by Carrie Dunn
“The major issue with this is that these guys train at these awful facilities and then their ‘trainer’ gets them ‘booked’ on a ‘show’ with a couple of months of training badly once a week.
“The student then believes that they must be fantastic to have got onto a show so quickly, they tell their mates what a wonderful school it is and how the trainer has ‘helped’ them start their career so quickly – and then they move on to an environment without crash mats outside the ring, without the knowledge of how to genuinely bump safely in front of a crowd and basically endanger themselves and the person that they are in there with.”
Dale concludes: “My issue with this, aside from it being dangerous and unethical to use these ‘performers’, is the fact that by using people who work for free they are denying the people who do things the correct way the chance to break out as all spots are being filled by these work thieves working badly for nothing.”
He suggests that wannabe wrestlers do their homework. “Research your facility and trainer beforehand,” he says. “Chances are if your trainer has never worked on any of the big shows in this country or internationally before, then they do not have the knowledge to pass on to you.”
He lists a plethora of schools run by well-known British names all around the country, and adds: “There are plenty of good schools out there. If people are not willing to travel to a good school, their career will never get off the ground.”
“I think the country needs to do something about these kids who are setting up training schools and don’t know how to wrestle themselves and are training others to wrestle – someone is going to die,” says promoter Ben Auld of Southside Wrestling. “I know that sounds really harsh and really over the top; I honestly believe that someone is going to get really, really hurt or get killed. When it happens, all it’s going to do is it’s going to smear the whole of British wrestling.
“If someone dies in the ring and it gets in The Sun or whatever, no one’s going to go: ‘Well, Southside’s a good company, it wouldn’t happen there.’ They’d go: ‘Oh, British wrestling, it’s just amateurish compared with America.’ These companies, I hate them and anyone that’sinvolved in them. I just don’t want anything to do with any of them. I think they’re a cancer in this business.”
El Ligero agrees. He is consistently ranked as one of the very best in the UK, and headlines on shows around the country, so his knowledge is broad. “While there are some bad schools out there, there are many that have developed a decent reputation, and with good cause. The one thing that I always say to those wanting to break into the business whilst choosing a school is to see what the school has produced in the past, and if they have produced workers with decent reputations or have done well, and luckily there are quite a few schools out there that are a testament to that theory.”
High standards
The late Andre Baker founded NWA-UK Hammerlock in 1993, and his training school had a strong monopoly on the market for several years, before the company stopped running events in 2007 and wound up two years later. His standards were high.
“Andre was the first person I know of to introduce a grading system to pro wrestling,” recalls Danny Garnell. “He got us accepted by the martial arts governing body as ring wrestling as an exhibition of real wrestling. So you had to do your yearly grading, and with your grading comes insurance, so we were all insured on the shows. It did limit injuries, and you knew that people you were going on with were as competent as you, maybe more competent, so you had that confidence that they could work safely.”
Jon Ryan, the ‘bad boy of British wrestling’, began training with Hammerlock as a 17-year-old in 1997, and as a regular attendee found himself used as the trainers’ demo dummy.
“Andre had a very specific view on how you should be forced to train to get into wrestling, and a lot of what he stood for I still believe is valid today,” he says. “Part of whatmade a lot of the guys from Hammerlock very different was the fact that we were made to understand shoot or submission wrestling, which is very important as you get a feel for how the body moves and equally importantly you understand the concept of what hurts, which can only make a wrestler’s selling [reacting to a strike] better.”
Sometimes the trainees themselves create problems. “We’d often have these guys that had come down to the gym and on their first week they’d say to Andre: ‘OK, how many weeks do I need to train for before I get into the WWE?’ Straight away that’d get Andre’s back up,” says Hammerlock graduate Dean Champion, who now runs the promotion himself. “He’d say: ‘OK, hang on a second, you’re in your first week, you’re practising your break falls, you need to learn to walk before you run’ and I think that upset some people. He didn’t cut his words. He’d tell you the way it was, so to speak. If you were doing something wrong, he’d tell you it was wrong, but that was Andre’s way.”
