Notre Dame’s Hesburgh Library home to thousands of historic wrestling materials
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While last weekend’s 2025 WWE Royal Rumble in Indianapolis the will go down in the history books, the University of Notre Dame is home to decades of professional wrestling history in nine languages.
Jack Pfefer had a 45-year promotional and managerial career in professional wrestling from 1924 to 1969.
The Jack Pfefer Wrestling Collection was donated to the university in 1977 and includes more than 13,000 photos, financial books, programs, correspondence letters and more.
“There are very few sports history collections that are this comprehensive,” Dr. Gregory Bond, curator of the Joyce Sports Research Collection, said in an interview with Inside INdiana Business. “Jack Pfeffer kept everything…and that’s relatively rare for sports history. People didn’t really take sports seriously as something to learn from until recently, so a lot of those collections just got dispersed or thrown away when people were done using them.”

Bond describes Pfefer as “kind of prickly get along with” but someone who would tell things like they were. He says the collection is one of the library’s most requested and it’s one of the biggest publicly accessible wrestling manuscript collections in the country.
“From the 30s, 40s through the 60s, there is correspondence with almost anyone you’ve heard of who was active in the game—as a promoter, as a wrestler, as a manager—in that era. He kept his receipts, he kept his finances, which tells an interesting story, because there are very few other sources that tell you about the finance or the economics of professional wrestling in this era,” Bond said. “[It] straddles that time when wrestling goes from a mostly straight athletic endeavor to the scripted, theatrical, vaudevillian soap opera thing we all know today.”
The Joyce Sports Research Collection is housed within the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections in Hesburgh Library on the South Bend campus. Whether you’re working on academic research, want to learn about a family member or are a wrestling fan, visitors can make an appointment to see parts of the collection and its artifacts in person.
“People sometimes have this misconception that archivists are gatekeepers—[that] we’re trying to keep you away from the stuff, which could not be further from the truth. The whole reason we acquire these collections and put all our resources into maintaining them, describing them, making them available, is for people to use them and learn from them,” Bond said. “A whole range of people use this collection…everyone’s got their own angle.”

The Joyce Sports Research Collection is home to all of the non-Notre Dame specific sports history material in Hesburgh Library. It features North American sports history as well as sports history from other parts of the world.
“From the beginning [we have] collected programs and media guides and posters and stuff that documents individual sporting events or individual sporting teams,” Bond said. “In the aggregate, those tell an interesting story. We have boxes and boxes of media guides and sports teams’ yearbooks and programs that people use all the time because they weren’t often saved.”
To view portraits from the Pfefer collection, click here.