by Carrie Dunn
She suspects, though, this might be a little way off.
“At SHIMMER, I’m sure many of them have aspirations to go to WWE or TNA or whatever, but at the end of the day, everyone there seems to want to have a good time,” she says. “They want to be there, they want to have fun, they want to have amazing matches, it’s work and it’s business, but at the same time, they want to enjoy themselves.
“Most places you go here [in the UK], a lot of the girls will be like that, but some of them have little cliquey groups, and some of them want to go there and wrestle and then leave, they don’t want to make friends. It takes away a little bit, even if it’s only one or two people, it’s a little bit of a downer. I would love it to get to the point where over here everyone is super-excited to be on the shows.”
One thing everyone seems to agree on is that there’s a huge amount of talent around at the moment.
“There are so many talented guys in the UK it’s unreal, far too many for me to mention,” says Lionheart. “But if I had to pick a few – El Ligero should have an opportunity to shine in the States or Japan. I’ve never worked with someone who has been as consistently good as he has for so long. Kris Travis is another one who never fails to deliver and is deserving of opportunities further afield, as are Joey Hayes, CJ Banks, Martin Kirby...the list is really endless. And younger guys like Noam Dar and Andy Wild will be signed in some way, shape or form easily in the next five years.”
Noam Dar is tipped for the top by lots of other people too, including Johnny Moss. “Noam Dar is tremendously talented and still very young – I see him following in Zack Sabre Jr’s footsteps. I remember Zack turning up at Hammerlock with his mam when he was only 14 years old. He took some stick yet still kept coming back – he has far exceeded all our expectations and is a tremendous ambassador for British wrestling.”
But if all these top UK wrestlers are going to get signed by international promotions because they can’t make a full-time living here, where does that leave the British scene? Will it continue to progress, with new generations of talent coming through?
El Ligero thinks so. “You have so much great talent already established in the UK, and it’s so great to see the UK scene bustling with ability and fresh guys.”
Others are a little more cautious, pointing out that more wrestlers coming through (and more promotions springing up) doesn’t mean that every wrestler and every promotion around now is necessarily better than the predecessors – as the scene has previously learnt to its cost.
“I would suggest that nowadays there is a greater breadth of talent,” says Majik with care, “and when I say greater breadth of talent, I mean utter s***arses all the way through to could be signed and could walk into any promotion in the world and do the UK justice. So it depends how you view, whether you’d rather pick from a smaller crew of maybe higher talent because in my day generally the crap was weeded out very quickly. If you couldn’t stand the pace or you couldn’t take the hits, you were gone. From what I hear, nothing compared to the two generations before me, but nowadays it seems like anybody with a pair of leather pants can call themselves a wrestler.”
“The talent level is at the highest it’s ever been, I’d say,” reckons Dean Champion, “but saying that, there seems to be a big difference between a s***ty show at the bottom and a very good show at the top. I try to go to as many shows as I can, just to see what talent’s out there, and there does seem such a big range from the bottom to the top. I’ve been to some schools where the guy who is teaching has probably only been training for six weeks himself and now he’s got four or five guys in the ring that he’s trying to teach. The level is very low there when compared to the top guys. There’s no middle ground.”
He thinks a bit more. “Some of the really small shows that I’ve been to, and I can’t mention any names, the quality of the wrestling wasn’t great, but the fans, the kids in the audience, loved it, so at the end of the day they’ve provided a product and the fans have gone away happy, so who are we to say this is good and this is bad? It’s really up to the fans. You just want to put bums on seats and for them to come back to your next show.”
And with that, Champion summarises the current UK wrestling scene – though the talent is there and the fan base are dedicated and the best promotions are impressive, at the moment nobody is quite yet in a position to think long-term, like the American companies with all their guaranteed funding can. The traditional emphasis on attempting to secure television spots for British wrestling needs to be tempered with an acknowledgement that production values need to be high for any potential programme for broadcast.
In terms of live shows, the traditional emphasis on attempting to secure the most appealing, star-studded cards possible needs to be tempered with an acknowledgement that money spent on huge salaries may not necessarily be recouped through ticket sales. There is a reason that companies such as All-Star Wrestling, Premier Promotions, Welsh Wrestling and LDN Wrestling have been operating consistently over several years (several decades, in the case of the former two) – they have historically kept their costs low without relying on banner names while at the same time delivering wrestling shows that their clearly-defined audiences have wanted to see.
“[Some promoters] seem to think you’ve got to have a crowd, you’ve got to have TV cameras, it’s got to be an episodic product, and people will just start turning up. That’s not how it works at all,” says Phil Ward.
As he concentrates on securing mainstream television coverage for wrestling, Alex Shane suggests that those involved in the current scene should know their history, and learn from the mistakes of predecessors.
