David Mantell

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.

Interesting. Apart from Halperin's promotion in Israel and Saddam Hussein's state run promotion with Adnan as lead babyface in Iraq, how many Middle Eastern Territories were there?

I'd like the see the Granada TV 1950s/1960s archive fully opened up so we can see George Kidd in his prime and all the lighter Wigan Snakepit crew who are less well remembered than Billy Robinson and Karl Gotch because they didn't go to America (Ernie Riley, Tommy "Jack Dempsey" Moore, Melvyn Riss, Billy Joyce etc)

For a while in the 1960s he was the Spanish Otto Wanz. Got to do adverts on TV and stuff. If he hadn't had the crash and had eventually come back to Spain maybe the CIC would have survived past 1975.

A nice news article from French TV of Flesh Gordon training newbies at his wrestling school. Included some show footage and some b/w footage of the Good Old Days:

Just seen an example of this - to a British audience in 1988 it would seem ABSURD that Hacksaw Duggan did not become the brand new Intercontinental champion on the strength of a win like this:

Not sure if this is pro wrestling or not, could be some type of sport wrestling. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3z5IpmXRIqA EDIT: It won't let me post the video for some reason so a link will have to do.I can't see what's wrong with the video but please feel free to delete if there's something wrong with it.

P.s. Yes I've found the DVD and it's an IPW:UK/FWA/ROH co promotion Frontiers Of Honour 2 and with al the respect in the world to Robbie Brookside, Bray. Danielson and one or two others on the bill, that Premier Promotions bonus feature match WIPES THE FLOOR with anything on the actual FOH2 show, (especially if you turn down the volume so you don't hear Alex Shane withering on like a two bit Ben Elton). Incidentally, not only was the crowd from the Premier Promotions easter egg match bigger than the main programme Frontiers Of Honour 2 crowd, but also so is a typical crowd at present day Rumble Promotions shows in similar sports hall rooms even if held in the daytime. In fact Rumble these days visibly gets about 3 or 4 times what FOH2 got. Clearly in Britain, then in 2006 and now in 2023, there is more demand for Traditional British wrestling - whether in distilled form or diluted a bit with family entertainment - than there ever was for bad US-style indie wrestling anywhere on the planet.

Some more Premier Promotions from 2006- don't worry it's not 91 minutes solid of Steve Grey Vs Ian Logan(no relation AFAIK to either Steve Logan), it's a four bout bill from Worthing although Grey Vs Logan does get repeated at the end for some reason. Also featuring Johnny Kidd, Doug Williams and Aviv Masyan. The MC (promoter John Freemantle) does mention a DVD on sale at the Merch stand so I think this may have been filmed as a follow up (YouTube having been in it's infancy back in 2006 and certainly not yet monetised so that promoters could earn income from "TV shows" on YT like they can today.) I've got a DVD of some New School promotion's supershow from this time that I bought from the Merch stand of an All Star show in IIRC Leamington Spa and there's a bonus feature on the disc, another Premier match from Worthing 2006 possibly filmed by the same crew as this, pitting Nigel McGuiness Vs Johnny Kidd and quite frankly the Premier bout wipes the floor with the main feature (despite some crap commentary from the dreaded Alex Shane.)

Anyway, talking of clean matches I saw this masterpiece one fall match from 1976 John Naylor Vs Bobby Ryan. Some good defensive use of the stepover toehold position to curl up and roll out of holds. Also a nice back and forth sequence of both escaping each others' folding press attempts by getting moving before being fully ensnared. Ryan was double-crown British/European Lightweight Champion here - he would soon lose the British title back to previous champion Jim Breaks. Dynamite Kid made his TV debut on this bill- he would soon beat both Breaks and Ryan to become double-crown champion himself then do the same at Welterweight beating Breaks again and Jean Corne.

In case I'm giving the impression that Premier are clean matches all the way, here are a couple of their takes on the heat fueled blue-eyes Vs villains 2KO tag match. Both from 2012, both featuring old fashioned South Coast veteran good guy Barry Cooper (no relation to Sid AFAIK). The first is in ITV-grade Redhill Assembly Hall, the second in the garden of a hotel in nearby Lancing: Also for good measure, here's a battle royal from 2017. Okay they call it a Rumble but (a) there's a promotion called that (b) at least they didn't call it a ROYAl Rumble after the WWF PPV or have that event's gradual entry:

This bout I posted earlier in the thread of Flesh Gordon in his later years has a similarly big house although the venue looks more like the sort of big town theare venue All Star in the UK would go for in the C21st.

