By David Mantell
Wrestling Heritage welcomes memories, further information and corrections.
January 1979 – the Winter of Discontent. Strikes, riots, powercuts and piled up rubbish. The punk No Future apocalypse came to life and the seeming collapse of the British Way Of Life. The one thing just to REALLY rub it in that cold winter was for the British to tune in to their tellies (when there was power) and be confronted with a loudmouthed Canadian giant calling the British “cowards” during their Finest Hour. That was the sound of so many jaws dropping open you could pitch an entire Third World nation’s peanut crop for that year into all the open mouths.
When Mighty John Quinn appeared on TV against Beau Jack Rowlands that month and declared that his father, a former war pilot, had told him that the Limeys were all cowards during World War II it was a national scandal. How dare, irate viewers chorused, this man come on the TV and SAY such things! When Johnny Rotten had slagged off the Queen two years earlier, knife wielding skinhead gangs had gone to sort him out in the carpark next to his recording studio. But Quinn was an altogether bigger man and it would take something bigger to hand him the beating every right thinking Englishman knew MJQ deserved. Someone blond from Yorkshire in fact …
More than Big Daddy vs Giant Haystacks, it was Big Daddy’s feud with Mighty John Quinn that really launched him as a national hero. Daddy’s mission was to take the bearded Canadian and shut his motor mouth for good. The former Kentucky Butcher of the WWWF in America, whom Orig Williams reported as having walked into Dale Martin’s Brixton Road office and stated his fee, was a shrewd operator – in America, antipatriotic villains were hated but they did not provoke utter shock and scandal.
For Brits this was a totally new experience and not only fans but the wider public marked out for the angle. Daddy and Quinn had several memorable match-ups, their two most defining being the FA Cup Final matchup pitting Daddy and Tom “Ringo” Rigby against Quinn and Rollerball Rocco as well as the final showdown match to a knockout at Wembley Arena that summer, headlining the first of three more-or-less annual Wembley shows to take place between this year and 1981.
For me as a five year old, one of the most impressive sights of the build up to the TV screening of the Wembley fight was the double spread photograph in TV Times that week of both men with their respective daily diets laid out on a table in front of them. Daddy’s consisted particularly of boxfuls of eggs (shades of Mr Strong from the Mr Men!) cheese and pint bottles of milk fresh off the back of a milkfloat somewhere. Quinn’s diet included large quantities of meat – several entire chicken carcasses, huge red slabs of raw beef, stackloads of pints of beer, entire harvests of cauliflower.
All in all Daddy’s diet looked rather healthier which is ironic when you consider that he was enormously fat while Quinn was trim and quite muscular. The mistress of the Crabtree household, Eunice was (somewhat predictably for the 1970s) interviewed about her husband’s grocery requirements. Echoing the sentiments of many patriotic Brits, she expressed the wish that her man would “shut Quinn’s mouth” for all the nasty things he had to say about Britain and the British. And on the big night in Wembley it only took Daddy a few minutes to dispose of Quinn by knockout (the only allowable method of victory in the match, not unlike Texas Death Matches in the USA).
Quinn, who was accompanied to the ring by a leather-jacketed Giant Haystacks (a “limey” ironically, but then again so was Quinn’s FA Cup tag team partner Rocco) only really managed to achieve anything in the match when he took a swipe at and spot-on walloped Daddy’s younger brother Brian Crabtree who was in Daddy’s corner. A series of devastating bodyslams was what it took for Daddy to cleanse British Wrestling of Quinn who, as per match stipulations, was forced to leave the country with his tail between his legs (so to speak). This Quinn duly did – just far enough so that he could enter the big German/Austrian tournaments that summer.
For Haystacks, getting reduced to being an adviser for the number one heel was something of a demotion, coupled with his loss of the British Heavyweight title back to Tony StClair by DQ (remember, DQ was also how StClair won the title the first time around from Gwyn Davies. I said there was a pattern! More on this in 1988!). Stax’s short reign around this time suggests that he could have been a last minute replacement to step in for Kendo Nagasaki as new champion. (Which in turn raises the question of whether Kendo would have stayed on as long term champion if not for his sudden retirement.) The Giant did get one more moment in the sun this year teaming with Rocco to lose to Daddy and the man who conquered McManus, Superstar Mal Sanders. But barely had Quinn left the country than a new threat from across the Atlantic emerged – again a former WWWF star, this time “The Iron Greek” Spiros Arion, the Greek-American who went from beloved babyface to detested heel in the WWWF in the early 70 when he tore up the head-dress of the beloved Chief Jay Strongbow.
Arion (whom, Kent Walton told us, was a friend of Quinn’s) arrived bearing a version of the World Heavyweight championship with the plan of putting it up for defence against every UK heavyweight he could come across. Joint Promotions decided to regard Arion’s claim as being the authentic Mountevans World Heavyweight title – ignoring the likes of Sammartino, Thesz and even Bockwinkel who were all hinted as being former holders of Arion’s title.
