by Carrie Dunn
Lion Kid is a young, small-of-stature, masked high-flyer, and former IPW:UK cruiserweight champion. So how does a wrestler from the New Forest decide to perform under a lion’s mask?
“Well, I was wrestling on the UK scene for a few years under my real name,” he explains. “Because of my young appearance, a few of my peers thought I might benefit from wrestling under a mask, but it wasn’t something that immediately took my interest.
“However, in early 2009, I began to seriously think about reinventing myself, as you need to keep evolving. By then I was 20 years old and had physically matured, so looking too young wasn’t an issue. I then spoke with DragonGate UK promoter Mark Sloan [who in a previous guise had been his tag-team partner]. We put together ideas for a character, names, his look, his style, how to market and so on, and we both began to realise that this had a lot of potential. Countless hours, resources and concepts were laid out before the Lion Kid made his official debut on 1 November 2009 in the opening match of DragonGate UK Invasion.”
El Ligero, the masked and horned luchador, had a similar issue with his youthful looks when he started out. “When I started out, and had my first few matches, I was only 17 and pretty quiet and shy. I didn’t really have the self-confidence to interact with a live audience, and that really hurt my role as a babyface. So I decided to start working under a mask until my confidence improved.
“Then because of this, I realised that it made me stand out from the rest of the pack, as it’s not something that’s done very much in this country, and standing out and being an individual, having a USP [unique selling point], is so important in finding work and being memorable. So I decided to stick with it.”
But wrestling under a mask creates as many problems as it solves, as he quickly discovered.
“I learned that, because I had taken away one of my most important features for conveying a babyface in my face – having no facials, which restrict selling, sympathy and so on – I had to rely a lot more on my body language to try and get across the story I was trying to tell.
“For me, under a mask, it can be sometimes difficult to sell sympathetically, with just my body, so I started to focus more on trying to come across with fire and passion.”
He certainly does that – for someone billed as hailing from Mexico City, the UK crowds definitely get behind him. At PROGRESS Wrestling’s inaugural show at London’s Garage in March 2012, opponent Noam Dar raged at the crowd: “He’s from Mexico! That’s the other side of the world! I’m from Scotland – it’s only up there!”
El Ligero is amused and pleased by such a reaction. “I love it!” he laughs. “I remember actually thinking just before I emerged for the match with Noam Dar that I probably wouldn’t get much of a reaction, as despite getting to the level where I’m quite well known in the UK, I don’t actually work for many independent promotions down in London or the south, so when the crowd gave a really big reaction when my music started up, I was actually a bit overwhelmed! But I absolutely love to perform, anywhere I go, and the crowd reactions are very rewarding.”
Young wrestler ‘White Lightning’ Mark Andrews is a sparky little face in more ways than one – his high flying in the ring is unusual to see even in these lucha-influenced times; he wears ring gear emblazoned with lightning flashes, reiterating his nickname; and his bright blond hair catches the eye if the tights didn’t do it.
He has a familiar story to tell about his early days in the ring.
“As I started wrestling so young, by the time I had debuted on shows I just didn’t look old enough to be in the ring, so I wore a mask to hide the obvious age difference between myself and other workers,” he says. “With the mask on, my trainers and I decided on the name ‘Lightning Kid’ – yep, it’s been used a hundred times already!
“Once I got to 18 years old and wanted to drop the mask, I figured a name change was in order too, so I used ‘White Lightning’ as a nickname as a reference to my previous work. I design most of my gear myself, and I always try to use vibrant colours to match my character. With the peroxide blonde hair, and what I hope is classed as a decent tan, I try to stand out on every show I’m on with my appearance, so the crowd are invested in me before I’ve even stepped into the ring.”
Sometimes developing a character comes in a very strange way. Phil Ward is a relative newcomer to the scene, working mostly with South London-based Future Pro Wrestling. In the ring, he’s The Warden – a shouty, slightly crazed prison guard wielding handcuffs. Simple, but effective.
“I was literally given the idea with the explanation that my name was Ward – Ward, Warden, get it? – and that everyone hates prison,” he explains. “Full credit to Steve Evans [the co-founder of FPW, also known in the ring as Heavy D], though, because if he hadn’t pushed me to do it, then The Warden never would’ve seen the light of day.”
When he first took part in a show, though, his gimmick was rather different – he was the Party Boy Phil Ward.
“It actually started from the trousers,” he recalls. At a training session the evening before his first show, he was fretting because his wrestling boots hadn’t turned up in time, and then a colleague produced a pair of spangly trousers. “He said: ‘Well, I’ve got these trousers.’ ‘Yeah, all right, we might as well go with something around that, somehow.’”
So what character options does a pair of sparkly trousers offer a novice wrestler?
“My mate started talking about the Party Boy from Jackass, the one who dances around. So we were like: ‘Yeah, just go with that.’ I got a bow-tie and my spangly trousers, stuffed a pair of socks down my crotch, and just went with it. That was it. It was one stupid idea after another, which ended up with me being out there doing it. It was surreal.”
Surprisingly, it seems to have worked quite well. “That was a good gimmick. That was over. The kids loved it. I don’t know why kids loved it – I was like, it’s really unsuitable for kids! I probably should never have done it!”
