Phil Lions

Came across an article from January 1950 where several French celebrities talk about why they like catch while also commenting about whether or not the catch matches were predetermined. I thought that's quite neat so I'll share here what they said. Albert Préjean (actor): "You can say what you want about catch, but... it's a sport. Besides, about tricks, I don't think there are as many as people say. For example, I had a friend who performed a hand-to-hand act. He was also a wrestler in his spare time. While performing his act, he never got hurt. While wrestling, he broke his nose. Breaking your nose is not a show, after all. I think the public goes to see the lightweight matches because of the spectacular appeal of these encounters, and the heavyweight matches for sadism. They always hope that one of the two wrestlers will get their head torn off..." Milly Mathis (actress): "What I am trying to understand is how, after having wrestled for an hour on the mat, the two wrestlers manage to find all their limbs. They must be flexible, it leaves me speechless to see such big gentlemen twisting and undoing themselves like that... As for knowing whether it is fake or not, that is their business..." Marcel Achard (author): "It's very good theater, although in my opinion they are not all rigged. I acquired a taste for catch during my stay in the United States. I saw a certain Jim Londos wrestle there, who must have been the world champion. What a guy! His great hobby was to throw his opponent over the ropes. And not in the front row. Up to the fifth or sixth. I never sat there..." Alfred Adam (actor): "I'm not looking for the same pleasure in catch as in boxing. Boxing is a dark, dramatic thing. Sometimes dirty. Catch is the opposite. What actors these wrestlers are. What an art to portray suffering, anger, fear... For me, the audience of catch today is the one who, fifty years ago, was passionate about melodrama. I don't mean by that that catch is just bluff. I believe that in the end it's the best who wins. In any case, we would be wrong to underestimate the athletic value of the matches." Francis Lopez (composer): "It reminds me of my job. Because between us it's great music, and well orchestrated..." That same article mentions that they had recently done a survey asking people whether they thought the catch matches were real and according to their poll 75% of the spectators were convinced of the sincerity, if not of all the matches, at least of the most important ones.

It wasn't televised, but man does this sound like something I wish we could watch. February 9, 1951. A young Gilbert Leduc wrestled a young Rene Ben Chemoul for 59 minutes in Paris. "A fireworks display of holds, throws out of the ring, jumps, and acrobatics" is how the report on the right described it.

Earlier today the 1954 French newspapers were put online (under French copyright law 70 years since the date of publication need to have passed for the papers to be made publicly available online) and that has now allowed me to finally answer the question: when did catch first air on TV in France? As mentioned before, catch highlights started airing as part of the TV news in 1949, but the first actual broadcast was on March 22, 1954, from Palais des Sport (i.e. the Paoli-Goldstein promotion). That night Primo Carnera vs. Hermann Reiss and Francois Miquet vs. The Great Zorro (Hans Mortier) aired live on TV at 8:45 pm. Claude Darget did the commentary. This broadcast was just a one-off, I believe. I've yet to research 1954 more thoroughly, but for now it seems like this was the only broadcast that year. On another fun note, I haven't looked much into it, but according to this one article I saw the first ever "catch aquatique" match in France took place on May 8, 1954, in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. It was a women's tag team match with the ring in the middle of a big pool.

I haven't decided yet. I have about 160 pages worth of notes, articles, etc. and I'm still going through them trying to piece together the whole timeline and make it as coherent as possible. Plus, I'm also still looking into gathering additional information on top of that and trying to fill in some of the gaps. Most likely I'll end it at the end of the 1980s. And I don't see myself going into much detail past the mid 1960s. Not because I don't want to, but because I don't have enough info.

Yes, it was them and actually this is a very good point that I didn't think to add to my write-up. I'll add some extra details now. Thanks!

