest stretch as champion, he said, was about 7 1/2 years, from the late 1940s into the '50s. He has held the champion's belt this time for three years.

"I had sort of retired," he said. "We were living out in LaJolla, and I was enjoying myself, sailing and skiing. Then I got the bug again and started training and beat Buddy Rogers in Toronto."

Thesz now lives in Phoenix, where he owns a winter resort, the Casa Siesta Lodge. His wife, Fredda, an interior decorator and painter, runs the lodge while Thesz is off wrestling -- about 100 matches a year.

They have two sons, Jeffrey, 13, and Bobby, 20 months.

Jeffrey is keen on amateur wrestling, and Thesz has been showing him some little tricks. But he plans to stop and turn his son's training over to an amateur wrestling coach.

"I'm going to show him some things he's going to get disqualified for," Thesz said with a grin.

"It really takes you 20 years before you know what you're doing," he said.

How many more years he has left, he isn't sure.

"As long as I feel good, I'll keep going," he said. "Of course, if I broke a knee again and had to lay off for a year, that would end it.Falling out of condition at 49, it'd be tough to get back."

Thesz noted that Strangler Lewis wrestled when he was pushing 60. That is one record Thesz is content to let stand, but there is one thing he wants to do before he quits.

"I've carried the championship around the world twice, and I'd like to do it one more time, and wrestle in India," he said. "I've never wrestled there, but they have some great wrestlers, India and Pakistan both."

The wrestling there is a modified form of sumo, Thesz said, and he believes he could pick it up in a month.

"What about training? I just work, I wrestle," he said. "No secret yoga exercises. These guys with their secret training, that's all baloney.

"Archie Moore -- I used to work out with him in St. Louis, too -- you know what that secret diet of his is, the one he says he got from the aborigines?

"Don't eat; that's it."

Thesz, a hunk of polished menace inside the ring, is a relaxed and amiable man in his hotel room. He doesn't bounce visitors against the wall for asking about that widely accepted story that wrestling matches are rehearsed down to the last groan.

"That's a popular notion," he said, "but our livelihood depends on our records. If I have a decent record, I have bargaining power. Otherwise you end up a palooka."

Another base canard pinned to the mat.

Unlike the wrestlers coming up now, many of whom are college graduates, Thesz got only a grade school education. But he seems to know his way around when it comes to mathematics.

"You know the story of most athletes -- they end up broke," he said. "I plan to end up a bookkeeper, counting my money."

To ease the heavy income tax bite on his wrestling purses, Thesz and his wife invested in real estate -- hotels, apartment houses, and now the resort lodge.

They own a little ranch, a hideaway, in Apple Valley in California where they are next-door neighbors to Roy Rogers.

What kind of wrestler does Thesz try to be?

He answered the question by telling of a wrestling jaunt to Mexico several years ago. The wrestlers down there, he said, go more for gimmicks than grappling.

"They have the Batman and El Miracle Kid and so on," he said. "So when I showed up at one match just wearing my trunks, the promoter asked me where my gear was."

What gear? the puzzled Thesz asked. He told the promoter he had it on.

"No, no, I mean where's your mask and your hillbilly overalls?" the promoter asked. "What's your gimmick?"

"I told him, 'My gimmick is wrestling,'" Thesz said. "Then I went in the ring and ate the other fellow up."