David Mantell

This could be the version Aledo was claiming. https://www.wrestling-titles.com/europe/spain/sp-world-l.html Kidd is billed as Empire Champion too. Hisa's site is very patch on that one: https://www.wrestling-titles.com/europe/uk/bec-l.html Hisa lists both Kidd and Aledo of being ex European Lightweight champions at this point: https://www.wrestling-titles.com/europe/uk/uk-eu-l.html It sounds to me like Kidd was mopping up another loose version of the World Lightweight title out there. He'd beaten Rene Ben Chemouel on or by 17th March 1950 in Paris https://www.wrestling-titles.com/europe/uk/uk-world-l.html It's just bad luck that the INA doesn't have any George Kidd matches, or if they do, they haven't found their way to Matt D. We have some Charlie Fisher, Francis Sullivan Tommy Mann, Vic Hessle etc from their films.

Talking of Wikipedia - Bob Plantin gave a short but nice review of my Professional Wrestling in France article: https://www.facebook.com/groups/BritishWrestlingRemembered/posts/6980331135338169

Arabic Wikipedia: https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/ممدوح_فرج

Facebook thread about Booker T's recent comments on Mercedes Mone which dovetails into issues raised on this thread. https://www.facebook.com/PWMMAClub/posts/pfbid0GQcm9ktG2prFMe4yFq4o739Ri65uC9qfxVDaa7s6TBmawPKHD4wRYZeHkyP367KXl (That Alldresseduplikeavamp person sounds very clever and insightful. Probably very handsome too! )

Add Gilmour - here are the Barons together on both sides of La Manche/The English Channel :

By the way, (and once again getting things back on topic! ) two years before that Jim Breaks match, Ian Gilmour wore a similar top to that when he tagged up with Fit Finlay as "Scotsmen" in Finlay's world TV debut in 1980.

Here's Ian Gilmour's Kamikaze in one of his other two TV matches, this one against the recently lost and much missed Jim Breaks. Also getting this back to French Catch here's the match Ohtani's Jacket was reviewing. I'm at work right now so I'll have to check it sometime later to see if it's the same two guys as the 1971 - or Modesto Aledo and "Benny" - or someone else. (Probably not Ian Gilmour though! ) P.S. have had a sneaky peak, saw the creepy bit at the start where they are kneeling down before the match, they seem to have got their masks from the same place as the 1971 Kamikazes/

Was looking for reviews of the 1971 bout in my last post and came up with this from 1968, I suppose I shall have to check this match out too. I don't think these were Modesto Aledo or Benny, the reportedly wore all black like 80s gimmick wrestler Mambo Le Primitiv (or like Brutus Beefcake and Arn Anderson as hired hitmen for Ric Flair in WCW 1994). Neither of these two do the slingshots with the ropes that the two Spanish Kamikazes do. (Incidentally, why call a masked villain in 60s Spain Kamikaze anyway? Spain. although officially neutral in WW2 was in practice sympathetic to the Axis powers and its fascist dictatorship under Franco continued until 1975.) I think the French Kamikazes were ripoff versions. And it didn't stop there - in 1971 Ian Gilmour was on both World of Sport Wrestling and French TV Catch with Jeff Kaye as The Barons. Gilmour must have seen Les Kamikazes and been inspired to do this blue eye/babyface gimmick: There was a SIXTH Kamikaze in the early 90s on the Relwskow Promotions TV taping for Grampian/STV in Scotland - the British equivalent of the 1991 run of New Catch episodes on TF1 in France. He was a heel like the first four before Gilmour and more of a ninja than a Kamikaze to be honest.

At some point in this bout the commentator says in French "if you have colour television you can see ..."

RIP Jim Breaks Yes I know this bout has been posted before but worth watching again in tribute to both men we have lost recently.

Actually, and bringing this neatly back to the subject of French Catch, there is a video of El Mansour/ Saade on French TV on Matt D's channel. It's the second bout of this video. Reasonably clean heavyweight bout marred by a finish involving an argument between Janek and the referee. Mansour has a nice little speciality - which I think I saw him do on the Lebanese TV footage too - where he gets into a forearm smash contest with the opponent and ducks out of the way of an oncoming Manchette by falling backwards into a bridge and then snapping back upwards to deliver one of his own.

am kicking myself for not mentioning Public Warnings/Avertisements/Yellow Cards, three bringing about DQ in the list of common threads. One North American territory- Stampede - also used this system but that was a direct import by Bruce Hart. I've said in the past online that a good measure of the survival of old British wrestling is that there are currently tens of thousands of young kids out there across this land of mine who, yes, DO know exactly what a public warning is!

