by Carrie Dunn
Contents
Title
Copyright
About the author
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Preface: The history
Chapter 1: The resurgence
Chapter 2: The training
Chapter 3: In the spotlight – the wrestlers
Chapter 4: In the spotlight – the women wrestlers
Chapter 5: The referees
Chapter 6: The ring announcers
Chapter 7: In the spotlight – the history of UK wrestling promotions
Chapter 8: Creating a promotion
Chapter 9: In the spotlight – the UK’s current promotions
Chapter 10: In the spotlight – London calling
Chapter 11: In the spotlight – heading north
Chapter 12: In the spotlight – looking west
Chapter 13: The marketing
Chapter 14: Brits abroad – the UK wrestlers travelling the world
Chapter 15: Outside wrestling
Chapter 16: The future
Epilogue: Recommendations
Glossary
The promotions and their abbreviations
Bibliography
Photographs
Pitch Publishing
A2 Yeoman Gate
Yeoman Way
Durrington
BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
© Carrie Dunn 2013
First published in eBook format in 2013
eISBN: 978-1-909626-02-7
(Printed edition: 978-1-909178-46-5)
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About the author
Carrie Dunn is a journalist. She is the founding editor of The Only Way Is Suplex (www.theonlywayissuplex.co.uk), a website dedicated to the wonderful sports entertainment form of professional wrestling.
She has also written for publications including The Times, The Guardian, The Independent, the Daily Express, Cosmopolitan and Psychologies.
She is the author of A Brand New Bright Tomorrow: A Hatter’s Promotion Diary (2002), Mothers In Fiction (2012), co-writer of From The Valleys To Verulamium (2011), and contributing author to Illuminating Torchwood: Essays on Narrative, Character and Sexuality in the BBC Series (2010) and The Light Bulb Moment (2011).
Her PhD examined the experience of sports fans in England – and if she is not at some kind of sporting event, she is likely to be at the theatre, in a karaoke bar or playing World of Warcraft.
Dedication
To Mike, with all my love and gratitude for your support, your endless faith in me, and suggesting that I write this book.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to the in-ring talent and promoters who gave up their time to talk to me: Darrell Allen, Dean Allmark, Mark Andrews, Paul Ashe, Ben Auld, Sanjay Bagga, Nick Bakewell, Steve Biggs, Hannah Blossom, Holly Blossom, Nick Branch, Jon Briley, Matt Burden, Kasper Cornish, Dean Champion, Nathan Cruz, Harvey Dale, Mark Dallas, Noam Dar, Shaun ‘The Hammer’ Davis, Eddie Dennis, Prince Fergal Devitt, Luke Douton, Pete Dunne, Daniel Edler, El Ligero, Joey Fitzpatrick, Steven Fludder, Freya Frenzy, Danny Garnell, Mark Haskins, Jimmy Havoc, Mike Hitchman, Morgan Izzard, Lion Kid, Saraya Knight, Greg Lambert, Georgie Leggett, Lionheart, Steve Lytton, Magnus, Majik, Nigel McGuinness, James Meikle, Johnny Moss, Richard Parker, Rhia O’Reilly, Kasey Owens, Leah Owens, Marc Parry, Andy Quildan, Alan Ravenhill, Dann Read, Iestyn Rees, Douglas Rockefeller, Chris Roberts, Des Robinson, Jon Ryan, Zack Sabre Jr, Marty Scurll, Alex Shane, Mark Sloan, Jim Smallman, Dave Stewart, Nikki Storm, Kris Travis, and Phil Ward.
Thanks also to European Uppercut, Graham Beadle, Brian Elliott, Richard O’Hagan, Rob Pouillon, Sean Walford, Lyndsey Mackay, Findlay Martin, Luke Wykes, Chris Pilkington, Tom Smith, Andrew Southern, Lee Tyers, Ben Veal, Sean Walford and Craig Wilkins for their views.