“If the Brit wrestling industry is going to grow, it needs to be about getting the main wrestlers mainstream, getting the promoters to unite, having a platform that makes us look equal to the Americans, and also making sure the students know wrestling history, understand the mistakes, understand the heritage and also don’t repeat the cycles, the negative ones,” he says. “If you do that, you’ve got something there that can move forward – but just to focus on one of those elements or to focus on three and ignore the other one, you’re going to repeat the same cycle.”
He has a plan for the future. “I envision a day, and I know it’ll happen, I hope I’m alive to see it and I hope I’m involved in it, it could be in ten years, it could be in 20, but there will come a day when wresting is so respected as an art form – theatre – that parents will say ‘I’m going to the local community centre to see my kid who’s wrestling’, and there will be kids who run the music and make costumes or do whatever,” he says.
“It won’t be rated by smart marks, it’ll be just what you do, and it’ll be more entertaining than parents watching their kid play football because it’s a show, and the kids will be learning not just how to kick a ball, but how to become fit, how to increase their balance, their public speaking skills, their self-defence skills. It’s the most untapped and unappreciated form of child enlightenment possible – in all the areas of sports and physical theatre and nutrition.
“Once that happens and there’s that tipping point, it’ll become ingrained in England again. Then it’ll be a good day and we won’t have to do 100,000 people at the Olympic Village to be able to say we’re the same as WWE. We can say actually we’ve got a much better business, there’s more people making money from it, and we’re happy.”
Fundamentally, the solution is simple. The British wrestling scene will continue to grow as long as there are people coming through the door, money flowing into the coffers – and people prepared to take the risk to enter the squared circle.
Epilogue:
Recommendations
THE very name ‘professional wrestling’ balances out very ironically with some of the amateurish conduct witnessed in recent years. Though some of the mistakes and sloppiness may seem entirely benign, this lingering attitude is a huge contributor to preventing British wrestling from expanding and carving out a mainstream nic
he.
So a tip for wrestlers – please don’t work for free.
This may be a controversial point to some. Alex Shane, the man who is dedicating his life to reviving British wrestling, says he is not sure this is a helpful principle.
“I wrestled for 20 years and I probably got paid less times than I didn’t get paid,” he said. “I did five years for free constantly. If there’s not enough money to monetise a show, then who takes the hit? Is it the promoter who nobody sees, who sits at home and who gives people HD-quality footage to put on their CV to get signed to the WWE and when that happens the promoter doesn’t even get a cut? Or is it the wrestlers? They should go ‘well, actually, this is phenomenal if you drew and give me money. If it doesn’t make money I’ll come to you at the end of the evening and say thanks for that, it was a great night’.”
Yet history tells us that if a wrestling company doesn’t have a business plan that allows for paying their workers from the outset, it is unlikely to be a wrestling company that will have long-term success. Past mistakes have shown us that wrestling promotions need to have an amount of start-up capital to pay for venue hire and for their talent (and their talent’s expenses). The promotions that are hoping for advance ticket sales to cover their costs on the night are usually doomed.
No performer should find themselves out of pocket when working for someone who is making money out of their efforts. It may be tempting when a wrestler is trying to launch their career, but why would a promoter ever give someone a show fee when they have already shown that they’re willing to travel and work for nothing? They are simply making a rod for their own back, and they’re screwing over the rest of the wrestlers out there who have to cover their costs somehow.
Some wrestlers continue to argue very vehemently that working for free is fine when it’s something you enjoy and if the money isn’t there to pay you – but if a business doesn’t have the money to pay you or a plan to make a profit, the chances are that it’s not a very good business and you should steer well clear.
Even as the British scene has rebuilt itself, its recent history has been littered with dismal planning fails, admin errors, and useless marketing. All the best promoters and promotions – just like the best in every field – know that they’re not perfect and are always happy to take ideas on board; so it might be worth considering some more ways to bring some professionalism back to British professional wrestling.
1. Get your house in order
Stop with the naïve admin errors. FPW’s well-publicised issues with licensing in 2012 should have flagged up the necessity to double-check your paperwork again and again. If you don’t have the right papers in place, then you’re not going to be able to put on a show. If you have not spotted your oversight, then someone else will. Learn from others’ mistakes.
2. Prioritise your products. All of them
Look at your output – not just what’s in the ring (although that’s vital, of course), but your merchandise, your website, your social media, even the programme you give out. Make everything as good as it should be – don’t make it look like your little sideline that allows you to indulge your inner fan. On your website, check all your links work and that the navigation of your site makes sense. On your content and flyers, run a spellcheck, or (horror of horrors!) get it edited properly. On your social media, don’t let yourself get dragged into personal correspondence or anonymous sniping or little spats.
