David Mantell

By the early 90s Roach had replaced Daddy as the man Stax was scared of and they had quite a feud both on Reslo reissued in Wrestling Madness and for Ring Wrestling Stars (the former Joint) on their 1992 Battle Of The Brits video release partnered for the Reslo match by Drew McDonald and a long haired Robbie Brookside (this match gets reviewed later on) and for the videotape by Scrubber Daly and Alan Kilby. They also had a back and forth feud for the European Heavyeight title. Roach was due to referee the 1991 Kendo vs Haystacks "CWA" (don't tell Luc Rambo Poirier) World title match in Croydon in late '91 as featured in BBC2's Masters Of The Canvas Arena docu, but Kendo's manager Lloyd Ryan objected so Steve Grey was brought in as replacement. Stax had no objections despite his own feud with Roach. Ah yes, the famous WrestleMania IV Battle Royal Rip Off Finish: Unlike Bret Hart, Rasputin's turn to good only lasted the one match before he was back teaming with Anaconda to face Daddy and Pat Patton in the match Tommy "Jack Dempsey" Moore and Ernie Riley had a good sneer at over wine in First Tuesday The Wigan Hold. There were actually a series of two matches within a short period of this. Max Crabtree off the back of the Kendo series was trying to promote Daddy as the kids hero in the Best Wryton area (Midlands + Lancs) but other promoters were having none of it and put Daddy on again as a heel. First he squashed the much lighter Jamaica Kid in Feb '76 then in March he got himself DQ's against Steve Veidor in singles wrestling after one pinfall each (I would love to see Viedor'spin on Daddy!) and now these two bouts. That seems to have been the end of Daddy the heel although he and Stax continued to do bouts like this into early '77 mostly for Morell and Beresford (rest of North) The sandwich double bodycheck was Daddy and Stax's speciality, although it was an illegal double team and such things were clamped down on pretty firmly over here.

I think Tim Fitzmaurice (RIP)'s later 1980 2-0 loss to Keith Haward gets reviewed later in the thread, which is a really good bout for seeing the original forms of various techniques such as the roll on the mat to untwist an arm, done from a kneeling position rather than standing with a cartwheel instead of the roll. Wikipedia describes Terriers as "small, wiry, game, and fearless". It was Kent Walton's preferred term for both Tim and brother Jim. Both were trained iby an elderly Bert Assirati after he'd finished chasing Shirley C out of the business in 1966.

Spot the irony there! LOL Francis is of course our man in the mask and leisure suit (and later on kayfiyeh) El Diablo/Sheik Ayatollah Tony "The Brain" Francis, the man who -as discussed earlier - replaced Charlie McGee as the chief evil mastermind behind almost all Big Daddy's hapless heel opponent.

Rewatched that match last night on the Smart TV and am having a quick flick through now. Not as sparkling as the match with Ken Joyce, but technically solid, with Anthony in the same role as Robbie Brookside in his famous 1987 match with Saint. Plenty of nice little moments like Saint using a bridge to turn out of wristlock at 1:28 (much as IIRC Kid McCoy did in the match against dad King Benn) and the move Kent Walton - and the crowd! - pops for at 5:48 where Anthony lifts up a leg high to corall Saint into a headscissors (rather than jump into the filying headscissor so beloved of les catcheurs across La Manche) Not sure what Ohtani is objecting to with the finishes, they are all nicely enough executed folding presses - Saint at 13:31 dropping to his knees and hooking both legs (like Davey Boy at SummerSlam 92 but in response to a rear trip rather than a sunset flip) - Anthony's consolation fall (unusually for a Saint match this is the equaliser not the opener) where he drops from a hammerlock into a trip then turns him over into guard with the open legs and seals it wih a nice graceful bridge, probably the best of the three falls - and finally Saint's decider with a legdive converting into a press not dissimilar to the American small package.

