Spandex, Screw Jobs and Cheap Pops

by Carrie Dunn

  As someone who didn’t initially train as a wrestler, Roberts has had to learn to take bumps and fall properly; after all, the incapacitated referee, who has been knocked out so that he can’t see the bad guys interfering in the match, is a staple of wrestling storylines. “You just have to roll with the punches. You can get in a situation where either by accident or design you get hit, knocked down, whatever. You just get used to it. It’s part of the job. You can’t be a referee and not take bumps. You just get on with it.”

  Now that he is established as one of the leading UK referees, he is much in demand for bookings, necessitating a lot of travel. “When I first started, everything I did was based in South Wales, so it wasn’t too bad. Now, nearly every show I do is based around London, Essex or Kent. Most of the shows I work on are three to five hours away, depending on exactly where they are.”

  He also balances his wrestling commitments with his home life and a day job. “I work a regular five-day week; I’ve got my own house – it’s hard, but I wouldn’t change it for the world.”

  Diplomatically, he won’t be drawn on his favourite promotions to work for – “I’m quite lucky, all the promotions I work for are very good companies” – but he admits to a sneaking sentimental fondness for IPW:UK, which he’s still happy to call his “home promotion – I’ve been there longer than I’ve been anywhere else, and for me it’s the standard for companies in this country, the standard that everyone should want to look to be at”.

  For anyone looking to become a referee themselves, he offers some advice. “As stupid as it sounds, you need to actually officiate the match. I’ve seen a lot of referees that just stay out the way. You have to treat it like a legitimate contest because fans do demand that the referee does his job. One of the key things is to perform the duties of a referee, and so many people don’t do that; they just do a little bit here and there, and count to three, but you should be doing your job all the time, otherwise people know that you’re full of s***.

  “A referee needs to be very vocal. You need to be very aware of where you are in the ring, and what the wrestlers are doing. You just need to have an understanding of wrestling matches and what makes a wrestling match, understand what works and what doesn’t, and where to be, and where not to be.

  “I’ve tried very hard to learn as much as I can about all the business, which I think has helped make me a better referee. Whenever there’s wrestling training seminars that go on in this country, I’ll go along, I’ll listen to the veterans talk, so when I’m in the ring, I know what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, and my work can complement what they do.”

  Unsurprisingly, he is very happy with the way his career has developed. “The companies I work for are all top promotions, and they’re all very interesting in what they’re doing,” he says. “They’ve all got good talent and have good people behind them.”

  That doesn’t mean he doesn’t have any ambitions left. “There’s still things I’d like to do. I think if I ever get to the point where there’s nothing left for me to want to do, then it may be time for me to step away. But at the moment there’s definitely still things in wrestling I want to do. I’d still like to do more work abroad if possible, there’s still wrestlers I’d like to referee – hopefully I’ll get to check a few more things off my list as I go along.”

  Chapter 6:

  The ring announcers

  EVERY circus needs a ringmaster, and every wrestling show needs a ring announcer – someone to take the microphone, warm up the crowd, and introduce each match. It sounds simple, but, as with anything in this business, doing this job well is surprisingly and deceptively hard.

  Steve Lytton made his MC-ing debut on national television – ITV’s ill-fated Transatlantic Wrestling Challenge, which lasted six episodes in 2000 before the plug was pulled.

  “I was working in television at the time – I was voicing and producing some sports stuff for various companies,” he says. “The guy that was producing this Transatlantic Wrestling Challenge for ITV was Nick Halling [since then most notably Sky’s presenter of American football coverage], and he’d once been a reporter for me when I was at London Tonight. So I was looking for work at the time, I was freelancing, and I saw that Meridian were putting wrestling back on ITV, and I just rang him up.”

  Steve had been a big fan of wrestling as a child, watching it, of course, in the glory days of World of Sport. “I said I’d watched more than enough wrestling over the years to know what to do as an MC, and I’m an ugly bugger, I can get away with it, and he booked me on that basis – of having worked with me once on London Tonight, and I sound alright.”

