David Mantell

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Here's a shot of South in The Legends of Doom: (Not sure if that's Dave Duran as Animal, some reports say he's been replaced by Welsh wrestler Boston Blackie by this point.)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

Actually, crowd riots like the Arion/Joynson bout were a nightly occurence during Kendo Nagasaki's post ITV era in All Star:

I've already discussed the Arion-Joynson match as an example of juice (actually "claret" was the preferred term in the UK backstage) on ITV. Apart from establishing The Iron Greek as a heel (although I myself aged 5 actually cheered for him a lot) it got Colin Joynson such sympathy that he was never able to be a heel again. Which is a pity as he could be a rather good heel, for example in The Dangermen tag team where he was the brutal droog heel to Steve Haggerty's smug smarmy heel. This title was the same one Wayne Bridges would eventually lose to Kendo Nagasaki in 1987 on TV. After Quinn defected to All Star, the semifinal match on the Wembley Arena show headlined by Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks was a match for the vacant World title between Wayne Bridges and passing American The Missisippi Mauler (Big Jim Harris, the future Kamala). Bridges won and shortly afterwards turned heel to defend against people like Pete Roberts before also defecting to All Star and Orig Williams's BWF. Quinn meanwhile lost his version of the title to Tony St Clair and so in early 1983 on the Welsh language Reslo show, there was a confrontation between the two champions: St Clair everntually lost his title back to Quinn at which pont Bridges reverted to blue eye and finally got his revenge on Quinn in a title unification match. The two titles were later split again when Bridges fell out with All Star in 1986 and Quinn won a 4 man tournament on All Star's satellite TV show to become replacement champion and was awarded the black belt St Clair is wearing here (Arion's original belt from 1979) but Bridges came back and reunified the title a year later. By the time of the Kendo loss, Bridges was a year into his fourth World title but ITV recognised the period from his win over Harris at Wembley to his loss to Kendo as one big six year unbroken second title reign. You can see Orig joining in the fun of calling the two titles all sorts of initials including "World Wrestling Federation" - I'm sure Bob Backlund would have been delighted with that, although to be fair back in the mid 70s when the New York WWF was still the WWWF, there was a WWF World title on Brian Dixon's shows which Kendo held unbeaten. By the time of Bridges-Kendo, they had settled on World Wrestling Alliance (an obvious amalgam of WWF and NWAlliance). Hulk Hogan had defended his title against Randy Savage and Bob Orton on WWF specials by that point, hence George Gillette's challenge to Hogan for a title unification bout.

If I may recommend: Very much Caswell's bout. And the fact that Marty refused the TKO and made it a no Contest so Caswell didn't even lose seems to be a bonus. Caswell Martin, along with the second Steve Logan (the clean young 1980s Logan from Birmingham, no relation to the Iron Man from London above - hopefully we'll get on to Logan mk2 in more depth later) are two guys who never won a title whom I wish had done so.

15:45 of Kendo & George vs McManus and Logan - Kent Walton: "Quite an unusual exhibition of tag wrestling, but it is different." - This was Kent's code (along with "Not too much wrestling just yet") for bouts he disliked or didn't approve of. Mercifully that was George's only time wrestling on TV although he and Kendo did have some non-TV bouts circa 1973 against Shirley Crabtree (pre Daddy, then The Battling Guardsman) and his retired lightweight turned referee (and later MC) brother Brian, which are arguably the earlierst root of the Daddy Tag formula (Daddy and vulnerable lighter blue-eye vs monster heel and snide heel).

This was supposed to lead to Nagasaki and Kung Fu forming a tag team of ex-masked men (they were intending to come to the ring in their old masks and remove them before each bout.) but again as in the decline of the Royal Brothers, Max Crabtree stepped in to ensure that his brother and power ticket Daddy would not be eclipsed. Talking of Daddy, 1978 was a handover year for who got the spotlight on Cup Final day - it was McManus's last Cup Final but Daddy's first as he teamed with Tony StClair to face Haystacks and Bruiser Ian Muir in a bout that ended 2-0 in just 85 seconds: Apparently McManus desperately politicked to have the result of the below partially comedy match from 1976 changed to a draw. Even despite his loss, you will note that it is Logan who takes the deciding fall from Kendo while McManus gets the consolation submission from manager and non-worker George Gillette. McManus was undoubtedly a great heel and an important pioneer in the heel role in Britain just as the Dirty Duseks had been in 1920s America, even if his strongest hold was the office hold. He and his heel vs heel rival Jackie Pallo were pop culture icons- there are pics of McManus hanging out with the Rolling Stones while Pallo's sppearance in a 1970s Royal Variety Performance sketch with Scottish singer Lulu - yes, THAT Lulu - alludes to their feud:

Interesting that all of these seem to be singles scale-downs of famous Royal Brothers battles - versus the South London Hardmen (Logan and Mick McManus), versus the Dennisons (Cooper and Alan Dennison until Dynmaite Kid inspired him to turned blue-eye.) and versus the Saints (Roy and brother Tony). Bert and Vic were an important skilled and popular tag team combination (until Max Crabtree scaled them down so as not to distract from Big Daddy) but Bert solo was mainly notable for being around for a very long time - he was on the first ITV show in 1985 and still around in the early 1980s although in the fullness of time, that's just like seeing someone now who started out in the 1990s - say, James Mason. Between 1966 and 1977 he had four runs as British Heavy Middleweight Champion, with the gap between the last two coming when Logan won the belt off him in Liverpool just eight days after the above listed match - Royal got it back in November. Most of what we have of him is from his later years - except for his apperances on French TV from the 1950s

Footnote to the above- King Ben did indeed defeat Alan Kilby for the British Light Heavyweight title on 25th March 1988 in the Boothmans' home town of Keighley, but Kilby regained it later that year.