Being the Party Boy was never necessarily a long-term plan; Ward already had a lot of potential characters bubbling around in his head. “I started thinking of how I could just do that better, but also other characters I might want to play. I’m pretty sure every wrestler had lots of gimmicks as a kid that they wanted to do, and they had storylines in their head, they had matches in their head, all that sort of stuff. So I had all that, then you’re obviously like well this wouldn’t really work, but you still try and think: ‘How could I make it work? How can I tune it so it could actually work in front of a crowd rather than just for my own amusement?’”
The Warden is probably the top heel in FPW at the moment, spending 2012 feuding with now-veteran babyface Greg Burridge, whose dance routines and fluffy-dice-tied-to-the-trunks gimmick never seems to get old, and culminating in a hair v dice match in which the loser lost his appendage. Unsurprisingly, the bad guy got his comeuppance and Burridge shaved Ward’s head in the ring. Ward thinks his success with The Warden character is down to a combination of interests in drama and in psychology.
“I’m a big people-watcher and I like working out people and what they’re all about,” he says. “It’s the same thing with a crowd – it’s just a big group of people, it’s not a crowd. Sometimes people think ‘oh, it’s a crowd’, and they get nervous because it’s such a big group of people that are watching them. To me, they’re just a group of individuals. If I can figure out one of them, I can figure out most of them, because they’re all reasonably similar in that they’re here to see wrestling. They’ve probably seen a lot of the same stuff that I’ve seen, so I try and think what would make me react to it.”
Being a bad guy in the ring inevitably elicits lots of heckles and abuse from the crowd – at the FPW Summertime Brawl in July 2012, Ward was dragged round the hall by Burridge, who invited the children in the audience to slap The Warden’s chest. It’s an occupational hazard.
“I think a lot of people are almost afraid that people will hate them at the end of it,
whereas I know that it’s an act, a character I’m playing,” says Ward. “I’m not going to lose any friends about it, although the kids might still believe it’s real, which is great. It’s not a reflection on me if people don’t like me afterwards, it’s a reflection on the character that I was playing. It would be like an actor in Hollywood being universally reviled because of a character he played.
“I really don’t care if I look like a complete t*** in the ring. It doesn’t matter. It makes people care about me more in terms of hating me, and it makes them care more about the face. They say if you get a bigger pop at the end than you did at the start, then you’ve done your job. That’s what I want. I want to make that as easy as possible to achieve.”
Interestingly, Ward thinks more wrestlers should pay attention to their character work, because storytelling is just as important a part of the job as technique.
“I’ve always thought you don’t need to be that good a wrestler to be good at wrestling,” he says. “You don’t need to be good in the ring – you just need to be good enough so that you don’t make yourself look s***, basically. You need to be good enough that you don’t embarrass yourself in the ring, but most of the rest of it is getting people through the door and sending them home happy. If you can do those two things, it almost doesn’t matter how good you are at wrestling.”
Occasionally, though, wrestlers may not have a ‘character’ they portray so much as a distinctive style. Jimmy Havoc is known for the ‘deathmatches’ he does, which invariably result in spectacular falls and blood loss; he has been tagged with the epithet ‘Suicidal’ because of the dangerous nature of his most characteristic matches.
“I don’t have a gimmick. I’m me. I like that, I think it’s quite good,” he says.
That’s not to say he couldn’t act out a ‘character’ if he wanted to; he also wrestles on the lucha scene as El Transexico.
“Character is more defined there, we’ve got our own masks, it’s brilliant,” he says.
For the more traditional British promotions, where he regularly works and also trains newcomers, he thinks that the best method of developing a character or a gimmick is to just use what’s already there.
“You need to see what the person’s personality is like,” he says. “We’ve got a guy who used to be in the army, so he’s going for military – it’s playing on his own persona. It’s people who have no personality and then try to go for weird outlandish things, they get in the ring and they just don’t do it. You’ve got the clothes on, but you’re not selling it. Why are you not selling it? The crowd ain’t gonna care.
“I’m much more of a fan of letting the students see what they want to do for themselves, what they feel comfortable doing, rather than saying ‘this is your gimmick, you’ve got to do that!’ and then them thinking, ‘how am I going to do this?’ because then it’s not coming from themselves. I think The Rock said it best – The Rock’s character is his personality turned up to 12. I think that works. You need to let out your own personality within your gimmick, or it’s not going to work.”
It’s probably not a surprise that as someone who is associated with risk-taking he started out in ‘backyard wrestling’ – unregulated, untrained wrestling, often frowned upon by legitimate wrestlers and promotions because of the inherent dangers.
“I don’t care, I enjoyed it, it was good fun,” he says. “We never put on shows, we literally wrestled because we enjoyed it and had a bit of fun.”
He maintains that his usual kind of work is less physically demanding than the performances of wrestlers who desperately want to show off their complete array of moves in every match.