  The series was recorded over one weekend in Southampton, and featured UK talent from the late Andre Baker’s promotion NWA-UK Hammerlock including Jon Ryan, Johnny Moss and Majik as well as newcomer Nikita, later to find a higher profile in WWE as Katie Lea and in TNA as Winter.

  “I had one warm-up match with Hammerlock at the Civic Hall, Bedworth, where I cacked myself because it was 1,000 people, they were turning people away, and I’d never worked in front of so many people,” he recalls.

  The series didn’t get great reviews. “The critics slaughtered it,” admits Steve. “And there’s quite a lot of bitchiness in wrestling. I think other wrestling companies were upset that Nick had chosen Hammerlock to provide all the British wrestlers for that series. And the wrestling wasn’t of the highest quality, but hey, it was wrestling on TV, and there hadn’t been any for years. At least Andre got it on.”

  Steve then went on to MC for Baker’s shows for some years afterwards. “I did some of his shows. Andre had a terrible reputation. I liked the guy, he always treated me very courteously, he didn’t do me any harm, but an awful lot of people hated him. A lot of British wrestlers I know won’t say anything nice about him – they thought he was the worst.”

  Lytton doesn’t see his role as a ‘job’ per se; it’s not his main source of income, and although he takes pride in doing it well, he avoids all the backstage bitchiness by remaining detached from the company as a whole.

  “It’s a bit of fun for me. When you do what I do, you get your booking, you turn up, you do it as professionally as you can, and you go home again. There’s no politics, there’s no ego, I’m not trying to be at the top of the show in the main event, I’m just the MC.”

  So how does Lytton perceive his in-ring role?

  “You’re the glue that holds the thing together. I’ll crack a few terrible jokes and have a bit of fun with the audience. I’m very old-school in how I do it, but I hate an audience who isn’t responsive. It just makes the evening go with a swing. It’s a difficult balancing act – what you shouldn’t do is put yourself in front of the wrestlers, because the audience need to react to the wrestlers, not the ring announcer. There’s an art to it. There are probably three or four good MCs around, and a lot of not so good ones. It’s not that easy.”

  Weirdly, Lytton is not that interested in wrestling itself anymore.

  “I don’t really watch any wrestling at all now, I’m not interested. I play tennis every weekend, but I don’t really watch tennis on the television. I suppose I’m a bit of a closet panto dame – I really enjoy what I do.”

  Matt Burden, on the other hand, is a dedicated wrestling fan. He founded Future Pro Wrestling (FPW) with friends Steve Evans and Lee Elmer to stage family-friendly wrestling shows in the London area, and took on the ring-announcer role immediately.

  “It was something I wanted to do,” he says. “I’d been podcasting for a few years and was itching to try some form of presenting in front of an audience when Steve came up with the idea for FPW, and I’m a little territorial about the role now.”

  So how did he start to plan how he’d fulfil the role? “I did take a look at a lot of UK wrestling online as we tried to get a feel for what FPW would be. I thought that there were some good ring announcers out there but a lot that I felt either really wanted to be wrestlers or would only address a came
ra or a fixed point in a venue.”

  Someone Burden does admire is TNA’s man with the microphone, Jeremy Borash. “Even at house shows, even more so in fact, he goes beyond announcer and becomes a conduit between the fans and the product. He throws out shirts, backstage passes and gets in amongst the crowd. He is a face. Don’t mess with JB or the crowd will give you heat, good and proper.”

  Burden has a very clear concept of what his job is. “From the start, I knew that I wanted to think of the ring as a four-sided stage with a crowd all around. They pay to see a show so why not give them one in between the matches and also mainly just make them feel welcome?

  “I must confess I do use prompt cards for names, weights and locations. At first I saw it as a bit of a weakness but now they feel like part of the costume. Suit, mic, cards and I’m ready to go.”

  It’s a straightforward person specification as far as Burden’s concerned. “I would say you need to be someone who connects with the crowd. It would be so easy to patronise or have a huge ego but that wouldn’t aid the show in any way.

