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If one non wrestler was singled out for maintaining the integrity of professional wrestling that would surely be television commentator Kent Walton.
He was quite simply the single most synonymous name associated with televised wrestling from its inception in 1955 through to Wrestling’s Final Bell in 1988. Cairo-born Kenneth Walton Beckett began his career as an actor in films and plays. Our earliest sighting is in the 1937 film “The Arsenal Stadium Mystery”. He served in the R.A.F., later taking up radio and tv work. It was in the R.A.F. that he developed his mid-Atlantic accent, from mixing with Canadian airmen. He compered the ITV pop show Cool For Cats for 4½ years, and was a judge on the popular Thank Your Lucky Stars. In 1955 he was hurriedly trained for his role as a wrestling commentator with great help initially from rule-bender Mick McManus, a fact Walton later downplayed. He always named his mentors as having been Jackie Pallo and Mike Marino.
There are too many aspects to Walton’s wrestling work to cram into this potted biography. He always defended the authenticity of wrestling, even coming up with some of his own creations as the names of wrestling holds. He favoured the clean wrestlers and waxed lyrical about the “good-looking boys” Steve Viedor, Wayne Bridges and Jon Cortez. He also had ongoing feuds with principally three rule benders in Jim Breaks, Abe Ginsberg and Goldbelt Maxine, invariably concluding that he didn’t know “what they are beefing about.” And most of all for Wrestling Heritage fans, he developed a vocabulary and phraseology all his own and which we have called Waltonisms.
Unbeknown to most wrestling fans, chain-smoking Kent carried on both as a Radio Luxemburg DJ and as a producer of low budget seventies films during the height of his wrestling fame.
Fact-packed biographies do absolutely nothing to convey just what made Kent Walton the ideal wrestling commentator. He spoke with beguiling authority and the full gamut of emotions from admiration to horror, from admonition back to wonder. He mesmerised a willing audience with his terminology and mellifluous tones, peppering his commentary with just enough criticism for us to believe he was one of us. Most of all, he straddled that uncomfortable fence to constitute a defining omniscient oracle, on whose every word we hung, and reacted.
Kent Walton took to his grave the mystery of precisely how involved he was in the inside goings on of professional wrestling, and all those masked men who wouldn’t talk to him in the dressing rooms.
Kent Walton, born August 22 1917; died August 24 2003.
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