Wrestling Heritage

By David Mantell

Wrestling Heritage welcomes memories, further information and corrections.

It had been a long wait for Brian Dixon but the five year extension on Joint Promotions TV monopoly was coming to an end at the close of this year and he was all ready for a brand new round of negotiations, just like the Opposition once the next General Election appears on the horizon. Dixon was to get his negotiations alright but as events turned out he would already get a slice of TV – obscure little-viewed TV but TV nonetheless – via an early satellite television channel owned by a frankly odd assortment of shareholders including WHSmith, broadcasting from the North of England to a fair spread of countries across Europe. Screensport, founded in 1981 and eventually merged into Eurosport (another channel to one day give British Wrestlers exposure as we shall see) in 1993, had connections to US sports network ESPN and was already airing their tapes of the dying years of Verne Gagne’s AWA to rival Sky Channel’s coverage of the WWF, but decided they would like to make some wrestling programming of their own and turned to Dixon.

​The result was All Star Wrestling on Screensport, produced by boxing promoter Pat Brogan. A couple of pilot episodes were produced in late 1985 giving Robbie Brookside his first turn before professional cameras and giving Rocco a win in a four man knockout tournament. In 1986, viewers of Screensport got to see such sights as the retirement match of the last ever Commonwealth Heavyweight Champion, Count Bartelli, former masked man unmasked 20 years earlier by his protegé Kendo Nagasaki, as well as seeing Mighty John Quinn win back his vacant World Heavyweight title in a tournament only to lose it back to Wayne Bridges again.

They got a taste for Keiji “Fuji” Yamada and his feud with Rollerball Rocco, which this year would see Rocco lose, regain and lose again his World Heavy Middleweight title to the future Justin Thunder Liger, at this point being tipped by Dixon as “the new Sammy Lee.” They would see Chic Cullen lose the British Heavy Middleweight title he had won from one Belfast Bruiser Fit Finlay to the other Belfast Bruiser, Rocky Moran, who in turn would lose it to Eddie “Kung Fu” Hamill. And occasionally they would see Joint Promotions’ own TV stars such as King Kong Kirk and King Kendo moonlighting before a different set of TV cameras. As with Orig Williams’ Reslo, the All Star shows on Screensport seemed to pass underneath the RADAR of TV watchdogs and so were able to push the envelope in terms of violence on screen, something that Rocco in particular took up with relish, freed from the fear of having a ban slapped on him by the IBA.
 
Having his own TV show on an obscure Satellite channel might not have been the kind of massive TV publicity All Star needed but it was a fillip in terms of status (the promotion even flirted with a rename to Satellite Championship Wrestling that year) and also meant that Dixon had some professionally produced TV shows to take along to show TV execs during the negotiating process as the year wore on. The only drawback, apart from the scantness of one or two of the taping venues (including one set of matches filmed inside what looked like somebody’s greenhouse) were the rather unfunny Chuckle Brothers style northern comedian commentators provided for the tapings. Kent Walton they were not – in many ways their work was not dissimilar to the kind of inane live commentary MC Redcoats would dribble on with at Butlins shows for the company. Incidentally, a video from this year of a holiday camp match pitting Brookside against a heel Cullen shows a wretched Redcoat imploring a family audience “Who do you want to win? The Scouser Brookside?” -yay! – “or the Scotsman Cullen?” – boo! More disturbing still, when Cullen starts using an illegal closed fist, the redcoat encourages the child audience to shout “FIST!!! FIST!!!” as though they were punters at the Anvil or the Mineshaft or some other Soho seedy dive of the time that Orig Williams would want his S4C audience to think was a favourite hangout of Naughty Nicky Monroe.
 
Meanwhile back in Joint Promotions, the big headline story was a feud pitting Fit Finlay against Big Daddy. Since Finlay had done a last minute runner from a Daddy tag late the previous year, the big man from Halifax had decided to take an interest in Finlay and his brutal ways. No, I don’t mean he was going to get the office on Finlay’s case for his stiff, hard working style (actually seen as a credit to the business in the context of British Wrestling culture) but rather that he intended to punish Finlay himself within kayfabe by humiliating and defeating the top Irish star with a good dose of Big Daddy treatment. Daddy came down to ringside to challenge Finlay about his brutal devastations of the young European Welterweight champion Danny Collins (who would more than get his revenge in later years as we shall see) and another lighter man Jackie Turpin. On the latter occasion, a whole barage of Joint Promotions individuals including Daddy’s own brother MC Brian Crabtree tried to hold Daddy back, causing him to body-check the whole group, filling the ring with prone bodies. Just so the rivalry could not be any hotter, one month before Cup Final day, Finlay beat his old rival British Light Heavyweight Champion Alan Kilby in a non title match and then followed up a hammering of Grasshopper Phil Johnson by kicking in a photograph of Daddy held as a target by Paula. When it came to the Cup Final match, Finlay received higher billing than his heavier tag partner, Scrubber Daly, against Daddy and Collins. Needless to say, Princess Paula’s man got duly Daddied before the big football match could come on (in what was to be Daddy’s final Cup Final Day appearance.) It says a lot about what American smarks would regard as professionalism on Finlay’s part (and Wigan Snakepit boys such as Billy Robinson – busy refereeing a young Shawn Michaels at the AWA’s Wrestlerock this year – would back in the day have called selling out). Clearly with two cup final Daddy tags under his belt, Finlay could be trusted more by Max Crabtree than his Riot Squad tag partner Skull Murphy who had been mysteriously pulled out of the 1982 Cup Final match.
 
