David Mantell

@Matt D, this was posted to Facebook by Bob Plantin. It does not appear to be on your YouTube as far as I can see and therefore has to be presumed to not be in the INA archive. The nearest match is a bout transmitted 10th February 1973 pitting Corne and Leduc against Schmidt and Janek/Jean Frisuk in place of Gonec Zeishuc. There is a similar looking long shot to the still on the document at around 23:30 of the video. If it's not the same bout, I would present this as another example of TV bouts not included in the INA archive and that therefore there are more (possibly considerably more) broadcasts than the INA archive list would indicate.

Like I said, it's more of a hero thing. Struggle back from the mat or the ringside only to be picked off for the deciding fall.

Another Rocco bout that has never been reviewed on here. Rather a lot of blue on the screen, both men in blue outfits plus the ropes, mat and referee's shirt - all colour coordinated! Roberts' superhero tight and vest with an Aladdin Sane thundebolt remind me partly if a masked wrestler who has just lost his mask and partly of France's Flesh Gordon, who at this time was still learning his craft in Mexico, home of masked superheroes. Kent Walton hits the nail on the head when he calls Rocco an all action man who hates to be held down on the mat. This time the brawling breaks out in round 2 with a flurry of forearms and the heavier Roberts getting the jump on Rocco with the dirty tactics, twice pulling him up off the mat by the hair. Rocco escape a headscissor using a mixture of dirty (biting) and clean (turning it into a small package pin attempt). He could have got out by taking advantage of Roberts opening and shutting the scissors which was just plain dumb of him but seemed to work. Rocco gets a knee in after the bell on round 2. In round 3 he gets quite a bit of fouling and illegal followdowns in with a public warning to prove it. He gets a second in round 4 for a flying move off th top turnbuckle on a prone Roberts which also violates No Followdowns. All the while he is getting leg weakeners on Roberts for a single leg Boston crab submission. Rocco spends Round 5; flirting with disqualification over follow up attacks to the point where Walton muses that it seems to be compulsive with him, despite the risks. Roberts comes close to an equaliser twice, first with a suplex and second with a cross press but still trails 0-1 by the start of the final round. Instead of giving Rocco the disqualification, the referee simply abandons the no follow down rule entirely for the final round, even for another top rope move which backfires anyway - letting Roberts get away with a whole lot of stuff until he scores the equaliser with an elbow and cross press- all very spaced out - for the equaliser. Another 1-1 Broadway. As we cut away, an argument seems to be breaking out, Rocco pointing his finger and complaining. I don't know what about, but I bet it's about Roberts following down. Haha. Postscript - after all Rocco's fouling, next up on my smart TV was a late 87 WWF Superstars starting with Demolition Vs jobbers Scott Casey and Steve Douglas. Smash got Casey with EXACTLY the kind of sneaky closed fist punch to the kidneys that had the Solihull crowd baying for Rocco's blood or at least his disqualification. The WWF referee didn't bat an eyelid at it and neither did the crowd. Talk about culture shock ...

My grandad and I once had a wrestling conversation that borderlined on being smartened up where we discussed how Big Daddy was a good guy who always won and Mighty John Quinn and Rollerball Rocco were bad guys that always lost (which made it all the more ironic when both became World champions on TV - Quinn at Heavyweight May 1980, Rocco at Heavy Middleweight December 1981). We agreed also that Lee Bronson was an example of a good guy who always lost ... For a man with a reputation for getting himself regularly banned from TV, Rocco is playing it reasonably safe in this one - the first three rounds are absolutely my cup of tea as a technical purist. Plenty of excellent reversals from both men, especially Rocco although the crowd are begrudging in clapping his good moves - a point he himself picks up on. Rocco takes quite a bump out of the ring from a Bronson bodycheck and Kent Walton catches him looking pleased at having taken the bump and explains it to viewers as Rocco having been caught surprised and even he being almost amused at it. Rocco gets the lead with a neck submission off the back of a near knockout - @PeteF3 there's another one for you, albeit an opener. Normally a heel starts the brawling after going a fall down, in this case it's Bronson the blue eye who, after Rocco sneaked in one extra dropped blow on the mat, goes wild with the same flurry of forearms that got him into REAL trouble with Billy Robinson on TV in 1978. Round 4 is more OJs sort of a round, the only public warning is to Rocco for dissent of all things. Things calm down after that, Bronson gets an equaliser with a bodyslam in round 5. By round 6 it has simmered down to a scientific bout once again, which goes to time. 1-1 Broadway. Well, Bronson didn't lose, for once - and neither did Rocco. If you like Round 1 of the 1981 Rocco-Dynamite World title match, you'll like this one too.

Good scientific bout from the same 1972 taping., veteran versus youngster, rather like Clay Thompson versus Tony StClair 1967 (and we saw Tony on Reslo 1988 Vs Steve Regal with the shoe in the other foot.) Good to see what the fuss was about with Tibor, just the one token chop but otherwise great moves, getting his head out of a crossed scissor then folding it into a Frank Gotch toehold was a neat touch. Equally liked Stewart countering a hammerlock by rolling on to Tibor's kness on his back to go for the chin and even a grounded hiptoss. Tibor's pins are both great, a bridging folding press as counter to sunset flip and then a blockbuster suplex in the final two rounds.

Owen, Tony and Mick reunited to deal with an enemy heel. Not sure why Scott Hall was on his own, he's not really enough of a monster to be the one versus two. He still has his moustache from the AWA/Florida, he's still a bit young for that look, the cowboy gimmick makes him look less (American) Blackjack Mulligan, more Barry Windham as Blackjack Mulligan Junior. No reason why Tony should be flying an Austrian flag, he's as British as boiled beef! Owen has fun running rings round Hall with his technical skills - Hall was an AWA man so didn't get the bad reviews from PWI for being a typical 80s power wrestler that a WWF contemporary would have got. Whenever Hall takes over, it becomes more of an 80s American match. Owen gets in a nice flying bodypress, shades of his Blue Blazer phase. McMichael gets tough with his friends, giving Tony a yellow card for a double team. Hall follows in on an Owen knee injury - apart from being illegal he could just have let Owen be counted down. Maybe he didn't get these Euro rules.Hall gets a low kick on StClair behind McMichael's back and behind his own back in a rather camp casual way that was rather amusing rather than heat inducing. Owen has to be carried away limping but StClair is tagged in so the last few minutes are a singles bout. Hall gets the win with a DDT, he had already shown American indie audiences his new heel attitude the previous year and by 1991 would be Diamond Studd in WCW. Yes I'll say it, both the singles title challengers from Summerslam 94 are together in this ring. Razor and the Rocket RIP (and Mick too).

See Bobby Barnes Vs Mick McMichael from March 1972 on the Britain thread.

I think "underrated" was Kent's way of saying he thought McMichael deserved a push! Worth noting that there is nothing remotely comic about McMichael in this bout - he only acted the grumbling Les Dawson type when in against his chirpy mate Vic Faulkner (or when refereeing similar soul Owen Hart) as their way of expressing their friendship to crowds. No kilt either. He's completely the straight man heel. Game of two halves, the first half scientific for me, the second half brawling for OJ. McMichael almost catches out Barnes with a legdive during his jumping routine. The rollouts from arm levers from both men near the start especially Barnes are gorgeously executed. McMichael rolls backwards risking a folding press but uses his legs to tempt Barnes which causes Barnes to release a hold and allow Mick to escape. @PeteF3 This is a good example of what I was talking about. Barnes avoids a McMichael sunset flip attempt, gets a 6 count then picks off McMichael with a slam and double knees pin.

