Spandex, Screw Jobs and Cheap Pops

by Carrie Dunn

  He failed to make the impact he had hoped for when he debuted in TNA as Brutus Magnus, but dropping the first half of his ring name and being given more freedom have helped him to secure his regular spot on shows. “Certainly my first gimmick was not successful,” he admits. “I stood out in Gladiators by not being this stoic serious gladiator character, I stood out by being a brash, idiot, over-the-top pro wrestler. Then when I went into brash, idiotic over-the-top pro wrestling, they wanted me to be a stoic, boring gladiator!”

  It wasn’t only Magnus who was confused. “Kurt [Angle] was one of the first guys who said to me: ‘Why aren’t you doing your Oblivion stuff? I thought that was what you were coming here to do?’”

  Angle had first seen his new young colleague perform on Gladiators while doing media work in the UK, and was an instant fan. Magnus admits that there can be some politicking in the locker room, with divisions between the established wrestlers and the new boys, but he pays handsome tribute to the support of Angle and Sting: “Kurt and Sting are the two guys who have been very good to me and very keen to help lay the foundations of the guys of the future. The same can’t be said of everybody.”

  Angle has gone on record as saying that Magnus could be TNA’s first British world champion, which he describes as “very humbling – I was blown away by that”. He beams. “I hope I can prove him right.”

  Doug Williams held the TNA X-Division title himself for a while, but since then has taken a back seat in the company’s television programmes. On the plus side, though, TNA contracts allow their talent to wrestle elsewhere if they’re not being used on TV, so Williams has been making guest appearances back on the UK circuit.

  “I don’t have to do the UK circuit still, but I like to,” he says. “I like to see what’s going on.”

  Does he enjoy being back in the UK? “I do. There’s no huge pressure, so I just have fun and a very nice experience – especially as it’s in isolation, I think if I had this schedule all the time it wouldn’t be so much fun! But it’s good to see fresh talent and see how the UK scene is improving. It’s definitely on the up, and I hope and think it’ll keep going that way.”

  Williams may have been part of the group that splintered off from Hammerlock and formed the FWA, but he doesn’t see himself going back into promoting any time soon.

  “I wouldn’t want to be a promoter. It’s too much stress putting on a show, particularly for the money you make.”

  That is despite him enthusing about lots of the British-based wrestlers. “If I were a promoter here there are at least ten guys I’d want to book straight away,” he grins, and then rattles off a list of all the talent he rates. “We have a lot of talent around now, but not so many opportunities as there used to be. There are lots of smaller promotions.”

  Sometimes British wrestlers get asked to guest on shows run by the big promotions when they tour the UK – occasionally as a try-out for a possible contract, occasionally simply to use local talent as a cheaper option to flying over the lower-card ‘jobbers’ from America. That happened to Johnny Moss at the start of 2011 when he joined the TNA roster and faced Jeff Jarrett on their show at Wembley Arena.

  “I was approached in December of 2010 about working with Jarrett on the Maximum Impact tour in January – naturally I said yes. It was a great experience working in front of the Wembley audience with a pro like Jarrett: it was a pretty simple match which served its purpose and was well received by the fans as well as TNA personnel.”

  Moss didn’t see it as a stepping stone to bigger, more high-profile bookings, though. “I wasn’t really counting on anything happening off the back of it, even with positive comments from Jarrett and the agents. It was a one-time deal, I had fun, and that was that.”

  Very few British wrestlers get even a chance like Moss’s. Instead – just like him – they earn their primary income the same way the rest of us do – with a day job.

  Chapter 15:

  Outside wrestling

  SURE, some of the UK’s talent are full-time professional wrestlers. These tend to be the ones who are regulars for those long-running promotions who operate all round the country – they are the ones who work all round the country and have regular bookings at the holiday camps to entertain families all year round. It might not be high-profile work, but it pays enough to allow them to concentrate on wrestling full-time.

  So that means there are a very limited number of wrestlers who continue to be based in the UK while still making enough money wrestling to live on – and of course, that means most of the guys you see in the ring around the UK also have “proper” jobs or are still full-time students. Some of them have ambitions to either make it to America or Japan – the two biggest lands of opportunities for those who want to be full-time professional wrestlers – and some of them are happy keeping wrestling as a hobby and forging a career in a ‘proper’ job that involves much less physical risk and significantly more money than is available working the British circuit.

  Phil Ward, an IT developer in day-to-day life, thinks that his years in the workplace help him manage his wrestling career in a professional way, but also give him a more objective perspective on the way the industry operates in the UK.

  “I think that people need to take a lot more responsibility in their lives,” he says. “If I f*** up at work, and I go ‘well, such-and-such didn’t send me the images in time’, they’d be like ‘why didn’t you chase them, then?’ or ‘why didn’t you tell us beforehand?’, things like that. It doesn’t matter to them. All they see is that I haven’t finished my project in time, and they say: ‘Why haven’t you?’ If there is a good reason, and it definitely is someone else’s fault, then they’ll say: ‘Well, fair enough, that is his fault, but what more could you have done? Did you get on to him and make sure he gave you those images, or make sure he wrote that copy, or whatever?’

