French catch

[David Mantell]

1 hour ago, Phil Lions said:

As for Lebanon, wrestling used to air on TV there in the 1970s on Channel 7. The Saade brothers were probably the biggest stars, but there were also international stars like Danny Lynch, Prince Kumali and Tsuneharu Sugiyama to name a few, who worked in Lebanon during this time too. Although to be fair I don't know which ones of the international guys worked the TV. I know they worked the big shows, but I don't know about the TV.

Been having some thoughts about Lebanon and Lebanese Wrestling which link back to stuff about French Wrestling on this thread and the "Why is America always assumed to be the centre of the wrestling universe?" thread:

1) Given that Lebanon was a French Mandate after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of WW1 and given therefore the large amount of French speakers and now adding on that it had its own televised territory in the 1970s, I would finger Lebanese TV as a strong candidate for having previously or perhaps continuously been a buyer of French Catch kinescopes from (O)RTF.  In fact I think I shall bounce this suggestion over to that discussion  on that thread.

2) I'd be interested to hear more of the career history/back story of Lebanese heel on 1970s French TV Joseph El Arz.  (IIRC he also gets a mention in that Spanish wrestling article I linked to above.)

 

By the way, Arz is Arabic for a pimp. (Also in Israel "Arzim" are a subculture of young  Sephardic Jews into sportswear, gold chains and hip hop culture - they are the Israeli equivalent of Chavs in Britain.)

[David Mantell]

15 hours ago, Phil Lions said:

Definitely not the case. I'd have to check my Greek clippings to dig out the exact years, but I have seen several reports about Greek wrestlers working in Egypt in the 1940s. Maybe the 1950s too. And of course, speaking of the 1930s, it's worth mentioning Jim Londos worked a few matches in Egypt in 1937

I'd have to find the match again, I think Pete Roberts was involved. A few years earlier in December 1976 Kendo Nagasaki returned to Solihull Civic Hall, scene of his unmasking by Big Daddy 12 months earlier to face and defeat Colin Joynson by KO in 3 rounds.(sadly not on YouTube although a different  1978 bout is up.). During one of the round breaks, Kent Walton mentions that Joynson "leaves tomorrow on a tour of Israel."

Colin's daughter has confirmed that yes, her dad did indeed wrestle in Israel.  Which does seem to suggest that Kent was not simply making this stuff up out of his head, so presumably the Egypt tour in 1980 actually happened and possibly was the first of its kind in some time and led to the remarkably modern-for its-time looking Egyptian footage posted above.

[David Mantell]

21 hours ago, David Mantell said:

It does seem like the sort of thing Saddam would do, running his own wrestling promotion and booking it with a firearm.  His son Uday was in charge of the national football team and notorious for torturing players who did not play hard enough with electrodes to their private parts.  Trump was very much into wrestling - there seems to be something that attracts these big power magnates.

And obviously we do have the pics of Saddam and Adnan which the WWF were only too delighted to reprint in the run up to WM7.

Just found some more Iraq footage,  Actually it took place in Kuwait, Adnan versus Danny Lynch:

(FAO readers of the "Why is America always assumed to be the centre of the wrestling universe?" thread - Oh look, it ends on a ten count Knockout! )

Probably the  Iraqi, Lebanese, Egyptian, Israeli and Spanish pro wrestling scenes each deserve their own threads, but this is where there has been discussion of Iraq recently, so there you go.

[David Mantell]

Apparently from the second video clip at least one of the Saades wrestled in France (at the Cirque d'Hiver) and also in England (agaist Norman Walsh on a Best-Wryton show) as "Sheik El Mansour".

[David Mantell]

On 12/19/2023 at 1:22 PM, Cien Caras said:

Egypt had a major scene, one of its biggest stars was Mamdouh Farag who also worked a lot for Big Otto.