I posted this video before, in response to that French blogger Sturky or whatever he's called's post about tuning in in the early 90s and seeing two fat old men. An eternity earlier in January 1969 Marcel Montreal was teaming with Warnia de Zarzecki against Delaporte and Bollet in the one surviving colour VT pre-1975 (unless the INA are ever prepared to put French taxpayers' money into VidFIRE and Chroma Dot Restoration of late 60s/early 70s content.) By this point he's a French version of late 80s Wayne Bridges or mid 90s Tarzan Johnny Wilson. Menard meanwhile is at his meanest, grey of hair and grieved of attitude, right from the start refusing a handshake. It's hard to reconcile him with the guy who let Guy Mercier's kid walk all over him. He must be male menopausal too as he completely ignores the two ring girls, a blonde one in his corner doing a vamp thing with a cigarette holder. the other dark haired, settling into the opposite corner like SHE'S the opponent! As OJ says it's a bit of a brawl, dirty wrestling from Menard, big beefy Manchettes from Montreal. Menard throws the chair in (after dropping it!) and aims it at Montreal but it misses and bounces off the top rope. Referee Charley Bollet throws the chair out and DQs Menard. I've seen a few chair spots like this on Reslo and even on KTV and aggrieved Giant Haystacks throw chairs around. Menard throws one of the best tantrums ever, worthy of Jim Breaks, now THAT'S a heel disqualification finish! Menard and Bollet have a screaming argument then Menard stomps off backstage. Cameraman comes across the dark haired ring girl, falls in love with her and starts panning up and down her frame - fortunately she's the vain sort and enjoys posing for the camera. Talking of throwing chairs, I once saw Blond Sting and Davey Boy Smith face Vader and Steve Austin when WCW came to Birmingham 1993. Vader threw in a chair, Sting just sat in it, cool as you please.

Around this time Menard was turning heel and tagging with the hated Jacky Richard. In time he would become quite the vieux pontoufle grumpy old man heel. It's also the match where Roger Delaporte comes into his own as the good guy Arbitre who takes no faesces from Les Mechants. Action wise it's pretty much the Acme of faced paced Catch A Quatre, Les Celts are a great Bon team and there are lots of monkey climbs, throws, bump landings from spinouts, reverse snapmares and back somersaults off a top wristlock abounding. Delaporte owned this building, the Elysée Montmartre, and the other Roger, Couderc, regales the viewer with it's long star studded history (Rabeles, Toulouse Lautrec etc) plus just the really rub it in there is a display of classic wrestling posters on the stagecas Rumble Promotions in 2020s England are also wont to do. Nine months after this, Corne would pop up on World of Sport, on the 1978 FA Cup Final edition no less, to job the European Welterweight Championship to Dynamite Kid just as Jorg "Baron Von" Chenok would do for Danny Collins on the 1985 edition.

Camcorder footage. Pierre, brother of Marc, second son of Guy, TBW contemporary of Danny Collins. I've already posted a swimming pool tag matchi of him and brother Marc from FR3's La Dernier Manchette in 1984, filmed somewhere outdoors in the Mediterranean sunset. Now here he is in solo action against Jean Menard, now fully grey haired. Normally at this point Mean Old Menard was a Mechant but here he was on his best behaviour as le gosse completely dominated him with every kind of acrobatic move imaginable in the 20th century. One key difference between veteran Vs TBW matches in Britain and this is that the TBW wins hands down. At the start we get to see some other legends like Mammouth Siki in their dotage too.

Do you mean at 16:45 where Owen scissors one arm to keep it out of the way (and prevent himself being cross buttock thrown) while he gets on the rest of the abdominal stretch?