  “There are a lot of people in wrestling who are students or just past students or whatever, a lot of people still at university, or they go to university around 21, 22, so by the time they get to my age, they’re still students. Obviously I’ve been at work for four and a half years now, so it’s almost like a different culture for me. As an IT developer I’m very project-based, so everything’s from project to project, and there’s a lot of accountability for me, so I have to take a lot of responsibility for my work.

  “I think that’s carried over to wrestling, I think that when I was a student, I was lazy as well, I didn’t turn up to lectures, I did my essays the day before. There were some cases where I started writing it the night before, and it was so bad I’d rather take the five per cent penalty for it being a day late so I can write it a bit better because I reckon I can make more than that with the time to re-write it – no real accountability at all.

  “But I didn’t start wrestling until after I’d done that, I’d already started working.”

  He wonders whether having a job and knowing a business outside of wrestling gives him an increased level of perspicacity when it comes to assessing the successes and failures of wrestling shows. “I always take responsibility for my stuff. I think a lot more people need to do that, they need to think: ‘Yeah, some stuff has gone bad.’ There are actually promoters where they’re like ‘oh, well’, there’s always an excuse, like the weather was bad, or too good, or the night was wrong, or there was something else. Well, you should know this stuff. ‘There was a boxing match on.’ Well, you should have known that. Know your competition. That’s basic. That’s business 101. Look at your competition. If there’s something on that night, don’t do it that night. ‘Oh, well, it was raining.’ Really? Is that an excuse? Or did you just not promote it well enough?”

  After years in the wrestling business, former FWA tag-team champion Ashe is now focusing on his work in project management – “it sounds fancy, but it’s like saying ‘I work in IT’, it’s a broad scale” – and doing regular working hours for a good salary.

  “I’m trying to switch things around
and actually have some money in the bank,” says Ashe. “So at the moment, work takes priority. In 2011 I was doing about two shows a month – I was working quite regularly for Lucha Britannia and a few other places. Now I’m concentrating more on work, and that’s taking precedence.”

  Eddie Dennis, the ‘Pride of Wales’, has adjusted his wrestling career goals in the past 12 months. Up until 2012, turning fully pro and full-time was still his goal. He trained in Canada during 2011 and was still aiming to get a place at a Japanese training school at some point – a major step for someone who chose to do a maths degree at university to please his parents rather than pursue his martial arts training. That degree led to teacher training and working at a private boarding school in the south of England.

  Since a promotion to the position of head of year, though, Dennis has reassessed his ambitions.

  “I’ve had to re-focus my efforts which has meant significantly less of my daily routine surrounding wrestling,” says Dennis. “As well as being appointed head of year I have also moved out of the boarding house [at the school] and am also in a relationship. The new job means that, while I still try and hit the gym most evenings, it is often the case that I have a meeting with a parent or staff member which takes up the time usually reserved for the gym. In these instances work takes priority and the gym takes a back seat.

  “Also, with the amount of hours I put into my working week these days and wanting to also keep a healthy relationship with my girlfriend, I really only wrestle one show a weekend these days, normally a Saturday: this way I still get to wrestle regularly but also get a day each weekend to relax and also spend time with my girlfriend.”

  Dennis is content with that balance, and is fine with the fact that he may never now be a full-time wrestler. “I realise that my current commitment levels will mean that it’s extremely unlikely that professional wrestling will ever be more than a hobby,” he says. “I’ve made peace with this and am happy training when I can, staying in decent condition and continue to enjoy wrestling. In the end all I ever wanted was to be a good wrestler, and I’m comfortable that I’ve accomplished that.”

  Education

  Zack Sabre Jr began training at Hammerlock at the age of 14, and debuted on a show two years later. Despite his youth and obvious talent, he was always focused on balancing his wrestling with securing some qualifications, and went on over the next five years to perform in shows while studying and taking part in school activities.

  “The first couple of years while I was wrestling I was still playing football for the school and a midweek league,” he says. “I played rugby whenever I could. I’d done judo and karate.”

  Wrestling began to impinge more on his free time, but this was a change he was very happy about.

  “By the time I started wrestling training, that was every Sunday, and once I was able to train on the Wednesday sessions and Saturday sessions, that was three days of my week just gone, on Wednesday I’d go home from school, get changed, go straight over to the training school, train until nine or ten, then go home. The weekend would be like 11am till 5pm Saturday and Sunday. That was the basis of my schedule.”

  Even so, he got 11 GCSEs at grades A to C, three A-levels, plus a degree – just in case wrestling didn’t work out for him. With travel and shows eating into his leisure time, that meant a lot of hard work when he came to study.

  “It is difficult, obviously. The demands of university are much higher than when I was at school or sixth form. You have a lot more free time and it’s more of an independent study thing. I would quite regularly get behind on essays – and Monday morning lectures at 8am after you’ve flown back at six o’clock in the morning and you’ve got to try and make a lecture, it is difficult, but you just have to find the right balance.

