French catch

[David Mantell]

Also I have to say, a lot of the French press articles I've read seem to treat him as a big deal:

https://www.ladepeche.fr/article/2011/04/17/1061443-catch-flesh-gordon-bientot-a-boe.html

https://www.ladepeche.fr/article/2018/09/13/2868085-la-star-du-catch-flesh-gordon-a-montauban-samedi.html

[David Mantell]

7 hours ago, El-P said:

Interesting how the woman pretty much talks about the etiquette as a heel dealing with hostile crowds : "We have to right to insult them back, but not hit them. It's a game."

I quite liked her, she reminded me of Klondyke Kate in the 1988 BBC2 docu Raging Belles talking about juggling life as a heel and as a mum while having to make it clear that there is nothing stopping one be both. I wonder if the kid went into the business like Kate's son from the docu Adam and her later daughter Connie both did.

Unlike ITV, Antenne 2 never had any qualms about screening women's wrestling - although they too drew the line at Seins Nus ....

I notice Rollerball Mark Rocco is on the poster at the start of the above video. Pity he wasn't included in the clip - I would have loved to see him in French Catch at that stage of his career. (He did of course appear on New Catch in 1991 against Danny Collins in Paris.)

[El-P]

4 hours ago, David Mantell said:

Also I have to say, a lot of the French press articles I've read seem to treat him as a big deal:

https://www.ladepeche.fr/article/2011/04/17/1061443-catch-flesh-gordon-bientot-a-boe.html

https://www.ladepeche.fr/article/2018/09/13/2868085-la-star-du-catch-flesh-gordon-a-montauban-samedi.html

Holy shit, you did not dig up some article from the PQR about some shows in Montauban and Boé (what, where ?) as a "proof" that he was some kind of a big deal, right ?  You realize how utterly ridiculous that is to anyone with *any* clue about France ? 

The irony is that in this interview that you linked, he actually is more brutal toward old-school French pro-wrestling that whatever fictional "aim to supplant the old school style" ICWA had. 

Trying to find bits and pieces that confirms a preconceived idea or narrative is the WORST way of doing any research. 

I repeat and it's the last time, feel free to not listen : Flesh Gordon was not, never, at any point, a household name. He's not known, he's not a star, he's not a TV personality, he's not part of pop culture at all. Do with that what you want, it's really not a hill worth dying on. 

[Matt D]

I've written thousands upon thousands of words about this stuff, but I kept it almost completely textual for any number of reasons. Here's what I'll say from a purely textual perspective of Hervé/Gordon in the late, late 70s into the 80s:

He was presented as the heir to the Ben Chemoul > Bordes line. More showy, less gritty, crowd pleasing, heel embarrassing, crowd singing. And in that role, he was believable enough. In a different world where there was steady and constant tv presence and connected promoters and more of a cultural need for wrestling, I honestly think that he could have carried that banner in the 80s and maybe even onwards before handing it off to someone else. He more or less had their tricks down and was relatively skilled at seeing what was going on around him and incorporating it into his act, including the Jon Guil Don finishing move that almost no one else has ever done before or after. Crowds were behind him. He was credible against all manner of opponents. He captured that same sort of energy in the 80s. There's definitely a world where which it was possible.

But this is the world we live in instead and obviously that didn't happen.

[El-P]

44 minutes ago, Matt D said:

He was presented as the heir to the Ben Chemoul > Bordes line. More showy, less gritty, crowd pleasing, heel embarrassing, crowd singing. And in that role, he was believable enough. In a different world where there was steady and constant tv presence and connected promoters and more of a cultural need for wrestling, I honestly think that he could have carried that banner in the 80s and maybe even onwards before handing it off to someone else. He more or less had their tricks down and was relatively skilled at seeing what was going on around him and incorporating it into his act, including the Jon Guil Don finishing move that almost no one else has ever done before or after. Crowds were behind him. He was credible against all manner of opponents. He captured that same sort of energy in the 80s. There's definitely a world where which it was possible.

But this is the world we live in instead and obviously that didn't happen.

Even past his prime when I saw him live, he was obviously still pretty good, and yes, his finisher looked cool and would have looked cool anywhere at the time he did it, including in the early 90's. He said it himself in interviews, he thought the old-school wrestling was dusty and kinda boring. Talk about wanting to replace the old ways, there it is. 

