Spandex, Screw Jobs and Cheap Pops

by Carrie Dunn

  It was organised – perhaps not surprisingly – by Alex Shane, a man who happily calls himself “the Mr Kipling of British wrestling” because he has a finger in so many pies. It was by no means a perfectly produced show, but he’s proud of that particular achievement.

  “It was a great experience and it was the first show my family went to as well in ten years, and they loved it, it was really good,” he says.

  He does wish that more promoters had been more vocal about their support for the event beforehand, and wonders if his involvement actually had a negative impact for the show within the industry and particularly among the ‘smart mark’ fans, who he thinks generally dislike him and his work.

  “Let’s say I do something moderately well: if I do something moderately well, it will be terrible,” he says with irony. “If I do it good, it will be bad, and if I do it exceptional to the point where nobody can knock it, it won’t get mentioned. So there was hardly any reviews of BritWresFest, hardly anyone on the fan forums went. But there was 900 people in there, we got written letters from families who got to take their family of eight to a wrestling show for free, meet Doug Williams from TNA, and Great Ormond Street got £2,000.

  “None of us got paid, we did all that work, it was the best produced show, it brought eight different wrestling companies together, it was filmed with seven HD cameras, which is double what anyone else uses, and we promoted it on BBC London, we got as much promotion as we could, and yet it was unnoticed as an event because I was involved.”

  He admits, though, that perhaps some promoters had a logistical problem with the show – companies are so unused to collaborating as a general rule that they didn’t think BritWresFest could happen.

  “I come up with something that’s never been done, it sounds so big that half the people don’t want to not be involved in case it comes off, and the other people think ‘well, if he does pull it off, and we aren’t on it, then this could give him the leverage in the future, we don’t want an adversary, so we’ll say yes’, and actually the other percentage of people go ‘there’s no way that’s going to f***ing happen so we’ll say yes, what have we got to lose?’” hypothesises Shane.

  “I really enjoyed that show,” says Mark Andrews, who featured in PROGRESS Wrestling’s match. “It was a spectacle, it’s just such a big show, it looks really professional; that’s what British wrestling should be if it’s on TV. I just thought it was awesome. Also because it was on the same day as WrestleMania, I thought if I was a fan I’d be having the best day of my life. I’d go to that show and it would be huge because of Doug Williams and all the British wrestlers, and a ladder match, the Lucha Britannia match, all this crazy stuff, and then you’d go home and watch WrestleMania – it’d be the best day ever! It was really cool to be a part of. It’s always nice when the production of a show is really high.”

  Of course, a big event like this involving dozens of promotions and scores of wrestlers ends up being mildly, endearingly shambolic in places – for starters, the two titantron screens on the stage were back-lit, meaning that every time anyone walked behind them, their silhouette was projected. There were a few video packages – glossy and well produced, but with spelling mistakes in the captions. And more than once the wrong titantron was played, announcing the wrestlers in the wrong order.

  Still, the major point is the money the show raised for Great Ormond Street – and the example the show set, demonstrating that, if promotions put their mind to it, they can work together without treading on anyone’s toes, pack out a huge venue – and make a hell of a lot of cash.

  Usually, though, they’re happy to stick to the status quo – and concentrate solely on their own brand.

  Chapter 9:

  In the spotlight – the UK’s current promotions

  Pro Wrestling EVE: the best of British

  Dann Read, the promoter of Pro Wrestling EVE, began in the ring, as a wrestling trainee at Hammerlock in 1999, working on some of the weekend camps, and then in 2002, while working in radio in Suffolk, he suggested the station should host a wrestling show as a publicity stunt.

  “The town was dying,” he says candidly. “We’d hit the boom, and it was bust. The radio station needed to come up with a gimmick, and wanted to do a live outside broadcast. And I said: ‘Well, we could do a wrestling show.’”

  Read’s colleagues thought he was “asking for trouble” but gave him the go-ahead to crack on with his plan regardless. “I’d drifted away from Hammerlock by that point, I was doing my own thing. So I booked the venue.”