Champion was in one of Hammerlock’s earliest cohorts. “The school started in 1993 and I went along at the end of 1994, beginning of 1995,” he says. “It was basically the only school that you could walk into. The only other schools that I know of was Pat Roach’s, which was up in Liverpool, and I think the Knights were doing a little bit of something somewhere up in Norwich. But yeah, Andre’s was the only school that was almost akin to a karate school, where you just turned up each week, you paid your subs, and you could train, basically. I think that’s what helped get so many people started, because it wasn’t closed doors, you could just walk in. I think that’s what helped kick-start the British wrestling again, back then.”
Previous generations of wrestlers had learnt their trade by doing the hard labour of setting the ring up, and then, after proving their dedication through that manual work, being thrown between the ropes with grizzled pros and finding out the tough way how to take bumps, meaning that the industry was still a very closed shop.
“I wrote to [Brian] Dixon at All Star saying I was interested in becoming a wrestler, and I know a lot of guys that I’ve spoken to all did the same, and he wrote a polite letter back saying ‘you need to come to shows, help set up the ring, and if you’re lucky, you might get ten minutes in the ring with a wrestler before or after the show’,” says Champion.
“There was nowhere where you could go and someone would take the time to actually stand next to you and say: ‘OK, you need to do this, this and this, this is how a lock-up is, this is how an arm-drag is,’ and actually take you through the basics. Andre was the first person to see a gap in the market, he realised that the WWF was getting bigger and there were these kids out there that wanted to do this, so he went down that route.”
After training at Hammerlock, Jon Ryan became a trainer there himself, and is characteristically blunt about the methods he used.
“My teaching style – I would say I was a p****. I used to really enjoy coaching back in the day and I didn’t take any prisoners – if you bumped badly you would do it again and again and again and again until I was happy. But the interesting thing is I really believe that was the best way. I think some people may not have been happy with it and thought I was a cock, but I think they still respected me for it. I did mellow towards the end of my coaching days and I honestly think that this had a detrimental impact on the quality of the coaching.
“I remember one summer camp at St Margarets Bay in Kent, someone did something to p*** Andre off and told me to teach them a lesson. So I went into the dorms at 6am with an airhorn and shouted for everyone to get up and out like a drill sergeant, made them run down to the beach and run shuttle runs with the slowest having to do press-ups with their faces in the sea for a punishment. I think Stu Sanders [WWE’s Wade Barrett] and Ricky Martin [of recent Apprentice fame] were at that camp! Maybe that was a bit far...”
Zack Sabre Jr, a ten-year veteran of the sport in his mid-20s, began training at Hammerlock as a 14-year-old, and has fonder memories of the drills Ryan put him through than you might expect.
“I was obviously much smaller, greeted by th
e bald-headed, angry muscly brute named Andre Baker alongside Jon Ryan,” he recalls. “It was incredibly intimidating but I think it just had the right balance. I was never scared to the point where I’d never want to go – you just knew you were going to be grilled and put through your paces till you thought you were going to die, but there were still the right levels of friendliness and enjoyment in it.”
He speaks very highly of the rigour of Ryan’s training and the standards he instilled. “It sounds strange now because we’re such close friends, and I’m an adult now, but obviously as a 14-year-old I remember going through drills, and if you did OK, he just wouldn’t say anything. He’d kind of nod. That was a sign of pride. On the real rare occasion you got told that was OK, you’d done something really, really right. That was the same with Andre too. All that did was make you strive to do it really well to get that praise and there was the right level there, but it was a really tough environment. Jon, Andre and the others took me under their wing quite a lot – but that also meant I was the dummy for being stretched and through favouritism I got tortured even more, but learnt and benefited 100 per cent for it. I feel lucky to have trained at one of the last traditional schools in the country.”
