Johnny Kincaid & Dave Bond v Pete Roberts & Kung Fu
Wrestling Heritage welcomes memories, further information and corrections.
“Never seen a tag match like it!” exclaimed commentator Kent Walton as he tried to describe the action in this exciting 1977 foursome from the Fairfield Halls.
It is incredible to note that this was the only television appearance together of the Caribbean Sunshine Boys. Even more bizarre is that, before this bout, neither Dave Bond nor Johnny Kincaid had ever scored a victory in their many solo televised appearances. The heat generated from this match was enough to ensure they didn’t appear in tag on television ever again, but they sure did around the halls and, in their 11 months together, they caused controversy all around the land.
So it is well worth analysing in some detail what was going on here to make this such a landmark occasion.
The match started cleanly enough with handshakes all round and five minutes of fast and friendly action. We learnt for the first time that Johnny Kincaid was a poet, and the commentator promised us, for next time, some readings from his writings about his opponents. These readings never came but you can read more in our Johnny Kincaid tribute.
Then, after one smiling handshake between Roberts and Kincaid following a super fast series of interchanges, Roberts turned his back only to be jumped on from behind and battered in the corner.
This was hardly earth-shattering stuff, but Kincaid’s arrogant strut away from the referee’s admonishments caused outrage amongst the fans.
Bond then used his elbow bandage to weaken Kung Fu’s eyebrow, and continued the treatment by grinding his own head against the similarly weakened area on Roberts. Kent Walton assured us this was within the rules, even though it was a “move” he hadn’t seen “performed” before. In that vocabulary he made all his own, he had told us he didn’t know why the audience were beefing about use of the bandage.
In essence, this was the extent of the dirty tactics used by the Caribbean Sunshine Boys – other than the usual double teaming that had been an essential part of tag-matches since their televised inception twelve years earlier.
Referee Max Ward was at his exasperated best, his expansive tellings off portraying experience and authority, but a different type of experience had him regularly turning his back on the action to allow all manner of double-teaming and dirty-dealing to go on behind.
The four protagonists seemed very well matched. Kung Fu’s red jacket in some ways camouflaged the vast amount of weight he was giving away, but he was nonetheless able to show flashes of his skill and speed and trapped Bond in a seemingly inescapable equalising fall, (left), following a great monkey climb on the heavier man.
Kung Fu had previously submitted to a straight arm lever suspension hold from Bond, and sold it quite beautifully, obligingly managing to spread his legs to enhance the spectacle.
Judo Pete Roberts, in time-honoured fashion, tried to continue after the break, but the referee was alert to this trickery and ensured a groggy Kung Fu re-enter the fray. Judo Pete was just as scurrilous as his opponents in twice entering the ring to push Kincaid off Kung Fu when a winning fall seemed inevitable.
The timing here between the three pros was great, but in a competitive respect surely these decisive fouls were worse than anything the Sunshine Boys dished out?
The end came amidst this melee in the corner with all five men involved. Max Ward belied MC Mike Judd’s very specific opening announcement that two disqualifications were required by summarily dismissing both Caribbean Sunshine Boys after 16 minutes. We hoped that one of the two villains would have been required to fight on alone, as prescribed in the rules, but it wasn’t to be.
Ringside-seaters were incensed. The best of the action was yet to come, however, with one fan jetting fountains of water into the ring and reaching Johnny Kincaid with the second. Kincaid was furious and charged for the ropes. The blue jacketed perpetrator fled through the crowds and Kent Walton informed us that if Kincaid caught up with him he’d “have his leg broken.”
Objective analysis of this tag match tells us it was good hard hitting and exciting stuff with all four wrestlers giving their all. But, in terms of action alone, it didn’t particularly stand out from the very exciting tag bouts we had witnessed down the years featuring teams such as The Black Diamonds, the Royals, The Dennisons, the Borgs and many other pairings, all abounding with double-teaming.
So what made this match so special?
In our opinion two factors were at work. Johnny Kincaid had developed from the quiet blond youngster who had been mauled by Logan, Pallo and McManus on the small screen, the junior tag partner alongside the lovable Johnny Kwango in so many earlier tag bouts. In this bout, we actually witnessed his heel turn, and in all the years of televised professional wrestling, it is one of the very few moments when we saw a wrestler change character from one moment to the next. His strut was magnificently alienating. Fans, and Kent Walton, were not ready for this.
We knew our goodies from our baddies. We even liked some baddies. But we certainly didn’t expect wrestlers to change persona mid-bout, thereby challenging all we held as gospel truth.
The other factor at work was something to do with race. We are no experts on the terminology that is right to adopt on this subject, but feel sure that the combination of two non-white villains struck some kind of chord here, in 1977 south London, that in some way magnified any rule breaking on their part to absolute cardinal sin status in the eyes of the spectators. Kent Walton knew better than to comment in any substantial way on such a delicate subject. Once again, by comparison with other south London pairs of villains from the same decade, whether The Artful Dodgers, the Roughnecks, or McManus and Logan, the rule-breaking here was par for the course, and was certainly far exceeded elsewhere, even on television.
There had already been a few black baddies down the years, so the race aspect was not an essential point in itself. Maybe it was just a combination of a good team name, the right time and place, and the cocky strutting and sneering from Kincaid that worked together to create a cauldron of heat. Not to mention an outraged commentator!
Dave Bond would go on to have three televised singles bouts against Judo Pete, would tag alongside Banger Walsh and others on the small screen, and would chalk up over his long career a grand total of two televised victories – against Tom Tyrone, and, very surprisingly, against the all time great, Count Bartelli. His best of three falls victory over Bartelli was clinched via the same submission move as applied to Kung Fu, but the commentator made no mention of it being a speciality manoeuvre. That result in itself is worthy of epic archaeology on this Wrestling Heritage site.
The next time televiewers would see Bond in the same ring as Johnny Kincaid would be a whole 8 years later from Battersea – with Kincaid running out the winner of their singles bout against each other in the town of his birth. However, in Kincaid’s next solo bout on television after this tag match, Bond acted as his second in a heavyweight match-up from Aylesbury against Johnny Wilson. Bond’s seconding was scarcely noticeable, and again, the commentator did not build up the team aspect at all – it seemed clear that the decision had already been taken that this pairing would have no further television exposure.
So this single televised outing for The Caribbean Sunshine Boys, and a mere eleven months in all, were enough for the producers and promoters respectively. Professional wrestling survived on a thread of believability and no risks could be taken in drawing extra attention to race issues. Later, in a more anything-goes society, budding wrestling promoters could not fail but to wonder why such intense heat, stoked by such mild fuel, was not built upon and taken to the greater boiling point it could surely have reached.
8153
Wrestling Heritage 