Wrestling Heritage

By David Mantell

Wrestling Heritage welcomes memories, further information and corrections.

In the four years since Greg Dyke had kicked wrestling off Saturday afternoon ITV the UK had steadily gone wrestling-mad. Bigger and badder WWF tours had peaked in a reenactment of Titan Sports Wrestlemania III triumph at Wembley Stadium, selling itself as the potential re-coronation of The Ultimate Warrior as WWF champion,  but instead just ending his three years of on-screen enmity with Randy Savage. Only for their entire match to be upstaged by Pro Wrestling Illustrated’s 1992 Match of the year between the two men we long-time fans knew a decade earlier as Young David and Cowboy Bret Hart, in the match Hart now considers his masterpiece as a worker and which arguably was his audition piece for five WWF World Heavyweight title runs between then and 1997. ​

ITV had very little choice but to sheepishly uncancel Saturday afternoon wrestling, although in this case the main beneficiary turned out to be the WWF’s back home rival WCW. The company had got a foot in the door of live UK shows with the Roar Power tour the previous December, while ITV already experimented with resuming daytime weekend wrestling coverage by having the main event of each Saturday night repeated the following Sunday lunchtime in the LWT area only as part of Pat Sharpe’s Funday. Mullet man Sharpe’s old Funhouse may have been “a real wacky show where anything can go” but that was nothing compared to paring a Tom and Jerry cartoon with a brutal ringside brawl between Cactus Jack and Abdullah The Butcher. With the roof not having fallen in, ITV felt safe to move WCW from Saturday night to Saturday lunchtime and then gradually bump it back to precisely the Saturday 4pm timeslot that had been British Wrestling’s pride of place three quarters of a decade earlier.

So what was British Wrestling’s response to all this manic renaissance of interest in The Business? In the case of its top star, the answer was to go upmarket and find new appeal in the world of high culture. 1992 was the year when Kendo Nagasaki broke into a new big world of BBC2 arts documentaries, art gallery openings and other high-falutin events. Oh yes, and computer gaming show Games master on Channel 4  sort-of -finally put on that Hulk Hogan vs Kendo Nagasaki match which George Gillette had called for five years earlier, in the shape of a wrestling video game match. “Hulk”, operated by Hertfordshire schoolboy David Kaye defeated “Kendo”, looking nothing like Kendo in the graphics but operated by yer actual Naggers in full wrestling gear complete with Lloyd Ryan, in a round of computer wrestling filmed in an echoey church, all overseen by a cybernetic Patrick Moore, host of The Sky At Night on BBC2. Which leads us back to the subject of the Arena documentary which had been in the works late the previous year and for which purposes the Nagasaki/Haystacks mega match at Croydon the previous November had been held. This is not to deny that said mega match had been a draw in its own right, and continued the tradition started by Raging Belles of using BBC2 documentaries as a backdoor route for televising major matches – that time Klondyke Kate’s title win over – and administering of a career-ending injury on – her former tag partner Nicki Monroe, an action for which Monroe would get revenge in 1992 by coming out of retirement and taking the title from Kate. The BBC2 documentary tradition meanwhile, would be taken in a new direction by Robbie Brookside the following year.

But back to Kendo and his documentary. On-screen, the film told the story of Paul Yates’ quest to get a TV interview with Nagasaki while at the same time arranging to have Kendo’s portrait painted by pop art legend Sir Peter Blake. Despite the best efforts of Lloyd Ryan, (something of an antagonist in the film, although he briefly gets to be the viewer identification figure when he interrogates Blake about the process of portrait painting.) Yates eventually succeeds with his quest and, late at night in a dodgy car park, he climbs into a black limo and gets his interview with an out-of-character Peter Thornley/Yogensha – albeit wearing the black mask and the actual audio of his voice blanked off and replaced with subtitles. Of course like and good movie or any good wrestling match, it was all just telling a story. In fact Kendo had approved the film concept many months earlier, happy to do any film about himself and wrestling as long as it did not show either in a derogatory light. Nagasaki had done previous out of character print interviews for the Mick McManus World Of Wrestling book in 1971 and for TVTimes in late 1976 and ultimately, in a Nagasaki documentary, it was the most natural thing in the world for the man himself to speak out behind his mask, have his say and share his own unique perspectives on “the Nagasaki phenomenon” with the viewer.

As shown in the film, Peter Blake was regularly taking a fully dressed-up Nagasaki out to art galleries to be presented to the cognoscenti as, quite rightly, a piece of living art in his own right. It was the beginning of a long friendship between the two Peters which continues to this day. Paul Yates meanwhile, would work again with Nagasaki six years later in the short art video Images Of Nagasaki, perhaps the strangest and certainly the artiest promotional video in the history of the pro wrestling business (and a far cry from WCW’s infamous mini-movies of the early 1990s). As for Nagasaki himself, he continued to do solid business in the ring, pleasing the faithful and enraging the haters night after night, still in a regular partnership with Blondie Barrett who would continue to defend the British Welterweight title he won late the previous year before losing it back to former champion Doc Dean in round 9 of what was said to have been an epic fight in Norwich in July ’92. Kendo and Barrett would often be seen finding improbable ways to get themselves out of whatever hole they had been billed or booked into. One night in Croydon that summer saw Kendo and Barrett in a best of five falls, two versus four tag match. With his team two falls down (Blondie having been the fall guy both times), Kendo pulled out all sorts of tricks to turn the tables and rapidly eliminate the four opponents one by one, salt bombing them for a pin or in the case of Robbie Brookside, planting a salt bag in his hand and smearing salt on his own mask to make himself look the victim of a Robbie salt attack, so as to get Brookside disqualified.

Later on that year in November, Kendo, Barrett and the “new” Rockers of Pete Lapaque and Hit Man Hobbs against a team of blue-eyes led by Pat Roach. Barrett at the time was working an angle where he was supposedly suffering from a chronic head wound that kept re-opening and costing him matches by technical KO, as had already happened in the opening match that night against Dean. When Barrett came out again, the referee took one look at the scab (as in the one on his head, not some heel bashing on my part!) and sent Barrett back to the dressing room to make it four on three from the start, much to Lloyd Ryan’s displeasure. This was soon reduced to four on one when both Rockers were disqualified in one go, leaving Kendo alone to face the blue-eyed Bomber-captained foursome. Or it would have done, except that Ryan revealed a stipulation in the match contract allowing anyone in that situation to press-gang any wrestler on the bill other than the actual opponents to join him as a tag partner and put it back up to two versus four again and, Ryan announced, Kendo’s pick was Robbie Brookside! Despite protest from the fans and the goodies, Brookside gamely came to the ring and offered to comply, asking his friends, the opposition, to keep an eye out for him, so to speak, lest Naggers hypnotise him yet again. For a while, one questioned Kendo’s wisdom as Brookside in a clean, technical and sportsmanly fashion took on each of his chums one on one, shaking hands with them all as they tagged in and out against him. In the end, however, Kendo finally got his way and put Robbie under his spell and the two formed the most incredible tag team as Zombie Brookie straight finger chopped, salt bombed and Kamikaze crashed the way to yet another Kendo Nagasaki victory.

After the match, Kendo led Brookside back to the dressing room as Roach screamed on the microphone “Robbie- COME BACK ROBBIE!!” Once it was clear that Naggers was taking home Robbie as a souvenir, Roach demanded a triple tag match. I for one was hoping that this would see Kendo and Brookside team with a ready-hypnotised Robbie, but unfortunately it was just another of many such matches around the country where the third man on the team was Lloyd Ryan, donning the tights just as George had occasionally donned the tights (and the wig and the fancy onesie) nearly two decades earlier.(“Everyone knows I’m not the greatest wrestler around, but when I team with Kendo, his greatness inspires me to pin even recognised title holders like Doc Dean” Ryan told the official All Star Wrestling programme that year.) 1992 was generally not a great year for Robbie Brooskide – when he wasn’t getting re-hypnotised by Kendo or negotiating terms for his video diary (again, see next year for more) he was busy losing his World Heavy Middleweight title to former champion (for a week in late 1985) and frequent British titleholder in the division, Frank “Chic” Cullen. Cullen had been left out of the tournament the previous year which saw Brookside bag Rocco’s old belt and – so we were told- he was not a happy bunny. Cullen made his point by taking the title off Robbie in June at Bristol’s Colston Hall in June and defending it with a tough-nosed attitude that recalled the heel Cullen of 1986 and his Butlins match against Robbie. He would go on to hold the title for ten years until his retirement in 2002 and, together with Rocco, book the 2003 tournament to find his successor, won by American Dragon Bryan Danielson.