I haven't yet watched this bout through all the way but it's from 2006 and features a similar building to Mercier-Cybernic and Prince Zéfy still in his athletic prime.

I thought I'd already posted this match but it seems I hadn't (EDIT: have since found out that I did post it, but never mind) so here goes: Marc Mercier three years before relaunching FFCP, in an IWSF (the future Wrestling Stars) ring against masked heel Cybernic Machine with Jacky Richard refereeing. It's from 2003 but there's still a good big house and quite a flashy venue too, like some modern art version of a catherdral. It's actually a considerable size larger than the sort of former TV venue you get in the UK or France, more like something that would be used in Germany/Austria for an Otto Wanz CWA title defence like the Stadhalle in Bremen. Ring is very New Catch looking, still with the long cornerpads, the individual-rope blue cornerpads were not a part of it yet. Anyone know - or can spot any clues that flew over my head - why this was filmed TV or video? It looks very good quality for straight to video by 2003. Perhaps it is for the TV contract I recall Eurostars having based out of Belgium.

Had a positive review for the Wikipedia article on the French Wikipedia wrestling project page: "Thank you very much for this article. It's really great. I don't necessarily have time to translate articles anymore, but I may do so in the future." (CoffeeEngineer) https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discussion_Projet:Catch#en:Professional_wrestling_in_France

Pretty good piece here (except for making a pig's ear of their British commercial television history - ITV was the entire network, ABC merged with Redifusion to become Thames TV in 1968. ATV continued as Midlands TV region until being replaced by Central TV at the start of 1982.) It does acknowledge the rise of All Star and its survival to this day (a refreshing change from these usual "Oh it died in 1988 when it came off TV and that was the end of it" lies.)

Marc Mercier posted on the FFCP's Facebook page to say that his autobiog is out. Someone asked him if there would be an English language edition for all the many British/American/etc fans of Catch Francais - he replied "Yeah, maybe". The same Someone also posted a link to the "Professional Wrestling in France" wikipedia page Wot I Wrote. https://www.facebook.com/ffcatch/posts/pfbid02zeHzaahLKAF9oMb7yqNMzi6TDQW7TYmqs8hrzBdqTqyQ3iuvX2ugvSzbqAz4FhWnl

Just posted this October 2019 bout to the French Catch thread, at the start the MC says Match d'Equippe. Mind you recently on Rumble's YouTube the commentator said "Trios" instead of the traditional UK term Triple Tag Match:

Came across this October 2019 (just 6 months before the Pandemic) bout from WS. MC says match d'Equippe at the start rather than Catch A Quatre. See my discussion with Sir Edgar on the "Why is America always assumed to be the centre of the wrestling universe?" thread. Old school legend Prince Zefy in action- he's bulked up quite a bit since his prime but has been working out and turned it into muscle. Looks a lot like Rufus R Jones circa 1983 in Mid Atlantic. Incipient bald patch. Not so much of a high flyer as he was in the late Eighties/Nineties/Noughties Nice big venue, very echoey like a cheap indoor council swimming baths. Apparently those turnbuckle pads are serious heavy duty weapons that can knock a man unconscious. What are they loaded with? The adversarial relationship between Les Bons and Monsieur L'Arbitre was alive and well in 2019 with Zefy walloping out the ref, counting his own pinfall and then being shocked when the ref wakes up, reverses the decision and makes it a DQ win for Les Mechants (as happened in the 2022 clip I posted some time back.) Talking of refs, I think that might be Monsieur Jacky Richard himself that comes in at the end to support the official ref. Neither of them get the aux Chiottes chant.

Have discovered that my two young favourites Jordan Breaks and British Lightweight champion Nino Bryant have had a match a few months ago, albeit for a New School promotion (Purpose Wrestling) and therefore under American rules and containing some very un Trad Brit material such as closed fist punches treated as clean, a lot of atacking a grounded opponent and an extended brawl outside the ring at about the 18 minute mark. Ah well, would like to see them get it on for Rumble or Premier or All Star under full Mountevans Rules - in the meantime there's several good minutes of what these guys could do together in here.

Thought - could Satoru Sayama have gone over in America as a babyface as Sammy Lee rather than as Tiger Mask? c.f. a certain Mr S. Stain's* comments about Japanese and Mexican wrestlers not getting over in America because Americans like himself only want to see other Americans. * © Jim Cornette