David Mantell

Harry Sefton and Jordan Breaks had another bout in 2022 for New School promotion South London Wrestling

Good to see Old School German wrestling lives on and the kids in Britain today will continue to take the North Sea Ferry across to Gernany for a working holiday and a good payday. Also means all six surviving Old School European promotions are still active - All Star, Rumble, Premier, FFCP, Wrestling Stars and EWP/CWP. Thought I had the other night about 1980s TV series Auf Wiedersein Pet starring actor and top wrestling star in all three Northweist Euro territories Pat Roach. The series was about a group of bricklayers from Northern England travelling to Germany to seek work due to lack or opportunities back home due to the 1980s recession. In retrospect a glorious metaphor for English wrestlers travelling to Germany for a payday at the Wrestling tent at the big annual beer drinking festivals.

Couple of good videos from 2011 from The Guardian newspaper in the UK. Firstly one featuring the now sadly late Karl Kramer (Carl Davies): This next one features Robbie Brookside and can be seen as a sort of sequel to the video diary 18 years later: Quite a lot of famous faces in there includin 1970s up and comer Bobby Ryan celebrating a milestone birthday. Also one of the two little girls grew up to be Xia Brookside who is doing well in Japan these days. It says there was a series on the scene but sadly I can only find those two. Good snapshots of Old School British Wrestling in the 2010s.

Two more matches from the same small venue circa 2006

Some rare fan-cam footage of Roger Delaporte just a few years before he switched from hated heel to beloved troubleshooter referee:

Good clean match in a rather tiny venue circa 2006, possibly the revived FFCP:

There's also a noticeably younger Max Ward in there.

Been looking for these for some time. Contains footage of a younger Zoltan Boscik and of "Judo" Al Hayes and Rebel Ray Hunter in singles bouts roughly from the same time as their tag team on French TV.

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 Quite a bit of juice in this one.

Hair vs Hair match December 1967 - Couderc confrms that it's broadcast on Channel 2 at 0:20 so it seems it had already made the move in time for the switch to colour in October that year. Probably got moved across when Channel 2 started in 1964.

I see the subject of the two Marquises has been addressed before. Same butler Paul double-barrel though.

I stand corrected - apprently this was a different wrestler doing the Marquis gimmick, the original bearded version Marquis Eduardo. Jacky Richard replaced him in the gimmick the following year 1985. This is Jacky Richard doing the gimmick: Which then begs the question - who was "Eduardo" ? One of those things we really need a native French fan to explain. Afterthought - it LOOKS a lot like British wrestler Barry "Rex Strong" Sherman, but I think he'd put on a lot more weight by this point - his stint as the masked Samurai for Joint Promotion (no relation to Le Samurai of late 70s French Catch) was 2-3 years after Marquis Eduardo and he was quite flabby by that point.

New video on Matt D's channel: 25th February 1984 Black Shadow vs Angelito (joined in progress) Marquis Jacky Richard vs Georges Cohen Flesh Gordon & Walter Bordes vs Les Maniaks (Different match from the one on August 18th 1985)

Unsurprisingly, "Ho Cette Arbitre" (originally "Oh Cette Arbitre De Merde") originally comes from Football (as in soccer, not as in what we call "American Football") - see also "Allez les rouges/ verts/ bleus /jaunes" and also the Big Daddy fans chant of "Easy, easy" in the UK. https://www.jeuxvideo.com/forums/1-20-15439950-804-0-1-0-topic-olympique-lyonnais.htm I suspect a lot of standard American fan chants such as " Go (babyface) go" and "(Heel) SUCKS!!!" similarly had their origins in other sports like (American) Football and Baseball.

Talking of "HO CETTE ARBITRE!!!" French WWF fans got a hearty chant of it going against Andre's pal Tim White at this WWF show in Paris October 7th 1988 at the 5:15 mark. Needless to say, Gorilla and Bobby were left nonplussed ...

https://www.ladepeche.fr/article/2011/04/17/1061443-catch-flesh-gordon-bientot-a-boe.html An earlier article from 2011. "Gentleman Grizzly" in the photo is of couse Paul Neu, known in other parts of Europe as Cannonball Grizzly (CWA) Raging Bull (Reslo) and American Avalanche (All Star going back to 1992 two years before John Tenta became Avalance in WCW)

2018 interview here with Flesh Gordon: https://www.ladepeche.fr/article/2018/09/13/2868085-la-star-du-catch-flesh-gordon-a-montauban-samedi.html Auto translation:

There's a bit of a career retrospective of him here - no mention of Le Catch though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yc37UPvelZQ When Roger Couderc dropped dead in the middle of a rugby tournament in 1984, it was Cazal who broke the news to the public:

Here's the full match - there are actually three versions on Youtube, a Matt D one, a Bob Alpra one and an ABCCatch one. I opted for the last on as it seems to be the best picture quality and have the most footage at the start Actually the audience seem less aggrieved with Jacky Richard and more with referee Michel Saulnier who gets a hell of a bad time from the crowd, not just the regular "HO CETTE ARBITRE" but at 18:31 a much nastier sounding chant that gets Saulnier seriously upset and standing on the middle rope shouting abuse back at them. It goes something like "L'Arbitre, ouiseaux, c'est --------aux" blanked sections are totally unintelligble, if anyone could decipher the exact full chant that would be great, even if it's something seriously rude. Commetator Daniel Cazal (later on apparently a respectable tennis commentator on Antenne 2's successor France 2's sports package show Stade 2) doesn't seem to want to spell it out, he just says "L'arbitre etcetera" Odd that kids should be showing up in such numbers given that we know from the speaking clocks on Matt D's videos that Le Catch mostly got transmitted at around 2200h/2300h in the late evening. They would have made good Big Daddy fans if Shirley had taken the cross channel ferry now and then, and probably many of them did go on to become Des Petits Hulkamaniacs over the next 4-6 years as private subscription channel Canal Plus arrived witht the WWF on board and soon took off. Angry Grandmas, of course, have been a worldwide cliché of wrestling audiences on both sides of the Atlantic since the 1940s and the days of Hatpin Mary. Cazal seems to take quite a lot of relish in poking fun at this particular one at 14:04 - "Bravo Madame - Vouz avez un sense de la justice et de la regularité dans le catch qui vous honore"

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: