by Carrie Dunn
Of course, the nerves settled, and he improved. He also drew on his background in amateur theatre, which helped with learning scripts and ad-libbing. “With a bit of an acting background I’ve always wanted to be involved a bit more because selfishly I’ve always wanted that buzz from the crowd,” he says.
After a year announcing at GPW, he also took on some work with FWA, 1PW and XWA, and then got the opportunity to work for PCW.
“I’d met Steven [Fludder, PCW’s owner] at many shows and got to know him, because he and his now-wife were nearly always on the front row,” he says. “I’d say hello to them, got talking to them afterwards, and about 12 months before his first show, he came up to me and said: ‘I’m thinking of starting my own company, would you be interested in announcing?’ I said yeah, no problem, thinking it would either be a one-off, or it wouldn’t happen at all. No disrespect to Steven, but the number of people I know who’ve run one show or gone to run a show and it’s not happened.
“I didn’t end up doing his first two shows, which were run under the Southside banner, but then when he went on his own, he called me again, and said: ‘Look, I really, really want you to do this show.’ So I said OK, walked in, and said: ‘This venue’s weird.’ Empty, it’s the strangest-looking place in the world. It’s just a dance floor with a DJ booth. Then the ring went up and they turned the lights on above the ring, they’ve got this big circular lighting rig, it can change colours, red, white and blue, and I just went, ‘This is amazing.’ It filled up with people, and the rest, as they say, is history.”
Parker is honest about the toll that his wrestling commitments take on his everyday life – particularly now that he is in demand from different promotions, and now that PCW in particular are running bigger, more elaborate shows. At the end of 2012 their Festive Fury event extended into an all-day extravaganza, with a two-hour pre-show (called Before The Fury) followed by a Q&A session with three of their big-name imports, John Morrison, Chris Masters and Eugene, plus PCW regular Mad Man Manson. After a meet-and-greet interlude, where fans could get autographs from and photographs with the stars, the main show itself began at 6.30pm and ran through until just before 10pm – all on a Sunday a fortnight prior to Christmas.
“Sunday was unusual. I’ve only done three or four shows like this in the whole four years,” he says. “I was there at 10.30, I left home about nine o’clock, got a bit of breakfast, chilled out for a bit, then I had my preparation to do. I always have a card, or a bit of paper, just with the [wrestlers’] weights and locations on as a bit of a reminder, and I have that cupped in my hand so that as a wrestler’s music hits, I can reference it, see what their weight and location is, quickly memorise it, and I’m away, so I have to write those notes out for myself before I go in.
“It was a long day with four different things happening, but that is almost unprecedented. I’d done a full week’s work, I work nine until six – and on the Friday I’d finished work at six and driven to Wigan for a GPW show, and then on Sunday it was PCW all day. I struggled to get up on Monday morning, so it really does take its toll.”
With a wife and a family as well as increased amateur dramatic commitments, Parker has planned his future in wrestling carefully, cutting down on his appearances at GPW, where he started out. “I rang the promoter recently and I had a full and frank and honest conversation with him,” he says. “I said I haven’t got the time I used to have, but I don’t want to give it up completely, and I won’t give it up for one simple reason, and that one simple reason is Preston City Wrestling.
“Two reasons – one, the enjoyment of doing the show as a whole because the products are strong, the fans are so good, the matches are so great and the roster is so varied, and two, I do this because I love wrestling and I’m basically a huge mark, and I can’t not do the shows with the imports that he’s bringing over, but at the same time I don’t want to give GPW up.
“So we discussed the options and what was ultimately decided, and a joke was actually made out of it at the last GPW show, that I will take an ‘Undertaker schedule’ next year – instead of doing seven or eight shows in a year, I’m going to do four or five for them, just so that I can keep my hand in, but I can still carry on with the PCW shows, and then any other shows and companies that come along, I will take the booking if I can.”
So four years on, does Parker still get that buzz he talked about? He thinks. “Not from every show. I still get it from every show at PCW, but I think that’s largely due to the crowd reactions, and it’s not just the venue and the set-up of the show,” he says. “So, no, I’m not always as excited, but I still do get it. I would say nine times out of ten I still get the buzz of when I first started.”
As is obvious, some of the in-ring talent, whether they’re wrestlers, referees or announcers, are loyal to one or two promotions – and others are happy to take bookings all over the UK, as companies spring up all over the place and attempt to claim their own little niche in the market. Yet it wasn’t always that way; only in recent years has this fragmentation occurred as a monopoly has been smashed.
Chapter 7:
In the spotlight – the history of UK wrestling promotions
IN the heyday of British wrestling, top promotions would run up to 700 shows a year, seeking a dominance and potentially a complete monopoly of the market.
In Simon Garfield’s The Wrestling, Bill Abbey of Dale Martin Promotions looked back to the 1950s and recalled: “We were in what seemed like constant conflict with the wrestlers. We didn’t pay them much, and when things became hard we had to fight their demands. So we formed Joint Promotions with the other wrestling companies, basically to keep other promoters out and control the wrestlers.