  At this stage, Read was still a teenager, and was making use of contacts he had already made in the business to put the card together – as well as using his own savvy to work out the best ways to get publicity.

  “I wanted a draw for the show, and one person who I noticed was getting a lot of attention was Low-Ki – he was getting a lot of attention from the magazines over here. I knew I didn’t have the budget to book page ads, and I also was smart enough to know that if you buy an ad, that’s great, but it doesn’t mean a lot because it’s very easy to skip over. If you can get people to talk about you, then people will read about you.

  “PowerSlam had been going on about Low-Ki, so I spoke to a couple of other wrestlers and said: ‘Do you know this guy Low-Ki?’ They said: ‘Yeah, he’s awesome, he’s superb.’ I’d never seen him before, but I booked Low-Ki for the show, just on the basis that he was a guy that everyone was raving about, and I knew the cost of him would get me a lot more in advertising. So I booked him on the show.”

  So that was the big draw – but obviously he needed people to wrestle against. Read opted to put together a tournament-style card; as the show was going to be a one-off, this kind of immediate pay-off was more likely to get fans invested in the action straight away. He booked top UK names such as Jody Fleisch, Jonny Storm and Doug Williams – and then found himself with a gap on the roster he needed to fill. Again, he had to draw on the expertise of people working in the industry.

  “I said to Alex Shane, ‘I’ve got one place left in the tournament,’ and he said: ‘I’ve got this trainee called Hade Vansen – he’s phenomenal.’ I said, ‘Will he have a good match with Jody?’ and he said: ‘Yeah, he’ll be tremendous – he’s going to be a big star one day. I’m telling you. He’ll be ending up in WWE.’ And he did.”

  That first show Read promoted was held on Saturday 13 July 2002. Even though he had planned it as a self-contained evening of wrestling, he had one eye on the potential of it developing as a business. “I think everyone always thinks about the future. If you’re a fan, this is like a dream job – running wrestling shows. I thought: ‘This is great. I could keep doing it.’ And it all seemed so easy. Well, it seems so easy until you’re actually doing it. It was a lot harder to do back then than it is now because it was so guarded.”

  This is an unpleasant reminder of the jealously close-knit wrestling promotion system. Yes, the Joint Promotions monopoly may have been broken, but the remnants of this territorial outlook linger on even today. “I had people ring me up and say: ‘If you don’t pay me X amount, then I’m going to get these guys off your show, because I’ll tell them if they work for you then I’ll never use them again and I do more shows.’ So there was a lot of stuff like that going on because the business was so guarded. Really, I don’t know if that show would have gone ahead if it wasn’t for Dino Scarlo.”

  The Scarlos are a famous wrestling family – Dino and his father Tony trained and worked with the new generation of workers in the UK, giving their name to today’s Scarlo Scholarship title, contested by some of the top young British talent.

  “Dino really put his arse out there. I don’t know if he was trying to protect me or protect the industry, because I did get a lot of attention, and I did manage to do what nobody else was really doing at that point, which was get attention from PowerSlam. It was all hard to do, but I was thinking I want to do this longer, and all the politics were kicking in – which I underst
and now. Who the hell was I to come along and potentially f*** up an industry?

  “We’ve seen so many times since then, there’s been nothing but embarrassment, trouble and bad exposure for the British wrestling industry. I had no real business guidance – been around five minutes, trying to do this job – so I understand exactly why, I don’t blame them for doing it. But Dino put his neck out for me, and the show went off, and got tremendous reviews.

  “I remember the phone call that I got – I remember absolutely everything about the phone call, I remember exactly where I was, I remember what I was looking at, Dino’s ridiculously respected and revered in this industry, and rightly so, and he phoned me up and said ‘you didn’t have anywhere near the budget that we have for Revival’ – which was the FWA show – ‘but you put on a show that some people said was better, and you ought to be bloody proud of yourself for that.’ It was so cool.”

