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Although Norman Cooper was the birth name of Cyanide Sid Cooper our Norman Cooper was a bruiser of a heavyweight and his name was not Cooper. All our second Norman has in common with Bradford’s Syd Cooper is a name, though Norman tells us that he didn’t know Sid’s real name was also Norman until the night they were travelling together between Bridlington and Aberdeen working for Relwyskow and Green Promotions. Norman was a fit and powerful six feet tall muscular heavyweight weighing fifteen stones, a hard wrestler who had no time for those with gimmicks and little skill who brought the sport into disrepute.
Our heavyweight Norman Cooper was born Norman Curry. He was born in Kelloe, a village to the to the south-east of Durham in northern England, on 1st May, 1945. Norman’s interest in wrestling started as a fan watching the wrestling on television – Johnny Czeslaw, Eric Leiderman and Honey Boy Zimba were his favourites, though he wasn’t quite so keen on Zimba years later when Zimba lifted him high and tossed him from the ring.
As a youngster Norman had no desire to become a wrestler, though he was always a fitness fanatic and interested in sport – throwing the javelin and discus, and weightlifting, at which he excelled. When he was seventeen Norman started to learn unarmed combat, and in his early twenties was an unarmed combat instructor in the Territorial Army. It was a few years later he approached professional wrestler Jimmy Devlin and began to learn the professional style of wrestling at the Hardwick Hall in Sedgefield where Jimmy Devlin trained wrestlers in the stables behind the hall. It wasn’t just the start of a wrestling career it was the start of a long, lasting friendship.
By 1971 he was considered good enough to work in front of the paying public and made his professional debut for Cyril Knowles at Whitley Bay. Norman also gained a lot of good experience working on Ron Taylor’s boxing and wrestling booth at the Newcastle Hopping Fair and the Durham Miners Gala. A wrestler can quickly learn a lot when he is wrestling six or seven matches a day in front of a demanding audience.
He was soon wrestling around the country for many of the biggest promoters, including Relwyskow & Green, Max Crabtree, Brian Dixon, Don Robinson, Orig Williams & Taylor-Allan. His daytime job as a long distance lorry driver proved handy as Norman would phone promoters to see if they needed any last minute substitutes in the town he happened to be sleeping in that night. Life was good as far as Norman was concerned as he was now getting paid to wrestle some of those men he had watched on television as a boy – Adrian Street, Eric Taylor, Honey Boy Zimba and John Cox amongst them. A hard man in the ring Norman’s philosophy was that it didn’t look like it hurt unless it really did hurt, and although he was always the good guy in the ring he enjoyed nothing better than a good scrap.
By the late 1980s Norman was becoming disillusioned like many of the fans. True, a recurring back injury was causing some pain but it was too many unskilled men in the limelight that made him disenchanted and so he decided to hang up his boots for the last time.
Page added 26/03/2023
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