Thank you particularly to Sarah Barraclough for her action shots from the British scene. Thanks to David Wilson for his photography. Thanks also to TNA for allowing me to use their images and artwork. Thank you to Clare Maddox for her invaluable assistance, and to Richard O’Hagan and Amy Hanson for their advice and comments on earlier drafts of the book. Any errors remaining are accidental and entirely my own fault.
The Wrestling reprinted by permission of United Agents (e-book edition) and Faber (print edition) on behalf of Simon Garfield.
Preface:
The history
THINK of British wrestling, and it’s likely you’ll think of Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks, the humongous hominids who strode across the small screen in the 1970s and 1980s when World of Sport was at its peak.
Saturday afternoons were synonymous with wrestling, with families around the country sitting down to watch British stars on national television – including the very famous family living in Buckingham Palace, who were also reported to be fans.
Imagine one of those typical shows, and you’ll doubtless envisage those hulking giants rolling around the ring, with little old ladies queuing up to hurl shoes at the heels, the baddies, and kids screaming to cheer on the faces, the good guys, our heroes. It’s a very peculiarly and particularly British leisure pursuit, coloured with the haze of nostalgia.
Legendary bad guy Mick McManus, in Simon Garfield’s eloquent eulogy to the era, The Wrestling, reminisced: “It was a sport which was entirely different. It was what I call a low-budget sport, not terribly expensive and quite within the bounds of people, whatever they earned...Wrestling was also something at which you could really let yourself go. You could scream and shout. No one ever took any notice, because it was the norm.”
It was a golden age, with hundreds and hundreds of live shows booked all over the country every year, and thousands of fans queuing to get in.
And of course, the television viewing figures were immense. Lew Grade, the executive in charge of ITV, had seen wrestling on television in the USA, he liked what he saw – and he was sure this success and popularity could be brought to the UK as well. The broadcasts would attract a family audience, just as the live shows did. Promoter Max Crabtree, the brother of Big Daddy, was the man who booked the wrestlers for the TV shows, enthused that the over-the-top and out-of-the-ordinary nature of wrestling meant it was perfect for mainstream televisual entertainment.
And so World of Sport was born – airing on ITV every Saturday afternoon, featuring various unusual games and pastimes, as a direct competitor to the BBC’s more mainstream Grandstand, and evolving into a programme that concentrated on showcasing British professional wrestling. The technical skills and the very British sense of humour and theatre on show made it a national institution.
“I got into wrestling like a lot of people from my generation – watching World of Sport on a Saturday afternoon with my family,” says wrestler Steve ‘Samson’ Biggs. “We would literally stop everything and sit and watch the action. Then my stepdad started to take me to live UK events run by Joint Promotions. I have no idea why and still can’t explain it but I was hooked.”
“I used to go along with my dad when I was the same age my kids are now,” recalls fan Graham Beadle, now the owner of a comic book store. “I used to go along
to Oakham Town Hall back in the days of Johnny Grey and Johnny Saint and the Windsor brothers and that sort of era.”
“The local shows were pretty much as you saw them on the television,” says Richard O’Hagan, now a solicitor, “although I was surprised at first just how long each bout could last – I didn’t realise that the fights they showed on television were edited down to fit the 40 minutes or so of air time that they had available.”
O’Hagan grew up in Leamington Spa, and went along to local shows with school friends. He remembers seeing all the top stars in action.
“There was never any problem attracting the big names to Leamington. Banger Walsh only lived a street away from me and was always on the bill, and Black Belt Chris Adams usually was because he was a Warwickshire boy, too. We had everyone you could think of, though – Big Daddy, Giant Haystacks, Mick McManus, Kendo Nagasaki, Golden Boy John Naylor, Catweazle, The Royal Brothers, Rollerball Rocco, Jim Breaks...I could go on forever. I think the only big name I never saw was Jackie Pallo, who had retired before I began following.”
The local crowd had a very British way of viewing as well – rowdy but respectful at the same time. “The arena was often noisy,” says O’Hagan, “but only really became anything like a WWE audience if [Big] Daddy was fighting. They were on the whole quite knowledgeable and respectful, though. One of my most vivid memories is of Max Crabtree making an emotional address the week after Tornado Torontos had died following a bout and being listened to in absolute silence.”
But after that, UK wrestling fell into the doldrums. Some blame Big Daddy’s dominance. That’s certainly what Adrian Street has claimed, telling a 2012 event about his disgust with the man he called “Big Fat Daddy” and declaring: “If they’d hanged him for being a wrestler, he’d have died an innocent man.”
And Jackie Pallo agreed, telling Simon Garfield: “The young person wasn’t interested any more. We lost an audience, the younger element, because it was all big fat horrible men.”
Richard O’Hagan is a little scornful of that suggestion. “Daddy was everyone’s favourite,” he says. “Daddy and Haystacks were the big names. When they appeared against each other shows sold out and TV ratings soared. People wanted them on their bills because they made more money.”
He admits, though, that there were problems with the ubiquity of the pair. “It became the beast that ate itself, though. Daddy could never lose, he was the hero. Haystacks – more of an anti-hero than a villain – could never win against Daddy but had to win against others because otherwise he wouldn’t be a credible opponent for Daddy.”
And, yes, this ‘credibility’ was an issue. Jackie Pallo had written a book some years before revealing some of the secrets of professional wrestling, meaning that some of the viewers suddenly had the comforting curtain pulled from their eyes, and began watching with a more cynical attitude. Promoters such as Max Crabtree shrugged off the impact of Pallo’s book, ensuring it was business as usual, and wrestlers defended the ‘reality’ of what they were doing, pointing out that it would just not be possible to completely choreograph an entire match.
Even so, O’Hagan thinks this knowledge of the storylining of professional wrestling did begin to damage what was seen on television.
“One afternoon I watched a bout between Daddy and a new guy named Anaconda. Before the bout even began, Haystacks appeared, he and Daddy fought outside of the ring before Daddy jumped into the ring and beat up Anaconda, who put up no defence at all. It was all very obviously staged in a very badly-thought-out way and I am sure that that flicked a little ‘off’ switch somewhere.”
ITV began to cut down its coverage of British wrestling in the 1980s, meaning that only those who got to the shows in person knew what was going on. It was a big culture shift. “It caused something of an outcry at a time when it was widely regarded as a sport rather than entertainment, with newspapers often covering it in the back pages and sometimes at the front as well – I remember Big Mal Kirk’s death making the headlines,” says O’Hagan.
And that was coupled with the outreach of WWE’s tentacles – then, of course, known as the WWF. The UK promotions, big fish in a small pond, could not compete with a big fish coming from over the pond, with glitzy showbiz production values. Vince McMahon’s company signed megastar Hulk Hogan in 1984 to be the face of professional wrestling, and the year after they staged the very first WrestleMania in New York’s Madison Square Garden. The British-focused World of Sport was taken off air in 1985.
There was, unsurprisingly, a lot of anger in the industry. Garfield chronicles the reaction beautifully, with Giant Haystacks fuming: “If we weren’t living in such a democratic society, I’d have gone up and broke [ITV head of sport Greg Dyke’s] neck.”
Because wrestling still achieved such great viewing figures, Dyke decided that he would keep the sport on television outside the World of Sport brand, mixing up British wrestling with American footage, but moved it around in the schedules, meaning that viewers could never be sure when they would see their programme. Eventually, Dyke took wrestling off the air altogether.
“Wrestling was clearly never a proper sport – that was part of the problem,” he was quoted as saying. “Wrestlingwas unlucky, but it was so tarnished with the old-style look of ITV that it had to go.”
His reference to the ‘look’ of the shows may be key. Wrestler, promoter and TV producer Alex Shane says: “I know why they took it off TV, and it had f*** all to do with Greg Dyke; the problem was there before Greg Dyke came on board. It was because promoters didn’t want to spend more money on production, and they could get WWE’s TV for £600, not £6,000, and it looked better.”
Whatever the reason behind the initial fall from grace, without that mainstream publicity creating megastars, the British scene deteriorated rapidly in the 1990s, causing it to be castigated and ridiculed by the veterans of the World of Sport era.
Adrian Street, the flamboyant, sexually ambiguous superstar of the 1970s, now resides in Florida with his wife (and former valet) Linda, and has been working on two volumes of autobiography. He has also been the subject of a documentary by visual artist Jeremy Deller, who launched his film at London’s Royal Festival Hall in mid-2012, and he was the guest of honour, talking to the audience via a live Skype link-up. He was scathing about the current state of UK professional wrestling, which disappointed some of those now involved in the business, who hope for more support from the old-schoolers.
“What was Adrian known for? His character, his razzmatazz, his showbiz,” says Alex Shane. “It’s highlighted at the best it can be with good production. Adrian Street would have actually had much better footage of his entrances if he’d have been wrestling now. He’d have had video screens and trons [video packages] and coloured lighting, so he should appreciate that.”
This gulf between the old school and the modern wrestling scene seems massive. Fans of the old British style of wrestling have fallen away, replaced by young people used to the American television programmes. Wrestling can no longer attract hundreds of people to weekly shows, as it did at its peak. And although new promotions are now springing up all over the UK, there’s a sense that something has disappeared forever from the scene.
“The values of wrestling have been kind of lost,” says wrestler-turned-promoter Mark Sloan. “The veterans these days weren’t lucky enough to learn from veterans when they started out, so they might be great athletes but the fundamentals of what wrestling is has been lost. The real purpose is to make it seem as though everything has a purpose. A lot of current students are much better than their friends give them credit for, because they don’t understand what they’re seeing. They just can’t see it.
“Wrestling has changed. It can’t be what it was.”
So what IS British wrestling now? It is a scene that has been struggling, having been castigated for a lack of financial investment and low production values, but is now undergoing a revival, with top promotions drawing crowds of hundreds, and with
the cream of UK talent being scouted by the rich overseas companies. That is not to say that it will ever be as popular or as mainstream as in the World of Sport days; indeed, there is still an amateurish and inevitably more dangerous side to the business as poor-quality promotions book untrained wrestlers simply to save on expenses. But the best companies and the best wrestlers in Britain are slick, media-savvy, and working to give UK fans the best product possible.
Take a peek behind the scenes, and see how wrestlers, referees and ring announcers work to learn their trade, how promoters strive to put together a profitable business, and how the British scene has slowly started to revive itself.
Yet this particular story begins with the downturn of the ‘golden age’ of wrestling, the dominance of WWE – and how UK promotions began to fight back.
Chapter 1:
The resurgence
IT is a June evening in Kent, and around a hundred people are milling around in a sports hall for IPW:UK’s Royale Rewards show. IPW are one of the UK’s biggest promotions at the moment; a few months ago they held an event in the vast Troxy, a former cinema in the East End, and they invariably book top talent. Tonight, for instance, the bill features Mark Haskins, brought to worldwide attention by TNA; Lion Kid, who has wrestled around the globe and trained in Japan; and the Bhangra Knights, one of the country’s best tag teams.
Tomorrow, though, there’s another show in London, hosted by a different promotion, and though none of the matches will be repeated, several of these wrestlers will also be on the card. That is because, although they may be excellent wrestlers, there’s a very limited talent pool in the UK. Wrestlers aren’t contracted to any specific promotions; and promotions want the best wrestlers on their bill.
“We see the same people over and over again,” complains one woman. She has been a wrestling fan for nearly half a century, and has been waxing nostalgic about the World of Sport days and the stars she used to see. She recently took her family to a Legends show at Fairfield Hall in Croydon – one of the classic British wrestling venues – and was thrilled to see some of her old favourites including Johnny Saint and Fit Finlay.