3. Your wrestling promotion is never going to monopolise the UK wrestling scene. Deal with it
Everyone is going to have to accept that British wrestling is never going to be run by a single monolithic promotion. It might have operated that way 30 years ago, but in an age where wrestlers (and fans) can communicate very easily and find out what kind of shenanigans are going on elsewhere, promoters are never going to have that kind of control over the industry. So like squabbling toddlers, you’re going to have to learn to share – areas and venues (until of course you make enough money to have your very own venue), fans (because, let’s face it, there are a finite amount of wrestling fans in the UK and you are never going to get a mainstream following behaving the way you are at the moment), and you’re going to have to share talent.
4. Uniqueness is good – and so is showcasing the best in the business
Having said that, sometimes it can be a touch tedious seeing the same names on everyone’s card. The promotions who have a level of exclusivity on their cards, or have the clout to bring in big-name imports, or focus on creating an original product even with the same talent – good for you. This is the way to make a thriving British wrestling scene, where everyone has a unique selling point and their own cachet – after all, everyone has different tastes, and not every promotion will appeal to every fan.
And treat the talent properly: not just the people on your card, because that should go without saying (pay them a decent whack, and don’t ask them to risk their necks doing ridiculous spots for you). It is broader than that. For a start, if you’re genuinely bitching and feuding with other promotions, the chances are that their wrestlers know everything that has happened. In ten years’ time, who are the ‘British wrestling legends’ you’ll want to be booking to attract the older audiences, keen for a dose of nostalgia? That’s right – the names at the top of the cards all over the UK now. If you’re alienating them now, don’t expect them to want to wrestle on your shows in the future.
5. Professional means professional
There is absolutely no imperative that means one promoter is obliged to point out to another what they’re doing wrong. There will probably never be the cross-country mutual support and cooperation that some dream of. The British Wrestling Council – yet another Alex Shane brainchild – was intended to professionalise training provision and bring together an alliance of promotions, but the take-up so far has been minimal.
And absolutely, wrestling is a business, and promoters should indeed be out to make money.
So perhaps everyone should have a plan to make their money by concentrating their efforts on their own work.
Spending your time and labour attempting to destroy or smear other promotions just makes the industry look bad. If a show is cancelled, you don’t then have a captive audience who desperately want to see some – any! – wrestling, and will happily turn up to another nearby venue in a few days’ time, or travel across the country that evening; you either have a really disappointed audience who will either stay loyal to their original promotion and wait for the next date, or a really angry audience who will decide that British wrestling is a pathetic farce and not go to any more shows, anywhere, ever.
Whether it’s defacing or tearing down a rival’s posters, hacking or trolling a website, posting anonymously on message boards, or something as apparently innocuous as having arguments with other figures in the business on social media – seriously, this is all the very worst of amateurish behaviour. It makes us all look stupid. This isn’t professional, and it’s no way to run a business or handle competition.
The way to do that, of course, is make your product the very best it can possibly be, and put your efforts into marketing that properly – then it’ll speak for itself. Don’t worry about what anyone else is doing. Just do your job properly and to the best of your ability – and put on terrific shows.
This is absolutely the only way that the miniscule fan base for British wrestling will ever expand – and the only way promotions will ever make more money.
Let’s all make British professional wrestling something worthy of the name – and make the industry a success.
Glossary
Babyface, face: a good guy
Bumping: taking a hit and falling properly
DDT: move where a wrestler has the opponent in a headlock and then drives their head into the mat
Deathmatch: match which uses a wide array of weapons and generally results in blood loss
Finisher: a move with which a wrestler typically beats his opponent
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br /> Heat: a negative crowd reaction (as in “that’ll get heat” means “it will receive a negative crowd reaction”)
Heel: a bad guy
Hurricanrana: move where a wrestler uses their legs scissored around an opponent’s head to take them down for a pin
Jobber: a wrestler who loses (or does the job) on a regular basis
Kayfabe: the fictional world in which wrestling exists and its events are presented as fact
Mark: wrestling fan; often used in a derogatory way to refer to obsessives
MMA: mixed martial arts; ‘real’ fighting
Moonsault: a backflip that lands on the opponent
Pop: a positive crowd reaction (as in “it got a pop” means “it received a positive crowd reaction”; “they’ll pop for that” means “they’ll cheer for that”)
Rat, ring rat: wrestling ‘groupies’; derogatory
Screw job: an unfair finish to a match
Selling: acting (as in “he really sold that move” means “he really acted as if it was real”)
Shoot: genuine, unscripted (as in “shoot wrestling” means “actually wrestling, usually according to amateur rules”; “shoot interview” means “interview in which the wrestler speaks their mind – usually negatively”)
Smart fans, or smarks: people who know about the backstage goings-on in wrestling, and are happy to talk about it
Spot: a sequence of eye-catching physical moves (as in “that was a spot-fest” means “it had very little content other than these rehearsed routines”)
Suplex: move where a wrestler lifts their opponent and uses their own weight to drive them into the mat (usually landing them on their back)
TLC match: tables, ladders, chairs match, which allows for the use of those items as weapons