And here it is. Part one of the catch timeline that I've been working on. It goes up to 1940 when all pro wrestling was banned in France. There will be a part two eventually which will cover the post-WWII period. Link: Timeline - French catch

Just came across these and I thought I'd share them here. Tony Oliver as Le Justicier Blanc (Maurice Durand's L'Ange Blanc ripoff): A few masked characters from the Durand promotion (April 1959): Superman, Le Justicier Blanc and El Diablo. Le Bourreau de Bethune in color: And finally, I love this one of L'Homme Masque (The Great Zorro/Hans Mortier, I assume):

Don't know. Yes, I know they were, but I'm certain the year is either 1968 or 1974 because of the poster. It had a date + day of the week combination, which can only be one of those two years.

A poster for a show in Amiens advertising a rematch of a TV match and it really sucks that INA doesn't have this particular one, especially if this was Aledo: Le Petit Prince vs. Kamikaze! I'm not sure about the year, but it has to be either 1968 or 1974. Plus, based on this TV listing below, we're also missing a pair of matches from 1975: Le Petit Prince vs. Daniel Noced and Monsieur Montreal vs. Zarak.

^ A fine choice! I'd probably go with Palais de la Mutualite, but it's a very tough call. Meanwhile, I just confirmed another TV match that's missing from the INA archive: L’Ange Blanc & Eddy Mores vs. Robert Duranton & Firmin from some point in 1979. How do I know that match aired on TV? Because here we have part of a poster for an April 21, 1979, show that's advertising a rematch of the TV bout. This was all part of L'Ange Blanc's retirement tour in 1979.

At one point the Paris audiences were so spoiled for choice it's not even funny. This particular example is a bit out of the norm, but still. Check this out. Just came across it. Picture this scenario. It's February 9, 1958. A Sunday. You happen to be in Paris and you realize that in the afternoon there's not one, not two, not three, but four catch shows happening at the same time (3:30 pm starting time for three of the shows and 3 pm for the final one). Which one do you go to? So many choices! Palais de la Mutualite: 1. Jean Rabut vs. Roland Daumal 2. Jacky Corn vs. Eric Husberg 3. Franz Orlik vs. Lino Di Santo 4. Jose Tarres vs. Robert Gastel 5. Hermann Iffland vs. Liano Pellacani Lancry Arena: 1. Jean Fryziuk vs. Gilbert Cesca 2. Yanek Anski vs. Ferdinand Bauer 3. Georges Gueret vs. Arabet Said 4. Al Hayes vs. Yves Amor 5. Roger Delaporte vs. Serge Gentilly Elysee-Montmartre: 1. Henri Le Mao vs. Jacques Couderc 2. Johnny Morandi vs. Marc Gaillard 3. George Kidd vs. Guy Laroche 4. Roger Laroche vs. Claude Montourcy 5. Robert Duranton vs. Jose Arroyo Stadium: 1. Berrigaud vs. Henri Cointepas 2. Robert Moine vs. Gaston Maujean 3. Inca Peruano vs. Jo Labat 4. Pierre Boss vs. Warnia de Zarzecki 5. Gilbert Leduc vs. Tommy Mann

As part of my research I've been going through old French posters and programs and just got to this one. Here's an excellent example from an autumn 1957 program for Palais des Sports: "Raoul Paoli promotes the 1957-1958 season of CATCH under the regulations of FILC". This sentence is a perfect illustration of how things worked in France (1940s-1980s) when it came to promotional names. Names of promotions didn't really matter in the grand scheme of things. It was never "FFLP presents" or "FFCP presents" . It was always such and such promoter or venue presents CATCH under the regulations of such and such federation. The promotional names were never the focal point and the shows were never pushed as a FFLP show, a FFCP show, etc. like we're used to pro wrestling shows being presented in the past few decades. The promotional names were just used as the governing bodies that supposedly set the rules. Hardly anyone remembers or cares about those names. If you were to ask older French wrestlers what promotion they worked for they'd never say "I worked for FFLP, FFCP, etc." They'd say "I worked for Delaporte, Goldstein, etc." or the name of the venue. And I don't think the fans cared about the promotional names either. The press sure didn't. That said, some of those promotional names started out as legit governing bodies, but that's another topic for another day.

