David Mantell

Yeah, the Americanised/New School sector scores its share of hits, fair play to them. To be honest I doubt if Tony Khan did much homework, he just looked at what had been on our telly just a few years earlier and judged it on that. At least they'll be getting the 2018-2019 Grado as a Dusty-esque working class hero type rather than the 2016 version who was just a gormless fool who lucked his way to triumph. (By this same token, All Star deserves more credit for TNA turning to them to recruit X Cup Team UK in 2004 - James Mason, Dean Allmark, Robbie Dynamite Berzins and Frankie Sloan - not to mention James Mason getting to beat MVP on that UK edition of Raw in 2008. Come to that, theee most old school of old school promotions, John Freemantle and Premier Promotions deserve more credit for scoring themselves some TV coverage in 2003 as part of Johnny Vaughan's World Of Sport.) But it's still a separate universe from the traditional promotions. They may not be as hermetically sealed from each other as they were back in the 1990s when the Americanised promotions first started appearing, but they're still separate phenomena which suceed and/or fail on their separate merits, not on each others'.

Re declining a TKO victory - an example of the polar opposite is Rocco pouring oil on the flames wth his "THE BEST MAN WON!" speech after winnng against Johnny Saint after Saint crotch-bumped himself on Rocco's skull during a rare rope-running sequence. Sorry if this match has already been reviewed here.

See the Nino Bryant vs Joe Lando 2023 British Lighweight title match I posted about a page ago. Only in that case it was a title change that got aborted due to one guy declining a victory.

Ah yes, this one. He'd been a more serious heavyweight as Blond Adonis Shirley Crabtree in the 50s/60s and even as the Battling Guardsman in '72-74. From about 1976 Max Crabtree was pushing Daddy to be the familiar figure we all remember on Best-Wryton (Midlands/Lancashire) bills, either in the Daddy tag format or else in big Battles Of The Giants against the likes of King Kong Kirk and Bruiser Muir. Elsewhere going into 1977 they were occasionally still putting him on in the old heel tag team with Haystacks or else putting him in serious matches like this one as well as against such opponents as Colin Joynson and Johnny Czeslaw. Author Tony Earnshaw condemned matches such as this one in his recent book We Shall Not Be Moved about the 1975-1979 period, claiming that it was a misuse of Daddy's appeal! You be the judges ... He has to properly wrestle in the 2-1 los to Kendo where he took Kendo's mask off.He also has to do a fair amount of proper work in a bout against Dave Soul Man Bond on a local experimental cable channel in Swindon in 1978. Mainly this bout is a realistic portrayal of Shirley's abilities - and limitations - at legit Catch wrestling. He knows a few tricks how to use his weight and power such as flinging Elijah from the ring with a flick of the ankle, but he had no real finesse and would be easy meat for any determined shooter.

Agreed Daddy would never have been a main eventer. He would have been an end of the evening bit of fun. A lot like the Flatiner circa 2005 in the UK when he was teaming with "Little Legs" Mark Sealy and the two would have a borderline comedy match where a couple of heels would be ritually humiliated. The main reason Big Daddy didn't go more internation is - like he said in the Sportsviewer's Guide To Wrestling he really didn't want to travel that far. Also he was brother Max's mealticket.

Grado is a different kettle of fish- the 2018 WOSW was totally New School and nothing to do with the world maintained by Premier, All Star and Rumble. I was answering back both Simon Garfield's claim that gimmicks took over and Herodes post on page 2 11+ years ago on here where he said that it was more like vaudeville than serious sport. The vaudeville people - like I said - were a minority (albeit a noisy one) - it was the serious no nonsense wrestlers that made up the bulk of the talent pool. That declined a bit over time but the priciple held true at least until the mid 90s and there are still traces of the imbalance to this day. And yeah,I'd rather watch Keith Haward than Big Daddy too. Any day!

Yes that rings a bell. I also saw a VERY bloody ladder match between Kendo Nagasaki and Rollerball Rocco from the front row of Fairfield Hall Croydon in July 1990, with Rocco in particular drenched in his own juice. The prize in the ladder match, incidentally, was allegedly the very same mask Rocco had made off with when they fell out on TV at the same venue two years earlier. Here is Rocco taunting Kendo with the mask. I have a later programme from that same show with a similar photo and the blurb - "Rocco shows off his proudest possession - the mask Kendo Nagasaki is so desperate to regain."