McHoy was/is the son of Wild Angus, whom Stax had often teamed with! Like his dad, he later made his way to Stampede and thence I believe to other North American territories. I mentioned before how a DQ could sometimes be used to keep a monster like Stax strong by have him lose the bout but win the fight and still be deplored by the fans for his cruletly and fouling. "I'll do the same to your brother" and the Daddy run in afterwards and Brian Crabtree being injured was a rare example of an angle on World Of Sport. Daddy did a number of confrontations of Stax after Stax's easy crushing wins to set up a possible singles match which would become a tag match where STax would lose but the partner would get the worst of it. In 1986 Daddy did a similar angle where he got fed up with Fit Finlay brutalising smaller opponents and would confront him after bouts demaning a match - the blowoff took place as part of the 1986 FA Cup Final coverage with Finlay thoroughly getting the Daddy treatment. I've already mentioned Rafael Harpin's Israeli promotion so he could well have got his start there. He would have fitted in to 70s French Catch which was starting to get gimmicky (though not yet to the point of Flesh Gordon, Jessy Texas, LEs Maniaks, Les Pihrannas etc when France was starting to be Europe's answer to Memphis) with his use of bare feet to attack pressure points etc. Czeslaw's grumpy blue eye foreigner character sometimes made him the butt of jokes with other unusual wrestlers - notably his bout with Kellet. It was mostly based on his real personality anyway - a young green Kendo Nagasaki once dropped Czelaw on his head circa '65 and he ran out of the ring screaming "He Try To Kill Me!!!" and never worked with Nagasaki again. Circa '77 he had clean matches with Big Daddy like the John Elijah ones. Hmm, I've been a fan of this one for quite a long time, nice serious match.Anthony looked young enought to pass for an upcoming kid although he wasn't and it was structured like many other Saint vs Young Whizzkid matches with a 2-1 finish with the YW getting an impressive consolation fall and otherwise getting to show all his moves in a plug and play with Saint'ts set of moves and counters. I understand people complain about Saint "always doing the same match" (although the first thing I'd have to say in response is that it was a pretty darn beautiful match to watch) but apart from this plug and play just add opponent and HIS moves, type there were also matches like the one with Vic Faulkner where he has to pull out new moves against a highly experienced rival who is a real threat, as well as his matches against bigger heels where he either bamboozles them to the point where they complain (eg vs Soldier Boy Steve Prince on camcorder in the early 90s) or where they beat him up and he surprises them or they are fighting him so dirtily that he has to compromise principles (vs Col Brody/Terry Rudge in Germany, vs Finlay and Rocco for All Star on ITV in 87-88.)

Tellingly, Maeda's first move in this match was to legdive Haystacks and have him almost falling out of the ring. Had this been a gym shoot, Ruane would have simply fallen to the mat and Maeda would have slapped a leg submission on and Stax would have screamed like a baby and that would be the end of that. Have duly made his point, Maeda got on with the business of jobbing to Giant Haystacks, just like he previously got on with the job of being rescued by Big Daddy on the 1982 FA Cup Final special. Such is the life of a future martial arts legend.

As discussed Haward's biggest achievement was taking Sanders' Euro Middleweight title a couple of years before this. They wrestled each other quite a bit around the world including some World Middleweight title matches in South Africa (a territory which, politics aside, resembled the CWA in many respects.) I think they carried on having matches even when Sanders went heel in 1986/1987 - he certainly carried on having matches with Steve Grey after that (eg the Mick McManus World Of Wrestling videotape and the aforementioned Coventry Skydome match from 2005) "He's a wrestling machine, and that's all you get -- just relentless wrestling -- but it's cool if you're in the mood for it." Like I said, there was an audience for that sort of thing over here - particularly among an older set of fans who were often crossover fans from legit Lancashire Catch Wrestling. Even with people who weren't into this sort of match, the message from the TV was that this was the high end of wrestling and that you SHOULD be into this sort of wrestling, it would make you a better more cultured wrestling fan. Well they got their wish in 1987, didn't they? Every fan in Britain reckons that King Kong Bundy was a rip-off of King Kong Kirk. They were both superheavies called King Kong and Kirk became a KK in 1979 and Bundy in 1982 (and he only went bald in 1983) so they may have a point. Did Bundy ever get interviewed about Mal Kirk? Kojak Kirk, who became King Kong Kirk was already a headline act as the frequent fourth man tagging with Kendo Nagasaki against Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks (or when Norman Morell wanted to confuse things, putting Daddy and Kendo together against Stax and Kirk.) (One time they even advertised Daddy and Kendo vs Kirk and Bruiser Ian Muir, but the team of Kirk and Muir were so unloveable they would have made Daddy and Kendo obvious blue-eyes and therefore Kendo the blue-eye in peril in a Daddy tag. So Muir was replaced by Dalbr Singh and it became a Kendo and another heel vs pareja increible of a blue-eye and a heel enemy of Kendo-a quite frequent Kendo match format, even more so in All Star in the late 80s/early 90s.) The one time this matchup was done on TV the fourth man was Rex Strong: Ironically, Rex Strong and King Kong Kirk would eventually form an anti Daddy tag team in 1987 during Kirk's final months. Even more ironically, a by then badly out of shape Strong was doing a gimmick as a masked Samurai: (and yes, that's our friend Tony "El Diablo" Francis in their corner.) There was a good vlog about this not so long ago. Peacock wasn't particularly a gay gimmick despite the name, just a midly flamboyant arrogant sort, perfectly suitable for 1980s family TV.

Yes, eccentric vicars with unusual hobbies are a bit of a traditional thing in English culture.

Danielson also mentions working as a boorish American heel who sang the Star Spangled Banner badly. If you guys don't mind being confronted with other nations' steretypes of yourselves, here is an example from Cannock, Staffordshire from 2008. MC is Laeititia Allmark, then wife of Dean Allmark and daughter of Brian Dixon and Mitzi Mueller, the little girl from the Mitzi video a page back:

They did this every now and then when they had a tournament to hurry along some of the elimination rounds. First 10 bodyslams wins was a variation of this He's also heeling it up (like Dynamite Kid did against Marty Jones a couple of months earlier) playing the compaining whining heel This is actually a rematch of Davey's TV debut where a skinny 15 year old Davey took on a promising 18 year old Bernie. This was the second Steve Logan - not Mick McManus's old tag partner the Iron Man. This Steve Logan, from Birmingham was the classic blue-eye technical whizzkid. His real name was indeed Steve Logan which the first one was not. When he first appeared on the circuit there were complaints from some fans of him being an imposter. This ended when he appeared on ITV in 1980 and his debut appearance was trailed by a nice TVTimes appearance hyping "the New Steve Logan". As I said, I rank him alongside Caswell Martin as people who never got a title but should have. He did get a few shots including one at Fit Finlay's World Mid Heavyweight Championship, mainly remembered for defeated ex champ Marty Jones parading at ringside with a sign saying "Finlay Is A Fake". He also made it to the finals of a tournament for the vacant British Light Heavyweight title before losing to Alan Kilby in early 1985. (The same thing happened to the original Steve Logan in 1952 and 1955 both times losing out to another perennial holder of the title Ernie Riley.) In later life he started up the K-Star chain of martial arts gyms in the West Midlands which I believe he still runs (there is one along my bus route to and from work - the Travel West Midlands X1 on the Coventry Road going past the Wheatsheaf junction.) K Star also did pro wrestling training and ran a promotion, albeit of the Americanised variety, in the Noughties with Steve Logan as a Mr McMahon type heel commisioner figure. i was watching quite a good short match with him just this morning against Greg Valentine (Steve Crabtree not John Wisniski) Re. Brody, no I don't think ITV was going to get away with having the full Brody character from German camcordings (check back a couple of pages for Brody vs Johnny Saint.) He could be a solid enough heel, I like his match with Owen Hart on Eurosport New Catch from 1991. He was also Steve Regal's first opponent at Bobby Baron's wrestling booth at Blackpool Pleasure Beach Horseshoe Showbar - something that Bordy aludes to in the promos before Brody vs Regal on a German CWA episode of New Catch - "He had a big mouth at the beginning of his career but tonight his career is over."

He was a bit of a national institution by this point and people would go to see him do his heel routine, particularly "The Ears" (selling opponents' attacks on his swollen cauliflower earlobes.) Some people would still go to a John McEnroe tennis match on the seniors circuit even today just to hear him tell the umpire that he cannot be serious.

Keith Haward, Commonwealth Games medalist in Greco Roman. Worked a very old fashioned style of match even by purist standards. Jon Cortez was the best opponent for him as he had the best grasp of Haward's style. His bout with Tim Fitzmaurice gets discussed later in the thread. Quite a lot of the techniques in both those bouts were old moves which had evolved beyond recognition by 1980, so his matches give a real glimpse into the past. Haward, along with 50s/60s Wigan Snakepit man Tommy "Jack Dempsey" Moore was the sort of wrestler you would cite in response to a claim like the one early in this thread about British wrestling being descended from a variety/music hall tradition. Haward was strictly a "gym boy" a former amateur GR champion turned catch wrestler and pro wrestler whose legit wrestling skills were his main - perhaps his only - credential for the job. There were only a handful of Catweazles and King Kong Kirks but there were dozens - perhaps hundreds - of if not Keith Haward himself then certainly Diet Keith Hawards. serious no nonsense guys whose acts were entrely based on their sport wrestling abilites adapted for an exhibition. From a career perspective, Haward did pretty handsomely - they put Mick McManus's old European Middleweight Championship that McManus had lost to Mal Sanders on him in 1981 (bypassing longtime British champion Brian Maxine.) and he kept hold of it for several years dropping it back to Sanders. I imagine most American fans would write him off as a Bob Backlund style "abomination". but it's nice to think that a serious athlete like him was able to make forward porgress in the pros without selling out his particular integrity as an athlete. (There is one bout where he gets a bit sly and liberty-taking much like Billy Joyce's heel work, and eventually gets a public warning.)