Here it is. Written by Claude Rocca. I made a few minor edits and added some notes [in brackets], but other than that everything is as Rocca wrote it. I do get a sense of some exaggeration at times, but honestly that is to be expected given how French wrestlers tend to view the glory days of catch and Leduc in particular. Either way, I think it's a nice little summary of Leduc.

^ Thanks. I was going through Bob Plantin's blog yesterday and came across a pretty good article on Gilbert Leduc that summarizes well who he was. I'll get it translated and tweet it at some point in the next few days. I'll make sure to tag Brian and Jim too. Meanwhile, a few additional nuggets of information that I've just come across: According to an article I saw, the original Der Henker was Johnny Stein, then Freddy Robert got the gimmick, and finally in the early 1970s it was Remy Bayle. Before that in the first half of the 1960s Bayle had done another masked gimmick - Le Justicier du Ring (a L'Ange Blanc rip-off which, it seems, a few guys worked as over the years). Luna Catch 2000 was created by... Ted Lamar (real name Albert Lafeuille). Lamar's other notable accomplishment was being Jean Ferre's opponent in Ferre's debut match. La Bête Humaine in the 1971 footage was Nick Sanders (real name Paul Papayre from Bordeaux). Sanders had a rugby background (which Bob Plantin had also mentioned to me in the past). He was brought to Paris and managed by Paul Marton. The Hungarian Paul Marton was one of the men behind the number two French promotion back in the 1930s (based out of Elysee-Montmartre). In the second half of the 1940s he took over as promoter at Salle Wagram. He was also the one who brought Gilbert Leduc into pro wrestling. Eventually in the 1950s Maurice Durand took over Salle Wagram and I had figured that meant Marton was out of the scene altogether, but apparently not - he was still active in Paris in the early 1970s. I'm not sure of the year (definitely before 1973) but apparently at one point there was a Guy Mercier vs. Kamikaze match on TV in France where Kamikaze ended up unmasking and was revealed as Modesto Aledo indeed. Well, sort of. His face was actually painted up so you couldn't really tell it was him but according to an article I saw it was him.

"Les Organisations Raoul Paoli" or "Raoul Paoli Promotions", if you prefer its English-language equivalent. Here it is on a poster from 1934: In the 1950s Paoli's promotion merged with Goldstein's promotion and eventually that became "Fédération Internationale de Lutte et de Combat" (FILC). Here it is on a poster from 1961 down at the bottom: Anyway, this will all be in my upcoming catch timeline. Up until the early 1960s I've got stuff mostly figured out, with a few notable gaps. After that it gets much trickier to figure out. The bad news is that French copyright laws are such that 70 years need to have passed since the original date of publication for them to be able to make newspapers digitally available, which means that right now almost nothing past 1953 is available (for a while there were some post-1953 newspapers available, but then they got taken down). So yeah, it would be quite a while until the 60s, 70s and beyond newspapers become available online and we're able to do more thorough research on those decades...

