by Carrie Dunn
“All we ever wanted to do was have a good tag scene – be a good team, and have a good tag division, and be part of a good show, so we tried to steer clear of the [backstage] politics as much as possible,” explains Ashe. “But there came a time when there was a lot of internal conflict between me and Phil, because we’d been friends for so long. To quote Doug Williams [one of the top British talents who moved to work in America for TNA]: ‘You’re like a married couple, but a bad one.’ We were arguing all the time. So our demise – we just self-imploded.”
And some tag teams just quietly step out of the spotlight in their current format to become stars in their own right. The Leaders of the New School, or LDRS for short, comprise Zack Sabre Jr and Marty Scurll, who have swept the board of tag-team belts. However, the UK scene won’t be seeing too much of one of the most successful and popular British tag teams of all time in the near future, because both are developing their careers as singles wrestlers; inevitable, perhaps, but also slightly disappointing. The pair have come a long way since they were initially paired together.
It seems clear, looking back on their career together, that when they were put together as a tag team, it was partially because Sabre wasn’t entirely happy with the showmanship side of pro wrestling, and working with Scurll and gaining more experience has helped to bring that out (although to be fair it would also be quite accurate to assume that Scurll’s mat technique has improved immeasurably since tagging with one of the best wrestlers to come from the UK in recent decades).
“Yes, I think that would be a fair summary,” Sabre admits. “I’ve always styled myself and the way I wrestle deliberately – that’s how I want to be perceived. But professional wrestling is entertainment at its core, and yes, I’ve gained confidence working with Marty. We were initially seen as the entertainer and a guy who wrestled but perhaps didn’t interact as much as you might want. Now, though, I’m infinitely more confident, and my trips to the US and to Japan have helped with that too. It’s a never-ending evolution of how I feel as a wrestler.”
Yet as their respective singles careers have progressed, it’s left much less time for tagging. In 2012, the LDRS began a bit of a hiatus, losing their IPW:UK tag-team belts to Project Ego at the Summer Sizzler in Sittingbourne in August. Though the pair are undeniably a draw and a tag team any promotion would love to book, they both wanted to concentrate on their singles careers; both continued to take bookings for shows in the UK and Europe, but as individuals rather than a team. Sabre was concentrating his efforts on carving out a career in Japan, and Scurll’s ambition was to secure a contract in America, which got a huge boost when he was booked for the TNA British Boot Camp at the start of 2013, meaning a weekly national television profile via Challenge TV’s programmes plus a slot on TNA’s live UK shows in January.
“Zack’s off to Japan,” explained Scurll at the time, “and obviously we can’t be teaming up when he’s out there. So I think we’ll find ourselves on the same shows when he’s booked in Europe, but not teaming up. That’s the way it goes sometimes. I guess we can’t team up all the time forever.”
“I think the beauty of the LDRS now, is while we do obviously really enjoy it when we get to team together, we have had success, we’re the champions, there’s no harm to us if we don’t get the chance to team for a while,” says Sabre. “We always started out as singles guys that wanted to team together. We can dart back and forth and there will be no problem with it – particularly when I’m away for months at a time, Marty is doing really well as a singles wrestler, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t both be able to do our own thing while being together.”
The Bhangra Knights are one of the leading teams on the scene at the moment, comprising RJ Singh and Dazzling Darrell Allen, both also excellent singles wrestlers in their own right. The pair met in 2008 when Singh ran a guest session at the IPW:UK school, where Allen was training.
“It was conveniently around the time they wanted to do an academy [singles] match on one of their main shows,” says Allen. “Me and another guy were picked for it; he was given Andy Simmonz, our usual trainer at the time, as a manager, and RJ was my manager. We seemed to click, have a similar background and look, so we joined up. I managed him mostly at first, tagging on academy shows occasionally, and eventually we’ve just grown into the tag team we are now, the Bhangra Knights.”
