By David Mantell
Wrestling Heritage welcomes memories, further information and corrections.
Danny Collins and James Mason. Two wrestlers that epitomise – perhaps along with Robbie Brookside – the career path of the classic top professionals of the 80s/90s/00s. Each man launched themselves as the Bambi-ish underdog kid, each became the hot promising prospect, each finally won gold and became established as the quintessential scientific wrestler du jour, each ended up turning villain for a while, each then hit a career high water mark. In Collins’ case, this was the year of his high water mark. In Mason’s case, this was the year he got his hands for the first time on the Gold. There was a connection – Collins moving up out of the Middleweight bracket gave Mason the break he needed to get his fist belt. Dirty Dan had won the vacant World Middleweight title when he was still Danny Boy in 1991 defeating another good kid later to go bad, Owen Hart, in Bath for the vacant belt. Now Danny was getting to be a bigger Boy and was ready to move up to Light Heavyweight. Having lost his European Middleweight title to Mal Sanders the previous summer, Danny simply vacated the World title. Since All Star did not seem interested in crowning a replacement, it fell to promising promotion Rumble Promotions of Gravesend – the baby of Steve Barker, to fill the gap.
Rumble made the most of things and decided to put on a supershow to crown a new champion on 21st February 1996 at the Woodville Halls in Gravesend. The event drew a crowd of 650 fans and was filmed and released on home video – just about the last major professional-quality TV taping for an old school British promotion apart from the odd snippets of Premier Promotions in the early Noughties filmed for “Johnny Vaughan’s World Of Sport” on BBC3. Scott Conway, promoter for rival company The Wrestling Alliance and reigning European Welterweight Champion Superstar Mal Sanders were the commentators. In addition to the big tournament, Rumble also put on an, ahem, Rumble (as in the Royal variety) and a tag team tournament, which saw Barbarian Karl Krammer and Blondie Barrett beat European Heavyweight Champion John Prayter and Mark Singleton, to set up a final putting them against current European Middleweight Champion Jason Cross and Robbie Brookside (despite him being a heel in All Star) who had beaten former British tag champs Steve Prince and Vic Powers in the other semi.
The eight contenders for the World belt were Johnny Kidd, Kashmir Singh, Steve Grey, Cyanide Syd Cooper, Flash Barker, Steve Knight, Jason Mason and The Mask (the late Dave George). The quarter finals saw Johnny Kidd beat Kashmir Singh, Steve Grey defeat cyanide Syd Cooper (their second match from the 1990s on home video!) Phil “Flash” Barker win against Steve Knight and that man again, Jason Cross beat The Mask. With Cooper and Mask, the only heels in the tournament, both eliminated, it came down to an all blue-eyed semi final of clean matches. In both of the semis, the younger keener wrestler pulled off the upset. Mason defeated Grey the former World Lightweight champion while Barker, the man with the Sting-stlyle blond flat top upended veteran Johnny Kidd. That left Mason to down Barker and end up as World Middleweight Champion at age 17. One man who was not impressed was commentator Sanders, who issued a challenge to young Mason. A couple of weeks later, on 13th March, again in Gravesend Mason’s first title reign was over and Sanders had the belt, but not for long as on Rumble’s next show on 17th April Steve Grey took the belt from Sanders. However, by the end of the year Grey had given up his World title and decided to concentrate on the Lightweight division. This spelled the end for the British version of the World Middleweight title, but all was not lost as there was still the CWA version in Germany which ran from 1985 to 2000.
As for Collins, his move up to Light Heavyweight paid off as on 2nd April in Croydon, Dirty Dan downed Alan Kilby for the British Light Heavyweight title, a title he would hang on to before losing back to Kilby the following year. Sadly this was to be the peak of Dan’s career as back injuries from his high-flying Danny Boy days started catching up with him. In an ideal world he would have been British Heavyweight Champion by 2000 and then perhaps gone off to have an American career, but instead he gradually scaled down before bailing out of the business some time around 2002 (two very late matches from Germany in 2001 on YouTube show him teaming with Drew McDonald and fighting against James Mason.) He would eventually make a comeback for All Star circa 2007 and eventually end up in WAW in the early 2010s where he won the company’s World Heavyweight title, so perhaps it was better late than never. One particular highlight of his later years would be his feud with brother “Mr vain” Pete for Orig Williams’ BWF, which was where he was last spotted before his first retirement, backstage at a 2002 WWF tribute show.