Having said that, even the belts for the Mountevans titles seem to have caught up in the modern era. Here is current British Lightweight Champion Nino Bryant with his belt: ... and here is current Mountevans British Heavyweight Champion Oliver Grey (aka Joel Redman)

Thanks and I'm not claiming any authority here, I'm just giving the native perspective as someone brought up to think about wrestling in the old school British wrestling way.

Royal Albert Hall was definitely bigger. Actually the ring from that Royals vs Saints match looks a lot bigger than normal. CWA in Germany had bigger rings, probably to accomodate all the visiting Americans with what they were used to. The ring in Reslo was slightly larger than UK standard, but only slightly. It was borrowed for the first WCW UK tour in December 1991, so it was quite strange seeing Lex Luger, Sting and the Steiner Brothers, not to mention Hayes, Garvin, Zybysko and Anderson in such a small ring. Title Belts have to be considered in terms of title belts in 1920s/1930s America ... or maybe title belts in boxing Bigger flashier title belts seem to have been a specifically American second half of C20th offshoot in evolution

Hi I went to all three of the big Skydome shows the FWA one and the two TWC shows, and actually walked from my house in Coundon to the arena for all three. After the 2004 FWA show I took their coach back from Coventry to King's Cross London as I went to see All Star's Sunday afternoon matinee show at the Fairfield Hall Croydon and spent the night at my parents. Apparently there had been some incident involving Sanjay Bagga and Tony Walsh earlier in the day where Sanjay had criticised Darren Walsh's abilities and Tony had responded by putting him in a hold. Sanjay was getting people on the coach to suggest ideas for what he could do in a putative "rematch". I remember PowerSlam's Fin Martin - who has always tried to bury old school British Wrestling - rather predictably put the boot into the Mal Sanders vs Steve Grey match from the March 2005 TWC show at the Skydome (actually far and away the best thing on any of those shows.) For the second TWC show, there was a "World of Sport - The Next Generation" match unfortunately involving the appaling Colt Cabana who seemed only interested in making a mockery of everything. Personally I feel that an ideal "WoS - TNG" match at that time should have been James Mason vs Dean Allmark in a clean match. There's a FANTASTIC match of exactly that up on Youtube from Croydon from October 2013 which I do intend to post to this thread in due course, but am saving for a mini deep dive into the Modern Era of traditional British wrestling - especially old school clean matches - in the 21st century once I've worked through all the old posts on here and replied to everything I want to reply to.

Mitzi did get onto ITV eventually in 1988 as a Mike McGuirk style female ring announcer. Her & Brian's daughter Laetitia (the little girl with the brown hair in the first clip) later took on this same role for All Star. Laetitia' son referee Joe Allmark (with her ex husband wrestler Dean Allmark) has now inherited ownership/ directorship of All Star since Brian Dixon's death, having taken over road manager duties from Brian last year. Summary - an indie set up as a vehicle for a female wrestler by her boyf and future hubby went on to be the biggest company in British wrestling history - bigger even than Joint Promotions - and still the biggest living company to this day..

Brian Dixon originally formed All Star Wrestling (then Wrestling Enterprises) in Sept 1970 especially as a vehicle for his girlfriend and later wife, British Ladies champion Mitzi Mueller. All Star eventually went on to get a slice of ITV in 1987-1988 and are stillthe biggest UK company despite Brian's death earlier this year. They eventually ran the last British show at the Royal Albert Hall-Mitzi's retirment match and a bout which circumvented a ban on Womens' Wrestling in London: The battle tor Mitzi's vacant title was the subject of a BBC2 documentary (the match was at one of my local venues the Royal Spa Centre in Leamington.)

I do remember thinking in Jan 1987 how strange it was that American WWF rings were so LARGE! Q: How you do feel about the similarly small rings in the NWA Cental States Terrirtry, particularly the one for Harley Race's maiden NWA World title win over Dory Jr?

Who were they? Heel opponents of his? Most fans were quite happy to see him get on the nerves of a villain. In blue-eye mode, his odd bits of mischief just added to the general air of sportmanship and bonhomie of a clean match. But he was not - repeat, NOT - a comedy wrestler. I posted his match with Johnny Saint from 1981 a couple of pages back. It's the bout I use to challenge American fans' preconceptions of what pro wrestling can and should be. I would also pick out another great classic that stands head and shoulders above the rest - this 1971 tag match with brother Bert against fellow blue-eyes and fellow brothers tag team Roy and Tony St Clair. (Incidentally, this was not broadcast on World Of Sport, but rather on Wrestling's late-evening midweek slot that it kept up to the mid 70s.

The round system actively works against this, bringing everything to a complete standstill every three minutes. I'm here to watch wrestling - what am I supposed to do between rounds? Scratch my arse? Plan to take over the world? It doesn't flow - it spurts. The tiny rings make the sport itself look tiny. The rounds remove the need for rest holds during the match. This doesn't mean that you do away with headlocks etc but that they instead become links in the chain. Without rounds, old school British wrestlers have to resort to other things to create gaps, such as leading the family audiences in clapping etc. Just heard Jim Cornette describing a match as "a Raw match without commercial breaks." And I just rememebered ANOTHER thing that rounds are useful for - you can slot the commercial breaks in the round breaks, especially in a longer match! I've seen this done with boxing and I've seen it done with longer matches on ITV (I think there was an advert break during the original transmission of Bridges vs Nagasaki and also during Fit Finlay winning the British Heavy Middleweight title from Chic Cullen around the same time in a title match that took up a whole episode of All Star's share of the final two years of ITV. Come to that, I've seen the advert break between rounds used in one of the most historic matches in British history - the match that made Big Daddy a star! (U=Matic recording of original December 1975 transmission. Advert break is at 5:10)