Pairing up a junior partner with a more experienced pro is a common theme on the UK scene. “It allows you to focus on your ring work,” says DragonPRO’s Morgan Izzard. “If you’re in the ring, you don’t have to worry so much about the crowd because your partner’s doing it for you.”
He always wanted to be part of a tag team. “I’m a big fan of Chikara,” he explains, “and Chikara is mostly tag-team stuff. When I started wrestling in shows, I said I’d much prefer to start off in a tag team. I paired up with Scott Gregory – we have a very similar crude humour – he came along with all his terrible jokes and it went from there.”
And sometimes your tag-team partner is staring you in the face. British women’s wrestling features two sets of twins at the moment – the Blossoms and the Owens – who faced off for the first time in 2012 at Pro Wrestling EVE.
“We know the advantages of being twins – being a strong unit and tag team,” admitted Hannah Blossom prior to the match. Kasey Owens agrees: “There’s a huge advantage tagging together, we have an innate ability to see things even quicker than normal tag teams would see during a match and we almost have this psychic ability to know what the other wants to do by just a look.”
The Blossoms – Hannah and Holly – are the more experienced of the two twin tag teams, and knew right from the start they wanted to work together.
“We grew up idolising the Hardy Boyz and wanted to be a tag team just like them!” says Hannah. “Plus, we have always been close and loved the idea of doing something we love together.”
The Owens girls – Kasey and Leah – on the other hand, didn’t begin their careers together. Kasey started training in January 2010 with MEGA wrestling school, run by Alan Cunningham, aka Bonesaw. “From that first day I knew I was on the right track and wanted to pursue a career in wrestling,” she recalls. “The plan was to compete as a singles wrestler as my twin hadn’t joined MEGA and I was determined to branch out on my own and discover who I am outside of being a twin and I felt that wrestling gave me that opportunity.”
Except 12 months later, Leah decided that she wanted to go along as well. “My sister had been training with them for about a year, so I asked if I could come and see what it entailed. I was hooked instantly after my first bump.”
Both Owens girls initially intended to pursue separate careers as singles wrestlers. “The plan for me was to become a singles wrestler in the scene, as there were very few female wrestlers in Ireland,” says Leah. “It gave Kasey and me the opportunity to actually perform in singles against each other to give us more skill within the ring, rather than be ‘stuck’ in inter-gender tag matches.”
Yet when they began to expand their careers into the more high-profile UK scene, they realised that tagging together would be a great gimmick.
If one got injured or decided to retire, each woman agrees she would carry on regardless without her sister. “We love wrestling,” says Hannah. “So if Holly chose not to do it any more I would see that as an opportunity to show the wrestling world what I am capable of as a singles competitor.”
Holly agrees. “If one of us wanted to do something else we would still support the other in their decision to carry on!”
The Owens twins have also discussed it. “Leah and I have talked about this on numerous occasions,” says Kasey. “And we have both agreed that we would be proud of the other carrying on in singles competition.”
“Even though we are a strong unit as a tag, we can hold ourselves well within the singles circuit,” concurs Leah.
There are some disadvantages to working with your twin sister. “We squabble all the time – espec
ially when it’s to do with something we are equally and strongly as passionate about as we are with wrestling,” says Hannah. “But at the end of the day, we always end up on the same page as we couldn’t go a few minutes without talking to each other and always make up pretty quickly. We are stronger as a unit and we both know that.”
Leah says she and Kasey don’t argue when they’re working. “We tend to keep focused on the job at hand, and not worry about anything else,” she says. “I would describe Kasey as my rock as she was the first one to introduce me to the scene, and I trust her judgement completely.”
The Owens girls are grateful to the Blossoms for blazing a trail, and all four enjoyed their match together for Pro Wrestling EVE. Leah names it as one of her career highlights so far. “Kasey and I were able to get so much insight from another set of twins within the wrestling business, which understandably is very hard to come by. We did an exciting match which I learnt a lot from, and will be looking forward to it again.”