  “I say be an announcer and fan all at once. If the crowd see you’re having a good time then hopefully they will too.”

  Nick Branch is another lifelong wrestling fan, and though he has always been realistic that he could never be a wrestler, he jumped at the chance to become involved in the scene.

  “I had an old college friend who was wrestler training,” he recalls. “He asked if I was interested [in joining in], but I have never been ‘big’ enough to be a wrestler. Anyway, I would come down to support, and then offered to volunteer for anything the company would need when putting on shows and became a cameraman.”

  This company was the Northamptonshire-based Brutal Wrestling, a relatively new set-up, and even as Branch was clutching the camera, he found himself thinking that he could do better than the ring announcer they’d previously engaged.

  “At the BWE’s first show they had a ring announcer who kept getting the names wrong – El Toro Diablo was announced as El Toro Disabled!” he says. “My friend knew I fancied being an announcer and asked if I could do their next show and I did all the shows they did after.”

  He recommends that any ring announcer should dress smartly – “A nice tux always looks good!” – but more important are confidence and interest in the show itself. “I have seen ring announcers who have no interest in the product. If you’re not interested, why should the audience be?”

  And paying attention to the audience is key for Branch as well. “Getting the audience involved is very important at the start of a show as it’s their involvement which can make an average show into a half-decent one!”

  He takes his preparation seriously too. “I get a running order and vital statistics,” he says. “I will speak to talent to see if there are things they want me to do to heighten their character – for example, heels love giving me special notes to read out before their entrance to get them instant heat. Some like threatening me or pushing me so you can work on that.”

  That doesn’t mean everything is scripted. “Ad-libbing is fun and it’s a great skill to have, and also a bit of acting comes in handy. Also, there is nothing like going to other promotions to see other ring announcers, and also watching old events from both the UK and US for tips.” Branch too is a big Borash fan, but also admires the work of Howard Finkel, and in the UK Dean Ayass and Lucha Britannia’s Douglas Rockefeller.

  Rockefeller himself suggests comedy skills are helpful for a ring announcer. “Being a good comedian is very useful,” he says. “I don’t know if I am that, but people laugh at the shows and some have asked me if I do stand-up so I’m at least on the right track.”

  He is the man with the microphone for Lucha Britannia, based in East London, but he grew up on the other side of the Atlantic. “I was always interested in wrestling since I was a kid growing up in small-town America,” he recalls. “This was the days before cable so there was not a huge selection, but whenever it was on, I watched it. When cable started, then I got to see wrestling from all of the country, which was awesome for a youngster. My dad’s stepbrother was a midget wrestler – as they called little people back then – back in the 1960s and 1970s. So there was a bit of an understanding and acceptance of wrestling in my household.”

  Even so, it took a while for him to become involved in the scene himself. “About a year ago, I decided I was getting too soft and wanted to start exercising and I hate gyms, so I saw an ad for Lucha Britannia training, I messaged the owner and went from there. They noticed I have a good personality for showing off in front of a crowd and I volunteered my services as an announcer.”

  Lucha Britannia has slightly different requirements of their ring announcers – they need to be talking all the way through matches and engaging the audience, not simply introducing matches and declaring the winner at the end of each bout. “That means I have to talk to or insult or engage the crowd as the match is going on while commenting on the action,” he explains. “I offered because I thought I could help but primarily it is a lot of fun. I was involved in drama and theatre when I was younger and this is the first time I have performed, so to speak, since then.”

  That doesn’t mean he is completely blasé about announcing. “I am still learning about being a good announcer. I am getting there but just like anything it takes practice. You need an understanding of the moves, crowd psychology, timing, confidence, a natural loquaciousness, and a good sense of humour. You need to take it seriously as your job is to entertain the paying crowd, but to not take yourself seriously.”