Saw buses in London last weekend with advertisments for the AEW Wembley Stadium Show and remembered that the last time I saw a double decker red bus done up with adverts for a wrestling show was 43 years ago for the untelevised middle Wembley show of 1980 featuring Quinn and Yasu Fuji against Daddy and Bridges. I liked Yasu Fuji - like with Grand Vladimir I was upset, even at age 6, when they threw him to Big Daddy like that. It's been good to see bouts of his from France and Germany lately.

Possibly, looking at the pic. There was continuity between Duran and Monroe's Road Warriors ripoff on ITV in 1988 and Johnny South's Legend of Doom trubute act and we know Duran was *an* Animal Legend Of Doom circa 1993. I think Ricky Knight would have been a bit too small to be a convincing Road Warrior/LOD member myself, but there you go. Talking of the Knight Family, if you read Daniel Bryan's book "Yes" with his account of working for All Star in 2003-2004, Guy #1 and Guy #3 were, of course Ricky Knight's sons Roy and Zak Bevis and the diva relative was Paige/Britani Knight/Saraya (or Saraya Junior as some British fans call her to disambiguate from her mother Sweet Saraya). Roy and Zak wrestle as the UK Hooligans doing a skinhead gimmick as heels and occasionally as blue-eyes. There's a Superflies (Ricky Knight & Jimmy Ocean) match with a very early Saraya Senior in their corner up on Youtube from Reslo 1992 but I'm holding off posting it because I think the bout gets reviewed elsewhere in this thread, so I shall deal with it when I get to it.

You may be right, but he definitely called himself a Vicar. not a "Priest"

He was Church of England so he was a vicar, not a priest. He appeared as cornerman/manager for Big Daddy on quite a few times in the 1980s including as a counter to Tony "El Diablo" Francis the time Francis, as I said earlier, "actually did a wierd crossover with his managing work when he appeared in Drew McDonald and Rasputin's corner as guest cornerman wearing the El Diablo mask (or rather a purple/silver version of - he usually used red and blue as his colours) AND his "Tony The Brain" lounge lizard suit." Actually, wrestling vicars were not that unusual - see this Newsreel from 1963, about the earliest colour UK footage around: (Consider also Rafael Halperin, promoter and lead babyface of the Israeli wrestling scene who became a Rabbi in later life.)

Ray Steele - About my favourite match of his is the final of this 4man KO tournament: (fast forward past the semifinals to 21:45) One of the same slimmer "move like lightweights" kind of heavyweights as Pete Roberts, Tony St Clair and 1970s Kendo Nagasaki.

Here's a shot of South in The Legends of Doom: (Not sure if that's Dave Duran as Animal, some reports say he's been replaced by Welsh wrestler Boston Blackie by this point.) This however definitely is Duran as Animal Legend:

Incidentally that's the same Dave Duran that Regal wrestled a lot (and got bashed in a lot by) during his earliest bouts on the holiday camps. His real name is John Palin, his dad was a star in the 1960s, Harry Palin.

Johnny South's career really took off in the 90s when he became a blue eye Road Warrior Hawk tribute act The Legend Of Doom. (You may remember his opponent here from WCW - yo baby yo baby yo.) (incidentally, "Jesse James" is a young James Mason with hair. This is rare professional TV footage of his early career. Orig Williams thought the actor James Mason was boring so insisited on giving James Atkins a different ring name) He eventually ended Marty Jones's final title reign as World Mid Heavyweight Champion in Bristol April 1999. (It wasn't the first time Jones had lost his title to a fine wrestler doing a silly gimmick - he lost it to Steve Wright in 1987 which should have been good except Wright appeared as German skinhead character Bull Blitzer for the title win. And then didn't defend it, leading to the match where Jones beat Owen Hart to get back the vacant title.) This was right around the time that the REAL Hawk was doing the whole Alcoholism angle with Darren "Puke" Drozdov so it was a bit odd that the tribute act was playing the post-Big Daddy kids' hero. South originally did the gimmick as Hawk Legend Of Doom along with Dave Duran as Animal Legend of Doom. Originally Duran and "Bad News" Jim Monroe had been in a tag team called The Road Warriors but more resembling mid 80s southern US tag team The MOD Squad. (At this time in 1988, few UK wrestling fans knew about the real Road Warriors, it was just borrowing the name from imported wrestling magazines - a practice going on many years, the most famous case being Martin "Luke McMasters" Ruane being rebranded as Haystacks Callhoun in 1972 by Brian Dixon - this would eventually evolve into Giant Haystacks by the time he made it to Joint Promotions and TV in 1975.) Sadly Monroe died a couple of years after this and so South replaced him. Then they decided to make their ripoff more authentic and started wearing the shoulder pads, paint and the two original names. Then Duran dropped out and South was turned blue-eye. He carried on doing the act into the early Noughties.

Invulnerable Daddy didn't really come about until the beginning of 1979. I saw this on the Content Posted In page and expected it to be the Daddy vs John Elijah strength-based clean match from late 77 I posted a couple of pages back. Nominally Daddy was a heel at this point - although getting cheered by the audience against Kendo and conssequently had a wider repertoire including stomping an opponent on the mat (technically a foul) and booting them in the back of the shoulder blades. His unmasking Kendo made him a star, while at the same time Kendo was able to beat Daddy 2-1 and did not have to job to him even if Daddy got the moral victory. The 1975-1977 Daddy & Haystacks vs Kendo Nagasaki feud that sprung from this match was the prototype for the Daddy-Haystacks and Daddy-Quinn feuds of the next several years. However Kendo may have made Big Daddy but he also destroyed him eventually when the two were the flagships of All Star and Joint respectively in the late 80s/early 90s and All Star overtook Joint as biggest UK promotion.

Logan got across as a heel just by being a brutal surly thug - a Southern version of Colin Joynson when in the Dangermen or even Jim Hussey. He was actually quite a good shooter - Johnny Kincaid recalls seeing him come up with some great moves in the gym. When Kincaid challenged Logan as to why he didn't use those moves in the ring, Logan replied that nobody could love an ugly face like his, as if technical skill was linked to being a blue-eye, although he could have been a "wrestling heel "like Kendo, Rocco, Finlay and others. In any case you can see fans cheer a brawling Logan against Kendo Nagasaki in the above 1976 Royal Albert Hall match and numerous Nagasaki-Logan solo bouts on house shows.

The above match was shortly after Brooks's big DQ win over Collins for the British H-Mid title and of course Rocco was World H-Mid champion so that was actually a battle of World vs British champions. Talking of the Danny Collins vs Ritchie Brooks feud - it was already getting quite heated even before said title change at Croydon. This cage match is an example of how, as the Welsh say, you can get away with ANYTHING as long as it's in Welsh as the people in London (in this case the IBA) won't even notice. In this case, ANYTHING being a cage match, the epitome of what Joint and All Star would claim on ITV was beneath them to ever hold:

Saw this on the smart TV the other night - an interesting illustration of the situation with Ritchie Brooks. Four years earlier than November 1990 this would have been a simple matter - roughouse heel Rocco vs clean cut blue-eyed boy Brooks. However Rocco is getting somewhat popular due to his feud with the hated Kendo Nagasaki and Brooks is getting somewhat hated due to his feud with the popular Danny Collins so the blue-eye/heel dynamic is somewhat convoluted here.

It was actually Max Crabtree. The Quinn feud really established Daddy nationally as the patriotic hero who shut Quinn's filthy yap. ( I remember TVTImes from 1979 with displays of Daddy and Quinn's daily food intake with Daddy apparently having the healthier diet of bread, eggs and milk against Quinn's pints of beer. As any five year old fan of The Mister Men - look them up if you don't know - could tell you in 1979 it was eating eggs that made Mr Strong strong) Quinn was the first, followed by his "friend" (and fellow ex WWWFer) Arion and then in 1980 when Quinn came back he had Yasu Fuji (named MISTER Yasu Fuji in a clear ripoff of Harry Fujiwara) as his sidekick - there to celebrate his world title win over Bridges and the two tagging in the main event of the untelevised middle Wembley Arena show against Daddy and Bridges (ironically, Bridges and "Battling Guardsman" Crabtree had previously been a heel tag team together in 1974). Then finally there was The Missisippi Mauler in '81. Adnan got everywhere. I see there are some later posts about his time as top babyface of Saddam Hussein's gunpoint-booked Iraqi Wrestling promotion - one of two fully grown wrestling territories in the Middle East along with Rafael Halperin's promotion in Israel (which Joynson wrestled for in early '77.)