David Mantell

Well it says 83 so I expect it was from 1983 - Sept 3rd to be exact Just spotted this while flicking through. Sorry to nitpick but ...

It's got Dusty's pawprints on it - the chase, not the triumph!!! (crossref Cody in recent months.) 10 months later Simmons got the belt, with Dusty there, from another Harley Race managed champion.

No he was SUPPOSED to be like that, portraying the heel champion in trouble. The babyface romps it, gets an easy first fall, a bunch of near 2-0s, flukes losing an equalizer, get a bunch more near second falls then SUDDENLY the heel champ pulls the ace out of the hole by getting Simmons to shoulder himself on the post outside the ring to set up the piledriver win. Afterwards as the defeated Simmons is screaming on his back in the ring, a bloody and disheveled but triumphant Luger holds up the belt above his head as he marches from ringside - "If you think I look a mess, you should see the other guy!" It's his finest moment, in its own way as champ-like as all those nice photos Apter took Aug '91 of Luger with the belt or the Lex/Race/Hughes group promos on Worldwide etc. I wish Luger had stayed on and had all Vader's title reigns and he could have been the one Simmons beat at the end of the '92 Bash tour to win the belt.

If anything it was more a local alternative to C(iz)arny speak. Most UK wrestlers tended to use cockney rhyming slang if they needed to code a conversation in the presence of outsiders. Polari is mainly associated with LBGTQ+ culture and many people from that subculture are keen to preserve it as part of their heritage.

As you can see, there was quite a long series of Finlay vs Collins matches, starting in about 1986 with an absolute squashing of Collins and climaxing in 1989 with Collins beating Finlay for the British HeavyMiddleweight title. The 2012 match pitting an older Dirty Dan against Finlay JR, from a fan appreciation show at Croydon was something of a coda to this. There was a final blowoff to all these years of Finlay pounding Collins and then Collins pounding on Finlay's son in Finlay's retirement match in Germany, Christmas 2012.

Something I forgot to post -Apart from Nino Bryant, my other favourite young wrestler working the Traditional British style and having great clean technical matches is Jordan Breaks: As the ring name suggest (and the programme page above implies) he is heavily influenced by Mike "Flash" Jordan and Jim Breaks (minus the crybaby heel act). He even does the Breaks Special (and Johnny Saint's "Lady of the Lake" and "Russ Abbott" sequences and the Surfboard too.) Here he is in action from just before the pandemic, from that most thoroughly old school of old school promotions Premier And here's a different match with Jordan Breaks from late 2021 with commentary from Lee Bamber! It's from a New School promotion, WrestleForce, but don't let that put you off, they have a very technical (apart from a few forearms and one aerial spot to ringside near the very end) clean bout that Kent Walton would have approved of:

RIP to Adnan Al Qaisi lead babyface in Saddam Hussein's state-run, gunpoint-booked Iraq wrestling promotion in the 1970s. One of two pro wrestling territories in the Middle East along with Rafael Halperin's promotion in Israel in the 60s/70s. Andre the Giant and George Gordienko both jobbed to Adnan because Saddam threatened to shoot them if they didn't. This time it was Ian Campbell: Adnan on his way to defeating Andre with the Saddam Shot Threat:

(if that embed doesn't work, the link is https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xsbju5 )

It's worth pointing out that Marc Mercier also (1) got old (2) faced his share of gimmicky opponents. This is from 2003:

Have just been put in mind of Jim Cornette saying how old time fans would protect the business so as to force the promoters' hands to also take it seriously and continue to provide them with good quality matches. I expect there was an element of this at work with Kent Walton - as a professional fan and as a sports journalist - also.

Rock N Wrestling Connection

Stuff I missed earlier: The actual word Kent Walton used was "swazzy". I'm sure Princess Paula had her fans but apart from odd bits of flamboyance like her Native American headdress, she did not really do the whole glamour thing like American valets/ manageresses (such as Elizabeth, Sherri, Missy Hyatt, Precious, Sunshine, Dark Journey) did, nor did any other female sidekicks (the only two I know of were Jeannie Clark, the future Lady Blosson, as then-boyfriend Chris Adams' second one time on TV in 1979 and Sharkey Ward having a similarly "ethnic" "princess" in his corner for a 1980 Big Daddy tag) until Monika came along. To some extent she paved the way for Saraya (senior) in 1992 on Reslo with her vamp/ganster's moll image. Monika Markwart was Drew McDonald's life partner and common law wife until his death from cancer in 2015. She reportedly still lives in his hometown of Perth & Kinross in Scotland. I asked Drew about her on his website messageboard in 2002 and he said that she was "living in England and still a heel in real life." Bless <3 For this first match, Monika wore a rather dodgy looking female military uniform in black and white, ucomfortably close to SS female uniform! For subesequent appearances she wore a black dress and a red summer hat. A shot of her slapping Big Daddy on his behind while he was sat in the ring corner was incorporated into the title sequence for the wrestling during the final year 1988. Bill Clarke as King Kendo was getting quite a lot of Daddy tags around late '87 - he was King Kong Kirk's tag partner the night Kirk died in the ring in August 1987 at the Great Yarmouth Hippodrome (also the site of the filming of the Pallo's 1981 video, some of the matches from which Ohtani has reviewed.) This was basically Max Crabtree's response to the real Kendo Nagasaki becoming Brian Dixon's flagship at a time when All Star were not only now on ITV but actually on the point of overtaking Joint as dominant promotion. Having Big Daddy squash King Kendo like he could never squash Kendo Nagasaki was Max C's equivalent of Vince doing the whole Huckster vs Nacho Man thing in early '96.