RIP Dave "Zarak" Larsen 1941-2024

I didn't see any comedy apart from a couple of bits involving McMichael where Owen leans on him to do a Spinout and Taylor lands on him. (McMichaels was grumpy but accepting, Didier Gapp would have been handing out yellow and red cards left, right and centre.) The rest was good solid technical work. Owen did spend time in Mexico but I believe that was later (him and Benoit under masks as the Blue Blazer and the Pegasus Kid.) The hold you mentioned was done a lot in Britain in the 50s/60s/70s/80s by Hungarian wrestler Zoltan Boscik. I think I posted a bout of him Vs Jim Breaks to the British thread. Kent Walton used to call that move of Zolly's the Three In One hold. On the WWF's WrestleFest 88 Milwaukee stadium show, during the Demolition Vs Bulldogs match, Dynamite Kid does the Zolly 3 in 1 to Smash (only for Ax to come to the rescue with Mr Fuji's cane.)

Reslo Goes To Graz! And just to prove it, here's Orig Williams speaking Welsh standing next to a CWA ring! Just before Xmas '91 while their own ring was on loan to WCW, the Reslo crew plus an S4C Outside Broadcast unit took the trip eastwards over the Severn bridge, across the Saesnag land and hopped on a North Sea Ferry to catch some CWA footage of their own. For advertisers' money's worth, they came back with TV footage of a bout between two North Americans, Rambo who we all know about and an aging flabby ex WWFer Ken Patera. Despite looking like a shopworn version of his late 80s WWF and AWA babyface runs and presumably a familiar figure to German WWF fans, Patera is the heel here against champion Rambo, conqueror of the hated Bull Power. He breaks Euro rules especially ignoring round ends a la Wild Angus Vs King Kong Kirk in their World of Sport match in the early to mid 80s. In the end Rambo prevails by reversing a suplex attempt for the pin. I wonder if Patera had previous in the CWA/IBV? His strongman contest antics would have been right up Otto Wanz's street! @JNLister The audio is badly out of sync so the last few minutes are played out to a soundtrack of the Reslo theme, a silence and Messrs Williams, Fon and Parry chatting in Welsh about Americans at the tournament and upcoming bouts between Johnny Saint/Kid McCoy and Danny Collins Vs Robbie Hagen. You might want to repair it.

I liked this one enough to run upstairs, take the tablet off charge and post a review (luckily OJ seems to have liked it too.). For me this represents Regal coming of age, able to work with a veteran to put on a decent scientific match. Both guys fitted the "heavyweights who can move like lightweights" category and Regal had a pretty decent repertoire of counters, none of them earth shattering but overall respectable. He and Brookside had an ITV clean tag match with Danny and Pete Collins around this time where Kent Walton said he hadn't previously been impressed by Regal but was finally warming to him. I wish this match could have been on ITV for Kent to comment on as it was a really good resume of what Regal had learned of technical wrestling by this point (okay there are the usual few forearms and Regal's "Look at me mum I'm Hulk Hogan" legdrop but never mind them.) Best bit is the folding press where Regal role his legs forward but instead of getting them hooked a la Bret/Davey/SS92 Regal actually uses his legs to break up the folder. Nice climactic finish too with Regal going for a cross buttock and press but StClair reversing it for the pin.

I think he knew that Colley was useless at counters so had to be allowed his section of the bout to do his thing. (There were some very crude attempts at counterwrestling in JCP/WCW in the late 80s/early 90s from some of the better workers, such as the go behind standing hammerlock reversed into another go behind standing hammerlock multiple times, and a cycle of reversion involving headscissors to side headlock to headscissors to side headlock. This, combined with some amateur freestyle sparring, appears to be was what passed for scientific wrestling in Southern US rasslin'. Or so it seems from a load of old 1987 JCP WCW @ Techwood Drive I've been watching the past 24h) Also Steve does win and he was indeed a pretty successful main event blue eye/babyface in Germany/Austria and had been for many years by this point. So I think they were doing with him already what you are suggesting.

