By David Mantell
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Back in 1979 a nervous young welterweight called Young David considered himself to have hit the big time when, at a TV taping at Leamington Spa’s Royal Spa Centre (one of my my local venues since the mid-Noughties!) he got to be the blue-eye in peril tag team partner of Big Daddy as they defeated the South London Hardmen tag team of Steve Logan mk1 and the legendary Mick McManus. Everyone at his school talked about it, and well they might to see one of their own number working with megastars like Daddy and McManus on national TV. Fifteen years later, via Calgary, Japan, two runs of coast-to-coast WWF stardom, a World Tag Team title Wembley Stadium, the Intercontinental title and a run as the flagship of WCW’s own UK invasion, British Bulldog Davey Boy Smith finally actually got to BE Big Daddy! No, he did not regenerate Doctor Who style into big Shirley, but rather for several months he got to take over the empty slot left by Daddy as the household name around whom Max Crabtree’s Ring Wrestling Stars shows were built.
Having starred at the Twin Towers and at major arenas up and down the land, Davey got his big chance to be King Fish in a domestic-sized pool due to the retirement of Big Daddy. “The British Bulldog’s Homecoming tour” saw Davey generally tagging with former Daddy partner Tony Stewart to face and defeat much the same sorts of pairings who would previously have been sent in to bounce off against Big Daddy. The highpoint of an RWS show was no longer the biggest villains of the scene getting the Big Splash but instead getting the running powerslam. Like his estranged cousin and former tag team partner Dynamite Kid, Davey Boy was finally into the megastar pay/conditions bracket historically reserved for McManus, Pallo, Nagasaki, Daddy and Haystacks. The Big Daddy Roadshow had suddenly become the British Bulldog roadshow.
One man who was deeply affected by this whole situation was the other British Bulldog Dynamite Kid, still a star for All Star and Orig Williams’s BWF, and still, despite his dilapidated condition, a better-skilled wrestler than his cousin. Tom Billington was recently bereaved and the real-life feud between him and David Smith had torn their entire family apart to the point where Billington’s father had refused to see his sister, Smith’s mother, on his deathbed. Dynamite also blamed Davey Boy and his wife Diana Hart-Smith for having assisted WWF lawyers in their quest to obstruct his UK appearances as a British Bulldog, and ultimately for a false call to Japan claiming he had died in a car crash. With this in mind, Kid took it upon himself to turn up to a Ring Wrestling Stars show near his home and sort Smith out. The plan failed – Smith locked himself away while Max Crabtree managed to keep Kid occupied long enough for venue staff to summon the police and arrest Kid. (One wonders why he didn’t think of turning up to the show in disguise and then breaking out to disrupt Davey Boy’s match – he might certainly have stood a better chance of getting his hands on Davey Boy that way.)
The problem that Max Crabtree faced was that Davey Boy was constantly in danger of being lured back to American or Japanese wrestling by the right offer. When the WWF made that offer and Davey Boy went back there in August 1994, in time to be in Bret Hart’s corner for his Summerslam title match against Owen Hart, Ring Wrestling Stars went into its final terminal tailspin that within six months would see it die off after nearly 43 years business. It’s doubtful if Max was looking for a long term plan for Ring Wrestling Stars, rather a quick money spinning retirement fundraiser – Shirley’s stepdaughter Jane Wade has confirmed that neither Steve “Greg Valentine” Crabtree nor brother Scott was interested in carrying on the business, so with no heir to Max there was no long-term future anyway. The bigger question which remains to this day is whether Davey Boy Smith would still be alive to this day if he had not gone back to the States – he was fated to injure himself on a ring trapdoor set up for the Warrior in WCW, thereby causing an addiction to painkillers that would ultimately prove fatal. If he had stayed as a home country household name, would he still be alive today?
Davey Boy Smith’s 1994 sting in Ring Wrestling Stars would prove to be one last twist in the tale of the All Star vs Joint/RWS promotional war as it was the last time Max Crabtree really put up a fight against Brian Dixon. It was a good time to play catchup against Dixon as his flagship wrestler Kendo Nagasaki had also announced his retirement the previous year. However, Dixon was more adept and experienced at the art of pirate promoting than Max had ever been – he had learned the ropes as an outlaw indie in the days of Joint Promotion’s pomp – and he knew how to milk as much cash as he could out of his own company’s golden era. All Star had been limbering up for a Kendo vs Kendo war between Kendo Nagasaki and Lawrence Stevens on one side and Lloyd Ryan and King Kendo on the other. So, the theory went, Nagasaki’s own heat could be carried on with Lloyd managing *a* Kendo. The only snag was that of course Bill Clarke, who regularly played King Kendo, had also just gone and retired.
Still, as the great Naggers himself had observed in his Arena documentary “Anyone can be Kendo Nagasaki!” He meant that anyone who wanted to could *fantasize* about being Kendo Nagasaki, rather than that the barn door was open for Kendo impersonators, but by Nagasaki’s logic anyone could be King Kendo (and indeed in the past a couple of other wrestlers had filled in for Clarke.) So it was that Dale “The Model” Preston, tag team partner of one time Clarke partner Drew McDonald in his Ultimate Chippendales combo and good Lincolnshire buddy of Bill Clarke himself, took over the role of King Kendo and carried on partnering the mouthy Lloyd as All Star’s new top villain. Initially it was announced that Nagasaki and Lloyd had patched things up and that Naggers had given Lloyd and KK his blessing to “carry on his good work” so to speak. Initially Preston wore specially purchased new Kendo-wear that made him look closer to the actual Nagasaki than Clarke ever did. However in order to fool the punters into thinking it was still Clarke behind the mask, Clarke made a present to Preston, his mate and fellow Bostonian, of all his old Kendo gear including the extra-wide Kendo helmet and short sword.
Just in case there were any doubters that Naggers and Lloyd had patched things up, the two made one more mainstream TV appearance this year when they turned up together on Danny Baker’s Saturday night TV show on BBC1. Lloyd confirmed that Nagasaki was now retired and also revealed that he had been teaching Kendo to play the drums – and the two of them proceeded to play twin drum kits together in the TV studio (recreating a cut scene from the Arena doc.) For Danny Baker himself, beneath all his bonhomie and humour, the interview was a bizarre experience as despite his expectations, he never got to meet the man behind the mask beforehand, only getting to see the Samurai Sword Bearer (TM) when he strode onto the set of the chat show. For those of the public that did not follow All Star, Nagasaki and Lloyd’s appearance together seemed to confirm the prediction in an article on Kendo, Haystacks (who got the magazine cover) Klondyke Kate and Big Daddy, published in the Sunday Telegraph that summer but written a year earlier, predicting that the Lloyd and KN would reunite.
The real hot villain in All Star this year, however, turned out to be a most unlikely candidate – Danny Boy Collins. Suddenly turning a squeaky-clean scientific good guy into an evil traitor supervillain has been a popular US trick, best epitomised by the “Is Nothing Sacred?” heel turn of Barry Windham in 1988 when he forsook Lex Luger, Dusty Rhodes and the fans and joined the hated Four Horsemen. In All Star in 1994 it was Danny’s turn to shock the fans when he suddenly fell out with Liverpool Lads Robbie Brookside and Doc Dean and began a heated feud with them. Danny had been having a good year, having taken the European Middleweight title from Mal Sanders back in March (although Sanders would make up for it by regaining the European Welterweight title from Kashmir Singh in about the only two title changes in what was otherwise a quiet year for belts). Now all of a sudden, Danny Boy had changed his image and changed his style and became Dirty Dan Collins – the snarling stubbled rule bender with tactics as foul as his old self’s were spectacular. Initially Dirty Dan grew his hair longer and wore a leotard instead of trunks. He even still performed many of his old scientific moves in among the fouls.
Danny’s heel turn was not quite the first of its kind – Sanders late 1980s turn first set the pattern. but it did pave the way for later heel turns by squeaky-clean blue eyes such as Robbie Brookside in 1995 or James Mason in 2002 – the same golden haired teenage James Mason that was by now starting to get a real winning streak together in All Star. Appropriately enough Danny, once a heel, began tagging with Sanders, the man from whom he had won his European Middleweight title. Talking of tag partners, Danny’s big brother Peter Collins also joined Danny on the dark side this year. Peter Collins would eventually go on to be one of the biggest heels in the UK as Mr Vain Pete Collins, one of the biggest heat machines of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Even when Danny went back to blue-eye for a while for Orig Williams in the late 1990s, Mr Vain would stay Mr Villain, ultimately resulting in a feud at the tail end of the 1990s between the Collins boys for old Orig.
So both All Star and RWS were running hot programmes this year, and Premier had expanded its repertoire of championship tournaments by introducing the Worthing Trophy, sponsored by Sussex Ford Breakers, to add to the Ken Joyce trophy won by Pat Roach in 1992 and by Johnny Saint over Tony Stewart in 1993. Both trophies in 1994 were won by Steve Grey over that man Sanders again. It all seemed like good cause to be optimistic about British wrestling’s future. One man who was definitely not positive about the current state of Traditional British wrestling, however was former journeyman Andre Baker who had bumped around the bottom of Joint bills for years without making it onto TV. The newly (re)launched Power slam interviewed Baker about his new Americanized promotion Hammerlock and how he aimed to get young wrestlers to train with him so that they could bypass the traditional British scene and go on to have American careers. Baker claimed how he would do everything in his power to persuade his students to have nothing to do with the traditional UK scene. He must have been gutted when his most touted student, one Doug Williams, went on to become a British and European Heavyweight champion for All Star Wrestling and a finalist for six straight years (five of those six the winner) for Premier’s Worthing Trophy from 2002-2007 as well as the 2007 winner of the Ken Joyce memorial trophy (about all of which, of course, PowerSlam was curiously silent.)
1994 would also end on a sad note for British wrestling with the death of Bobby Barron, the man who ran the world’s last shoot challenge booth out of Blackpool’s Pleasure Beach Horseshoe Bar. Wrestlers like Robbie Brookside, Steve Regal, Klondyke Kate and Keith Myatt had all worked as carny shooters taking on all comers and defending carnival money by hooking the all comers with brutal submission holds that allowed them to take out even top amateur free-stylists. It fell to Regal, briefly back here on leave from WCW where he had clocked up two TV title reigns – to promote a tribute show for Barron, which he did at Christmas 1994 in Blackpool. Sadly attendances were depleted by the Tower Circus, which had suffered a fatality on the high wire just days earlier, bringing in all the gruesome voyeurs hoping to see it happen again. Barron would always be remembered by the boys for giving the likes of Regal and Brookside a head start and allowing them to be ambassadors for the old school UK game.
With Davey Boy gone back to the WWF, RWS would spend its final months mostly in the North promoting tag team tournaments. It would make it a couple of months into 1995 but, as we shall see, when it was gone it was not too desperately missed. All Star might have gone off the boil and the tributes were starting to multiply like rabbits but Danny’s heel turn would be supplemented by another heel turn, while his old top heel manager and replacement top heel would continue to milk the golden era by re-enacting all manner of old feuds, especially with Giant Haystacks. It proved enough to draw the angry heat however. However, the big news for All Star in the new year would come from another masked mystery man – or two – over on the side of the blue eyes. For All Star, 1995 would be a mighty morphin’ kind of year.
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