Injuries
One of the inevitable downsides of wrestling – no matter how well you’re trained and how safe you are in the ring – is getting an injury. The ‘competition’ side of the business might be ‘fake’, but the contact is very real. Majik, who has worked for promotions all around the world, confesses his mother has still never seen him wrestle for fear of seeing him injured: “I’m her baby boy, so she doesn’t want to see enormous men pound me in the face, which is understandable.”
Ashe admits his knees are now in “terrible shape” but is proud that in the nine years from 1998 he avoided any major injuries. Then in 2007, he was booked on a bill in Norfolk, with some painful consequences.
“It’s always the silly things that cause it,” he says. “I’ve come off ladders, cages, tables, no problems. This was off a dropkick. I went up for a dropkick, and the guy I was up against, we mistimed things. I didn’t get the chance to connect with him properly so I couldn’t get the proper landing going. As I came down, I landed on my shoulder, and straight away I knew something was wrong and I was hurt; I just didn’t know how much.
“I carried on wrestling for a couple more minutes until I could literally do no more. It turned out I’d actually broken my collarbone in two places, and torn my rotator cuff completely through on my shoulder. That led to about a year before I could do anything remotely normal.
“Through that year, I was crazy enough to keep wrestling for a while. That did a lot of damage. Doug Williams told me not to do it, and I should have listened. But at the time, I was in a very big programme in IPW:UK, and I felt I owed it to them to finish the programme, which I did. Ironically it finished up with a cage match, in which I tore my shoulder again.”
Iestyn Rees – a dark, handsome hulking giant of a wrestler – has to be one of the unluckiest men on the British scene when it comes to injuries. Talented enough for the big American promotions to keep an eye on his progress after trying out for them several times, he has also incurred a series of serious injuries which have kept him out of action and hindered his rise to the very top of the profession. Meanwhile, he has seen contemporaries raise their profiles across the globe and on the UK scene. He would be forgiven for being a little bit envious, but he’s amazingly relaxed about it.
“I wouldn’t say I’m jealous,” he says. “I mean, I’ve been unfortunate with all my injuries. I always got positive feedback when I was at the try-outs. If I was running WWE and I had a choice between Iestyn Rees and a guy who hasn’t had four knee operations – well. If it’s a business decision, you’re going to choose the guy who hasn’t had the four knee operations. You don’t want to spend thousands of dollars’ worth of money bringing a guy over who could be spending more time on the surgeon’s table.”
It’s not simply had an impact on his wrestling career – the severity of the injuries and the surgery he’s had to undergo has, obviously, affected his everyday life.
“Needless to say, it’s been a bit of a pain in the arse,” he says, with ironic understatement. “I’ve had four operations on my knees, two major, two keyhole.
“You know when Triple H [13-time world champion in WWE, and as Vince McMahon’s son-in-law the heir apparent to the company] tore his quad? Basically, I did that, but a lot worse. He tore the muscle from the tendon above the kneecap; I tore the tendon that goes from the kneecap to the shinbone – I basically blew it apart. They had to put my whole tendon back together, literally rebuild the front of my knee.
Rees recalls: “I was against Dave Moralez [now known as Dave Mastiff] – a big guy – and I got him up for an FU [where the wrestler picks up his opponent in a fireman’s carry and slams him to the mat].”
Moralez may only be billed as 5ft 9in – small in height as far as professional wrestling goes, and certainly much smaller than Rees, who is around 6ft 4in – but he is a significant weight to lift. His current billed weight is 350lb (25st); even allowing for wrestling’s love of exaggeration and assuming that a few dozen pounds have been added on to that tally, that’s a huge mass of matter to have to lift.
“I’d done it a couple of times before – at the time I think he probably weighed about 22st, so not the smallest lad on the scene,” says Rees. “As I squatted down to roll him off, my knee, the tendon, just exploded. I ended up in a heap on the floor.”
Yet even knowing that he had done himself a serious injury, the professional wrestler’s code of conduct never strayed from his mind.