  And there is a certain amount of legwork to do before the show as well. “I generally have a couple of lines prepared specifically for each character and match. I often don’t use them anyway because the match action directs the commentary. Ninety-nine per cent of what I say is purely ad-lib and those are the lines that tend to get the best reactions anyway. I’ll occasionally recycle successful lines but I generally make up content on the spot. I have a segment now on every show where I interview a wrestler. That is usually prepared ahead of time in terms of content for a purpose – either just to make the audience laugh or to make them boo or to promote a storyline.”

  Stand-up comedian Jim Smallman made his debut as a ring announcer in March 2012, at his own promotion, PROGRESS Wrestling. He had considered having a character to portray, but in the end decided against it, and decided against scripting his links as well, using just a couple of lines that had been pre-used in earlier stand-up routines.

  “That is me. That is more me than when I’m on stage being a comedian. When I’m on stage being a comedian, there’s much more of a character that comes through, because people don’t realise I’m nervous. No one ever thinks I’m nervous because I don’t look it. But I am.”

  So Jim’s ring announcer persona is as much like himself as it’s possible to be, and he’s adamant you won’t catch him changing his style – particularly not his accent.

  “There’s one thing that winds me up – I love British wrestling, but one thing that does wind me up about it, people putting on an American kind of promo voice and stuff like that. No. There’s no need. We’re British. I’m quite happy being British and I’m quite happy with my accent. It’s like you’ll never see me wearing a suit in the ring. It isn’t me then.

  “Especially with what we’re doing, we’re trying to create that whole underground feeling, so I don’t see why we should, necessarily. There are going to be bits where we’re like other promotions, but equally there’s big bits that we’re making completely different from other promotions and being a bit more unorthodox, and if me being the ring announcer and slightly odd in the ring is part of that, then brilliant.”

  Ring announcers are a necessity, but the very best ones become an essential part of the event – rather than just the person who reads out the wrestlers’ names. Richard Parker gets his name chanted when he enters the ring at Preston City Wrestling – it’s something that’s very, very rarely s
een.

  “I keep saying to friends of mine who are wrestling fans ‘you’ve got to come’, because it’s bizarre, because any company where the ring announcer’s over, the ref’s over, is just almost unprecedented,” says Parker.

  He has been a ring announcer for four years, after travelling to WrestleMania in 2008, and deciding that he wanted to get involved in the business. He took a rather odd first step, though.

  “I knew from Big Brother that [contestant] Luke Marsden had previously been a ring announcer, so I said: ‘Let’s find out who he was involved with,’” he says. “Through a bit of digging online I found GPW, and I found their training school, and my friend and I both went there.”

  However, it soon became clear that his future would not be as a wrestler. “I did one session, one three-hour session, and I have particularly bad knees, and I was limping for about three weeks. I hadn’t injured myself or anything, it was just that athletic and that exhausting on the body, I couldn’t hack it.”

  He discussed his options with GPW’s promoter, and decided that he would like to become a referee, so continued his training there. “My first training session was in the August, and in November it got to the end of a training match, and he [the promoter] came into the ring and he was giving the two wrestlers pointers on the match, came over to me and gave me some pointers on the refereeing, and he said: ‘Don’t worry too much about the refereeing, because you’re going to announce our next show.’ I said: ‘Pardon?’ He said: ‘You’re going to announce our next show. I’ve got to know you, I’ve got to know your personality, I’ve got to listen to the way you talk, I think you’d be great as our new ring announcer. The guy we’re using is good at what he does, but I don’t think he’s got enough personality.’ So that was that.”

  Well, sort of. Ring announcing, as is clear, is an art, and even the most confident and loquacious wrestling fan will take time to settle into the role. “My first night was a disaster,” admits Parker. “Nothing went particularly wrong: I had a job at the time that took me all over the country, and I was working that day down in Kent, so I finished at about one or two o’clock, but every single road I went on between Kent and Wigan, I hit traffic, and I got to the venue at quarter past seven, and the show started at half past seven – my very first show – and I just grabbed a microphone and went out there and shook because I was so nervous, I was just shaking the whole time.”