Phil Lions

As promised, here it is: Spanish Title Histories (1943-1983). Putting this together was quite frustrating (due to there being many mistakes and conflicting information in the Spanish press), but overall I'm happy with how this turned out, even if it's not perfect (and it will never be perfect). Spain was different than France in that throughout the whole period all promotions were under the rule of the same governing body so therefore the title lineages were pretty straight forward, for the most part. In France there could be two or three World Heavyweight champions, for example, at the same time, because they worked for different promotional groups. That wasn't the case in Spain. In Spain there could only be one champion (well, with a few small exceptions by the looks of it).

Here's something random. A few matches that I didn't have on my Spanish lucha libre bingo card, but they definitely did happen (in 1974-1975): Ricki Starr vs. Jon Guil Don Clive Myers vs. Modesto Aledo Hector & Mando Guerrero vs. Antonio Montoro & Modesto Aledo Kamikaze I & Kamikaze II vs. Hector & Mando Guerrero I checked in with Hector himself. He said him and Mando did a three and a half month tour of Spain. Hector was only 19 at the time. He was very complimentary of Aledo. Said they learned a lot from him.

This is a case of two different titles being mixed up. In the late 60s Febrer was the Spanish Mid-Heavyweight champion. In 1978 he became the World Heavyweight champion. This will all be addressed in my upcoming Spanish Title histories article once it's ready. Sullivan/Fortuna was said to be originally from Tonga so not quite a "North American from Hawaii", but close enough, I guess.

Better known as Leon Fortuna.

Yep, so there you have it. "Wrestling was at its peak between 1958 and 1975 approximately" is nowhere near the same statement as "the wrestling scene ended in 1975". Speaking of peaks... I made this new random discovery yesterday. Modesto Aledo winning the World Lightweight Championship in Valencia in August 1964 in front of 15,000 fans. This is the type of business they were doing in Spain back then. I find it especially cool in this case because it's lightweights that are reported to have drawn this level of a crowd and generally in wrestling you don't see lightweights drawing such crowds.

No such thing. And Spain wasn't "taken over" by anyone. There were still local promotions and shows through the mid 80s, and even some occasional small shows after that too. Obviously, not to the level of prior decades, but Spanish wrestling didn't just poof and disappear in 1975. I know where you're getting the "there was no Spanish wrestling in the 80s" idea from and in general that is a good article on the history wrestling of Spain, but it's old and outdated. As more newspapers have become available over the past decade, that claim can easily be proven to be false.

I put down Empresa because that's how the Spanish press always referred to the promotions. Some promotions, like Empresa del Gran Price in Barcelona, were based out of a particular arena (hence their name). That wasn't the case with all "Empresas". Some were known by the name of their promoter/owner (e.g. Empresa Bamala). In reality I don't think there were any official promotional names. There was no "WWF, "WCW", etc. Not until Colosos del Ring (Madrid) in 1975-76 and Inter-Catch (Barcelona) in 1981. Well, for example, Empresa Bamala (also often referred to as Organizaciones Bamala) closed shop in 1975. I'd have to doublecheck the exact year for Gran Price, but I think it ended around 1973 or so. Their venue had been torn down already by that point, but they moved to a new venue for a while. So basically the top two promotions in the history of Spain ended around the same time.

There's no need to guess about that. The French rules were definitely based on the American rules. That was the intention from the very start. They did have some slight differences initially though, for example being able to win the match on points (if there was no winner within the time limit), but that was eventually dropped (I wanna say at some point in the mid 1950s but I'd have to doublecheck). FFL, the major governing body for wrestling (amateur and pro) in France at the time, actually officially changed the format of the French catch matches to 5-minute rounds in September 1952, but there was a lot of pushback and the decision was quickly reversed.

I've been doing some new research on Spain and just posted a new article on the history of luchas de apuestas (mask vs. mask, mask vs. hair, etc.) in Spanish lucha libre from 1960 to 1978. It's available here: https://phil-lions-research.blogspot.com/2026/06/luchas-de-apuestas-spain.html Had fun putting this one together. I don't go too in-depth and it's more of a list than anything else, but it is a fun bit of wrestling history that I thought I'd share. L'Ange Blanc, the Kamikazes, Los Halcones de Oro, a masked hunchback, etc. Over 40 matches on record. I've also been working on a big update on the various Spanish title histories. It's been a tough challenge but I've got a clearer picture now, although far from perfect, and the update should hopefully be ready very soon. Will share it here.

That narrative of Blanc and Bethune being some big TV rivals is something that often gets mentioned in French articles about catch and is complete nonsense. They worked for rival promotions (Goldstein's and Durand's respectively). Never wrestled each other on TV. L'Homme Masque was the big L'Ange Blanc rival, not Le Borreau de Bethune. As a matter of fact, Goldstein sued Durand, before Bethune ever appeared on TV, because he felt Bethune was a L'Homme Masque rip off (which he was). Eventually, when Blanc switched sides, Blanc and Bethune did work together on non-televised events, but that was after Blanc had unmasked. That Leduc/Bethune match is a great example of how to make a new top heel - by having him dominate the top babyface of the promotion in his TV debut to a point where the babyface has to be helped to the back. It worked like a charm in that case. The network, reportedly, received more than 200 phone calls by viewers asking about Leduc's condition. The match was a real turning point for the Durand promotion (well, the Durand/Leduc/Gastel/Montourcy promotion if are to be precise since they were all business partners, which is something that I've learned only within the past few months). I don't know about Leduc being the inventor of the toupie. May be, may be not. The earliest footage of anyone doing the move is actually of Frank Sexton in Paris in January 1950 (which is nine months earlier than the earliest footage of Leduc doing it). I haven't done a deep dive into the newspapers to see if Leduc was doing it before that though so it is possible. Also, it's Leduc. Not LeDuc. Not sure where that spelling popped up from originally, but it's not correct.