Brother Pete meanwhile had his own first taste of title success this year, teaming with World Mid Heavyweight Champion Marty Jones to win the vacant British Open Tag Team titles, beating the Liverpool Lads in the final. The title had been stripped from the Power Rangers when they had been stripped of their gimmick by lawyers acting on a tip-off from the WWF (although one single Power Ranger would years later reappear as an embittered heel character for Orig Williams.) Marty Jones also scored well in the singles division when he avenged his loss to WCW regular Dave Taylor in the British Heavyweight title tournament the previous year by beating him for the belt in Croydon. While the Superflies would regain the tag belts from Mr Vain and the World’s Number one (and hold on to them until their 1998 falling out), what happened to the British Heavyweight title and to Marty Jones remains a bit of a mystery (and is an example of why I don’t feel confident to take this series beyond 1996.) While it is reported on most websites that Jones vacated the title and retired by the end of the year, he was around for important events in 1999 and 2000. This will be dealt with in my epilogue along with just what happened to the title between now and Doug Williams as champion in 2001.
If it seems like titles were dying out this year then things were not helped by Nicki Monroe abandoning her British LAdies title after four year, although that vacancy would be filled in 1997. However, sometimes titles in British wrestling in 1996 just flew in from outside to fill the gaps. Lord Steven Regal had won the WCW TV Championship for a third time and in 1996, looking for something different to do, he took the top American title previously held by the likes of Dusty Rhodes, Arn Anderson, Tully Blanchard, Nikita Koloff, Mike Rontunda, Rick Steiner and Sting all around the world to locations in Japan, to CWA shows in Germany and, lo and behold, to All Star shows in Croydon and Hanley where he defended the title against his former tag team partner Robbie Brookside. There was much novelty to be had from putting up a title which a decade earlier seemed locked in a Southern US rasslin’ world of imported magazines and traded tapes of “the NWA” in the rings and subject to the rules associated with the World Of Sport style of wrestling so despised by those tape-trading types back in the day.
Still stranger things happened in Croydon in 1996. For one thing, one night just over a year before his legs gave way, Dynamite Kid was wrestling one of his last matches when he revived an offer to wrestle in Japan one last time. Needing the money, he accepted. (How much the match contributed to his needing a wheelchair the next year onwards is open to conjecture.) Around this time, Dynamite was also due to manage an invading contingent of top legit submission wrestlers from Aspull Wrestling Club (the old Riley’s Gym) in Japan, although this idea came to nothing and instead the contingent of Wiganners went over and fought a tournament among themselves. However the trade worked the other way when, one night, the ring was given over for one triple tag team match to the stars of pop art Jap Lucha promotion Michinoku Pro. On 6th February 1996 at Fairfield Hall, The Great Sasuke, Tiger Mask IV and Hanzo Nakojima defeated Terry Boy, Sato and Shiryu to bring to British shores what was described as “the first ever purely Japanese style match on British shores”. The good news is that they gave a fantastic match and, for Nakojima, it would lead to a long run over here in Britain. The bad news was that it brought to the Fairfield Hall a contingent of the “smark type” ECW loving, QoS hating fans of American Wrestling – one of whom was tape trader and PowerSlam columnist Rob Butcher.
Needless to say, Butcher used the power of the press to butcher the Croydon show. Of course he gave the Mickinoku Pro match a good review, while oddly stating that topes and planchas had never been seen before in a UK Wrestling ring (clearly he was pretending to have never seen any of Fuji Yamada’s old matches in the 1980s) the other three bouts got savaged. King Kendo was on the bill, still managed by Lloyd Ryan and had been set to face Giant Haystacks in a lumberjack match only for Haystacks to be lured away to a new life in WCW as the Loch Ness monster (and had WCW carried on with its Sat afternoon ITV slot a few more months then Stax would have been back in his pride of place on Saturday teatime TV.) So instead Kendo faced Rico The Gladiator, gaining a two falls to one win in a usual Kendo/Lloyd heat machine match which got the Croydon hell crew riled up. Butcher claimed that the audience rowdies’ antics were the only thing that saved the match from “banality” and complained about the “Jurassic” empowered referee who actually kept control. Butcher also seemed to like former 1980s rookie Steve Casey’s turn as heel Psycho Steve Casey, and expressed disappointment when this evening Casey turned blue-eye on Jones, setting up a feud between them.
Butcher saved his real venom, however, for of all people the legendary Johnny Saint, this evening wrestling Jason Cross, in what Butcher described as a “scientific snoozefest” like the complete phillistine that he was. He also claimed that Saint had been in his sixties when he, Butcher was still a kid, and even mocked Saint’s World Lightweight title, claiming that by WCW Fall Brawl that autumn, Saint championship claim “might just come true”. He claimed that the abuse from his smark contingent at the “ancient slo-mo” style that Saint would nearly two decades later be teaching the kids at WWE’s training facilities was representative of the crowd over all. Butcher’s comments earned him and Fin Martin a big target across both their backs which they would only try to stretch bigger during the remaining 18 years of PowerSlam’s life. As for Saint, who was certainly in fine form just three months earlier in a November ’95 camcorded match against Tony Stewart in Leeds, he was able to spend the rest of that year showing the likes of Butcher how his precious Michinoku Pro crowd really felt when he went over to Michinoku Pro himself for a season that summer.
Throughout July, August and September, Saint spent his time in that same Michinku defending his title against the likes of Pro Masato Yakushiji, Piloto Suicida, Mens Teioh, Yoshito Sugamoto and Naohiro Hoshikawa and earning respect from the Japanese fans who had fallen in love with Karl Gotch and Billy Robinson a quarter century or so earlier and proving that British Wrestling was the most important ingredient in transforming Puroresu from the old “American Sumo” Japanese babyfaces vs American gaijin heel pantomime to the wrestling style that trendies like Butcher claimed to be into. The final match of the tour was on 10th October at the Ryogoku Kokugikan in Tokyo where Saint beat Hoshikawa in four rounds of a one fall contest, wowing the Japanese crowd with his escapes and counters before finishing Hoskikawa with a big back suplex and proving that REAL puroresu fans respect old school British wrestling! After the tour, Saint announced his retirement but continued to work the odd match on and off until 2011, even making his US debut with indie promotion Chikara. He resigned his World Lightweight title in 2001 hoping for a tournament to crown a new champion, but 16 years later there have still been no takers.
Still, for all the Rob Butchers in the country, new school wrestling continued to flourish. Dirtbike Kid Jason Harrison finally paid off enough of his debts to run a couple more EWA shows one of which saw Steve Grey have an actually quite splendid technical match against the late Masakazu Fukuda although there were plenty of further appearances by Sabu and Rob Van Dam to keep the smarks happy. Meanwhile Mirror Group’s L!ve TV – the home of News Bunny, topless darts and other such highbrow fare would this year put on something called the UWA, featuring a lot of the EWA crowd – and yea verily Sabu and RVD – running through the late 1990s until both station and promotion close. Many of the familiar faces from the FWA in the early 2000s cut their teeth on the UWA. At this stage however – and so it would remain for the rest of the 90s – Traditional was Traditional and Americanised was Americanised and never the twain did meet. The Americanised crowd dreamed of a final heat death for proper British Wrestling and in 1996 it looked superficially like that was the case.
1996 was the year that saw Victoria Hall Hanley close for a couple of years for redecorations. In the event, the refurbished venue would resume wrestling shows in 1998 but in 1996 with no guaranteed future for wrestling at the Victoria Hall, a parade of champions was held where Kendo – not King Kendo but the real Kendo Nagasaki – come out and took a bow for the old time crowds. Simon Garfield was just putting the finishing touches to his The Wrestling book and used the occasion and the general mood around the business to portray a world coming to an end, even quoting Klondkye Kate about how a friend of hers was getting very emotional about how the wrestling was “all coming to an end” (at Hanley, but implicitly nationwide.) Even Brian Dixon was quoted by Garfield about how things were at their lowest ebb and there was no going back – an interview about which he would confess embarrassment when asked about it by FSM magazine nearly two decades later while still at the helm of a thriving All Star. Still, 1996 was for many years used by the likes of tape traders European Wrestling Video as a cut off point between the old days and the new. As for your humble narrator, living in Coventry doing his final year at University in academic year 96/97, looking for wrestling shows on and finding only WWF tribute shows advertised, this was the year I lost contact with the British scene, only reconnecting in 2002 when Traditional British Wrestling finally started to get itself properly organised online, particuarly with the launch of 1stopwrestling.co.uk and its forum, the first of the modern Old School British Wrestling forums.
But of course it wasn’t the end of the Traditional British scene and others can tell the story better than me year-by-year from this point onwards. I’ve told the story of the scene over twenty years, so to wrap up with, I shall outline what happened next – and what broader developments occurred – over the *next* 20 years …
Wrestling Heritage 