Wrestling Heritage

By David Mantell

Wrestling Heritage welcomes memories, further information and corrections.

By 1995, Brian Dixon realised that his company All star’s post-ITV boom period had come to an end and he was back where he was a little over a decade ago, as a big indie promoter orbiting a mainstream media star promotion. Back then it was Joint Promotions, by this point it was WCW and the WWF (in that order, considering WCW having the old Sat teatime slot) and nowadays it is WWE. But it is not for nothing that Brian Dixon and the Dixon-Muller-Allmark family are survivors and they still have a promotion nearly 23 years later. Their fate contrasts admirably with that of Max Crabtree’s Ring Wrestling Stars, the former Joint Promotions which finally breathed its last to virtually no fanfare in February of this year, a month short of its 43rd anniversary (setting a record which All Star would eventually eclipse in 2013.) after six months living on tag team elimination tournaments mostly up north after Davey Boy Smith went back to the WWF. Ring Wrestling Stars demise opened up a spot for number two promotion in the UK and that spot would eventually be filled by Scott Conway’s TWA, based mostly around the twin pillars of Southampton’s Guildhall and the St George’s Hall Bradford (just as Premier had Worthing Pavilion, WAW would soon have Norwich Corn Exchange and All Star had the triangle of Fairfield Hall Croydon, Victoria Hall Hanley and Colston Hall Bristol.)
 
Dixon was not above a spot of cashing in – although he never went full fledged WWF tribute, he had a few such performers on the roster such as Legend Of Doom Johnny South, and he was not above being a tribute to his own company’s recent past as we shall see with Dale “King Kendo” Preston’s antics this year. However he also knew how to cash in on current trends and it just so happened that the current fashionable toy/cartoon franchise aimed at the young boys market was something very adaptable to “Jap Lucha” culture, in fact very much inspired by it, I would say. 1995 in toyland was the year of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, so 1995 in All Star became the year of the Power Restlin’ Rangers. The gimmick was simple enough, a masked tag team done up as two of the Power Rangers, one red and one blue. There would be pots of money to be made and houses to fill so long as the copyright holders of the Rangers never found out. Some fans at the time denounced the Power Rangers as cheap, but I just saw them as an extension of the same cultural tradition which produced Tiger Mask and Jushin Liger in Japan – that is, the gimmicks rather than Satoru “Sammy Lee ” Sayama and Keichi “Fuji” Yamada – all of them comic book heroes come to life as masked blue-eyes in the ring.
 
Quite a number of different wrestlers would play the Power Rangers although most commonly the role went to Doc Dean and Robbie Brookside. Back in March in Liverpool, with Brookside’s mother and her granddaughter (Xia Brookside?) and author Simon Garfield in attendance, The Liverpool Lads finally regained their British Open tag team title in front of their hometown crowd after a two year gap. While Mother Brookside was overjoyed, Garfield reports that Brookside felt underwhelmed by the win. It only took a couple of months for the Superflies to regain the belts. Talking of the Superflies, this year, I witnessed Ricky Knight in action with Saraya in his corner in Croydon. I have to say that Saraya didn’t come across as a particularly evil heel wicked witch of the west like Princess Paula or Dr Monika Kaiser had done in the past – rather she came across as another soft-spoken naive young lass in glasses, plimsolls and a black catsuit who didn’t seem to grasp that there was anything morally wrong with interfering in a match and was rather nonplussed as to why the crowd were cussing her out ans an evil slut and similar. All a far cry from the red-haired matriarch of the Knight clan in later years, although I have seen a Reslo match from around this time of a ginger haired fold lamé dressed Saraya playing quite the scheming vixen quite well.
 
Just two months later, the Red Ranger and Blue Ranger had taken the belts off the Superflies and would spend several months holding the belts until the inevitable court order came through (curiously, from the same firm of solicitors that would send legal letters from the WWF) whether or not it was always Robbie and Doc, if it was them, that would be one good kayfabe explanation for them vacating the belts since Robbie Brookside, like Danny Collins the year earlier, would take a turn to the darkside, falling out with Doc Dean at Croydon and storming off to make a new life for himself as an angry snarling heel. This was quite an eye-opener as up until now, Robbie’s only heel work had been as Nagasaki’s zombie slave. I saw Robbie raise the ire of the crowd myself at Croydon that summer as he overcame Doc Dean, Rico the Gladiator and the Viking Warrior to win a fur man knockout tournament, using dirty tactics to deal with the somewhat Ultimate Warrior inspired Rico in the semis and then ex-partner Doc Dean in the finals. (Talking of Ultimate Warrior, he became just about the biggest legit ex WWFer to work for an old school European promotion this year when he beat Ulf Herman in a one night stand for Germany/Autstria’s CWA.)
 