Whatever your moral opinion of Finlay’s compliance, he did get the debt paid back to him as the Daddy/Ritchie Brooks team suffered a rare 2-1 loss to Finlay and Bully Boy Muir this year, well away from the TV cameras but similar in style to the televised 1978 Haystacks/Elrington win over Daddy and Gary Wensor. With the score at 2-1, Finlay was suddenly able to pull out his piledriver on Brooks for a deciding pin fall, leaving fans in shock and Daddy shouting angry abuse. Still it wasn’t all a bad year for Brooks – he managed to first get a draw against and then beat British Lightweight champion Steve Grey in non title matches on TV before coming up short in the resulting title rematch (much as had happened when Grey challenged World champion Johnny Saint six years earlier.) Another Finlay victim Danny Boy Collins was able to make another European tour with his title – with both his titles this time – and was able to benefit from a two way trade by beating visiting Frenchman Jacques Le Jacques. Another challenger to both Collins and Grey was Superstar Mal Sanders (although his first match against Grey was ruled non title due to Sanders being above the weight limit and a rematch ended in a double KO.) Sanders was no longer the polite young apprentice of the late Mike Marino but now a mouthy villain, nicknamed the Mouth Of The south (name nicked from WWF manager Jimmy Hart.) On one occasion, his villainous antics earned him a heft punching from Collins compensated by a rare DQ win over the young Euro champ as a result. In his new heel identity Sanders was able to rack up a collection of belts and a run in the ring that would go on all the way to 2016 and a few years earlier at a Croydon show would be one half of the first ever match a young fan called James Atkins, who grew up to be James Mason, ever saw.
 
With Daddy focussed on Finlay, his old nemesis Giant Haystacks was off on a tear this year, coming back to TV and making short work of Big Jon Cox and then squashing Tony Francis in a TV record of 30 seconds, leaving Francis wondering if he should wear something more suitable like a mask, or maybe a lounge leisure suit. Before Francis could take up a new life as a heel manager, veteran Daddy nemesis Charlie McGee was up to old tricks, pairing King Kong Kirk and Scrubber Daly together as a team to beat “Gloucester Gladiator” young Lee McConlon and ex Lincolnshire poacher Big Bill Clarke to earn a shot at Big Daddy and Danny Boy’s big brother Peter Collins, still just a College Boy and light years away from being the late 1990s/ early 2000s mega heel Mr Vain Pete Collins. Not that it did the heavies much good; not only did they lose to Daddy and the elder Collins in the big match, but even in the aftermath of their win over Clarke and McConlan, Daddy avenged their splash assault on Collins by tossing both the superheavyweight villains over the top rope. By Christmas, Daddy had decided to deal with both Haystacks and McGee together and the manager put on the tights (okay, the tracksuit bottom and t shirt) and teamed with Stax and Cyanide Syd Cooper, back to old duties after his title reign last year, to face Daddy, Brooks and a youngster fresh from Bobby Barron’s shoot wrestling challenge booth and indie promotion, Roy Regal or Steve Regal as he was usually known when not working for Max Crabtree. In his second TV match (after being knocked out by Marty Jones despite having a one fall advantage at the start of the match.) Regal was sent packing from the ring early due to a Haystacks knockout, in what Regal would later pithily call the worst TV match of his career. With the rookie thus disposed of, Daddy dealt with Cooper and finally handed McGee personally the Daddy treatment to which the Gentleman had for so long seen his men go down.
 
And still new foes came for big Shirley. Two future Daddy rivals reappeared on the scene this year, both with similar gimmicks. Clarke’s alter ego and Kendo Nagasaki impersonation King Kendo, fresh from a Screensport TV hammering by Tony StClair, faired rather better in his third ITV appearance in nearly five years, taking Romany Riley to a draw. Meanwhile Rex Strong the lifeguard from Blackpool who had teamed with the real Naggers against Stax/Daddy and lost both falls for the team and then been hypnotised and pinned by an unhooded and clean wrestling Nagasaki in 1978, put on a mask of his own and became a Samurai himself, getting disqualified for his brutal ways in the ring against Tom Tyrone. Next year, both masked faux-Japanese warriors would be Daddy fodder, as if to send out a message to a certain more established Samurai legend.
 