‘White Lightning’ Mark Andrews also began as a teenage Hammerlock trainee, travelling to Kent from his home in Wales for their summer camps while also studying more regularly at NWA-UK Wales.
“I was one of the very last trainees to come out of Hammerlock,” he says. “I must have started in about 2006, and they stopped doing the camps in about 2007, I think. NWA Wales was running up until about 2008, I guess, and I actually started training with them in 2005: a good few years I had there. NWA Wales was kind of different from Hammerlock. At Hammerlock you had Andre occasionally, which was awesome, and Zack Sabre, and people who knew what they were doing, like Jon Ryan. NWA Wales was a good training school, but there’s not a lot goes on in Wales, so there was no light at the end of the tunnel.”
Just like Sabre, who became his trainer, the young teenager was slightly bewildered at encountering Baker for the first time. “I was really young when I met him, and he was just really nice to me; to be honest, I couldn’t understand a word he was saying because he had quite a strong accent.
“He gave me quite a lot of positive feedback, which gave me a bit more self-esteem with my wrestling. It was always good to know there was such a knowledgeable person there, even if he didn’t train us consistently. He was the guy who trained Zack and most people in the UK, to be honest, and we were learning from them, so we were learning the Andre Baker style.”
Steve Biggs, another Hammerlock graduate, had his appetite whetted by seeing wrestling on TV.
“One day about 1989 I went down to Blockbuster to hire a video and I saw by chance two WWF tapes. My friends who had Sky had been going on about American wrestling but I had never seen it until that day. I rented SummerSlam 88 and then Survivor Series 88 and this was even more amazing than what I had seen: big characters with larger-than-life personalities doing battle in the ring. This seemed like the most exciting thing to do in the world.
“Then when I was in high school they started showing WWF then WCW really late at night on TV. I used to stay up really late to watch this every week and then started going to live WWF shows. I was hooked on the smaller technical wrestlers who were having great matches and feuds. I started buying all the magazines to find out what was happening when I couldn’t see it.
“Me and my younger brother would watch the action and then try to copy the moves, slamming each other on the sofa. I thought I had to try this. I wasn’t very athletic and very overweight when I was a teenager but I worked hard to lose the weight and started hitting the gym.
“I kept going on about wrestling all the time to my mum and she eventually started finding out about wrestling schools. This was in a time pre-internet so it was hard to find but we came across an advert for Hammerlock Wrestling in Kent run by Andre Baker. My mum and stepdad took me to see the school and meet Andre, and I had my first session where I was so nervous but at the same time it felt very natural.
“I just wanted to practise non-stop and would often be the first in the ring. I would practise mainly what I saw on TV, or at least how I thought it was done. A few of the Hammerlock show guys would then help out or correct us along the way. They were very knowledgeable and willing to help out. I loved it all the same and couldn’t wait to get on shows. Andre was a character; he didn’t really help out with our training. He would take the money when we arrived and that was it. Of all the times I trained there doing day training, weekend training and summer camps, he maybe helped me once, and that was over a three-year period.”
“I got into it quite late,” recalls Ashe. “I was a fan. The guy that I got into the business with, my initial tag-team partner, Phil – we worked together as the New Breed in FWA – we both used to buy the Superstars of Wrestling magazine, and there was an advert in it for Hammerlock, they were doing a training camp. On a whim, we just thought: ‘Let’s give it a go. What have we got to lose? The worst that will happen is we’ll go in, get knocked around, and we’ll know it’s not for us.’ So we went along, and we’ve stuck at it ever since.”
What was that first training session like? “Terrifying. Absolutely terrifying,” he says, and chortles loudly. “My background – I hated sports at school, I’m an average-sized guy, 5ft 9in at a push, no athletic background at all. It was terrifying. It was a world we knew about, but didn’t know about. Our trainer there was Justin Richards, and it was run by Andre, and they welcomed us in – they were fantastic to us, as were all the guys there. You hear a lot of stories about guys getting in the hard way, and they get hazed, and they get beaten up to see if they can stick at it – we didn’t have that. We got pushed, but no worse than you would do at a martial arts school or a gym class. We were treated very well. They could see that we wanted it and had a lot of passion for it.”