Perhaps it was the new heel attitude that helped Brookside to do well in Premier Promotion’s tournaments that year as he beat Dale “the Model” Preston for the second annual Worthing Trophy and made the finals of the fourth annual Ken Joyce trophy before losing to Tony StClair. He also won Premier Promotions’ inaugural Wrestler of the Year this year. Tony St Clair incidentally ended his fourth and final British Heavyweight title this year when he vacated the belt. He would continue for several more years both in the ring and in the office both in Britain and in Germany for the CWA’s successor the EWP before his career was finally ended by a heart attack in the early Noughties. Dave Taylor won the vacant belt for the second time, beating World Mid Heavyweight Champion Marty Jones. Around this time Taylor began exhibiting increasing heel tendencies, teaming up with the likes of American Avalanche Paul Neu on Reslo. By the late Autumn, Taylor was splitting his time between All Star and WCW where Squire David was gradually in the process of replacing Bobby “Earl Robert” Eaton in the Blue Bloods. For a brief period, Taylor was able to get his face back on Saturday afternoon TV, however it was only a brief period as curiously, with the onset of the Monday Night Wars, WCW decided to pull out of the United Kingdom. ITV found themselves without any Saturday afternoon wrestling once more, only this time it wasn’t particularly their fault. WCW would not re-emerge on UK terrestrial television until mid 1999 on Friday nights on Channel 5, by which time the entire rise and fall of the nWo and the rise and fall of Eric Bischoff’s dominance of American Wrestling had all floated under the bridge and out the other side. On top of this, WCW had no tours of the UK between the 1994 Hulkamania tour and the two 2000 European tours.
 
Another loss to TV this year was the end of Reslo on S4C, which in the years since the end of the ITV slot had provided an alternative shop window and source of professional footage for British Wrestlers. Orig would continue to promote Trad Brit shows for a few more years, but by the millennium had sadly slumped into doing full-blown WWF tribute shows. This was mercifully cut short when Orig fell ill circa 2002 and his promotional activities dwindled down to zero. Still, while some things came to an end, other things were just starting up. All Star Wrestling’s Young Wrestler of the Year 1995, James Mason was now coming of age and heartily pursuing Mal Sanders for his European Middleweight title which he had won back from Danny Collins that summer. Unfortunately for James, another hot young prospect, Jason Cross would beat him to the trick, taking the belt from Sanders in November. (This would be the last recorded change for this title to date and as Cross is still active in 2017, he is still the dormant champion.) Still, the following year would see Mason bag a rather bigger piece of gold as his first title courtesy of Rumble Promotions.
 
Another wrestler coming of age around this time was Big John Prayter. A few years earlier, Prayter and his wife Julia had been the local heroes of Top Line Promotions down in Kent. Their occasional visits to All Star had drawn comments about how they could be “The New Mr and Mrs of Wrestling” and be able to teach Finlay and Paula a thing or two, especially after the latter pair’s mixed tag win over Danny Collins and Klondyke Kate. Now in 1995, husband John was the proud wearer of the European Heavyweight Championship. Another man to finally make it to Mountevans gold after years of contenting himself with trophy prizes like the Grand Prix belt and the ITV tag team belts with partner Fit Finlay was Skull Murphy. The son of the legendary Roy Bull Davies unseated Alan Kilby in Norwich on 23rd March 1995 before losing the belt back to Kilby circa September that year.
 