Still there would be one consolation for Brookside this year when he defeated Soldier Boy Steve Prince in a loser loser hair match and got to shave the comedy heel with the loaded boot bald (a mercy for Prince and his growing bald patch anyway.) Talking of hair matches, Drew McDonald had now grown his hair back to being longish and slick and, duly pumped up and with manageress and real life girlfriend Dr Monika Kaiser now stopping home, Mister Kaiser reinvented himself as the Ultimate Chippendale an egoistical heel in love with his own handsomeness just like Johnny England (of whom more below) or the American Ravishing Rick Rude (whose nickname was being ripped off in the UK by Ravishing Robbie Hagen.) As the Chippendale, McDonald would get on the microphone before matches and declare his disgust for the lazy slobby audience members who could never have a body like him! The Chippendales would later go on to become a tag team with the addition of Lincolnshire’s Dale “The Model” Preston. McDonald himself, meanwhile, would continue to use elements of the bragging egoistical Chippendale character even into the Noughties when he was quite tubby and once again bald.

Kendo’s feud with Giant Haystacks would continue meanwhile, as would Haystacks other feud with Pat Roach (now with the European Heavyweight title back firmly around his waist). Haystacks would find a new ally in both feuds with Scrubber Daly, the former Masked Marauder Major from Nuneaton and real life Nagasaki-hater. The two big mens’ matches against Nagasaki brought back memories of Kendo’s mid 70s feud with Stax and Big Daddy, who this year was still busy headlining his family’s Ring Wrestling Stars shows alongside partners such as nephew Scott Valentine, hot prospect Tony Stewart and Johnny Angel against such opposition as the Mighty Yankees and the masked Undertakers who were really Crazy Dave Adams and his son, er, Johnny Angel – leading the busiest multiple life since

Colin Joynson in the late seventies was tagging with Daddy one night and Stax the next. 

Daddy even got in one more TV match – still with a t-shirt under his leotard on, when he and Scott appeared on Reslo to defeat the masked Dau Dihiryn. Big Daddy was nowhere in sight however, when his brothers Max and Brian pulled off their biggest coup of ’92 by getting Ring Wrestling Stars back in front of TV cameras again for a taping in a balloon-strewn Basildon Festival Hall. The headline match was billed on the posters and on the video cover as Haystacks versus Pat Roach (and with the Reg Gutteridge-hosted Wrestling Madness tape on sale headlined by a Haystacks/Drew McDonald versus Roach/Brookside 1990 Reslo bout, there was plenty of home video demand for this match-up). In the event  the Giant partnered the Scrubber and Roach partnered Alan Kilby,with Stax showing an unlikely talent as a rapper in his “I’ve been downtown, uptown …” prematch promo. Eleven years after Stax got his team disqualified splashing Kilby in the 1981 FA Cup Final match  he was able to squash Kilby more productively in the video main event to get the winning fall for his side and leave Roach screaming with outrage yet again. It wasn’t a totally bad year for Roach however, as he beat Pete Roberts to become the first ever winner of Premier Promotions’ Ken Joyce Trophy – one of two trophy tournaments Premier still organise right up to this current year 2017 along with the Worthing trophy instituted in 1994, which fill the gap left by the demise of the old 1980s Golden Grappler and Grand Prix Belt tournaments.  Also on the videotape (reissued in the late Noughties as series of two DVDs, long after RWS itself was demised) Tony Stewart defeated and unmasked the now divorced Princess Paula’s new masked protegé Doctor Death. Stewart, incidentally gave a rather strange quasi shoot interview about his training regime to Princess Paula on the said Wrestling Madness video where he talked about running along the beach, stopping and digging up the sand with a plank of wood. It must have done some good for Stewart as that year he took the European Lightweight title from Steve Grey, who had previously been seen on the Battle Of The Brits video holding on to the belt with a 1-1 draw against Cyanide Syd Cooper, managed by the bowler hatted, cane-wielding Mr Madeen. Not to be downhearted, Grey that year won the European Middleweight title from Mal Sanders in Walthamstow and after briefly dropping it back, regained the title in Clacton in July and held it for the rest of the year. By the end of the year Grey was a double crown Lightweight champion as, twelve years after he gave Johnny Saint a scare for his world title, beating him in two non title matches before going down in the championship match (and four years after their indecisive tournament final at the Croydon Mick McManus video taping) Grey finally won the World title from Saint towards the end of the year.
 