 

 

If you look through that clip you will spot Greg "The Hammer" Valentine at 0:08

There are a bunch of other clips of Mamdouh online:

Also Mamdoh visited Germany, presumably for the VDB:

 

[Phil Lions]

16 minutes ago, Cien Caras said:

Last thing for now, from Lebanon circa 1970

To be more precise:

September 26-October 3, 1974
Beirut, Lebanon
City Sports Hall

I've previously come across a few newspaper photos of Danny Lynch, Prince Kumali and others in Lebanon around this time (could even be from the same tour):



And speaking of Lebanon, the article is in Bulgarian but here you can check out some posters for wrestling shows in Lebanon and Syria in the 1930s and 1950s. This an article about a Bulgarian wrestler who wrestled there in those decades. Some of his personal belongings have been preserved at a museum in Bulgaria.

[Phil Lions]

Actually, I might as well share these too since I have them in my files.

February 18-22, 1998
Beirut, Lebanon
Promoters: the Saade brothers


The covers of Lebanese wrestling magazines from 1986-1988:

[David Mantell]

20 hours ago, Cien Caras said:

On an international note there are a lot of clips of Titanes Del Ring from Chile on YouTube, appears to be largely a derivative of the Argentinian Titanes En El Ring with an 80s kids studio vibe and mummies etc. I believe other South American countries also had their own Titanes equivalents.

I did suggest on the "Why is America always assumed to be the centre of the wrestling universe?" thread that WWC/Puerto Rico, rather than being considered part of American Wrestling, should be considered part of a different family of wrestling cultures - Latin American Wrestling - along with Mexican Lucha Libre, Brazilian Telecatch, Cuban wrestling, Dominican wrestling (what do we know of this other than the Jack Veneno/Ric Flair incident? ) - and presumably all these Titanes En El Ring shows. (I notice they say "ring" rather than "cuadrilatero", the standard Castillian Spanish term for a boxing/ wrestling ring)

That would then leave New York/Capitol/W(W)WF as the ONE surviving American Wrestling culture post-2001 (apart from the odd occasional twitches of the corpses of old territorial Calgary and Portland wrestling in the late Noughties) as compared with THREE old school European wrestling cultures (traditional style British Wrestling, French Catch and German/Austrian Catch) all still chugging along at least at grassroots level in 2023 with dates booked for 2024.

[PeteF3]

Why would Puerto Rico be lumped in with lucha? Lucha and Argentina-type wrestling aren't really all that similar, either.

[NintendoLogic]

Antonio Pena was heavily influenced by Titanes en el Ring, so there is a connection. Regardless, treating the British, French, and German wrestling cultures as completely distinct while lumping all of Latin America together is pretty silly.

[David Mantell]

1 hour ago, PeteF3 said:

Why would Puerto Rico be lumped in with lucha? Lucha and Argentina-type wrestling aren't really all that similar, either.

Geographically Puerto Rico is closer to Mexico, Cuba and the Dominican Republic than Puerto Rico is to the mainland US.  They all speak Spanish and Brazil speaks another Iberian language, Portuguese, so there is that cultural bond,

Mexican and Puerto Rican wrestling also each emphasise one particular non grappling aspect of wrestling to the point of distortion (flying moves in Mexico, bloodletting in Puerto Rico)

[David Mantell]

3 minutes ago, Cien Caras said:

I would also think that saying British, French and German wrestling cultures are distinct is being very optimistic

They are related and distinct like three different territories of American wrestling.  There are also noticeable style differences in what escapes are emphasised (the roll on the mat in Britain versus the flying headscissor takedown in France.)

French wrestling to me feels different from what I grew up with on Sat afternoons on ITV and I wonder what I would have made of it had I had the chance to see it when I was younger or as a kid who only knew British wrestling, but there are lots of details I recognise in French wrestling which are absent in American wrestling eg seconds, no followdowns, KO counts, a more vigoruous prohibition of closed fist punches etc etc.

[PeteF3]

1 hour ago, NintendoLogic said:

Antonio Pena was heavily influenced by Titanes en el Ring, so there is a connection. 

There's a not-inconceivable argument that VKM was, too. 

There are "connections" between American and British wrestling, of course. Whether direct crossover or through Japan.  Same with lucha and Puerto Rico. Doesn't mean they're not distinct.