Johnny Moss is another Hammerlock graduate, but he first encountered wrestling as an eight-year-old watching Big Daddy and Fit Finlay at a local show.
“My interest really picked up though when I first watched WWF on Sky Sports back in 1990 and I was hooked from then on,” he says. “I would collect every magazine possible and was fascinated about all the different promotions and wrestlers from all over the world. I quickly found a tape trader, Glen Radford, and would get tapes from virtually every promotion possible – I was hooked. I think part of the fascination was trying to decipher Glen’s writing on the video sleeves!
“I finally decided to take the plunge after seeing an advert in Power Slam magazine for the Hammerlock School of Wrestling and attended my first training camp in 1997. This was a bit of a trek for me as Hammerlock was based in Kent and I lived in Cumbria; I also wasn’t driving at the time so I would take a nine-hour National Express coach overnight to London then get the train to Sittingbourne.
“I did this on a regular basis and it could be quite brutal as I would finish work on Friday, travel overnight, train Saturday and Sunday, then travel home Sunday night but I didn’t care, I loved it. Some people these days think they’re going out their way if they have to drive an hour – they’re the ones that should just probably pack it in.”
Dean Allmark loved his training from the start. He is another who has been on the UK scene since he was a teenager, and now heads up the training school at All-Star Wrestling.
“On the opening weekend of the school where I trained in Stoke, there were about 40 trainees there on that first day,” he says. “We had five hours’ training each day. Saturday’s session we were told nothing but to grapple and try and win, so it was five straight hours of ‘shooting’ with everybody there. When we turned up for Sunday’s session, there was less than half there that had turned up the day before, so I guess it was a test to see who really wanted it.
“The Sunday session we started to learn more of the pro style, like rolls, bumps and chain wrestling. There was no ring a
t the school for the year and a half I was there; it was just judo mats. The first time I actually got in a ring was on the day of my first ever match.
“Training became three hours every Tuesday night and five hours on a Sunday: I must say while I was there I enjoyed every second of my training – even in the winter, when we were in a room with no heating and no double-glazed windows, bumping our arses off on those stiff mats, I loved it!”
Lion Kid was a media-addicted child who grew up to live out his dreams – but for him, it wasn’t television or magazines but video games that gave him a taste for wrestling.
“I was always pretty active as a youngster; I wanted to be a wrestler since I was around eight or nine,” he says. “But unlike most people, it wasn’t watching wrestling that got me into wrestling in the first place: that would be playing the video games – WWF WrestleMania on the Super Nintendo and later WWF Warzone on the Nintendo 64. I actually still have both games. The old games machines are still my favourites.
“So after playing the games for years, one morning I saw it was on TV and thought I’d see what it was like. That was 1998 and I was hooked instantly. I was playing the games so it was easy for me to get into the shows, as I already knew who all the characters were before I even saw them wrestle on TV. It wasn’t until I started watching it on TV that I felt the desire to become a professional wrestler.”
Lion Kid trained at the FWA Academy, an offshoot of the Frontier Wrestling Alliance promotion, and based in the south of England. They have had a hand in the training of lots of today’s big names, listing WWE stars Justin Gabriel and Drew McIntyre as alumni on their website. Seeing fellow students graduate to such high-level success was a huge motivation.
“My favourite wrestler growing up was Chris Jericho, but as for my real inspirations, I guess that would be the fellow students and the alumni of the FWA Academy where I trained,” says Lion Kid. “I saw what the students went on to achieve while I was still training and we as a group were inspired to be the absolute best we could; we were a real team and we all strived to achieve something special. Looking back at my Academy days, they still hold up as some of my fondest memories that I have in wrestling to this point.”