“If someone’s booked in the second match of the evening to do eight minutes, they think: ‘But I’ve come all this way, I’m not just doing eight minutes, f*** ’em! I’m going to get my s*** in, I’m going to do 15 minutes, I’m going to get all my stuff over, I’m going to look the best on the card.’ What’s the point? You get paid the same money. I’m not being funny, I’d rather risk the eight minutes, get paid the same money, and go and have a beer.
“I know I’m going to get a lot of that sort of criticism with the deathmatch stuff that I do, but I’ve never been to hospital before. It looks horrific, but if all of you think that I’m doing it because I need the money or I can’t get booked any other way, you’re all idiots. I do it because it’s easy!
“I can take a bump through a table and lay there for five minutes and just sell. You guys, you’re running backwards and forwards, running, jumping – how much effort have you put into your match? How many times have you been dropped on your head? I can get dropped on my head once in that match and the crowd will go more wild for it than you’d get if you’d taken a hundred brainbusters.”
As a trainer, Havoc encourages students to think about the logic of putting a match together, and fitting their moves to the story they’re trying to tell.
“What I tell everyone is if you can do all this flippy s***, brilliant, awesome. Make it mean something. Don’t just go in there and make your first move. I was doing a tag match at Lucha [Britannia, one of the promotions where he wrestles as El Transexico], and it was me and this other guy against a couple of the students. They said: ‘Yeah, the first spot, we’re going to do this, this and this, and a shooting star.’ The first spot? What are you doing? Save it until the end! They’ll enjoy it at the end. They’re like: ‘But I need to get my s*** in.’ No, you don’t need to get your s*** in. You need to structure a match. If you’re giving them that at the start, what the f*** are you going to give them at the end? You can’t top that. If you build to it, they’re going to pop for it.
“Wrestling is fake. If you want to drop yourself on your head 100 times, the only person you’re working is yourself. I was guilty of that for the first few years I wrestled. ‘Oh, yeah, I need to get all this s*** in! I need to get thrown through glass, and tables and FIRE! I need to do it cos THAT’S WHAT THE FANS WANT TO SEE!’
“Now all I think is: ‘What’s the one spot I can do that they’re going to remember? And we’ll do that. We’ll build to that.’ I’m quite good at getting dropped on my head now, to be honest. It doesn’t hurt anymore. It’s fine. I’ll do that maybe once in a match, twice in a match. That’s the pop. If you do it 100 times, the pop’s going to get less and less and less every time. They ain’t going to care. That’s my philosophy. Less is more.”
He thinks there is an endemic lack of professionalism among some elements of the current UK talent roster – not necessarily because of a lack of training, but because there is a significant number of wrestlers who are prepared to perform for free and cover their own expenses for a profit-making promotion.
“The thing that annoys me is that some guys are doing it as a job. I’m not doing it as a job – it’s good money for me, but I’ve got a job and I study as well – but a lot of guys in this country are trying to make wrestling their living. If you get guys coming along who are paying for their own flights, who are working on the cheap, what’s the promoter going to do? Of course they’re going to book them.”
But he also thinks young wrestlers coming through need to behave in a professional way to their peers – and their elders.
“The things I care about – are you polite to everyone? If you get to a locker room, do you shake everyone’s hand when you go in? I know that sounds pathetic, and some people are like: ‘Why should I shake people’s hands?’ It’s polite, isn’t it? If you go to work in the morning, and you don’t say hello to your co-workers, they’re going to think you’re a miserable bastard.
“It’s the same with wrestling. If you go into a locker room and you look at someone and you just ignore them – just say hello! It’s not difficult! Even if you think they’re a veteran. I go into locker rooms and I’m wrestling loads of kids or whatever, I say: ‘Hello, I’m Jimmy, nice to meet you.’ I’m friendly. I like to think that. It’s just polite.”
Tag teams
Tag teams are
often unfairly thought of as either a way to cram more wrestlers on to a card and a way to find something for a decent quartet of wrestlers to do if they’re not involved in singles action, or an additional expense which doubles the wages outlay for one match. Yet in companies where tag teams are given time in the ring, and rewarded with title belts, they can be just as much of a draw as the individual stars.
“When we started out, there were very few tag teams,” recalls Ashe, one half of the New Breed along with his partner Curve, who spent much of the turn of the millennium leading the division in the Frontier Wrestling Alliance. “We had matching gear, we looked quite similar – people thought we were brothers for years. We kind of are like brothers – more like Cain and Abel in the sense that one day I will kill him – but apart from that we put a lot of effort into being a team rather than two guys who were put together. Without blowing our own trumpets, we were the top team there for about two or three years. We were given a lot of leeway in the division, a lot of opportunity to go out and create something, and we did quite good and we had a lot of fun.”
The inkling of their pairing up as a tag team had always been lurking in their minds, even when they began training. “I don’t like using the word, but we were smart to a degree – we watched a lot of ECW – and we watched a lot of interviews, so we always had the idea of going in as a tag team. We knew at some point we would do the split and we would be singles, but we always planned to be a team, and planned to be a team for at least a couple of years, and see how we went from there, which is a very hard way to get into the business, because nobody wants to book tag teams. It’s double the money and there’s not a lot of guys who want to be in a team, so it’s one of the harder things to do.”
It’s also hard to do because a successful tag team depends on the dynamics between its partners.