On the subject of Big Daddy, this should be required viewing as a guide to the Great British attitude to Kayfabe. The actual sport and the finishes and holds hurting - yes all that got protected, but when it came to hiding from the outside world the fact that goodies and baddies weren't really enemies, well that was a different kettle of fish .... On a similar note, at home I've got a TVTimes lifestyle piece about Rollerball Rocco by his wife Ann from 1981 saying what a wonderful, hard working and helpful man around the house he is. Complete with pic of Mark and Anne working away together at the kitchen stove! Honestly, Bill Watts would have had KITTENS!!!

He appealed to kids who saw him as being this indesctructible juggernaut that just BULLDOZED the villains. He was also a very colourful and charismatic guy. There's a bit of the Warrior appeal there, think of how the Warrior just knocked down Honky at SS88. I've never been a parent myself but apparently parents and grandparents like to see their offspring having fun and like anything that makes their offspring happy (until they reach about 9 or 10 and get into heavy metal.) I was an unquestioning Daddy fan myself until aged 6 when he beat Le Grand Vladimir who I thought was cool and I was upset over that. I'm glad Spiros Arion never did a Daddy tag as I liked The Iron Greek too. By 16, obviously, I was hoping someone would make Paul Ellering an offer to bring the Road Warriors to England and kick Big Daddy's head in. At the end of the day kids are kids and families and families the world over. I don't think he would have been a main event but he could have been end-of-the-night send-em-home-happy fodder. With WWF kids in the US, he also wouldn't have the extra handicap of TV trying at the same time to educate them to be technical wrestling connosieurs as in Britain.

I would think Big Daddy would if anything be a lot less offensive to American fan sensibilities than he was to adult British wrestling fans at the time. I could imagine Daddy in the WWF in the late 80s doing end of the night tag matches similar to those six man tags Andre used to do at the end of the night at MSG where he (or earlier on Haystacks Callhoun) would send the audience home by teaming with the likes of Ivan Pustki and Dusty Rhodes to beat three of the most vicious heels-typically the current heel tag champions. Daddy would never have topped the bill, but he would have made a good novelty attraction like Uncle Elmer. Book yer own WWF Daddy tags - Big Daddy and Sam Houston vs One Man Gang and Butch Reed Big Daddy and Tito Santana vs Earthquake and Dino Bravo Big Daddy, Paul Roma and Jim Powers vs Big John Studd, King Kong Bundy and Bobby Heenan. etc

Nick Aldis got VERY upset with it for showing the world old school British Wrestling as still surviving (there was footage from All Star's fan appreciation night at Fairfield Hall Croydon 2012) instead of peddling the usual narrative of it being killed off by the Americans which people like Fin Martin. Alex Shane and the New School crowd are so keen to push. It was quite good although most of the b/w footage was just colour-stripped 1970s footage. Didn't agree with Simon Garfield's belief that gimmicks etc drew more interest than the serious wrestling or that the latter subsided somehow. Serious wrestlers remained the majority like I said above - for every one Les Kellet there were a dozen Keith Haywards. Some of the serious wrestlers were MILITANTLY anti showmanship - best case in point Tommy "Jack Dempsey" Moore - but they still got pushed and gave the scene a backbone of credibility that - for this 12 year old in 1987 anyway - the WWF lacked.

Rosalind is her real name

Klondyke Kate material comes from the docu Raging Belles Atlantis Chronotis Goth is an M>F transperson who replaced Lloyd Ryan as Kendo's spokesperson in 2007. Pre-transition she (then a he) worked as a sound engineer for Thornley and Gillette's rock management company's home studio while they were out of wrestling in the early 80s. ACG came from a broken family with an abusive father who was outwardly a respectable doctor (GP) but privately a mad Kendo-hating psycho wrestling fan until the day he met Thornley out of character and he (Thornley) turned out to be a charming bloke - but stayed a dangerous abusive dad causing ACG to relocate permanently to Thornley's London home, pursue a sound engineer career and sort out her gender identity issues with transition - it's all in Kendo's book.

There's some footage in Granada TV's 1967 docu The Wrestlers of him versus Kellet. Kellet isn't doing the comedy in that one, he's in a hard fight. Not at all like his son. Big beefy moustacioed bully. Every big tubby snarly hard northern bloke with his wife and kids you ever get stuck on a train with. Like an evil version of Ted Bovis out of the sitcom Hi De Hi. Kendo was supposed to be a masked comic book superhero in Thornley's mind, but he ended up stiffing Hussey so badly that Hussey ended up the sympatthetic victim blueeye for a night, which is really saying something.

