by Carrie Dunn
So Lion Kid speaks very highly of his experience and the camaraderie he found with his fellow students – what does he think UK wrestling schools need to do to improve their training and the talent that emerges?
“That’s a good question, but I do not think I am the right person to answer it. It is difficult for me to give a balanced answer as it’s been years since I’ve visited any other wrestling schools in the UK, and things are very different now to how they were when I started training.
“I have heard good things about some of the next generation of wrestlers on the UK circuit. There’s a wealth of new home-grown talent to go up against, and as always that presents all-new challenges.”
Teenager Freya Frenzy has been a wrestling fan since childhood thanks to the influence of her late mother and one of her closest friends, and when she was 15 she decided that she wanted to step into the ring herself. She has got nothing but good things to say about her training.
“When I was watching, there was something in the back of my mind that was saying, ‘I want to do this! I can do this!’ so I researched schools in my city. I found one that was about half an hour away, but due to not having any transport, I couldn’t go. I was disappointed but I didn’t give up, resolving to just try again later and see if anything had changed.
“Then my uncle said that he’d be able to drive me so in January 2011, I went to my first training session. I felt out of place, since I was the only girl and was just a 5ft 1in 15-year-old, but I decided I had more to gain than lose, so I just went for it. And it turned out to be a pretty good decision.”
She trains weekly on Saturday afternoons in a community centre, beginning with warm-ups. “Then, depending on how many people are there, we either get the crash mat or we put the ring up. When we train with the crash mat, we usually do our bumps on there, then go through the basics such as clotheslines, hip-tosses and suplexes. We then sometimes practise moves in our move-sets, so I’d practise leaping facebusters, and we also practise chain wrestling, and sometimes watch DVDs of people such as [veteran British star] Johnny Saint to see what he does and to see what we could maybe use ourselves. When we have the ring up, we practise bumps, basics and then stuff like running the ropes, and then usually have practice matches of around five minutes long.”
Freya loves wrestling, but she emphasises what tough physical work it is: “When I first started training, I found it tough and had aches and pains. Bumping in the ring was hell, since it hadn’t been used much and was harder than most rings are but we’ve got new underlay on it that makes it much easier. I’m very comfortable with my trainers, so that helps a lot. I think that having the confidence to ask questions and say: ‘Hey, I don’t get how to do this, can you show me again?’ definitely helps a lot too.”
Like Freya, the high-profile younger talent coming through now speak very highly of their training in the UK. Noam Dar, one of the most promising young heels on the circuit, began his career in Scotland as a 14-year-old and since then has become a fixture on the UK circuit.
“As a young child, I was always aware of wrestling but it never really garnered my interest too much,” he says. “I didn’t have one of these situations that the whole family sat down every Friday night to watch it like many stories you read: it wasn’t until I was around 12 when my grandpa got Sky and it became easily accessible. Paired with my laziness, watching wrestling became a major part of my pastimes. I didn’t really comprehend that people could train to be wrestlers, I just assumed that it was for the ‘Americans’ and it stayed very much a teenage fantasy.
“However, when one of my friends discovered the Scottish Professional Wrestling Academy, I decided to tag along for a bit of fun. The more I attended, the more I became interested, and from there it elevated from Sunday afternoon activity to an immediate passion. I debuted aged 14 and the rest is history, as the saying goes.”
Rhia O’Reilly trained in the UK (like Lion Kid, initially at the FWA Academy, but on weekend camps, travelling over from Ireland) and in North America, with former ECW superstar Lance Storm, and has found herself realising some slight differences in technique since beginning her career on the British circuit.
“Wrestling’s wrestling, but there are differences,” she says. “The way you bump an arm-drag is different in America to here. Just little things like back body-drops are slightly different here. There’s a British way of doing things, so I had to re-learn some stuff. I have a weird hybridy style.”
She stresses, though, that there’s no reason that women should train any differently to men. “Sometimes we get taught front bumps differently purely because boys have junk,” she says. During her training, she found herself attending girls-only sessions on spots such as hair-pulling and hair-throws – “guys don’t really need to know that, but we do” – but apart from that, she has trained with men throughout.
“There are certain moves that aren’t conducive to girls’ strength,” she says. “Sometimes you might do slight variations on it: there’s variations on the body slam that girls learn before they do a proper one, just because they’re not as strong, but then weak guys would do it the same way. It’s not like: ‘This is the girls’ version.’ Then there are super-strong girls who do everything the boys can do anyway.”
Even if someone has had a good in-ring training, wrestlers invariably continue to learn throughout their careers, picking up knowledge as they get more and more matches under their belts.
Luke Douton is one who happily admits that he didn’t become a “real” wrestler until he started performing in front of audiences, and even with years of experience, moving to a new promotion developed his knowledge even further.
“I got into the wrestling business when I was around 12; I went to a wrestling school in Birmingham run by Steve Logan. I stayed there for four or five years doing a few indy shows a month, but it was when I went to work holiday park shows that I really learned my craft and began to understand the job.