I finished reading the new Marc Mercier book that was just released. It's a mix of stories about Marc's father and family, Marc's career as a wrestler, Marc's movie career, Marc's personal life and Marc's days as a promoter. I found it enjoyable, mostly because it's not often that you get to read books set in the world of catch, and overall it's a solid account of Marc's life, but some parts of the book I don't buy. At times there's definitely exaggeration in there and also some stuff that is absolutely not true. The most amusing example of both being Marc claiming that his father was a huge star in Zurich and with him on the card they were regularly drawing 47,000 people (mind you, the venue he mentions cannot hold more than 15,000) until one time when he wasn't on the card and the attendance was 1,500... A few interesting nuggets of info from the book: José Gonzales' real name was... Daniel Lequec, a Frenchman. The Golden Falcons were Guy Renaud and Robert Torres. That was in 1977. Later they also wrestled as Les Panthers, a nazi-esque gimmick. Marc was trained by Michel Chaisne at Louis Michon's catch school in Paris. Guy Renaud and Robert Torres also had a big hand in training him. Marc's debut match in 1977 was against Bruno Lequec (José Gonzales' son). Marc's big break, and he got it less than a year into his career (according to him because Roger Couderc recommended him), was working for Delaporte at Elysee-Montmartre. He has a very high opinion of Delaporte. If Marc's narrative (i.e. his claims of regular TV appearances by his father and later by him) is to be believed, then INA is missing quite a few matches. At one point Delaporte teamed up Marc with Gérard Hervé (Flesh Gordon) under the tag team name Les Playboys. Marc says they worked as a team for about three years and he talks very fondly of this time. Marc says Delaporte didn't like Gordon very much, because he found him to be arrogant and eventually Delaporte fired Gordon, which led to Gordon starting his own company. Marc credits Gordon for talking him into returning to the ring in the early 2000s (Marc had retired in 1989 after a serious car accident). Eventually Marc decided to leave Gordon's promotion and start his own company so in April 2006 he bought the FFCP name from Delaporte. He says he didn't feel at home in Gordon's promotion and didn't like how the younger generation was treating him. He told Gordon about starting the new company and wanted them to work together and share the French market. At first they were working together and Gordon was sending Marc talent, but then their relationship turned sour. In the book he keeps taking shots at a certain "rich promoter", one of the French ones, and never mentions him by name. I can't quite figure out who he's referring to. It was someone who he says was in a few car crashes and one of them led to the death of an English wrestler (not mentioned by name). He paints Duranton specifically in a pretty negative light and makes him out to be very arrogant. At one point he mentions the term "bourre", which kind of surprised me. "Bourre" and "chiqué" were the old Greco-Roman pro wrestling terms for shoot and work, respectively, used in the times of Paul Pons before WWI. Didn't expect to see such a term used in a book about catch. However, it seems over time "bourre" became the term for wrestlers having a private gym match to see who the better man is. Mercier used it in that context and I checked with Bob Plantin, who confirmed he also knows the term in that context. In the times of Pons it was used for shoot matches in front the crowd too. According to Marc, before championship matches wrestlers used to have "bourre" bouts in front of their colleagues and the winner would then be booked to win the championship match. He doesn't explicitly say it, but he mentions the "bourre" stuff right after talking about the 1960s so this gives the impression this championship-deciding practice was happening in the 1960s, which I don't believe. Heck, I don't believe they were doing it in the 1930s either, let alone the 1960s. Either way though, it's interesting to see that the term "bourre" traveled through the decades. He also uses the term "mourir" (to die) as the term for "selling". No. My new research has confirmed that this is definitely not correct and it's something that people often get wrong (Mercier gets it wrong in his book too). FFCP was started by Etienne Siry and Robert Lageat in 1950 and at first it was just a governing body for catch (a rival governing body to the one Paoli, Goldstein and others were working with). At that point there were still no promotional names. FFCP later became the name of the Siry/Lageat promotion. I'm not clear on the timeline after this, but I guess later Delaporte ended up with the FFCP name and then in 2006 Mercier bought it from him.

Over the weekend I started researching the career of Gilbert Leduc more in-depth than I ever have in the past, because I want to help push his case for the WON HOF next year, and in doing so I ended up uncovering a bunch of new information on how catch worked in France on an organizational level in the post-WWII years through the mid 1950s. I became so intrigued by it that I've paused the Leduc research for now and have focused my efforts on the organizational stuff instead. Apparently, things were a lot more interesting and tumultuous back then than I realized (rival organizations, lawsuits, potential corruption...). So now I've decided to do a timeline/article chronicling all the important events in French catch history that I'm aware of. Haven't decided yet what year would be the cut-off point. I'll share the link here once it's ready, hopefully in the next few weeks.