Colt did a Big Daddy tag on drugs. He didn't so much shoot on Daddy (now there was a thing someone should have done, like Pete Preston did with McManus) as generally misbehave so as to make Daddy look stupid and ineffective. It made Daddy look ridiculous anyway, and got Colt the sack.

Odd - I always found this a bit of a dissapointment. A Saint match against a lesser younger name is usually a chance for said lesser younger name to showcase their clever moves and clever counter moves against the master. Hassouni didn't seem to have too many eye catching moves. He was better back home as a tag team wrestler.

True also of Reslo and indeed the French Catch. No matter how much lawlessness there was from looser broadcaster restrictions, prooters still felt the need to push the classier higher end element of the product. Interesting.

They still had some good clean matches and helped give a window to people like Brooside and Yamada before they finally got on ITV. The "Chuckle Brothers" commentators (one of whom Max Beasely was the ring announcer for Bridges/Kendo) were of course dreadful, like a less snooty, more get-ourselves-over version of some of the French Catch commentators. Ultimately the Screensport shows demonstrate that Dixon needed to learn from working through the filter of the IBA to finally get a truly world class product (input from Thornley/Kendo on storyline ideas also helped.) One positive - Rocco had come out of his shell by this point in the time he had been away in Japan/the US as the Black Tiger, his "Maniac" persona had really blossomed. I would have loved to have seen Rocco do Pipers Pit while in New York in '84ish

This was his last one on TV and it actually got a good five years of heat-triggering show to show storylines as Kendo would repeatedly retake control of Brookside, even to the point of tag teaming with him sometimes quite efficiently, then ending the night by luring Brookside back to the dressing room and back to his lair as the crowd desperately tried to rescue him and Brookside's blue-eye compadres would be shouting from the ring "Robbie! ROBBIE!!! COME BACK ROBBIE!!!!" Brooskide had his long heavy metal hair by then and when "hypnotised" would let it hang down in front of his face and shamble around the ring like something out of Day Of The Triffids when not immediately called into action by Master Kendo.

Bridges was not the ideal opponent for a singles match with Nagasaki, too much of a power-based brawler, not enough of the technical skill to bring out that side of Kendo. He was better as a thuggish heel - or else being put over by his mentor Mike Marino. It does requite its clean round at the start. I wish this could have been somebody like Pete Roberts as the defening champion. They were genuine supporters - part of what gave a late 80s Kendo match its sense of danger was the clash between the regular fans who hated Kendo and the Kendo supporters. People talk of the America vs Canada feud in WWF 1997 but there never was a situation where America and Canada were both in the same building and liable to get into fistfights ringside with each other (although as Cornette pointed out, you got something like this recently with pro and anti CM Punk factions.

Earlier on, he did get to properly bodyblock his opponents. I believe the subject of the 1977 match with John Elijah gets braoched later on in the thread. Of course his lack of shooting skills made him offensive to all the shooters, perticularly Bert Assirati after they gave Crabtree Bert's BWF British Heavyweight title ....

A few more I could name - Kendo Nagasaki vs Giant Haystacks 1977 The Iron Greek Spiros Arion vs Colin Joynson 1979 Blondie Barrett doing an ongoing cut angle in 1992

This was why I thought MJH might be a fellow Brit - I don't agree with their views but here are some ageing WWF kids saying similar things from 2:20 Personally I watched wrestling for the, er, the wrestling and found my first WWF episode to be distinctly lacking in substance - a world where EVERY MATCH was a Big Daddy match.

This is a rather selective view of that era of British Wrestling. and one which a non wrestling journalist could have written (even more so in France, it seems.) Gimmicks, comedians and villains actually made up a minority element of the locker room, even in the 1980s. The overall majority were a serious no nonsense bunch whose main credential for getting their jobs were that they were recommended from an amateur club or a submission gym. A very "dry" bunch - it depends if you like it dry or not. This proportion declined over time but still remained if not a majority then at least a plurality or at very least an imbalance. I will get back in a future post to the difference between an outright comedian like Kellett, Catweazle, Kevin Coneely or Dizzy Dave George on the one hand and someone like Vic Faulkner or Ken Joyce who could be a bt of a "cheeky chappy" but whose primary focus in their act was their serious skill. Faulkner is a particularly prominent case in point as he seems to get mistaken for a comedy wrestler - he most affirmedly was not.

A sportsmanly no contest due to one wrestler refusing a TKO win is still happening to this day - even causing a recent nearly title change to be aborted: (NB for those unaware, in old school British Wrestling, titles change on any type of win including DQs,cuts and TKOs )