Okay, eight pages later I'm finally up to date with everything I wanted to post. Hope this has all been some use, giving the native perspective of someone whose ground floor thinking on pro wrestling was shaped by this territory. Thanks for reading, look forward to any feedback.

Okay, I seem to have caught up with myself on page 19 now. Just to polish this off, here are some promised favourite examples of the Great British Clean match alive and well in the 2010s and 2020s All Star typically puts a clean bout on as bout number 4 of a 5 bout bill. Here is a typical example from Oct 2013. One drawback to the lack of rounds is that in order to pace themselves, the wrestlers have to have clapping breaks to lead the fans in cheering. Being the C21st versions of the good sportsmanly tehcnical blue eyes, Dean Allmark and Tony Spitfire encourage the fans to cheer each other. An even better example here from the same months (the same day according to an error Dean input into his Youtube account.) Notice James Mason appears to be a little riled about this - usually if it was somewhere like Rhyl or a holiday camp, he would turn heel by the end of the match, setting up a grudge rematch with little technical wrestling. Possibly that was being saved for the rounds match proposed at the end which never occurred. This should have been the World Of Sport The Next Generation match at that second TWC Skydome show instead of that ridiculous comedy wth Colt Cabana: John Freemantle's Premier Promotions adheres stricly to full blown Mountevans Rules. Naturally they have plenty of clean matches such as this from 2017: Also Rumble Promotions, Steve Barkers old 1990s company was revived after the pandemic and reactivated the British Lightweight Championship, won by Nino Bryant. He is still defending the title on Rumble shows in 2023, but here is his 2021 title win.

The full tape of the broadcast exists Kinescope print actually, 16mm black & white. Tapes were expensive and got reused at that point.

The seconds with the corner bucket were a familiar sight in the old days, usually aspiring wrestlers although Jeannie Clarke did some for her man Chris Adams including one TV bout. One old boy called Arthur was still seconding at Croydon for All Star into the late '90s Currently Rumble Promotions uses female seconds ("corner girls") for Nino Bryant's British Lightweight title defences.

The dancing was a German thing - they thought that a good way to get a babyface over was to make him dance like one of the spare members of a boyband. Alex Wright eventually took it to the States and seriously freaked out the Americans. I don't think the UK style was lost then or now - there are plenty of other clean matches from the modern era that I'm saving for the end but now seems to be a good time to post Johnny Saint vs Naohiro Hoshikawa from 1996 as an example of the UK style spreading around the world:

Something you neglected to mention - the face to face promo at the start where Brody recalls the legit incident where teenage Regal challenged him at Bobby Barron's booth at the Blackpool Horseshoe Showbar (as mentioned in Regal's book). "He had a big mouth at the beginning of his career, but tonight his career is finished."

The name EWF smacks of being Orig's work, a development on BWF as he called his promotion Flesh had - and still has - Wrestling Stars, formerly the IWSF, together with Jacky Richard

Saw the end of this in a shop window while out shopping with my gran while staying at her house in Surrey. Barry Douglas moonlighting as a heel, see also Clay Thompson as the Exorcist. Lost a triple tag to Daddy, Vic Faulkner and John Savage a few weeks later but got away with the mask untouched.

Try this one with Bernie Wright in Morecambe from 1981 (Don't worry, Bernie isn't yet Bearcat despite the video title.)

I was definitely a fan too. He started out as a green kid getting a consolation fall over Jim Breaks and shocking him in his 1983 TV debut. A year later he suddenly had a winning streak over Breaks and clearly had his number, beating him in a tournament then in a challenge where Breaks would pay him £500 pounds for any fall/submission/KO he could get, then winning the British Welterweight title from Breaks at the Royal Albert Hall and holding onto it in the 90 day return match before beating Breaks in a second return bout to put him out of contention. Soon afterwards Steve Grey beat Collins for the belt and a tearful Collins handed it over sportingly nontheless and astonishingly Collins got the win in the return match to get the belt back. Come FA Cup Final Day, in a support bout to the Daddy tag he beat German Jorg "Baron Von" Chenok for the European title and then spent each summer defending the belt for Roger Delaporte in France and North Spain. Sadly no INA footage of this but it's clear that by 1990ish he was VERY over with the French fans. Some good moves including his cartwheel counter to an armbar and a scoot through the legs that was like a train flying under a bridge, it was so swift. There's a win he got on camcorder over Johnny Saint somewhere in the southwest that I wish was up on Youtube.

They have both died in the last few years and the pub last I heard was up for sale. The Red/White/Blue world title belt that Bridges was awarded for beating Jim Harris at Wembley '81, then lost to Kendo in '87 and regained on a DQ in '88 was on display at the pub til it closed. No word on its current wherabouts.

Prince was actually British Welterweight champion by this point, having ended Doc Dean's second reign in 1993. His claim was gradually forgotten about until in 2000 when Scott Conway's TWA set up a new version which Johnny Storm and Jodie Fleisch feuded over. Comedy heel best known for a loaded boot which refs were desperate to catch him and DQ him over, and also losing a hair match to Robbie Brookside. Later on became a ref and quite a good old school one for the early 2010s: Another nice bloke like Kramer who it was good to chat to about old times at shows.

European Heavyweight title, Pat had it (for Orig), Stax took it off him for a while.