Meanwhile, more serious action was underway in the Heavyweight and Mid Heavyweight championship scene. Wigan Snakepit man Steve Wright, having failed to show for a crack at Marty Jones last year, showed up this time goose stepping around and claiming to be German like the good folks in the nations where he lived and plied his trade for the CWA. Seemingly unrecognisable to Kent Walton (even though Kent had easily recognised the mowhawked Bearcat Wright as Steve’s brother Bernie), “Bull Blitzer” as Wright called himself, broke rules and earned public warnings but in the end left the ring carrying a World Championship. However when it came to the return match, he once again failed to show and was stripped of the title. Jones duly knocked out Wright’s replacement on the night, Barry Douglas but had to enter a tournament in order to get his belt back. Another belt which ended up vacant this year was Joint Promotions/ITV’s shiny new version of the British Heavyweight title. Pat Roach had regained the belt from Steele and kept hold of the belt in a rematch at the last ever TV taping at Digbeth Town Hall (now rock/clubbing venue The Institute) but announced after a win over Skull Murphy (by now sporting red or black batwing facepaint suspiciously like he’d been looking at photos of Road Warrior Hawk in US wrestling magazines) that he was vacating his title to concentrate on his other duties such as starring as Bomber in Auf Wiedersehen Pet. A tournament was set up but a final match ended inconclusively with Steele and popular Punjabi veteran Tiger Dalbir “Gil” Singh both getting counted out. Singh would win the rematch and the belt and be recognised as British Heavyweight champion by ITV for the rest of televised wrestling’s run.
 
Other action for the purist this year saw former Welterweight title contender Mike Bennett defeat the Birmingham Steve Logan for this year’s Grand Prix belt and gain a knockout win over hot prospect Richie Brooks and reach the semis of the Golden Grappler trophy tournament with another win against Brooks, before suddenly emigrating to Australia, leaving the defeated Brooks free to instead face Steve “Greg Valentine” Crabtree. Similarly in the other semi final, Tally Ho Kaye was forced to pull out due to injury and was replaced by “Wildman” John Wilkie to face Mick McMichael. valentine and McMichael both went over their substitute opponents before in the finals the man whose name ripped off America’s “Hammer” beat the man whose name ripped off The Man You (Used To) Love To Hate. Talking of the Golden Grappler trophy, next year’s winner Mark “Kid McCoy” Boothman made his debut this year teaming with the winner the year after that, his father King Ben (Phil Boothman) to victory over Rick Wiseman and Mike Flash Jordan. Not long after, McCoy would be seen in a triple tag match alongside rare masked blue eye Ray “Spiderman” Crawley, roughly a quarter of a century before Brian Dixon was castigated for including a masked Spiderman on his bill. McCoy and Spidey teamed with Ian McGregor to beat Cooper, Jordan and unlikely partner Nipper Eddie Riley (substituting for Tally Ho Kaye) in a match that saw Riley turn on Cooper and refuse to play villainous ball. McCoy, with his famous Yorkshire Rope trick and other skilled moves was tipped at one point to succeed Johnny Saint as Saint had once succeeded George Kidd. Saint reasserted himself as World Lightweight Champion while his two rivals in the three cornered feud, Jon Cortez and Jim Breaks, spent the year passing the European title back and forth.
 
But of course all this was just fiddling while the Joint TV monopoly burned. This time round with a strong case of town to town box office battles, a strong roster and existing smart use of TV coverage, Dixon won a certain slice of the TV action for the next two years as did another promotion on satellite television, the World Wrestling Federation where two former lighter weight prospects, the Dynamite Kid and the man once known as Young David but now mostly calling himself Davey Boy Smith, were heavyweights and World Tag Team Champions, winning the belts from a team including the “real” Greg Valentine and often defending against the Hart Foundation featuring one Bret Hart, now no longer a Cowboy but a Hitman. on the last couple of TV shows of 1986, at the end a trailer was shown for an all new look TV wrestling show for the new year. Not only did it promise to introduce the British people to the delights of Hulk Hogan and let them see how big – in more ways than one – the Bulldogs had become, but it also promised the “Return” to the small screen of a variety of people who had mysterious gone AWOL from the small screen (unless you had a satellite dish) – Quinn, Bridges, St Clair (albeit with no mention of his still ongoing championship claim) and a raging Rocco vowing “Johnny Saint – just you watch out!” all curiously re-emerging from the All star Bermuda triangle into which they had vanished. Biggest of all was the unveiling of what was to be All Star’s flagship performer for the next seven years – “It all starts with the return of the great KENDO NAGASAKI”. Maybe Max Crabtree did need to stock up on impersonators like Clarke and Strong after all. Eleven years earlier it was Kendo’s feud with Big Daddy that had made big Shirley a star. Now that Crabtree and Nagasaki were the top stars of rival promotions, the time had come for Kendo to destroy the monster he had created.