“Holiday parks are great to learn because you have a new sell-out crowd every day of the week if not twice a day. Because you are working constantly to a casual fan base, you are able to try out new spots all the time, even change round the way you build your match – see what does and does not work.
“As soon as I came off the camps in 2005 I found myself working for All-Star Wrestling. The guys that work there really are good and it felt like I was starting all over again but the whole experience sharpened up my in-ring work and made me into the good all-rounder I am today.”
Jimmy Havoc, who trained with Hammerlock, is now a trainer himself, working with London-based promotions including Future Pro Wrestling, PROGRESS and Lucha Britannia, and he knows what to look out for when he is seeking good students who will make it in wrestling.
“The kind of people I like to teach are people who want it and enjoy it,” he says. Does that mean that sometimes he is faced with teaching people who are not completely dedicated? “Yes, I don’t like people who turn up and just want to do Stone Cold Stunners [the finisher performed to great effect by WWE legend Stone Cold Steve Austin] or something – people with attitude. I want people there who want to learn. I’m still learning myself; I learn something every time I have a show.”
Now he has taken things from his own trainers into his teaching style.
“I took quite a lot from the way Jon [Ryan] taught me at Hammerlock, but obviously I’ve learnt stuff over the years from other people. Everyone’s got their own style, and everyone’s going to treat people slightly differently. I hate trainers that go ‘no, you have to do it my way, if you don’t do it my way then that’s it, it’s game over’.
“When you’re with me, if I tell you to do something my way, yeah, I want you to do it like that, but if you’ve been told otherwise elsewhere and you want to put your own flourish on to it, brilliant, you do that. That’s how we all end up being different. I don’t want to end up training people who are just robots, and they all do exactly the same thing exactly
the same way. It’s pointless. As long as what you do is safe and you’re not going to hurt anyone, I think that works.
“There’s things you can do properly and safely, like hip-tosses, there’s a way to do them, suplexes, there’s a way to do them. How you then portray your character after and before you do it, that’s really important. I want students to do stuff safely and properly, but I don’t want all of them to be exactly the same. It’s not good for anyone. Why would one of them get booked [to appear on a show] over any other?”
So where does the division come between training someone in the ‘proper’ way to do things and allowing a bit of creativity?
“I think it depends what you consider ‘properly’ to be. ‘Properly’ for me would be can you do it safely, are you getting your character over, are you getting yourself over, are you protecting the guy you’re doing the move to? That’s properly.
“I don’t want to teach people who turn out to be rotten, go out and work a show, someone asks who trained them and then it comes back to me,” he says with crushing honesty.
“You can spot who’ll get it from the start. There are people I’ve been wrong about – people who have worked, and done the same thing 1,000 times until they get it.”
There’s no denying the physical – and psychological – toll that wrestling takes on its practitioners. Yet Havoc’s highlighting of character is essential, and highlights one of the key elements of professional wrestling, so often neglected in favour of impressive physical feats – the theatrical art of in-ring storytelling.
Chapter 3:
In the spotlight – the wrestlers
ONE of the most fascinating elements of professional wrestling is ‘kayfabe’ – what’s happening in storyline as opposed to reality. In the ‘golden age’ of professional wrestling, kayfabe was paramount; characters were maintained all the time, bad guys couldn’t be seen interacting with the heroes, if a wrestler incurred an injury in the ring they had to continue to ‘sell’ it outside.
Now, though, everyone is smarter. Everyone – fans and wrestlers alike – know it’s not real. Or do they?
The audience at a Hammerlock show in November 2012 were stunned to encounter a raucous family who genuinely, truly believed that what they were seeing was real. It is a very unusual sight – unless, of course, you’re used to seeing the archive footage of shows from the 1970s and early 1980s, as people struck wrestlers with makeshift weapons and shouted huge amounts of heartfelt abuse at them.
When the evil Majik endeavoured to conceal a weapon (ahem) with which to attack Hammerlock’s hero Jimmy Havoc, it seemed as though they were going to rip him limb from limb as they stood up and tried to rush the ring – only some expert and swift diplomacy from promoter Tony McMillan and then some swift vengeance (through Havoc’s challenge for a hardcore rematch) managed to settle them down.
Yet after the show, as the wrestlers came out into the auditorium to meet their fans, friends and family, if two of them were enemies in storyline, they would have no contact so as to maintain their feud in front of the audience.
It’s a difficult balance to strike. People may know that the matches are fixed and that the wrestlers are playing characters, but the entire parallel universe of professional wrestling depends on the collusion of fans and wrestlers. In the ring, wrestlers play their roles, and in the audience, the fans cheer their favourites on, just as they would for a ‘real’ sports team or perhaps a theatre performance.
“Nobody is to break character in front of the audience during the production,” says Dann Read, promoter of Pro Wrestling EVE. “Afterwards – well, it’s like meeting the actors and actresses. The public like to do that. If we’ve done an injury angle I’ll probably tell that person to stay back until everyone else has left because again it kills everything you’ve just seen and like a good movie you need to be left wondering something, but otherwise it’s a business. And as a business it’s your job to keep your customers happy.”
