Pat Roach

[Grimmas]

Discuss here.

[Jetlag]

Roach not being talked up much is a bit of a mystery to me. A badass giant with a black belt in judo, who wasn't afraid to rip guys heads off with forearms or just dump them hard in the middle of the ring. And it's surprising how well he works as a TV star in restrained british style bouts when you expect this guy to show up in NJPW and battle Hashimoto. I find it really amazing that I watch his matches to see him eventually knock the shit out of people, but then end up staying for the more technical stuff. I really love his graceful throws and surprisingly agile movements when locking in holds. Due to him being Roach, every match becomes interesting simply because he has it all over his opponent's in size and skills. Being quite a household name, he also has many taped matches including some brawls in germany (which I enjoyed more than OJ), so unlike some other british guys footage is not an issue with him.

 

Also, I have soft spot for the guy because watching him as an unstoppable machine in Never say Never again is one of my earliest childhood memories.

 

Recommended matches:

 

Pete Roberts vs. Pat Roach (2/13/80)

Pat Roach vs. Gil Singh (4/21/80)

Pat Roach vs. Tom Tyrone (10/11/83)

[ohtani's jacket]

Roach is one of the best big men ever. How many other big men could work the judo throws he could, take it to the mat, and look so good in forearm smash contests? A lot of the footage we have of him is from when he was older, and he slows down as the years go by, but even his early 90s stuff is fun, and I don't think there's ever been a better "bear with an angry head" in wrestling than Pat. I wish we had more of his 70s heel work, but he's one of the better heavyweights of the period we do have footage from.

[NotJayTabb]

"Bear with an angry head" is a perfect way to describe Roach. There's a match I love on a Reslo comp I bought where he's fighting Skull Murphy, and Murphy spends the opening section constantly scraping Roach in the eyes with his wristguard. Every time Roach tries to muster some offence, Murphy is back scraping the eyes again. This goes on and on until the referee has had enough and forces Murphy to take the wristguard off, leaving him with a big bear of a man who's thoroughly pissed off with him, and proceeds to batter him for the victory.

[Dylan Waco]

I agree with all of the sentiments expressed on Roach above, but I'm trying to write on these Brit candidates at length, so I'll go a bit deeper.

 

One thing about Roach that I don't think is fully articulated in others comments is that he was a giant, but as a character he seemed to work against this until he reached a breaking point. In Roach matches you'll often see him work the mat in a very sporting manner early. He's this giant guy, working dudes that literally look half his size in some cases, and he's doing rolling neck bridge outs on the mat that would inspire "holy shit" chants from most crowds today. It's not an exaggeration to say he was a very god mat worker, and the way he carried himself it was almost like he had a chip on his shoulder and wanted to win that way. But if you pressed him...

 

Well if you pressed Pat Roach he would fuck you up. And I really mean that. There are very few guys in wrestling history who are better at getting across the ferocity of a forearm flurry - especially when presented as a counterattack of sorts - than Pat Roach. I absolutely love the rare occasions when he would bust out the big boot or diving headbutt off an Irish Whip too, as they came across as especially hearty fuck you's to a challenger who had either frustrated him, annoyed him, or worst of all pissed him off.

 

I like him as a heel, and his size obviously works best in that role in theory. He has a great look too, and I can imagine him having been a super fun wrestler in the U.S. if life had ever led him there. That said I also really enjoy him as the guy who snaps when heels like Skull Murphy piss him off. I'm not a huge fan of his backbreaker, though he delivers it with conviction, but the rare cases when he would drop a guy on his face from a Gorilla Press position ruled.

 

To me Roach actually deserves credit for doing a lot of things that made him stand out. On top of the obvious look/size thing which enhanced the impact of his flashier grappling spots, the aforementioned strikes of which he showed a great variety, and the delayed way he would take certain bumps that seems to maximize the visual impact, he would also do completely unique shit that I can't recall seeing out of anyone from that era. For example, last night I saw him work a match v. Tiger Dalibar Singh, where he actually dropped into a his fucking guard to work a submission. In 1980.