Still it wasn’t all serious technical wrestling and hard-nosed violence this year. There was always room for a good old fashioned scam or gimmick steal, such as the visiting American Kenny the Stinger, who was most definitely not Steve Borden on tour. (We did get a couple of minor name Real Americans in our halls however- the Hustler Rip Rogers and the American Hawkwind played by Bill Danenhauer, formerly the Barbarian in the CWA and The Equaliser in Don Owen’s Oregon-based Pacific Northwest Wrestling, and later to find comedy fame as Dave Sullivan, the dyslexic “brother” of Kevin Sullivan, number one Hulkamaniac and secret admirer of “Diamond Doll” Kimberly Page.) Another person who wasn’t Steve Borden was Phil “Flash” Barker, who not only sported Sting’s original ringname but also his blond flat-top haircut. This was as nothing however compared to the latest image of sometime referee, some time man of a thousand gimmicks Frank Casey and his British Bushwhacker persona, launched this year. Casey was to benefit from some unlikely goodwill over the next decade as not only did the WWF send him a tape of the official Bushwhacker music rather than just sue his behind off, but also by the Noughties he ended up in triple tag team action alongside the real Butch Miller and Luke Williams! Other rip-offs started subtle but ended up going over the top. Johnny South had replaced the late Bad News Jimmy Monroe as Dave Duran’s tag partner in The Road Warriors, but they still weren’t the real Mike Hegstrand and Joe Laurinatis. This didn’t stop the duo from becoming the Legends Of Doom complete with haircuts, face paint and spiked shoulder pads, however South took this a step further by becoming the singles-wrestling blue eyed Legend Of Doom, enforcer of the squared circle, squasher of knock-off Undertakers such as Shane Stevens on Reslo, and eventual taker in 1999 of Marty Jones’ World Mid Heavyweight title. (Jones had metamorphosed into an arrogant heel after a forced alliance with Dave Finlay had shockingly gone genuinely cosy. One night in Croydon this year would see him dive in as substitute referee in a clean match where the ref had been knocked down and reduce it to a farce, disqualifying both men for the pettiest of reasons and then strolling off, leaving the competitors to shake hands and agree to a proper rematch some time.)

When it came to Brits who wanted to be Americans however, there was nothing like the Americanised sector of UK wrestling. Two years ago, Jackie Pallo had seen his Wrestling Around the World come a cropper. This year, while Pallo’s cousin was off hosting videotapes for Orig Williams, his idea was getting recycled by the American Wrestling Academy UK, another promotion offering Real Wild American Style wrestling. The company was knee deep in silly gimmicks that would have made 1970s French wrestling blush for shame – the Hypnotist, the Exterminator, the Terrible Turk and his equally terrible girlfriend Luscious Laura, Malicious Mel, Yuri Vlasov, an elderly blond Johnny England, the Preacher, Corporal Punishment and most bizarre of all VAT Man(“Mr 17%” an obvious rip of the WWF’s IRS). Apart from one TV taping next year at Leicester’s De Montford Hall, things never really took off for AWA-UK and soon one or two of their stars like Cpl Punishment (a Falklands veteran, allegedly) were popping up on All star shows. Still the new schoolies were learning – as we shall see, the next couple of years’ worth of New School Promotions such as Ricky Knight’s WAW and André Baker’s Hammerlock would stick around much longer.

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Anyway, as far as North Americans go, Kendo would soon have one hell of a North American to help out in his feud with Stax and Daly. WCW superstar PN News, better known to CWA fans as Cannonball Grizzly, had performed his Broken Record finisher on jobber Dave Sheldon in 1991, ending Sheldon’s career and ultimately leading to News doing the Record Company Drop (or let’s just say getting sacked by WCW) in Spring 1992. By 1993 he was back in Britain with a new name and a new feud to get into. However for Kendo things would take a stranger turn as a falling out with Lloyd would see the return of Battle of the Kendos – 1993 style!