  Read kept up his working contact with Scarlo “to the point where I remember him calling me and asking me for my opinions on Greg Lambert, who I’d met purely by chance at Revival. We’d got talking, and I’d said: ‘Look, I need somebody to do write-ups for the website and everything for the show that’s coming up, because I don’t know how to do any of that s***.’ He said ‘well, I can do that’, and I said ‘OK, cool’.

  “So that’s how he got into the business. I gave him all the guys’ phone numbers so he could phone them up and do interviews with them for the website, building up the show that I was putting on. So Dino asked me what Greg was like, and I said ‘seriously, bring him in – he’d be awesome as a manager’, and that’s what they did. And he WAS awesome as a manager.”

  Read admits he is always looking for something novel to do with his shows and with his wrestlers, to make his promotion and his roster stand out from the crowd.

  “It’s not just about doing things, though,” he points out. “It’s about doing things the right way.

  “If you look at everything I’ve done with EVE, it went from one show to a big old set-up where we brought in a lot more people from outside the country, and then we went to bringing Japanese over, and then we went to doing live iPPVs [internet pay-per-views]. It’s always evolved, there’s always been something bigger. That’s just how I work. That’s how I worked when I was promoting guys – I’m always trying to come up with something different.”

  As he started out on his promoting career, mostly featuring men at the top of the bill, Read began to notice just how hard female wrestlers were working for little recognition. “Nobody else was really giving them a chance. It was just the odd girls’ match here and there. Even when I’d got into the business, there weren’t really any girls who’d kept at it. You’d hear people who are respected veterans on the scene saying things about doing a tombstone piledriver [a very dangerous move, forbidden in many promotions, where one wrestler has the other wrestler upside down, keeping her in place using her knees and holding her face in tight towards her crotch, and drops her, apparently on to her head] so you’ve got something for the guys, and doing a lot of leg scissors, things like that.

  “There weren’t many people like Kat [Waters, a guest on Read’s promotion, Hammerlock’s Nikita] around before that – but I saw that there were a lot of girls out there who just wanted to wrestle. It wasn’t about something for the guys, it wasn’t about anything like that. It was about wanting to actually wrestle and put on actual wrestling matches – not girls’ style matches.”

  Indeed – peculiar as it may sound, some traditionalists still stuck (and are sticking) to the idea that women have to wrestle in a particular way. Yes, that’s “girls’ style”.

  “Yes, you’ve got to learn to ‘work like a girl’, apparently,” says Read, with heavy irony. “But seriously, at the end of the day, if you’re a wrestler, you go in there, you have a story, and you have a strategy to win your match. So at this point we were getting Eden Black coming through, Jetta coming through, Sky, Jade, Sarah Jones – there were so many girls on the UK scene. So I looked at it and thought: ‘Right – let’s see what we can do.’”

  After discussing the possibilities with friends and colleagues and deciding that the women on the UK scene deserved their own platform so that they could be featured on a bill as stars, rather than filler or distractions between men’s matches, Read never had any doubt that his new promotion would find an audience.

  “When you’re told you can’t have something, it makes you want it. When you’re not being given something, it makes you want it, and nobody was really giving fans women’s wrestling,” says Read. And then he corrects himself. “Well – proper women’s wrestling.”

  Although Read admits that his initial decision was purely business-driven rather than motivated by any desire to bring equality to the scene, he’d become more interested in women’s wrestling in recent years.

  “I wasn’t really a women’s wrestling fan!” he confesses. “The first women’s wrestling match I ever saw was 1989 at the Royal Rumble [one of WWE’s pay-per-view shows] and that was Rockin’ Robin against Judy Martin. I thought that was pretty cool, you saw a DDT, all sorts, the girls were busting out moves you wouldn’t normally see until the end.

  “Then I got into the tape-trading scene and started watching the stuff from Japan, which was awesome. So I already knew what could be done in terms of that aspect.”

  So he got in touch with the founders of ChickFight, who suggested that he run a women’s show in the UK under their name – an already-established brand, with publicity behind them, a good communications set-up including a popular website, and the support to provide a good quality DVD of the show to purchase afterwards. In 2007, Read put on ChickFight UK shows that featured US stars including Cheerleader Melissa and Daizee Haze against British talent such as Eden Black and Sweet Saraya.

  After a handful of shows, though, the collaboration ended in 2008. “ChickFight I stopped doing, because it was starting to get where it wasn’t financially sensible. We’d got to the point where everyone was expecting Americans. If there were no Americans, they weren’t interested, which wasn’t doing much for our girls over here. We just look to America for our culture, and think Americans must be the best.”

  Booking international talent and arranging their flights and accommodation as well as their fee became prohibitively expensive. “The income wasn’t matching the outgoings. Everyone was just like, ‘I want to see the stars! Who can you bring over this time?’ and in my opinion it ended up becoming detrimental to the European scene. We weren’t making stars.”

  Read also had some life changes around that time, including becoming a father and a home-owner, meaning that wrestling had to take a back seat – until he decided to create Pro Wrestling EVE.

  “This was never going to be about which American we’d be bringing over. This would be about creating stars, and making other promotions elsewhere in the world want to work with them,” he says. “Before, it’d be that this person in the UK wanted to work with someone from America, and it would be all: ‘Isn’t it nice that someone from America comes over and puts on a good match? Doesn’t that show respect?’ Well, no. We said we’re going to make them want us. That’s what we did.”

  With his existing network of contacts, Read looked for recommendations for his roster, and trusted their judgement, but also took advantage of technology, looking up videos on the internet to see examples of wrestlers’ work, and asking potential recruits to film themselves in the ring and upload it as a showreel – just as casting directors have done for actors for years.

  In collaboration with Alex Shane, Read ran a females-only training camp to see whether there was more undiscovered talent around the UK. That’s where he first spotted Jenny Sjodin, one of the mainstays of his roster now, who is based in Manchester and has an MMA background, meaning her fighting style is stunningly strong.

  “I got to see who I felt was worth using and who wasn’t,” he says, and then corrects himself. “If I don’t use someone, tha
t doesn’t mean I don’t think they’re worth using. It just means that I don’t think now’s their time. You don’t use someone just because they’re a girl! I won’t use someone just to make up the numbers, and I won’t use someone because I think they’ll be good one day, because if you’re exposed at the wrong time, that could end up being very detrimental to your career – it’s very hard to go back on first impressions. You need to make sure people aren’t going to have their careers marred.”

  Read continues to innovate with his promotion, introducing an internet pay-per-view in 2012 for a variety of reasons. “It was everything. It was a challenge – can I do it? It gives us the opportunity to be seen. A lot of our audience is in the States, and so it gave them an opportunity to watch us live. We’d done the Ice Ribbon thing before then [a show with one of the leading Japanese female-only promotions], and obviously that gave us a lot of exposure in Japan. From a business point of view, it just made sense.”

  There is also the fact that Read is convinced that the talent on show on his cards speaks for itself and deserves the biggest audience possible. “My roster is as good if not better than any other roster out there right now,” he says. “I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t believe in the girls.”

  Even so, the organisation required to put on a successful iPPV is massive. “Jesus Christ, it was stressful,” says Read. “It was the most stressful thing I’ve ever done in professional wrestling. If you want to kill yourself through stress, it’s a fantastic tool. I recommend it for that.”

  With a decent buy-rate and a moderate income, Read is planning to repeat the experiment in the future – as long as it remains profitable. “Women’s wrestling is a lot more expensive than guys’ wrestling. This is a good way to get our name out.”

  He is also experimenting with adding one or two guest male matches to the EVE cards to win over the waverers who aren’t quite sure about women’s wrestling. “They either think it’s not going to be very good, or that it’s like porn,” says Read. “I’ve been accused of everything – I’ve been accused of being a pimp, I’ve been accused of encouraging domestic violence. You name it, I’ve had it said. I want people to experience EVE – see how good the girls are for yourself.”