Yes but Puerto Rico is further away from the US than any of the other countries I mention except the ones on the actual continental South American mainland . That and the obsession with bloodiness were why I tended not to think of PR/WWC as a US wrestling territory, or at least less of one than Cuban or Dominican Republic Wrestling (did/does Haiti have its own wrestling? Or is it just an overspill of Jack Veneno land Dominican Wrestling? Or is there just one big wrestling scene covering the entire island of Hispaniola? ) "Technical skill is not at a premium( in the WWC,) the emphasis is on drawing blood, a task at which (Jose) Gonzales seemed gruesomely adept ." - Eddie Ellner , obituary for Bruiser Brody, The Insider, Inside Wrestling September 1988.

They are related and distinct like three different territories of American wrestling. There are also noticeable style differences in what escapes are emphasised (the roll on the mat in Britain versus the flying headscissor takedown in France.) French wrestling to me feels different from what I grew up with on Sat afternoons on ITV and I wonder what I would have made of it had I had the chance to see it when I was younger or as a kid who only knew British wrestling, but there are lots of details I recognise in French wrestling which are absent in American wrestling eg seconds, no followdowns, KO counts, a more vigoruous prohibition of closed fist punches etc etc.

Geographically Puerto Rico is closer to Mexico, Cuba and the Dominican Republic than Puerto Rico is to the mainland US. They all speak Spanish and Brazil speaks another Iberian language, Portuguese, so there is that cultural bond, Mexican and Puerto Rican wrestling also each emphasise one particular non grappling aspect of wrestling to the point of distortion (flying moves in Mexico, bloodletting in Puerto Rico)

I did suggest on the "Why is America always assumed to be the centre of the wrestling universe?" thread that WWC/Puerto Rico, rather than being considered part of American Wrestling, should be considered part of a different family of wrestling cultures - Latin American Wrestling - along with Mexican Lucha Libre, Brazilian Telecatch, Cuban wrestling, Dominican wrestling (what do we know of this other than the Jack Veneno/Ric Flair incident? ) - and presumably all these Titanes En El Ring shows. (I notice they say "ring" rather than "cuadrilatero", the standard Castillian Spanish term for a boxing/ wrestling ring) That would then leave New York/Capitol/W(W)WF as the ONE surviving American Wrestling culture post-2001 (apart from the odd occasional twitches of the corpses of old territorial Calgary and Portland wrestling in the late Noughties) as compared with THREE old school European wrestling cultures (traditional style British Wrestling, French Catch and German/Austrian Catch) all still chugging along at least at grassroots level in 2023 with dates booked for 2024.

If you look through that clip you will spot Greg "The Hammer" Valentine at 0:08 There are a bunch of other clips of Mamdouh online: Also Mamdoh visited Germany, presumably for the VDB:

Regarding KNOCKOUTS as a finish , here's another one from another part of the world - Adnan Al Qaisi vs Danny Lynch in early 1970s Kuwait:

Apparently from the second video clip at least one of the Saades wrestled in France (at the Cirque d'Hiver) and also in England (agaist Norman Walsh on a Best-Wryton show) as "Sheik El Mansour".

Just found some more Iraq footage, Actually it took place in Kuwait, Adnan versus Danny Lynch: (FAO readers of the "Why is America always assumed to be the centre of the wrestling universe?" thread - Oh look, it ends on a ten count Knockout! ) Probably the Iraqi, Lebanese, Egyptian, Israeli and Spanish pro wrestling scenes each deserve their own threads, but this is where there has been discussion of Iraq recently, so there you go.