Der Henker is one of the more amusing gimmicks to me. Durand saw the success of L'Homme Masque so with Le Bourreau de Béthune he created his own L'Homme Masque but instead of black made him red. Goldstein then returned the favour by introducing Der Henker a.k.a. Le Masque Rouge. In short, Der Henker was an imitation of an imitation, which I find amusing. And that guy in the video is definitely not Verdu. He had a different build. That said, based on photos and videos that I've seen, more than one person did the Der Henker gimmick over the years, which is par for the course for France. It's certainly possible for Verdu to have been one of the Der Henkers at some point.

Had a feeling you had something to do with it, but didn't want to call you out. Thanks! Kellet and Grey I don't know too much about as the TV era of the UK isn't really my area of expertise, but I'm looking forward to eventually digging in more on them. It's good to have some new faces in the mix for that section of the ballot.

Gilbert Leduc being on the ballot next year really caught me off guard. Talk about an unexpected, yet very pleasant, surprise. I don't know what or who made Dave finally decide to put him on, but make no mistake about it without the Segunda Caida guys uploading all the catch footage, Leduc wouldn't even be in the conversation so kudos for that. He's going to be a tough sell though. He's not a Tarres where you can point to him drawing big crowds and people can easily see why he's on the ballot. Leduc's case is harder to make. I feel like a lot of pushing would need to be done for him to even get enough votes to stay on the ballot. I hope I'm wrong, but it feels that way. And thinking about it, I may try to put something together in the future to help strengthen his case. Pleasantly surprised about Brazil's Ted Boy Marino too.

The George Hackenschmidt vs. Joe Rogers footage that I mentioned earlier has finally been released. It's available here: https://www.ngataonga.org.nz/search-use-collection/search/F18094/ The Hack/Rogers match took place on January 30th 1908 in London at the Oxford Music Hall. The video is almost 24 minutes in total. It features the whole Hackenschmidt/Rogers match (both falls) and between the falls there's footage from another match. I'm pretty sure the other match is Joe Carroll vs. Peter Gotz from February 3rd 1908, which was the middleweight final of the National Sporting Club's catch-as-catch-can tournament in London at the Alhambra Theatre. There's also some footage of Hack and Rogers posing for the camera.

Indeed they were. Here's a newspaper advert for the movie (its title in France was "Les Frères Dynamite"): And here they are as their characters in the movie:

How about that! Just found this out. The OSS 117 in question was portrayed by none other than Benny Galant from Spain. This was in the early 1960s right before Galant went to Mexico in 1962. I did not have Galant portraying a French James Bond of sorts on my bingo card, yet here we are. Cool!