The bolded part though. That's what I've been trying to get at for a while now. There was no pro-wrestling culture anymore in France in the 80's and so on. It was not part of popular culture anymore. There are probably inner reasons that are due to the business itself, but most probably other reasons too that have nothing to do with pro-wrestling and that have to do with changes in French society (not to mention the influence of the US entertainment industry with the new Hollywood blockbusters like Star Wars and such, new cartoons including Japanese anime that we got super early, so many things changed at that time, France got the very first hip-hop show on TV in the world too for instance, there were so many new exciting things happening).

Even when Canal + brought WWF, there was no pro-wrestling culture in France. Christophe Agius, who is a few years younger than me but started watching earlier, mentioned it in  lenghty interviews he did on his Youtube channel a few years ago. Even though he was a fan, he was basically alone. Pro-wrestling was not a thing. I experienced the same thing, I had no friend in middle-school nor high-school who watched WWF. There were enough people that they could do a few houseshows, yes, because Hulk Hogan was a global star and there's no escaping that. But it was never a part of mainstream pop culture at all.

Pro-wrestling became popular again not when ICWA ran a few shows with indy wrestlers from abroad in the early 00's, but when WWE caught on in the late 00's because they were on NT1 and had a unique duo of announcers. For a few years, pro-wrestling, through WWE (and because of Agius & Chereau, who carried that stuff like they were Russel & Brown and literally built an entire generation of fans), became part of the pop culture. In 2013 not one but TWO pro-wrestling movies were produced in France. There was a lucha themed bar in Paris. John Cena became a meme in Youtube videos that had nothing at all to do with pro-wrestling. That's when pro-wrestling, as part of pop culture in France, became relevant again, for the first time since some time in the seventies, maybe the late sixties.

Pro-wrestling was not part of France pop/entertainment culture at all from the end of the "golden days" until the days of the "Catch Attack" generation on NT1 in the late 00's. That is a fact.

[David Mantell]

At the end of the day iLe Depeche is an acceptable wikipedia source and the point is that it takes about him like it expects its readership to know and be wowed by the mention of Gordon's name.

The WP article does mention the change in style that he exemplifies. Personally I think in terms of showiness, gimmicks etc that train was already leaving the station in around 1971 with the likes of La Bête Humane, Le Hippie Du Ring and poor old Dave Larsen as Le Batman - and the driver was very much Delaporte. but then I only said Gordon exemplified that direction, not that he originated it.

Was Gordon a betrayal of French Wrestling tradition? If he was, then Big Daddy was a similar betrayal of British Wrestling as an attempt (and clearly a very successful one) to turn round a decline in UK audiences similar to  the French decline Delaporte describes in the docu, by subverting the whole sport into a kiddy pantomime in which he mows down all heel opposition and everyone else has to take their turn in the pillory, heels being crushed by him, blue-eyes being rescued by him. It was utterly offensive to British wrestling's classical values (to the point where it opened up a gap in the marketplace for Brian Dixon and All Star) yet undeniably Big Daddy is a key landmark name in the history of old school British wrestling and clearly a big identifiable part of that culture.

ICWA on the other hand were part of a wider trend across Europe (the FWA and all the other New School promotions in Britain were part of this too.) that simply did away with local wrestling history/culture, (often ferociously disparaging it and using the likes of Daddy and Gordon as sticks to beat it) and instead just did American Wrestling - loudly trumpeted as such - in a different accent or language.

 

[David Mantell]

My previous post in a nutshell-

Flesh Gordon was the French Big Daddy, Pierre Booster Fontaine was the French Alex Shane.

[El-P]

(EDIT : yeah, whatever, this is going nowhere and it's just tedious at this point)

39 minutes ago, David Mantell said:

Flesh Gordon was the French Big Daddy

Talk about exposing yourself with that one 

Big Daddy was a huge star.

No one knows who Flesh Gordon is.

 

[El-P]

And since I'm a generous fellow nonetheless, the VOD of a famous French pro-wrestling Twitch streamer watching the opening and the Flesh Gordon match (against Carlos Plata) from the first 1991 New Catch show in TF1, which I watched and probably even taped at the time. This is such a treasure.

OMG LOOK AT THE TITLE ! HE CALLED FLESH GORDON THE FRENCH HULK HOGAN ! THIS IS PROOF RIGHT THERE !

Yeah, no, it's ironic.

Enjoy nonetheless people. Or don't. But you won't find this anywhere else.

[ohtani's jacket]

1 hour ago, David Mantell said:

At the end of the day iLe Depeche is an acceptable wikipedia source and the point is that it takes about him like it expects its readership to know and be wowed by the mention of Gordon's name.

The WP article does mention the change in style that he exemplifies. Personally I think in terms of showiness, gimmicks etc that train was already leaving the station in around 1971 with the likes of La Bête Humane, Le Hippie Du Ring and poor old Dave Larsen as Le Batman - and the driver was very much Delaporte. but then I only said Gordon exemplified that direction, not that he originated it.

Was Gordon a betrayal of French Wrestling tradition? If he was, then Big Daddy was a similar betrayal of British Wrestling as an attempt (and clearly a very successful one) to turn round a decline in UK audiences similar to  the French decline Delaporte describes in the docu, by subverting the whole sport into a kiddy pantomime in which he mows down all heel opposition and everyone else has to take their turn in the pillory, heels being crushed by him, blue-eyes being rescued by him. It was utterly offensive to British wrestling's classical values (to the point where it opened up a gap in the marketplace for Brian Dixon and All Star) yet undeniably Big Daddy is a key landmark name in the history of old school British wrestling and clearly a big identifiable part of that culture.

ICWA on the other hand were part of a wider trend across Europe (the FWA and all the other New School promotions in Britain were part of this too.) that simply did away with local wrestling history/culture, (often ferociously disparaging it and using the likes of Daddy and Gordon as sticks to beat it) and instead just did American Wrestling - loudly trumpeted as such - in a different accent or language.

 

There were gimmicks and showiness long before 1971. There was a lot of that stuff going on in the 50s and 60s, more than made TV considering how many weekly shows there were in Paris, the snippet of it that made weekly TV, and the stuff that was going on out in the wop-wops.

There was a definite decline in the quality of French wrestling over the course of the 1970s, and particularly into the 80s, but it had nothing to do with Flesh Gordon and it's a mistake to think he was the face of the decline or a poster child for everything that was wrong with Catch at the time. That may have been how it looked when all we had available was the trashy 90s stuff he did, but it was clear that a good worker in the early 80s and that Catch simply lacked the infrastructure it had enjoyed in the 50s and 60s. It's hard to piece together the decline of French wrestling as we don't have all the facts. We're basing almost all the information we have on whatever is in the archives. All we can tell for sure is that there were several promotors competing with each other in Paris in the 50s and 60s and eventually they whittled down to only a few. Whether that was because of business or the promoters retiring, I'm not sure. I would assume that it involved a decline in business, but there may have been other factors. 

[David Mantell]

30 minutes ago, ohtani's jacket said:

There was a definite decline in the quality of French wrestling over the course of the 1970s, and particularly into the 80s, but it had nothing to do with Flesh Gordon and it's a mistake to think he was the face of the decline or a poster child for everything that was wrong with Catch at the time.

Yes, the malaise wasn't focussed on Gordon the way the UK's problems were focussed squarely on Big Daddy. Gordon is simply the natural case study as lead babyface of the scene - also even in the 90s and 00s he was still a better wrestler than Daddy in every respect. With Joint in the 80s, if you delete the Daddy tag main event, often what you are left with on the undercard is something resembling John Freemantle's Premier Promotions in the C21st. With FFCP, EWF and WS in the last 4 decades, it's more something spread in homogenised fashion across the whole of that Wrestling scene - Mambo Le Primitiv, Marquis Richard's butler Paul Butard being allowed to stand on the ring apron the better to interfere in the match, Les Maniaks, Scot Ryder, Kato Bruce Lee ...

[Matt D]

There's probably a fascinating book to be written but the answers aren't on the tapes. We're the blind men touching the elephant. I've seen every bit of the archive footage there. There's no fingerpoke of doom, and even if there was, we're in a world where people spend hours upon hours saying it was all about the merger instead anyway. Watts pointing to the oil crash has always been compelling because it's not like UWF is all that bad, even if he was overstretching himself. We have every indication that all of those things you mentioned were symptoms and not the disease.

[ohtani's jacket]

There is a decline in European wresting across the same time period. One of the strengths of the 50s and 60s footage is that you had a bunch of foreign workers available to square off against the locals. And those foreign workers had a lot of places where they could work. As the work dried up, so did the talent pool. There was still a very good group of lightweight wrestlers on France n the 70s, but as with many other territories around the world, the heavyweight pool was dwindling, and it's the heavyweights who are so often the draw in wrestling.

That said, whoever the booker was, and whatever the promotion was that was getting TV sporadically in the late 70s and 80s, they were the ones who made the decision to put the gimmick stuff on television. The alternative, I suppose, was putting two dinosaurs on TV and having them grapple,  but they were still cheapening the product with the product they put on TV. It may have worked on house shows, but doesn't make for great looking television. 

[El-P]

One obvious blind spot to me is that the discourse is only focused on inner working of pro-wrestling, while ignoring the outside factors that may have played a consequential part. The old France of Pompidou was not the France of Giscard d'Estaing in the 70's. Mai 68 changed society a whole lot. Ditto 1981 which had huge effect on the structure of medias in the country. There's many reasons why the mythology of French pro-wrestling belongs to the 50's and 60's mostly, with the 70's already showing a decline. 

[David Mantell]

Quote

There is a decline in European wresting across the same time period. One of the strengths of the 50s and 60s footage is that you had a bunch of foreign workers available to square off against the locals. And those foreign workers had a lot of places where they could work. As the work dried up, so did the talent pool. There was still a very good group of lightweight wrestlers on France n the 70s, but as with many other territories around the world, the heavyweight pool was dwindling, and it's the heavyweights who are so often the draw in wrestling.

That said, whoever the booker was, and whatever the promotion was that was getting TV sporadically in the late 70s and 80s, they were the ones who made the decision to put the gimmick stuff on television. The alternative, I suppose, was putting two dinosaurs on TV and having them grapple,  but they were still cheapening the product with the product they put on TV. It may have worked on house shows, but doesn't make for great looking television. 

 

Different Euro territories seem to have declined at different rates. Italy, so I gather, died off entirely in 1965, subsequently getting some revival attempts by a couple of wrestlers from Piedmont. That same year according to the essay on Wrestling  Titles, Spain's CIC got reduced down to just Madrid and Barcelona before even that petered out in 1975, leaving various French and German promoters to spend the next 15 years fighting  like hyenas over the corpse of Spanish wrestling until the WWF marched into both Spain and Italy and properly revived interest. They did not bother to do this in Greece where the scene limped on in sickly fashion, by 1987 holding shows in converted concrete car parks with the most awful jerry-built rings you ever did see, before finally sputtering out in 1991. That leaves the UK and France with actual national TV plus West Germany/Austria with a highly developed early wrestling home video market. We've discussed the decline of quality and popularity in France - local wrestling seems to quietly vanish from terrestrial TV in 1988 unlike in the UK where it goes out with a Greg Dyke shaped bang that same year. The UK has been able to rebuild itself commercially with Big Daddy but at a cost in quality to the point where a red hot opposition promoter takes over the territory.  In Germany, the long tournaments incorporated into beer swilling festivals continue despite the WWF success and the CWA happily co-exists with the German Cult Of Bret Hart just as in Blighty, All Star's post TV boom happily co exists with Bulldogmania.  So it goes on and by the C21st all three territories are doing unspectacular but steady business at grassroots level up to the present. Meanwhile all over Europe, new American Wrestling promotions spring up. The Southern Europeans have no memories of their old time scenes but in Northwest Europe the traditional scenes trundle on and are much derided by the old school as antiquated and kitsch and something they intend to do away with. But they never quite manage this goal.

[David Mantell]

( in response to apparently deleted post)

Just to clarify, I meant that according to Wikipedia's own rules, La Depeche is AFAIK a reliable independent source, so OK for referencing stuff.

If you know of any claims to the contrary on either English or French Wikipedia, please link to them. If it's actually the most godawful slanderous tabloid and is banned from WP like The Sun, then fair enough, but otherwise it's fair game as a WP source as far as I can see.

[El-P]

13 minutes ago, David Mantell said:

Just to clarify, I meant that according to Wikipedia's own rules, Le Depeche is AFAIK a reliable independent source, so OK for referencing stuff.

If you know of any claims to the contrary on either English or French Wikipedia, please link to them. If it's actually the most godawful slanderous tabloid and is banned from WP like The Sun, thenn fair enough, but otherwise it's fair game as a WP source as far as I can see.

What I mean is that an article from a PQR in the 10's promoting a show in the local town mentioning "Hey, this guy was a star in the 80's" is not a valuable source because it doesn't mean anything, not because La Depeche is a trashy tabloid. Every article about Flesh Gordon is from some PQR journal, because he sells his show in small towns. And of course they are gonna refer to him as "A star from the 80's", with the usual bit about "Oh, he was european champ and then world champ in whatever years" that he tells in every interview ever. You think any of these people know who the hell he is ? You've very naive... You've got a pigiste being told by the boss "hey, you're doing a paper on that wrestling show that happens next Sunday", and the guy is gonna go talk 5 minutes to Flesh Gordon who's gonna give him the bit and there you go. Again, this is not a hill I'm gonna die on. 

And although I may come off as if I have something against the guy. I don't. I don't care. He's got his place in French pro-wrestling history. But it's not one of fame.

[David Mantell]

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Dépêche_du_Midi 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Dépêche_du_Midi

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability,_not_truth

 

[El-P]

....

Yeah. I know what La Dépêche du Midi is. I'm French, you know.

I also know how Wiki works. Which is why Wiki is not considered a valuable source in many cases and should by used with much care.

[El-P]

I don't see a better way to end this but by finally posting the one and only, "Flesh Gordon et les pompiers", the peak of Flesh Gordon on French (although it's a Belgium show) TV. Amazingly cringe too. 

(notice the description of the video and how it introduces Flesh Gordon. Yes. The exact same three of four elements that you'll find everywhere, in every PQR article and every interviews of him ever)

[David Mantell]

9 minutes ago, El-P said:

I also know how Wiki works. Which is why Wiki is not considered a valuable source in many cases and should by used with much care.

Yes, but this whole debate is over an edit to Wikipedia and whether or not it should be changed.

[El-P]

4 minutes ago, David Mantell said:

Yes, but this whole debate is over an edit to Wikipedia and whether or not it should be changed.

Yes. Because you're basically giving a false information to people. The fact Wiki allows people to give false informations is an issue. It happens in very serious articles about very serious stuff. Whether Flesh Gordon was a household name or not really won't matter one bit in the end, because no one cares. It's still wrong, but it won't affect anyone. But it's still wrong.  

[PeteF3]

This is mostly going to go over the heads of everyone else in this thread but this reminds me of the myriad articles in actual newspapers talking about Vader playing football in Super Bowl 14 for the L.A. Rams. This was repeated in *lots* of places because it was obviously one of Leon's own talking points when talking to reporters and this was before the days of sites like pro-football-reference where that could easily be verified. Vader was drafted by Los Angeles in 1978 but was placed on the injured list before the season started and never played a game, and wasn't on the active roster for the Super Bowl game (also published in numerous papers that Sunday).

Of course, the NFL is bigger than French wrestling, possibly even at French catch's peak, so there's more out there to rebut such a claim, so it's not in his Wikipedia article while a specific passage talking about him never playing a game and amassing no statistics is. But that's what came to mind reading about ol' Flesh.

[David Mantell]

2 hours ago, PeteF3 said:

Of course, the NFL is bigger than French wrestling, possibly even at French catch's peak, so there's more out there to rebut such a claim

Whether someone was drafted for a NFL team or not is a matter of hard fact (which could be dealt with on WP via a counter source about them getting injured and not getting to play) whereas whether someone is a household name is harder to counter if there's a reliable independent source that makes him out to have been one, as no one is likely to bother to write an article along the lines of "C'MEC FLESH GORDON, IL N'ETAIT RIEN!!!", are they?

[David Mantell]

16 hours ago, El-P said:

 

 

Been watching his other VOD of Travesti Man 

Actually I have to admit that until that point not only had I not realised Travesti Man was actually Jacky Richard but that "Best Boy" Jean Claude Blanchet was actually the same person as Paul "The Butler" Butard whom Jacky the 2nd Marquis de Fumolo inherited from beardy  Eduardo the 1st Marquis.  Well that explains how he put on the weight and dumped the horseshoe hairdo for Monsieur Jacky later on.

One thing still not explained is why he was allowed to stand on the ring apron like that.  Even in America they had to step down to ringside.  On non-TV shows when Fit Finlay wrestled, Princess Paula was made to spend the rounds sat n a chair. On ITV the likes of Paula, George Gillette, Charlie The Gent, Doctor Monika, Tony Francis etc were regarded as seconds like the corner bucket crew and made to disappear out of sight up the aisle while the match was on.

Have left a comment on the FG VOD suggesting he do some VODs on the INA's stock of vintage French TV wrestling.