The preservation of kayfabe outside the ring has become much more difficult since the popularisation of social media. Even WWE’s big names struggle with this, using their Twitter accounts in part to communicate with fans, in part to talk about their charity work, and then in part to trash-talk with the man they’re feuding with.
“I believe the consumers like to see that the people they’re paying to see soon or thinking about paying to see soon are just as excited about the upcoming show as they are and subsequently look to social media because they want to be even more excited than they already are for a certain match,” says Read.
“I think you just need to be clever in how you do it because if done wrong the people involved can easily come out looking stupid, like they’re trying to ‘play wrestler’ – who they look stupid to is another question – but if done right I do believe it can add extra sales or at the very least extra interest.”
One of the most obvious points of kayfabe is the idea that the matches are not unfolding to a predetermined conclusion, and that the wrestlers are genuinely competing to the best of their ability to win. Of course, it’s all been sorted out before they climb into the ring, and rather than a ‘match’, they are performing to the requirements of their promoter.
“Winning or losing means nothing to me,” says ‘The Pride of Wales’ Eddie Dennis. “As far as how other wrestlers feel, it depends on the situation. I understand feeling upset if you work somewhere where losing or winning a particular match will hurt hard work you’ve put into establishing something.”
Promoters, however, take a somewhat more candid view.
“The moment a wrestler starts caring about winning and losing is the moment they should f*** off,” says Dann Read. “When a wrestler cares about that, rather than letting the embodiment of the story happen, that’s when you’ve got an issue.
“With people I’ve worked with in the past, there was an issue there, and that made life incredibly difficult. It’s not just one group of people I’ve worked with in the past – there’s a lot of groups of people I’ve worked with in the past who care about wins and losses, and that’s the thing, if you care about wins and losses, then you’re not welcome here. If you care more about whether you win or whether you lose than the effort you’re putting in to your match going out there, then you don’t get it.”
Read wonders if wrestlers who care about their win/loss ratio and the title belts they claim are secretly insecure, or whether it is simply that they do not understand the business decisions made by a promoter.
He said: “If any wrestler out there is stupid enough to think that a promoter does anything other than what the promoter feels is right for their business – and that means right for their roster – then they should be paying money to sit on the seats with all the other paying customers and watching the show because they’re everything that’s wrong with the business today.
“They don’t get it, they’re on an ego trip and self-esteem boost. Your job as a performer is to entertain the paying customers – to perform at the venue you’re being paid to perform at. Winning and losing makes no difference to the job at hand. If you care about winning and losing then get into a real competitive sport. If an actor only ever wants to play the hero then they’re not going to go very far, are they?”
‘Faking It’
Making the leap from trainee to actual professional wrestler can be very, very scary. And yet professional wrestling is not a real sport per se; it might be better to categorise it as a type of theatre, or performance art – or, indeed, ‘sports entertainment’.
In 2001, that was demonstrated with perfect clarity on an award-winning television show, the documentary series Faking It. The premise of the show is that an individual learns a profession entirely different from their own, and passes themselves off under the scrutiny of expert judges. In the third series, ballet dancer Kasper Cornish became a wrestler, sent to Andre Baker’s legendary NWA-UK Hammerlock school to learn his new trade.
He had responded to
an advert for a “professional male ballet dancer required for a Channel 4 TV documentary” which he had seen in a dance shop, close to where he was teaching in central London. The production team invited him to an interview, then asked to watch him teach one of his dance classes, and finally offered him the chance to participate in the show.
Cornish confessed some fears at the start of the documentary, saying that he was less afraid of injury than he was of having to shout at the crowd. He also admitted that his knowledge of wrestling comprised only what he had seen at the Olympics, but suspected “that’s different from this”.
He soon found out just how different, as he was put through a gruelling training regime alongside Hammerlock’s other trainees.
The chance of being on mainstream television was exciting for everyone involved. “Everyone at Hammerlock was very excited about the prospect of doing Faking It – it was massively high profile at the time and got good viewership,” says Jon Ryan, who was the man charged with the responsibility of training Cornish.
“The main thing Andre and the guys more involved in Hammerlock were concerned about was making sure we didn’t break kayfabe too badly and p*** off a lot of the older generation and the rest of the industry. As such, we were lambasted a little by the fan community for being a bit hokey but it worked well for what it was supposed to do and held kayfabe particularly well.”
Hammerlock knew nothing about their new recruit until he literally turned up on Dave ‘The Tank’ Stewart’s doorstep. “Genuinely, we didn’t know nothing,” says Stewart. “All we had was a rough schedule of dates that they’d film, which was in June and July. Other than that, apart from a few set shows that Hammerlock had at the time, where they’d be filming, and they’d be coming to the gym and stuff like that, we had no expectations at all. I remember watching the first series, and I remember having a conversation with someone down at Hammerlock, saying we might end up with some kind of dancer or gymnast. Other than that, we were genuinely in the dark until he turned up at my door.