 

I'd love to see his German brawls if they are up somewhere I don't know about. He's kind of a bubble guy for me, in that I want to include him, but his resume feels a little thin to secure a definitive spot. I really love him as an opponent for guys like Singh, Ray Steele and Pete Roberts, but in an ideal world I'd like to find one or two more truly great matches before I commit to rating him in a top 100.

[goc]

Watched a few Pat Roach matches today thanks to Dylan's post and REALLY enjoyed them. He does a lot of cool judo throws but also has some nasty looking forearm smashes and an awesome big boot. He feels like a really good "gateway" into WoS for people who have had trouble getting into the style.

[club]

I’ve been dipping into less celebrated WoS guys recently and Roach comes across as an excellent big man. I just finished watching a match of his against Johnny Kincaid (also awesome), and Roach’s selling of pain was amazing.

Edit - also in the 88 match with Caswell Martin, his selling of being stuck in a painful submission was great. Just this pained 'no, no, no-no-no-no-no'. Really helped along the narrative of the match.

[GOTNW]

You'd think a literal James Bond villain pro wrestler would get a little bit more attention, eh?

 

WOS heavyweights were a blind spot for me, and it's something I wanted to explore. Roach immediately came to mind because I remembered going through this thread and just reading "Judo throws“. Immediately I imagined an Englishman working like Shota Chochishvili or an early Naoya Ogawa, which sounded utterly preposterous, so of course I had to check him out. Unfortunately, that's not quite what you get with Roach. In the first several matches I saw of his, he didn't even do any! After watching more, it turns out Roach does exactly two hip throws: a "regular“ Catch Hip Throw, and a Harai Makkikomi from a Wristlock.

The more accurate comparison for Roach would be an English Ashura Hara. In his younger days, he could go anywhere. Weight classes be damned, I'm sure he would've had a great match with Mile Zrno as well. As he gets older, he essentially morphs into a WAR heavyweight, the matwork and the throws gradually go away, but the clubbing blows and forearms are there to stay. Unlike Hara, you can't really make an argument he was better older, because he had the same intensity and ferociousness in his younger days, it's just that he could connect it to doing crazy matwork too.

Roach is in for me, though I still need to figure out the Roach/Ray Steele/Pete Roberts power ranking. Watching their matches, I came away thinking Steele was better. But I also came away thinking Kawada was better than Misawa when I was just getting into Japanese wrestling and binging their matches over a decade ago so it's probably wiser to not judge a book by its cover. The Misawa comparison is probably closer than might initially seem – Roach is really good at projecting dominance and asserting control of the match, which makes moments of him in peril much more engaging, and he smartly picks and chooses whom to sell "big“ against and how much. Just watching something like the Singh match from 1980, I don't think Singh brought the amazing babyface fire or had an inspiring underdog performance, but it almost doesn't matter because you get a great level of heat and crowd engagement without that just by Roach treating him like a big deal and varying his reaction to him in comparison to other wrestlers.

[Jetlag]

I still stand by much of what I wrote about Pat Roach earlier. Great guy. While we have a good deal of him on tape, there is not much of his heel stuff. There's one match vs Mike Marino on YouTube where Roach is full on cocky giant and it's pretty amazing. He reminded me a bit of Andre there. He had surprisingly few TV matches in the UK at that point but there's some interesting looking stuff. He lost by KO to George Gordienko on TV in the early 70s, and had another TV match against a guy labeled "Seigi Sakaguchi" and I'll be damned if that's not Seiji Sakaguchi on a somehow forgotten foreign excursion. I'd give my toe to see that.

 

Roach also had lots of nice performance very late in the game. There is a brief TV match with Johnny Kincaid that has some awe inspiringly painful looking holds and selling, and also an old man tag from Germany in 1994 featuring Axel Dieter, Klaus Kauroff and someone else that I recall being pretty fun.

[ohtani's jacket]

It's a shame we didn't get any footage of Pat from France. IIRC, there's a match where he's introduced to the crowd.