In one of his first UK matches, Arion wiped out forever the heel status of Colin Joynson. The former Boot Droog of the Dangermen tag team became a figure of sympathy after being viciouly bloodied by the Iron Greek in an early title defence. Back in 1972 big beefy Bulldog Joynson had bullied teenage Marty Jones of the Hornets around the ring and been threatened by ladies with loaded handbags. By the late 1980s a grey-haired Joynson was wrestling respectable clean world title matches challenging that same Marty Jones. And the turnaround all stemmed from the vicious juicing Arion meted out to him.
But if Haystacks had – in kayfabe – been scared of losing to Daddy then Arion’s fear of a Daddy defeat was of a more real life, behind the scenes affair. Arion found out that he was due to job his title to the People’s Champion and found a novel way to do a bunk out of the territory. Making a defence of his title at the Royal Albert Hall late that year against another Mike Marino student, Wayne Bridges, Arion simply pulled Bridges on top of him to get his shoulders counted down, then fled the ring and the promotion. Just in time too as Quinn had finished in the German/Austrian tournaments and was headed back to Blighty in the new year.
Before a fresh round of fun and games with the Canadian, Daddy had to quickly see off three other enemies, all of them masked. One of these was Chelmsford based journeyman wrestler Arthur “Buffalo” Bison who, by the simple expedient of putting on a mask and calling himself Mr X, suddenly found himself in the big Christmas Big Daddy match – a solo bout, no less! Bison did rather better for himself than Quinn had done that summer, making it to the end of round one, before finally being knocked out in round two. As far as anyone knows, it was Daddy’s last ever televised round break. The next challenger would waddle down to the ringside just at the conclusion of that match in the form of the grossly overweight Fatty “The Bulk” Thomas. Thomas also would later on wear a mask as the Masked Bulk. The third masked enemy Daddy would face was The Hooded Monster, a masked opponent who, instead of carrying a sword like Kendo, carried a far scarier weapon – a Big Red Book! Yes, Daddy had made it on to This Is Your Life that summer, where friends and enemies (including Haystacks, an unmkasked and unshaven Kendo, George still his old self and McManus) would come along to congratulate him on his career. Daddy (who in fact already knew about the show due to Eunice drunkenly blurting the truth one day) was also reunited with his trainer from the 1950s Sandy Orford, who told us what we already knew from TV Times that summer when he mentioned how Shirley loved to drink pints of milk as well as a little girl whom he had coaxed out of a coma some years earlier (when he was a heel/tweener?)
McManus, like Haystacks, may have been all chummy with Daddy in Eamon’s TV studio but in the ring the old wars went on. Having lost his European Middleweight title to Mal Sanders the previous year, Mick and his soon-to-retire South London Hard man partner Steve Logan went down in defeat to Daddy and Ted Betley’s young student Young David in a match which the future British Bulldog would later recall as the first time his mates at school were impressed with his career choice. Davey Boy would have other goals to shoot for by the end of the year. In the light of Smith’s cousin the Dynamite Kid vacating his welterweight titles for a career in the new world, Jim Breaks had regained the British title.
Much of 1979 had seen Breaks and Peckham based prospect Steve Grey feud for the belt – one title match had even been broadcast in a 12:35pm warm up for the 2:10pm Daddy/Rigby vs Quinn/Rocco FA cup match. Following Betley’s retirement Dynamite’s old friend Alan Dennison had taken over as Smith’s new trainer. At the same Xmas TV taping as the Daddy vs X solo bout Breaks and Dennison had got into an argument in the middle of a Breaks title defence against Smith, causing Smith to seemingly win the title.
The decision looked sure to be reversed, but equally surely there would be ramifications going into the new decade …
Nightlight added:
Interesting stuff, David. I’ve just been watching the ’79 Cup Final tag and YouTube, and whilst it’s not a bad match, it strikes me as a missed opportunity to have injected some serious heat into the Daddy/Quinn feud. As with the later feud with Haystacks (which led to their ’81 Wembley showdown), there was no real sense of Daddy being threatened by Quinn. If Shirley had conceded a fall, or if JQ and Rocco had won the bout, then this surely would have upped the stakes for the later solo confrontation?
I’ve never understood why the Crabtrees were so utterly reluctant to see Daddy suffer the occasional defeat. Was it always about not wanting to upset the kids in the audience, or were there genuine health concerns about Shirley hitting the canvas by this point?
Suffolkpunch24 added
A tournament is held for the vacant British Welterweight Title. After two televised draws,Jim Breaks defeats Steve Grey at the Wembley Arena. Sadly, Steve Logan retires from wrestling.
Ohtani’s Jacket added
ITV Wrestling says Stax won the British Heavyweight title in ’78 and lost it back in ’79
Lengthy Breaks vs. Grey feud followed by Young David beating Breaks for the British Welterweight title only for it to be held up on a disputed finish
Almost all of the Breaks/Young David feud took place in ’79, though. The blowoff match that led to the Breaks/Dennison feud was taped in Feb 1980, but the rest of the Young David stuff aired in ’79.
Tony added:
The Sheik Adnan Al Kaissy was here.
ITV strike that took wrestling off of ITV for 3 months thus ruining the arrival of Spiros Arion.
Wrestling Heritage 