“My first thought was looking after Dave,” he says. “I managed to not let him drop straight on his head.”
After a trip to accident and emergency, where they encased his knee in a brace, Rees learnt that he would have to undergo surgery to repair the damage as best as possible, but was warned he might never be able to return to wrestling.
Unsurprisingly, this prognosis did not please him.
“I’m a physio by trade anyway – I knew exactly what I should be doing,” he says. “I decided I was going to work as hard as I possibly could, and eight months after that, I got back in the ring, but since then unfortunately I’ve been hit by one or two little injuries along the way as well.”
While he was out of action, he managed his own rehab programme, with some advice and encouragement from a close friend who is also a physio. Returning to action after the knee surgery didn’t worry him: “I purposely got myself booked with people that I knew previously; it took a while before I wrestled anyone that was new, that I hadn’t worked with before. I wanted guys that knew my history and wouldn’t be stupid, basically. I took every possible precaution I could when getting back into it, and I think it’s just one of those things – you’ve just got to get in there and do it. But sometimes that’s the hardest bit.”
Ever the optimist, Rees considers the 12 months of his career as he returned to full fitness after such a serious injury to be some of the most enjoyable he has had in wrestling. “Coming back from injury, getting myself fully fit, working regularly – it’s hard to get into the rhythm of things, stop-start, stop-start, so it’s been really good, actually.”
One of the most enigmatic wrestlers in Britain over the past decade has been Nigel McGuinness, aka TNA’s Desmond Wolfe, not least because after striding around on television as the show’s commissioner, he then disappeared off viewers’ screens for good. TNA tried to cover up his absence with an angle about him having ‘try-outs’ for Chelsea, but their naivety about British sports just served to draw more attention to the fact that McGuinness had not wrestled or even been seen for ages.
Obviously, with any kind of mysterious absence, the internet wrestling fans begin to speculate on the reasons why – so given the opportunity to speak to McGuinness, any journalist would push him on that particular topic. Yet he had maintained his privacy for long enough now that he wasn’t about to give that up easily. “I couldn’t wrestle for a while but am fully cleared to wrestle now,” he told me carefully at the end of 2011. “People like to gossip a lot online when they have little better to d
o with their time.”
Once he had been cleared to wrestle, he promptly announced his retirement, along with a number of in-ring dates across America and in Europe on his farewell tour. Again, the cynics wondered whether this was a genuine retirement or a work. McGuinness was unequivocal. “This is genuinely a retirement tour, why would I work anyone?” he asked, seemingly bemused at the scepticism.
Since stepping back from the ring, McGuinness produced a documentary, The Last of McGuinness, chronicling his retirement tour and highlighting the best of his career, and revealed in it that he stepped back from in-ring competition with TNA due to contracting hepatitis B.
“I guess to a certain extent I am private,” he admits now. “Also, given what happened to me in TNA and all the issues involving that, I knew that I only had one opportunity to make that mean something. I walked around with that burden on my shoulder for the last two years, feeling that this was an important issue that I wanted to talk about and I wanted to make public.”
He points to other wrestlers who have become synonymous for their work to raise awareness of medical issues related to wrestling, such as Chris Nowinski, a former WWE talent who now heads a Harvard University institute to research sports-related head injuries.
“I knew that I didn’t want to just gloss over this, I wanted this to mean something, I wanted it to be important, and that being the case, I didn’t want to just pass it off and put it out there until I had the right forum and the right venue to do that, and obviously I felt this was that.”
He is critical of the people who circulated the lurid rumours about the reasons for his retirement, and still seems bemused that people would bother to speculate on his health.
“I’m not famous – my mother has trouble recognising me sometimes,” he says, and laughs. “I talk in the movie about how people reported things as fact when it wasn’t fact and they’d only heard it as a rumour, yet they felt they were perfectly entitled to put it out on the internet without any kind of concern or consideration about what that sort of information may do to affect the people involved.