[Control21]

Puerto Rico was definitely not Lucha. Lucha developed as a unique flavor of wrestling in Mexico. As far as I know, Puerto Rico did not follow the same traditions and elements of Lucha Libre.

I think England, Germany, and France all developed in similar ways. Catch wrestling from Lancashire influenced all three up until the 1940s or so, when they began to evolve into more modern wrestling and that's where they all adopted a "European" flavor if you will, with all three regions more or less having the same elements. French wrestling probably stood out the most in the 1950s/1960s.

[PeteF3]

34 minutes ago, Cien Caras said:

Nah you’re wrong on this one, countries speaking Spanish or Portuguese doesn’t make their wrestling cultures related, PR was a US wrestling territory from its inception as was the majority of its roster.

I don't get the geographic argument, either, considering Mexico's closer to the mainland U.S. than it is to Puerto Rico. Before we even get into the proximity of say, Germany to France.

It's not exactly culturally homogeneous between Mexico and Puerto Rico, either. Go through San Juan on November 1 and I don't know how much Dia de los Muertos celebration you're going to see. 

[Graham Crackers]

Two decades of indy dream matches may have diluted this but Northeastern indies were heavily influenced by/had a good deal of overlap with Puerto Rican wrestling culture thanks to the concentration of Caribbean diaspora in the area. Lucha libre on the other hand does not have the same kind of drawing power in NY or NJ that it does in Chicago or the Southwest.

[David Mantell]

4 hours ago, PeteF3 said:

I don't get the geographic argument, either, considering Mexico's closer to the mainland U.S. than it is to Puerto Rico. 

Yes but Puerto Rico is further away from the US than any of the other countries I mention except the ones on the actual continental South American mainland .

That and the obsession with bloodiness were why I tended not to think of PR/WWC as a US wrestling territory, or at least less of one than Cuban or Dominican Republic Wrestling (did/does Haiti have its own wrestling? Or is it just an overspill of Jack Veneno land Dominican Wrestling? Or is there just one big wrestling scene covering the entire island of Hispaniola? )

 

"Technical skill is not at a premium( in the WWC,) the emphasis is on drawing blood, a task at which (Jose) Gonzales seemed gruesomely adept ."

- Eddie Ellner , obituary for Bruiser Brody,  The Insider, Inside Wrestling September 1988.

[PeteF3]

Haiti has its own issues--French-speaking and generally the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Some Florida indy guys along with some WWE releases like Cryme Tyme ran some there in the late 2010s, and according to Matt Farmer when I asked him about any Haitian scene years ago, there was a big stadium match in the '50s between Ilio DiPaolo and Haitian boxer Omelio Agramonte, who apparently ran a small local promotion. 

That said, I would imagine once Papa Doc was in power, the local wrestling went away. 

[cad]

The Central American countries are a lot more similar stylistically to Mexico than Puerto Rico is. Panama doesn't seem to have much of a wrestling scene nowadays, but in the 1980s they were able to run shows in the top boxing arena in the country. Guatemala had televised wrestling at one point, don't think they do anymore, apparently they haven't had a national superstar since Astro de Oro (a 1980s-1990s wrestler).

[NintendoLogic]

This issue has come up before on this board, but non-Americans often forget that Puerto Rico is a US territory. That means Americans can travel there and work there without a visa and vice versa. That's a big part of why Puerto Rican wrestling is more connected to mainland US wrestling culture than that of Latin America.

[David Mantell]

On 12/22/2023 at 4:33 PM, David Mantell said:

They are related and distinct like three different territories of American wrestling.  There are also noticeable style differences in what escapes are emphasised (the roll on the mat in Britain versus the flying headscissor takedown in France.)

French wrestling to me feels different from what I grew up with on Sat afternoons on ITV and I wonder what I would have made of it had I had the chance to see it when I was younger or as a kid who only knew British wrestling, but there are lots of details I recognise in French wrestling which are absent in American wrestling eg seconds, no followdowns, KO counts, a more vigoruous prohibition of closed fist punches etc etc.

am kicking myself for not mentioning Public Warnings/Avertisements/Yellow Cards, three bringing about DQ in the list of common threads.

