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John Mitchell continued the fine wrestling tradition of his father, Dennis Mitchell. John was the eldest of the three Mitchell boys, brothers Steve and Karl both wrestling as amateurs. Karl was an amateur county champion and British amateur finalist.
It was John, though, that made his mark in the professsional world. Hardly surprising as he was immersed in wrestling from childhood, the Mitchell family enjoying long summer holidays in Germany and Austria when Dennis worked the European tournaments. Back home he would accompany his father to the wrestling and knew that he too wanted to wrestle.
Not that it was straightforward though. On one of those summer holidays four year old John fell from a moving Austrian train and suffered serious head injuries. Never mind thoughts of wrestling, survival was touch and go. John did obviously recover but was told he must avoid knocks to the head and would not know if it was a full and lasting recovery until his early twenties.
With such warnings there was obviously some concern in the family when John expressed an interest in wrestling and his childhood injuries meant that he was quite a late starter in the business. John’s first professional contest was in October, 1974, in his mid twenties, and he lost by straight falls to Count Bartelli at Sheffield. It was the start of a career that lasted about a decade, right up to his last match against Ray Steel in Blackpool.
Between these two contests he wrestled the likes of Mal Kirk, Pat Curry, John Cox and other top heavyweights not just in Britain but all over Europe and Japan. In the mid 1980s John retired from wrestling to concentrate on his career in the fire service.
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