  “Obviously being at university you’re trying to be a student and have friendships and try to live that life, but it never seems like something that’s a problem because you’re enjoying everything so much. You just have to be incredible at time management – which I’m not.

  “[Being a full-time professional wrestler] was always in my mind. After that first training session, I knew this is what I am supposed to be doing, but even without parental or teacher advice, I was pretty aware it’s unlikely that it would work out, so I was going to have to have a real plan. It is so circumstantial – the wrestling industry can just pick you up or drop you in a second. I would love to be doing wrestling forever, but I’ve got a back-up plan.”

  So the assumptions about all wrestlers being brainless meatheads may just be misplaced. Noam Dar and Mark Andrews both fit in their professional wrestling engagements in between their university lectures.

  Reflecting on his three years of a media production course, Andrews says he has found it relatively straightforward to balance his study and his wrestling. “Because wrestling’s getting a bit more consistent at the moment, maybe in a year I’ll regret saying this and I’ll have completely messed it all up because I didn’t have enough time to do both or something, but I’m hoping it’ll all go really steady, really smoothly,” he says. “It’s all coursework, and a lot of work is done at home because it’s all computers and stuff – so [I’m in university] maybe like eight to ten hours a week. My lecturers know I do wrestling, so whenever I tell them I’ve got a show somewhere else they’re cool with me taking a lesson off.”

  Indeed, one of Andrews’s lecturers sounds quite proud of his student. “Everyone’s always surprised when I say I’m a wrestler, because obviously I’m quite a small guy, so I always get funny reactions, but when we were all getting to know the class, in the first year, one lecturer was like ‘actually, I know something about Mark!’ and he put up my 2010 music video [a compilation of clips from his matches for that year, all set to a soundtrack] on the screen, and I was like, well, this is kind of cool, but maybe my class will think I’m a bit weird for wearing tights and rolling round with other dudes, but hopefully this will get me a bit of popularity instead of a few frowns!”

  “At first it was a struggle,” says Dar, who is studying social sciences. “But once I fell into my routine, they actually benefit each other. I need something to fall back on if wrestling doesn’t work out and I hope this degree gives me that. However, if I ever felt that I could become full-time I would defer my studies and commit 100 per cent to wrestling.”

  Some of the slightly older crew are also returning to study now.

  “I think it’s important to get an education,” says Marty Scurll. “I’m passionate about that. I don’t want to be like some of those old wrestlers who haven’t got any money left and who don’t have anything else apart from wrestling. Contrary to what some people believe, wrestling hurts, and I don’t want to be doing it when I’m old. I’d like to have a wife and kids; I don’t want to be an old, broken man with nothing.”

  Jimmy Havoc is another who is considering pursuing an alternative career through a degree in film studies. “I worked for a web design company for about three and a half years, and towards the end the company was really changing and I just started to really hate working in that type of environment,” he says. “I’d always wanted to be a teacher, so thought I’d go back to uni and get a degree and try and follow that up – plus it’s an extra few years where I can keep putting off acting my age and get drunk most nights with no remorse.”

  And is there an ultimate plan? “Teaching is the realistic end goal. But there is a dream scenario: I make a student film so incredible that Warner Bros decide that I’m the man they need to write, direct and star in their next Batman film, and pay me several million dollars for the privilege.”

  Having big dreams goes hand-in-hand with being a professional wrestler in the UK; everyone grows up imagining that one day they will star at WrestleMania, and very few are realistic enough to admit that it’s far, far more likely that they’ll spend their career in Britain working shows in venues with capacities in the hundreds rather than thousands.

  But with larger
clubs like the Islington Garage (home of PROGRESS) and Lava Ignite (home of PCW) selling out regularly, the indications are that there’s a growing appetite for top-quality British shows – and a growing audience who want to see top-quality British wrestlers. So what are the next steps for the UK scene?

  Chapter 16:

  The future

  NOBODY can predict the future with any certainty, but one thing is clear – British promotions and wrestlers need to continue along the trail that has led to this current resurgence at the top of the scene, relying on quality shows, a niche in the market, and increasingly professional attitudes.

  After her experiences with SHIMMER, Rhia O’Reilly is keen for all UK promotions to take a tip from their American counterparts – and for UK wrestlers to learn as well. She wants the British scene to have a positive vibe in which everyone is working for the good of the business.

  “SHIMMER is different to any other show I’ve been on, even the other girls’ shows – the mentality backstage, the atmosphere, it’s so different, it’s awesome. It’s something to always look forward to,” she says.

  “That’s what I want it to be like over here. Everyone’s nice to each other, everyone’s lovely, everyone helps each other out, it’s really fun, everyone helps with hair and make-up backstage, you can go up to anyone you want and if they’re not busy they’ll help, you can ask people to watch your match and they’ll watch it and you’ll get feedback, amazing fans – I want that here. That’s what I want here.”