“With Joint Promotions we developed our own territories...We agreed not to poach venues, and not to operate within a ten-mile radius of each other. If the wrestlers didn’t turn up they would get their remaining dates cancelled. If they went off to fight for other smaller promoters, we threatened them with never working for Joint Promotions again.”
They claimed they were doing this because wrestlers were playing companies off against each other; if they collaborated, then promotions would have nothing to worry about. The wrestlers, though, felt they were being treated badly – they were paid very little, the idea being that if they had money they wouldn’t want to wrestle any more – and those who didn’t want to work for the Joint Promotions conglomerate ended up going to compete abroad instead.
The smaller promotions that Abbey scorned did flourish and proliferate. That is not to say they were all necessarily offering a great product, but they could sell tickets at the smaller venues that Joint Promotions didn’t feel were worth their time. But that meant a big schism between the promotions and the wrestlers; sure, Joint Promotions were collaborating and considered themselves successful, but nobody else liked the way things were going on.
It got even worse when Joint Promotions got a TV deal with ITV and World of Sport, meaning they secured their position as the most high-profile organisation on the UK scene. The smaller promotions wanted a look-in, but they had a struggle.
Even Jackie Pallo, who had a great in-ring career thanks to his flamboyant style, found it difficult to make a living as a promoter when he tried to set up his own business in the mid-1970s – mostly because he could not get his roster on television, despite applying for a World of Sport slot when the contracts were renewed in 1977 and again in 1982.
He told Simon Garfield: “I tried to get my own fights on TV, but Joint Promotions had been there for 20 years. Couldn’t get rid of them. In the end we had everybody on our books – Adrian Street, Les Kellett, everybody. They left Joint Promotions because it was being run by idiots, whereas before it was being run by wrestlers...The wrestling business was a fabulous business ruined by greed. Greed.
“When I went out on my own, one promoter took me to dinner and said: ‘Jackie, I wish you all the luck in the world to get on in showbusiness, but we’re going to
destroy you as a promoter.’ I said: ‘Well, buy me out.’ He said: ‘No, we’ll destroy you.’”
Pallo died in 2006, but his namesake son continued to try and run shows.
“The older guys like Jackie Pallo that I used to work with in the past, these guys have stepped down now,” says Dean Champion, who began working for Hammerlock in the 1990s. “All the guys that are promoting now are workers that were around and could see that the only thing holding us back was that no one was working together, so I think it’s the only way forward.”
What was Pallo like to work with? “He was a nightmare. I’ll be honest with you,” says Champion. “I remember I went on with Andre [Baker] for one of his shows; it was me versus Andre, big man versus little man, and Andre, for a huge guy, could actually fly around quite a bit, he liked to do a lot of top-rope hurricanranas. I remember looking up at Jackie in the back row, holding his hair, because all he wanted was wristlocks and armbars and stuff, even though the crowd were cheering.
“I remember coming back and Jackie was absolutely screaming at Andre, saying ‘look, this is not wrestling’, and Andre was saying ‘look, you need to change’. That upset Jackie, I think. He started to step away from the business, and I don’t see many of his shows running now.”
Brian Dixon of All-Star Promotions has been running his company for over 40 years, starting out with a 1970 show in Cheshire, and securing some television coverage in the dying days of wrestling on Saturday afternoon ITV schedules. He is possibly the last of the old school of promoters still prominent on the UK scene, running a packed schedule of shows all over the country including the holiday camp market – maybe not the most high-profile of bookings, but a regular one, and one which brings wrestlers and wrestling to the attention of a family audience. That does mean the people who work for him are stepping into a great historic British wrestling tradition.
Dean Allmark is now Dixon’s son-in-law, but he has been working full-time for All-Star since he began in the business, meaning he has had thousands of matches just for that promotion.
“There’s nowhere else in the world that I know of where you can do ten shows in five days, like we do in the summer, or where you can do three shows in one day,” he says.
It wasn’t easy to break in to the company, though. Allmark had contacted Dixon along with some of his colleagues – Robbie Dynamite, Kid Cool and Mikey Whiplash – to see whether he would be interested in using them on his roster.
“Brian gave us a try-out match before an All-Star show in Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent, and he liked it and threw us in to the battle royal later that night. Just before the battle royal began, we were walking from the dressing rooms to the backstage area, all the big Americans and British guys were lined up against the wall on each side of the corridor. They said nothing as we walked past – there was just silence – they just stared at us.
“That’s when I became a bit worried: they were the biggest guys I’d ever seen in my life and they looked very angry for some reason. So everybody got in, the bell rang and they proceeded in battering the living s*** out of us – and it was very much like this for quite a long time until we became regulars on the team. I think they came to respect the fact that we kept coming back for more. I realise now that that was their way of making us humble and making us pay our dues.
“I was 16 when I first worked for Brian and I’m very sure he didn’t like me at first. My first day on the Butlin’s holiday camp circuit I accidentally smacked him in the head with one of the ring boards while dismantling the ring. From there on, my job was to wash his car at every petrol station we stopped at, make everybody’s beds when we got to where we were all staying that night, collect everybody’s breakfast dishes after they’d finished and scrape them off – just little things like that to humiliate you in front of the other wrestlers, but again I just think it was part of paying my dues. After exactly a year the next young lad started on the camps and it was his turn and I was pretty much left alone.”