Murphy was also still in the main event scene at All Star as in addition to the Power Restlin’ Rangers, another tribute masked man was trying to squeeze the last drops of cash from the cow – King Kendo, now played by Dale Preston (in Bill Clarke’s old clothes) and managed by good old motormouth Lloyd Ryan, was still generating some old school Naggers style heat by feuding with old Nagasaki enemies – most particularly Giant Haystacks. The two had already had a double DQ in Cleethorpes the previous December and now Stax, as a blue eye, was determined to sort out KK/Preston and Lloyd. On one show I saw that Autumn in Croydon, (just before I went off to the continent for my academic year abroad as a modern Languages student) Haystacks was set to fight in a one-on three handicap tag against King Kendo, Skull Murphy and Lloyd Ryan, but Ryan cried off with an injured arm so it was down to Haystacks versus KK and Murphy – a tag pairing which summoned up the ghosts of the old Nagasaki-Murphy tag team from the Mick McManus World Of Wrestling videotape from several years earlier. Kendo and Murphy gave the South London Riot Crew plenty to riot about. Haystacks spent most of the bout handily dominating Murphy and Preston just as he had dominated in many a two on one challenge such as against the Wilson brothers in the old days. Things changed around when Kendo and Murphy smuggled a steel spike into the ring to stab Haystacks with in the forehead whenever the referee was looking the other way. Then in the end, they palmed the object onto Haystacks and got the referee’s attention just in time for him to catch the Giant with the metal spike and disqualify him. The win in the bag, the masked man, the bald man and the mouthy man all scurried away back to the dressing room in triumph as Haystacks – and the Croydon crowd – exploded with RAGE.
 
For all the progress up the sport being made by youngsters such as Mason, Cross, Stevie Jay, Justin Hansford and others around this time, British Wrestling was still a tough old game to get into even in 1995. Knight family scion and 1995 newcomer Stevie Knight would later recall well how the process of dues paying was still alive in ’95. “Basically, I busted my nose and my wrist. They used to do that to see if you’d come back again … I wasn’t what I’d call smart like people think they are now. I knew it wasn’t 100% real but you were always left wondering, is it or isn’t it? I had my first matches and I thought, “damn they hit a lot harder than I thought”. Some younger wrestlers with dreams of WWF superstardom would try to bypass the British scene altogether by going to the defiantly New School Hammerlock (soon to be NWA affiliated.) One young Brit who did his damnedest to avoid the UK scene growing up had been Jason Harrison otherwise known as the Dirtbike Kid. From the start, Harrison had eschewed the British scene by going to America, training in American style wrestling under former WWF enhancement talent Bill Anderson and his American Wrestling Federation. While in America, he had managed to get bookings with the much touted ECW and made contacts with the likes of Sabu and Rob Van Dam. Now he had come home to the UK and was determined to get up the noses of everyone in the British Wrestling establishment. He found a willing ally in Powerslam editor Fin Martin, whom he told in a PS interview that then end of British Wrestling on ITV had been a good riddance matter and that he dreaded how things might have turned out otherwise. A man who was the very embodiment of the smarkish hatred of Trad Brit Wrestling that Fin and his staff preached in his magazine.
 
Harrison first made his name promoting a show with himself versus Sabu in the main event in July 1995. Although I maintain that the Pallos “Wrestling Around the World” outfit in 1990 was the first Americanised/New School promotion, writer John Lister has recounted how the EWA, as Harrison would later name his company, promoted “arguably the first events specifically aimed at the UK’s ‘smark’ generation”. (Ironically, JJ Pallo was also on the bill as an opening match heel.) The attendance roster was swimming in smug future FWA types – student Dean Ayass as MC, 15 year old Alex Shane as referee, and future new school spot machines (and ssshh, whisper it, both future British Welterweight Champions) Johnny Storm and Jodie Fleisch were both in the audience. They got to see Sabu give Dirtbike his worked tables-and-chairs kicking. but the financial blowback from the show would drive Harrison to seek work with All Star. There, even the mild mannered Doc Dean would refuse to job to Harrison in a match to create a “European Junior Heavyweight title” for Dirtbike to take to ECW and trade with the likes of Sabu and Mikey Whipwreck. Doc Dean’s disdain for Harrison was nothing compared to the reaction of Karl Kramer of the Barbarians (last seen as lighter judo men that actually attracted sympathy from Kent Walton when they fought Big Daddy, now big beefy super heavyweights in their own rights.) Kramer moved out of the way of one of Dirtbike’s wretched high flying spots and Harrison was in hospital for several months. He didn’t learn his lesson and ended up getting a severe kicking from the Great Sasake in Japan in 1999 after disrespecting an all masked tournament he was supposed to be participating in.
 
But for the respectful and hard-working, the rewards were still there to be reaped. Jason Cross was already a European Champion, James Mason in 1996 would bag even bigger gold and Danny, sorry, Dirty Dan Collins would strike his high water mark – or high gold mark in the weight divisions for his original career run. Meanwhile the stars from around the world would descend on Croydon in 1996, be they Steven Regal bringing a top American title into the old school ring, or six of the best from Michinoku Pro fighting it out in South London and forcing Powerslam to give some coverage. 1996 will be my last full year article but as years to pick to go out with a bang on, it was a goodun.