One North American territory- Stampede - also used this system but that was a direct import by Bruce Hart.

I've said in the past online that a good measure of the survival of old British wrestling is that there are currently tens of thousands of young kids out there across this land of mine who, yes, DO know exactly what a public warning is!

[David Mantell]

On 12/20/2023 at 11:42 AM, David Mantell said:

Apparently from the second video clip at least one of the Saades wrestled in France (at the Cirque d'Hiver) and also in England (agaist Norman Walsh on a Best-Wryton show) as "Sheik El Mansour".

Actually, and bringing this neatly back to the subject of French Catch, there is a video of El Mansour/ Saade on French TV on Matt D's channel. It's the second bout of this video.

Reasonably clean heavyweight bout marred by a finish involving an argument between Janek and the referee.  Mansour has a nice little speciality - which I think I saw him do on the Lebanese TV footage too - where he gets into a forearm smash contest with the opponent and ducks out of the way of an oncoming Manchette by falling backwards into a bridge and then snapping back upwards to deliver one of his own.

 

[David Mantell]

On 7/31/2023 at 12:52 PM, David Mantell said:

I definitely think INA should check its stock of Channel 2/Antenne 2 b/w kinescopes for chroma dots for possible colour recovery.  If wrestling was already on 2er Chaine then any of the bouts from Oct '1967 to 1974 could be restored to colour.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chroma_dots
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_recovery#From_chroma_crawl

At some point in this bout the commentator says in French "if you have colour television you can see ..."

 

[David Mantell]

On 3/29/2020 at 11:30 AM, ohtani's jacket said:

Rene Ben Chemoul & Walter Bordes vs. Kamikaze I & Kamikaze II (aired 12/26/68)

Well, this is confusing. I'm pretty sure that Les Kamikazes were the Spanish versions but neither guy removed their mask. I guess we don't have an accurate timeline on when Kamikaze I lost his mask, or perhaps he kept using it in France. In any event, the match was more about Chemoul and Bordes than it was the Kamikazes. This felt like a better reflection of what made Chemoul so beloved. He gave a fiery and passionate performance. He danced salsa when he was winning and shed tears when his prodigy was in trouble. I was surprised by how good Bordes was. I didn't expect him to be be so smooth. The match was formulaic but entertaining. Les Kamikazes were strange and exotic and shifty enough to make decent foils for the babyfaces, and the team of Chemoul and Bordes shone. 

Was looking for reviews of the 1971 bout in my last post and came up with this from 1968, I suppose I shall have to check this match out too.  I don't think these were Modesto Aledo or Benny, the reportedly wore all black like 80s gimmick wrestler Mambo Le Primitiv (or like Brutus Beefcake and Arn Anderson as hired hitmen for Ric Flair in WCW 1994). Neither of these two do the slingshots with the ropes that the two Spanish Kamikazes do. (Incidentally, why call a masked villain in 60s Spain Kamikaze anyway? Spain. although officially neutral in WW2 was in practice sympathetic to the Axis powers and its fascist dictatorship under Franco continued until 1975.)

I think the French Kamikazes were ripoff versions. And it didn't stop there - in 1971 Ian Gilmour was on both World of Sport Wrestling and  French TV Catch with Jeff Kaye as The Barons. Gilmour must have seen Les Kamikazes and been inspired to do this blue eye/babyface gimmick:

There was a SIXTH Kamikaze in the early 90s on the Relwskow Promotions TV taping for Grampian/STV in Scotland - the British equivalent of the 1991 run of New Catch episodes on TF1 in France. He was a heel like the first four before Gilmour and more of a ninja than a Kamikaze to be honest.

 

[Phil Lions]

"The Japanese Suicide Wrestler" Kamikaze gimmick was first used in France in 1961. It was around as early as March 1961. It was brought over to Spain in the summer of 1963. It made its first appearance in England that summer too.

This is the original French Kamikaze from 1961. Not sure who was under the hood then.