Hammerlock has turned out many of the best wrestlers in the UK today – names such as Doug Williams, Zack Sabre Jr and Johnny Moss, all of whom work all over the world. That is much the same with all the UK talent – though wrestlers may have ‘home’ promotions that they’re primarily aligned to, they’re free to work anywhere. Initially, though, founder Andre Baker’s intent was to put together an in-house roster who performed exclusively for his company.
“Yes, he did like everybody to remain exclusive to Hammerlock,” says Moss. “I believe his reasoning was to try and have an exclusive roster that people could only see on his shows, but in reality I think it was because he ended up very bitter towards the UK scene and wrestling in general and didn’t like a lot of the other promoters.”
Baker’s dislike of some of the other folk on the scene was well known, because he wasn’t a man to hide his thoughts.
“He was honest, that’s all I can say,” says Jimmy Havoc. “If he didn’t like you, you’d know that he didn’t like you. But I don’t think that’s a bad thing.”
Havoc was one of the people Baker did get on with, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t believe the more negative stories about him. “Andre was Andre. He was never two-faced, he’d never talk about you behind your back. If he didn’t like you, he’d slap you in the face and tell you he didn’t like you. That was Andre. He helped me out a lot. I liked him.”
So why did Baker like Havoc? “I think the reason he liked me was my first ever show, I was wrestling for a couple of months, I had a match with Hugh Mungus, and ended up breaking the middle ropes because he threw me so hard into the buckle and post, so that was always good. Then there was me and a guy called Mr Vain were the last two in the rumble. Vain was in the corner and I went to kick him in the shoulder, and he moved back, and I just walloped him in the head, and Andre thought it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen. Me and him got on really well after that.”
“Andre was a character. He was a good guy,” says Ashe. “He was funny – very dry. He gave us our chance, he gave us our first break into the business. The scene wouldn’t be what it is today if it wasn’t for Andre Baker. He was a father figure to all of us.”
Well, perhaps not quite all. Ashe corrects himself.
“A lot of guys at that time, some got on with him, some didn’t, but Andre – well, he told it how it was. People in wrestling don’t like being told how it is.”
“He was one of those guys that – how can I put it? He was like Marmite, you either loved him or you didn’t like him,” says Dean Champion. “I absolutely owe Andre everything. When I was 17 and turned up at the wrestling gym, I was the most shy kid in the world, I wouldn’t say boo to a goose. He took me aside every week and he brought me out of my shell and he pushed me. He helped me not just wrestling-wise but as a person loads, even out of the ring. If I was ever going for a job interview he’d always ring up and just say: ‘You OK? You want to go in there and be confident. Almost become a bigger person than you actually are – be more outlandish, be like a character.’”
Danny Garnell, another Hammerlock graduate, describes his relationship with Baker succinctly but profoundly.
“He was definitely a friend. When I was going through some personal stuff, he was always there. I used to go and stay at his place just to get away from stuff. He was just my friend,” he says.
“Andre Baker commanded any room he entered,” recalls Prince Fergal Devitt, now a star for New Japan Pro Wrestling. “He had an aura about him that gripped your attention, yet he was very humble and treated everyone with respect. When he spoke people listened with pricked ears. He taught me many valuable lessons, both in and out of the ring, about wrestling, physical development, and most importantly about life.
“I was lucky enough to get to spend a lot of time with Andre outside of wrestling: he would often put me up in his home, where you can be sure he played many a prank on me. His sense of humour is something that is not often spoken about, but he had a sharp wit and loved a jok
e.”
Baker was intensely loyal to the people who were loyal to him, but even so, there were grumbles behind the scenes.
“We never got a wage at Hammerlock, and I think that upset a lot of guys,” says Champion. “But at the same time, when we were on tour, I’d never pay for food – Andre was paying for our food, he would put us up, so in a sense he was.
“And I thought he was a very clever man, very businesslike in the way he ran Hammerlock – he’d see gaps in the market and he’d go for it. He was always looking for the small little venues in the small little towns because he knew there was nothing else there that would compete against the wrestling when it came to town. One hundred per cent, I owe Andre a lot.”
“I got on with Andre occasionally very well, occasionally...I...he was a very blunt man,” says Majik. “Very blunt, and I’m not cotton-wooling that, that’s the genuine word to use.”
Alex Shane, who with a heavy layer of irony still refers to himself and his then-colleagues as ‘Andre’s boys’, is now intensely conflicted about his feelings for Baker.
“Andre broke the mould,” he says. “I was there, I lived with him for a long time. I saw lots of stuff that I shouldn’t have seen.”
That included Baker’s crueller side, which was always mixed with his sense of humour. “He was funny when he was bullying people,” says Shane. “He was doing it in a funny way, but he wasn’t doing it for comedy, he was doing it for control, and he was doing it out of insecurity, and he was doing it because that’s how he kept all those people doing what they were doing, not because they loved the product alone – they did, they would have done it without that, there was no need for that – but he could be funny while he was doing it.”