I'd have to find the match again, I think Pete Roberts was involved. A few years earlier in December 1976 Kendo Nagasaki returned to Solihull Civic Hall, scene of his unmasking by Big Daddy 12 months earlier to face and defeat Colin Joynson by KO in 3 rounds.(sadly not on YouTube although a different 1978 bout is up.). During one of the round breaks, Kent Walton mentions that Joynson "leaves tomorrow on a tour of Israel." Colin's daughter has confirmed that yes, her dad did indeed wrestle in Israel. Which does seem to suggest that Kent was not simply making this stuff up out of his head, so presumably the Egypt tour in 1980 actually happened and possibly was the first of its kind in some time and led to the remarkably modern-for its-time looking Egyptian footage posted above.

Interestingly enough it's emerged on the French Catch thread that in the 1970s Lebanon was indeed a wrestling territory and there is even surviving TV footage. This ties into what I suggested about kinescopes of ITV World Of Sport and (O)RTF Le Catch matches getting sold to countries in Africa and Asia and in some cases inspiring local wrestling scenes. In Lebanon's case, I'd suggest French Catch was the likelier suspect than British Wrestling. I skim viewed some of that second clip and I think I heard a mention of René Ben Chemouel in there too.

Been having some thoughts about Lebanon and Lebanese Wrestling which link back to stuff about French Wrestling on this thread and the "Why is America always assumed to be the centre of the wrestling universe?" thread: 1) Given that Lebanon was a French Mandate after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of WW1 and given therefore the large amount of French speakers and now adding on that it had its own televised territory in the 1970s, I would finger Lebanese TV as a strong candidate for having previously or perhaps continuously been a buyer of French Catch kinescopes from (O)RTF. In fact I think I shall bounce this suggestion over to that discussion on that thread. 2) I'd be interested to hear more of the career history/back story of Lebanese heel on 1970s French TV Joseph El Arz. (IIRC he also gets a mention in that Spanish wrestling article I linked to above.) By the way, Arz is Arabic for a pimp. (Also in Israel "Arzim" are a subculture of young Sephardic Jews into sportswear, gold chains and hip hop culture - they are the Israeli equivalent of Chavs in Britain.)

Anyhow, with regards to the history of Spain, this seems to be the best article: https://www.wrestling-titles.com/europe/spain/spainhistory.html although the author seems unaware that French wrestling not only carried on going but was still on terrestrial TV nearly as long as British wrestling. Which I'll admite makes it an odd thing to post to a thread about French Catch.

It does seem like the sort of thing Saddam would do, running his own wrestling promotion and booking it with a firearm. His son Uday was in charge of the national football team and notorious for torturing players who did not play hard enough with electrodes to their private parts. Trump was very much into wrestling - there seems to be something that attracts these big power magnates. And obviously we do have the pics of Saddam and Adnan which the WWF were only too delighted to reprint in the run up to WM7. Halperin had various Arab heel kayfabe enemies such as Achmad Fuad and the "Jordanian Tiger" Abu Antar but I expect these were actually Israeli Arabs. There does seem to be a tradition of Arabs playing heel roles in Israeli wrestling - Jim Cornette read out a letter about one such wrestler who was killed in the October 7th attacks. A few years ago, an Israeli Arab guy wrestling at Butlins in the UK managed to get All Star in quite a lot of trouble when a Butlins Redcoat (look it up if you don't know) , trying to gee up the audience to give the guy heat, started shouting "Who wants the Muslim to win?" getting the crowd to hiss and boo. Unfortunately one of the residents at the camp was a Guardian reader and penned an angry letter to the newspaper about this nasty Islamophobic show. It ended up with Butlins changing from All Star to another promoter (although All Star got a contract with Pontins instead), the Israeli Arab guy having to become a babyface/bleu eye Arab character in Britain and generally quite a lot of adverse publicity. Just before the first Gulf War there was a piece in Around the World in PWI saying how despite the war wrestling was still going on in Baghdad and that someone whose name I've forgotten beat Bad News Brown in a main event. The someone in question says their family pleaded with them not to go but they're glad they did. Perhaps some kind soul could check as my PWIs are all piled up in a state of disorder. When was the Egyptian footage from? It looks very modern - like a mishmash of CWA and a Southern US territory, say World Class. I'd guess mid 80s. There is a World Of Sport bout from 1980 where Kent Walton says that a wrestler is going on a tour of Egypt and it will be the first wrestling there since the 1930s.