Just got my hands on this special edition of "Sport Mondial" (A French sports magazine) from the summer of 1959, which is dedicated to catch. Articles, interviews, photos, illustrations and even a L'Ange Blanc/catch crossword. It's pretty neat. There's nothing particularly noteworthy in there, but there's a few interesting tidbits that I thought I'd share. One of the articles suggested that about half of the pro wrestlers in France at the time were full-time pro wrestlers while the other half had side jobs in addition to wrestling. A few examples: Lino Di Santo - used to be a precision fitter, King Kong Taverne - was a taxi driver, Jean Wanes - taxi driver as well, Michel Allary - used to be a a cook, Jack van Dooren - a salesman (he was a full-time wrestler, but then he fractured a vertebrae during a match and that's when he got the salesman job and was no longer a full-timer). There's an article on promoter Robert Lageat, who used to be a pro wrestler in the 1930s, and about how how he injured his foot and was then shot in the stomach by the nazis in 1940, but ultimately he managed to avoid capture and saved his life. That incident did leave him partially handicapped and ended his in-ring career. At some point after 1945 he became a promoter. The article mentioned that he was part of the Siry-Lageat-Caliez group. Caliez is a name I hadn't come across before. I looked him up. Turns out this Gaston Caliez was partners with Etienne Siry since at least 1951, if not earlier. In fact, it seems he even predated his partners as a promoter since I found him co-promoting shows at Palais de Glace in Paris in 1945. His partner at the time was someone called Dubois. The article also mentioned, and this is true (I looked it up), that at one point in 1950 FFL (or rather its president Roger CouIon) took away Lageat's promoter license so Lageat sued them for abuse of power, won, got his license back and was awarded 300,000 francs in damages. In relation to that lawsuit, and it's not outright stated, Lageat alludes to there being a "wrestling trust" and how they were against him. Another interesting fact about Lageat, and this was mentioned in Jean Corne's book too*, is that Lageat had a standing offer to give 1,000,000 francs to anyone who could prove the old rumor that the results of the wrestling matches in Paris were being reported to the police in advance. Speaking of Lageat, the boxer-turned-wrestler Robert Charron identified Lageat and Siry as the people who recruited him to pro wrestling. Charron was broke, 1.8 million francs in debt, a drunk and was also doing drugs. He was at rock bottom, but he got clean and entered pro wrestling, which he credited as the thing that saved his life. Another article that I found interesting was a commentary of sorts by journalist René Lehmann. It was more or less a critical take on the business and talked about how wrestling was fake and had always been fake. He talked about watching Poddubny and others wrestling as a kid in the early 1900s and even then thinking it's not real. Then in the 1930s he once wrote an article about the matches he had watched and expressed his opinion that they were fake. Raoul Paoli and Henri Deglane summoned him to watch a training session. He ended up wrestling with Deglane, who threw him around a bit, but it doesn't read like Deglane stretched him or anything like that. Still, Lehmann walked away unconvinced at the legitimacy of pro wrestling, even though Paoli and Deglane were swearing by it. He ended the article by telling a story about how recently he had been visiting with a very educated older couple and he was shocked to see them turn on the TV to watch wrestling. How could such educated people (a retired Sorbonne University professor and a former university director) like such a ridiculous thing as wrestling, he wondered. I'll quote the wife here directly as I think her response to Lehmann summed it up well: "I recognize that this wrestling is a circus attraction, but it lifts me up from my armchair both figuratively and literally. And you, you are jaded!" * I'm pretty sure Corne used this very magazine as one of the sources for his book. And finally, here's a few photos from the magazine. Roger Delaporte feeding pigeons. Lino Ventura shaking hands with Johnny Rougeau (the recognized World Heavyweight champion in France in 1959) as promoter Alex Goldstein looks on. Robert Charron next to promoter Robert Lageat. The brutality of wrestling.

George Hackenschmidt footage has always been one of my "holy grails" and we're on the verge of perhaps finally being able to see some footage of him. The Estonian Sports and Olympic Museum, who are also in possession of a Hackenschmidt autobiography which was unpublished until a couple of years ago, worked together with a New Zealand archive, where the film had been stored, and managed to restore and digitize the George Hackenschmidt vs. Joe Rogers match from 1908 in London. It's 17 minutes of footage in total, including the introductions, the match and some posing by Hackenschmidt. It's a silent film. The footage is not available online, but the museum held a screening of it recently. According to someone who saw it, there was about 15 minutes of footage of Hack wrestling. Based on the match reports from 1908, the Hack/Rogers match went 14:20 minutes in total so that means they must have the whole match on film. Despite wrestling there for several years, Hack didn't have many high-profile matches in the UK and while the Rogers one probably doesn't crack the top 5 in terms of significance, it definitely makes the top 10 so it's not just some random match. A frame from the film: So yeah, it's pretty incredible to see a complete Hackenschmidt match from 116 years ago randomly pop up. The footage is not available online and I have no idea if the museum has plans to make it available at some point, but just knowing the footage exists takes us one step closer to possibly being able to see it.