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Liverpool hard man Johnny Mack roughed it up with the best of them: Dempsey, Riss, Sherry and the like for around twenty years from the late 1940s until the mid 1960s.“He was as hard as nails,” Buddy Ward told us. Such a description should not mislead us though. Johnny Mack was a skilled technical wrestler with first class credentials. He was the trainer at the Crosby Amateur Wrestling Club and trained Empire Games light heavyweight champion Tony Buck.
Johnny’s birth name was John McLoughlin. An accomplished amateur boxer he was a member of the Enka Club in Liverpool, Johnny should not be confused with Canadian heavyweight wrestler Jack McLoughlin.
Johnny was wrestling around the halls of Britain by 1950, most frequently for Wryton Promotions, wrestling the likes of Jim Mellor, Mel Riss, Tommy Pye and Cliff Beaumont. Never a regular main eventer he brought credibility and skill to professional wrestling. We saw him wrestle just the once, it was in 1965, and must have been in the closing days of his wrestling career. It was a career in which he’d wrestled the best and appeared at some of the great wrestling venues: Belle Vue in Manchester, Liverpool Stadium and the New St James Hall in Newcastle.
Apart from entertaining wrestling fans for two decades Johnny also bestowed on the wrestling world his son Johnny Locke (Johnny Palance).
Johnny Mack died on 7th April 1975. Following his death a memorial event was held in his honour with presentations of trophies in his honour to representatives of the Amateur Boxing Association and Amateur Wrestling Association. A number of professional wrestlers were also in attendance, including Bert Royal and Vic Faulkner.
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