Uneventful. Cyanide Syd Cooper was a "carpenter" noted for making blue eyes look good. (For this he was rewarded with a few months, unacknowledged on TV, taking care of the British Welterweight title while Danny Collins went off on tour defending his newly won Euro title in France and Northern Spain on FFCP shows for Delaporte, the first of several such summer tours.). Unfortunately his opponent here Colin Bennett is quite old and doesn't have that much in the way of clever escapes (about one cartwheel notwithstanding) and it goes against Cooper's legit nature to upstage Bennett so what we are left with is a lot of static holds, enough fouls by Cooper to clock up two public warnings and finally a basically clean submission. Cooper should just have accepted that this was his night to be the star and at least made himself look good.

It can work the other way. Not as often though. (Strongbow as a heel sounds interesting. Do tell on -or post he video.)

That was a common finish across Europe. A babyface/blue-eye wrestler valiantly battles back from near knockout only to be picked off by the heel for the deciding or only required fall or submission the moment they are fully off the canvas/in the ring. Rocco Vs Collins on British TV 1988 and Kendo Nagasaki's world title win over Wayne Bridges are both slight variants on this.

Kip up spots are themselves undressing a wrist lever which as I've said could be developed into something more substantial. There were only one or two bits with McMichael, similar in character as I said to his banter with Faulkner in their matches. It didn't get overbearing like Didier Gapp in the tag match constantly trying to be the "humourless" jumped-up petty official and grab all the attention with his antics to the point where he was the de facto heel in the match.

A TV play from Greece 1987 involving some wrestling. Three bouts. Starts with guy in red versus masked man in appalling leopardskin mask with fabric running down his shoulders, the costume makers had obviously not researched what a wrestling mask looks like. Masked man wins, guyin red gets ear bending from his trainer. Fast forward to 40min in, guy in red goes to draw with old grey haired bearded guy. Final five mins, guy in red and masked guy have rematch, guy in red's daughter shows up unexpected in his corner, guy in red gets his win back by submission with a Boston crab, big family reunion afterwards. Apparently set in a big theatre but the limitations of a TV studio plus the decision to decorate the set with flags hanging down by the short end make it all look like an episode from the time of WTBS World Championship Wrestling at Techwood Drive in Atlanta GA (which would have been at its peak right then). Ring has badly loose ropes and no turnbuckle covers or post pads, canvas looks suspiciously similar to the one from the actual Tromaras match I posted previously. Knockout counts are in force, prohibitions on attacks on the mat are not. The middle match appears to be on TV (a Bell from No Holds Barred style baddie is watching in his office). which as far as we know was not done in Greece except for the unexplained professional shooting of the said Tromaras match.

Interesting. I wonder when that first started in that case. How much foresight about the home video market could there have been in 1979?

Dave Taylor vs. Owen Hart (Wien, 8/4/90) I'm not a huge fan of the globe-trotting younger Owen, and Dave Taylor has always lacked something for me, but I do like the novelty of watching a Dave Taylor vs. Owen Hart match. This was a deliberately paced draw, but an entertaining contest nonetheless. I particularly liked the final round where they stopped buggering around and tried to score a pinfall. If they'd worked he entire bout with that intensity it would have been a great match. Why would a submission not be similarly effective? Chain sequences in British wrestling are about one wrestler putting on a hold and either trying to advance it or the other escaping/reversing it - "undressing" the hold as Kent Walton would put it. An armbar not rolled out of could become a hammerlock and then a double wristlock or a chicken wing. As such it is about near-submission predicaments in the same way that a long string of evenly split 2 count false finishes (which is what is supposed to be so good about Savage/Steamboat at WM3 for instance) is about pinfalls. The same holds true with the styles of French Catch and German Catch except that the former has a more acrobatic edge, preferring to somersault upwards rather than roll downwards, and the latter (at least between two native Germans/Austrians) slower and more deliberate with longer struggle and more time before a counter is produced. In short I would dispute that they were at all "buggering around." Within kayfabe, a submission could have come at any time in those early rounds but for each man's knowledge of counterwrestling.

Is it professionally filmed with a camera crew like the best IBV/CWA stuff or is it a single handheld camcorder like the VDB footage?