Until the 80s for sure. After that we'll see. Probably only a paragraph or few to cover the 90s and 2000s. Not much of note happened then, really.

It just occurred to me I hadn't mentioned it here. Apologies for the plug, but I thought some folks might be interested. I've started transferring all my past pro wrestling research, and some new stuff, onto a new blog to make it more easily accessible: https://phil-lions-research.blogspot.com/ Close to 70 articles posted so far and plenty left to go (and new research in the works too). It's mostly European pro wrestling history dating back to the 19th century, and there's a lot on France in particular. The French Catch Timeline is the most relevant entry in terms of this forum and it will be extended at some point in the future once I eventually get to it. I have an old L'Ange Blanc article that should get a sizeable update as well.

I've now confirmed that French catch was also airing on Télé-Sarre a.k.a Telesaar (Europe's first commercial TV channel, based in the Saarland region in Germany, next to the French border) in the 1950s. The network existed between 1954 and 1958 and catch seems to have aired in 1955-1958. I don't know how regularly though. I've seen a Télé-Sarre TV listing from 1958 for Valois vs. Vignal and Delaporte & Bollet vs. Gentilly & Khan, both of which I believe never aired in France, so it seems Télé-Sarre was also getting original catch content.

Ah, yes! Great catch, thanks! Got my years on the launch of FR3 mixed up somehow.

Cheap plug. If last year you enjoyed listening to me blabber on about Gilbert Leduc on a podcast, here's me now talking about Le Petit Prince in detail as well. The first half of the podcast covers the life and career of Le Petit Prince, then we get into discussing him from the perspective of the WON HOF (since he'll be on the ballot this year), and finally we talk about other European names on the ballot such as Jose Tarres, Otto Wanz and Andreas Lambrakis. Link: The Ballot: Le Petit Prince with Phil Lions It's also available on YouTube and all the usual podcast platforms.

I think it was probably original unaired matches, but hard to say for sure without knowing exactly what matches aired each week. There was definitely commentary. Sometimes the TV listings would mention the commentator. In the case of Monaco in 1955 there's three names mentioned and off the top of my head I don't recognize either one of them as someone who did catch commentary for French TV (although I could be wrong about that) so it seems it was a different commentary crew altogether. Again, I'm not sure about that. By that I mean I don't know if RTF taped the footage and then sold it or if TMC worked out a deal to come in and shoot it themselves. My best guess is the former, but I'm just guessing.

Not sure about the first part. It definitely wasn't the footage from the news.

France. Now some of this is an educated conjecture on my part, but based on everything I've read I believe this is how things worked and France was the sole source. The catch footage that aired in France was only a portion of what was actually filmed and most of the footage was airing outside of France in countries where catch was broadcast on TV on a much more regular basis compared to France (i.e. Switzerland, Luxembourg, Monaco).

I've updated the original post a little bit with some new research regarding Monaco. So here's a couple of fun stats: Catch TV broadcasts in France in 1954: 2 or 3 Catch TV broadcasts in France in 1955: 9 or 10 Catch TV broadcasts in Monaco in 1955: 30 In short, Monaco was the first place to start broadcasting French catch on a pretty regular basis. It wasn't until 1957 that France would start doing a similar number of broadcasts per year, and overall only a handful of years in the history of catch on French TV would reach those kinds of numbers.

Roland Bock has passed away, at the age of 81.

Yeah, I sent that to Bob. 🙂 Valencia, 1951. In 1951 Gilbert Leduc (c) vs. Rene Ben Chemoul matches for the (FFL) World Welterweight Title took place in France, Spain, Germany, Morocco and possibly elsewhere too. The year prior Leduc had become the first Frenchman to win a catch World Title in France and by the looks of it Goldstein was using his influence to get Leduc featured as World champion in as many places as possible. That wasn't Quasimodo (Victor Castilla). That was Eduardo Castillo, who was actually a bigger star than Victor Castilla in Spain. Yep, Salvador Font. Also notice Cabeza de Hierro (Jose Tarres) in the semi-main.

^ That's Vic Hessle vs. Paul Leteurtrois. October 15, 1948, at Cirque d'Hiver. More footage from the same match:

The Spanish wrestlers' union was linked to the artists/entertainment union (Sindicato Nacional de Espectaculo) and it had somewhere between 30 to 70 members. The wording in the article that I found about its formation in October 1969 is a bit vague. "About thirty professionals out of the seventy in Spain attended the meeting, but it is necessary to clarify that the absences were equally represented in the letters of support that those not present sent to their colleagues." One of the main issues they wanted to fight against was the Spanish promoters hiring too many foreign wrestlers, thus limiting the work for the Spanish wrestlers. One of the big talking points in press around the formation of the union was how the Spanish wrestlers beat the Spanish footballers to the punch since recently there had been a lot of talk of the football players unionizing too.

There was the odd show here and there after that too, but more or less yes - you could say that 1986 was the end of the "lucha libre americana" era in Spain since that's when the last notable Spanish promotion closed shop. Although funnily enough, when WWF came to Spanish TV and the "Pressing Catch" branding was introduced, in the TV listings they'd still make sure to list it as "lucha libre americana" too since that was the most common name for pro wrestling in Spain up to that point. This is from September 1990:

Yes. Quasimodo (Victor Castilla Sancha) and the Argentine wrestler Gran Jacobo (Jacobo Rossi Sarrat) ran the "Los Colosos del Ring" promotion in Spain. It was in operation from 1974 to 1986. A few years before that Castilla served as vice-president of the first Spanish pro wrestler union (which was formed in 1969). Here are Castilla and Rossi posing with a few of their wrestlers at their wrestling school in Fuenlabrada in 1984: