David Mantell

Marty Jones vs Danny Collins in Leeds 1993.  Jones was a heel by this point, but Collins not yet.

On 11/20/2023 at 1:29 PM, Keith Houchen said:

Thanks for that, I found it interesting and indeed the whole thread!  It’s like when people complain about quiz shows how they don’t just answer the question and waffle on for a while. It’s so the show can run to it’s time and the editing team sort out which bits stay. 

1993 was an interesting time in British wrestling, the final year of All Star's post-TV boom ending in Kendo's second retirement, and the final end of Big Daddy's career.

On 11/19/2023 at 4:56 PM, JNLister said:

It's a series they did of 10-minute clip shows of different elements of World of Sport, including this episode on wrestling. It gets shown fairly frequently as it's designed as a filler whenever they have a 50-minute show in a one-hour slot, or similar.

Pity.  If they were re-running all the matches repackaged for TWC/Fight/M&M then they might show more bouts - eventually put on all Granada Archives' stash of 1960s b/w bouts with George Kidd and all the Riley's Gym crowd.

4 hours ago, davertfnewman said:

I remember seeing Moondog Rex in the programmes, but instead of the torn-up jeans he was just wearing black trunks and knee pads alongside the heavy boots, still had the bone, though. More of a wrestler look for him, but still with the gimmick.

You'd be surprised who wrestled on the Old School German/Austrian Wrestling circuit - pre-patriotic, heel phase one Sgt Slaughter (yes the real one not the early  '00s tribute act) juggled not only on the one hand being managed in the WWF by the Grand Wizard to World title bouts with Backlund and the alley fight with Pat Patterson and on the other hand  being JCP NWA World Tag Team Champion with Don Kernodle, but also with his third hand travelling to Germany in 1982 and 1983 to challenge Big Otto for his CWA belt:

16 hours ago, davertfnewman said:

I'm pretty sure I had a Cannock version of that for the Prince of Wales Theatre show. Certainly remember it for Linda Lusardi. Isn't the Kamala there Ben Peacock?

I'll take your word for it, clearly he's a better Kamala impersonator than Stan Frazier!

Peter Flowers worked A LOT of promotions in the 90s around the world including WCW and WWE. It would have been quite easy for him to have crossed paths with the real Jim Harris somewhere on his travels - possibly prior to Kamala's 1992-1993 WWF run.

Moondog Rex may well have been the real Randy Colley - he worked for the CWA n Germany in the mid 80s ...

... As indeed did Moondog King a few years earlier:

Another 1993 poster.  Featuring Kamala for no reason than he had posed for a photo with Mongolian Mauler (American-born Peter Flowers) although Kamala did of course wrestle over here a decade earlier as the Mongolian Mauler.

Good title match from 1993 - World Heavy Middleweight Championship Chic Cullen (defending World champion) Vs Danny Collins (challenger, reigning British champion and World champion in the weight division below, Middleweight, since beating Owen Hart for the vacant title two years earlier at the same venue.)

On 10/10/2023 at 10:37 PM, Arthur B. Funky said:

The WOW gig was around the time he started training at Hammerlock, but wanted the extra cash & was single ... could bog off to Blackpool or wherever on a "tour" to improve.  Had a chat with 90% of the workers on that night I watched ... only Karl Kramer was reluctant to discuss ANYTHING, & was bubbled by my then GF for not being a viking or even Scandinavian.  He told her to fuck off & skulked back to the dressing room.

Took me ages to tell her to fuck off though ... she was a costly mistake.

 

Well done Karl RIP. I met him a good few times and he was a lovely bloke. Plus he was the first in a series of people to give the Dirtbike Kid exactly what he deserved.

If I hadn't already posted it above, I'd post Karl's 2011 video for the Guardian.  So here instead is a young Karl in his one and only ITV appearance from 1988

On 9/6/2023 at 2:09 PM, David Mantell said:

Robbie Brookside's Video Diary was filmed.  The Liverpool Lads lost the British Tag Team title to Vic Powers and Steve Prince after Doc Dean and Robbie Brookside banged heads in the ring and knocked each other silly (I believe this was a shoot accident, hence them being urinated off about it at the start of the video diary.) Prince and Powers lost it to the Superflies a few months later.

Eighteen years later, Robbie filmed a sequel for The Guardian:

Keeo an eye out in that for various famous faces past and present including a young Xia Brookside, Laetitia, Dean Allmark, Frankie Sloan, Ketih Myatt, and an elderly mid 1970s Britihs Lightweight champion Bobby Ryan celebrating a round numbered Birthday. 

This was supposed to be a series on British Wrestlers on The Guardian's YouTube Channel, but unfortunately AFAIK only one other was made - the late lamented Carl Davies aka Karl Kramer (aka the bigger one out of The Barbarians who wore orange judo ghis and lost to Big Daddy and Marty Jones on ITV in 1988.)

On 9/22/2023 at 7:21 PM, Just Some Guy said:

I live in Blackpool and remember those shows being on. Didn't go as I would have been Billy-No-Mates!

I recall seeing the wrestlers on the prom drumming up some interest and in addition to those you mentioned, they had a heel construction worked called Demolition. Was that Karl Kramer?

Flash was Phil "Flash" Barker?

Phil Barker had the blond Fido Dido haircut like Steve Borden did and of course "Flash" was Borden's early ring name in Memphis when he and Hellwig were the Freedom Fighters.  It sounds a distinctly Americanised/New School promotion, similar to the American Wrestling Academy discussed above.

On 9/18/2023 at 12:06 PM, Sminion said:

Hello, does anybody have more details about this show at all please?

By the sounds of it, just a standard Max Crabtree "Ring Wrestling Stars" (ex Joint Promotions)  house show with a Big Daddy tag headlining.
Can't find you the undercard but some shows from around the same time with the exact same main event included Swanley 1st May (undercard Ian McGregor v Steve Johnson, John Prater v Ring Warrior) and the Aberdeen Grampian TV taping on 11th October (undercard: Ian McGregor beat Rex Lane, Andy Strong drew with Dale Preston, Chic Cullen beat Mike Roberts, Pat Roach beat Bearcat Brody, Giant Haystacks beat John Prater)

Undertakers Doom and Gloom were Big Daddy's main opponents in that final year.  Tony Stewart (Euro Lightweight champion, sometime challenger to World champion Johnny Saint) was about the most credible wrestler to get the blue-eye in peril tag partner slot - other times it went to Daddy's nephew Spencer "Scott Valentine" Crabtree or to "The Karate Kid" (Angus Lancaster).  Stewart would be the tag partner in Daddy's retirement match in Margate 29th Dec that year.

On 9/6/2023 at 2:09 PM, David Mantell said:

Robbie Brookside's Video Diary was filmed.  The Liverpool Lads lost the British Tag Team title to Vic Powers and Steve Prince after Doc Dean and Robbie Brookside banged heads in the ring and knocked each other silly (I believe this was a shoot accident, hence them being urinated off about it at the start of the video diary.) Prince and Powers lost it to the Superflies a few months later.

 

Rewatched the video diary over breakfast this morning.  Thought it would be a splendid thing to post on here as it pretty much sums up the UK Old School scene in 1993 (with bits of Germany and WCW at the time thown in for good measure.) Checked to see if anyone else had posted it already, just in case - then found that I myself had posted it only four days ago!  Clearly I'm going senile.

Talking of Brookside, I think any list of big draws in early 90s UK should include his "Liverpool Lads" tag team with the late Ian "Doc" Dean, they had a big female fan following similar to the Rock N Roll Express (Morton & Gibson, not Blondie Barrett) or the Fantastics in the US in the mid/late 80s.

11 hours ago, CavemanLynn said:

I was always under the impression it wasn't so much "one big crowd" when it came to British wrestling, so much as it was about dozens of shows multiple times a week individually drawing hundreds all over the UK a night. So although an individual gate wasn't spectacular, it meant that on any given night, thousands of punters were at shows, with dozens of workers getting a wage.

Yes, and historically that was the business model in the UK apart from the Royal Albert Hall and the three big Wembley Arena shows 79-81.

13 hours ago, Browser Brady said:

What was the biggest non WWF or WCW crowd drawn in UK wrestling in the 90’s ?

In the early part of the decade the biggest draw was Kendo Nagasaki as lead heel of All Star, following on from the end of the 80s.  Big Daddy was still top draw of Joint (or Ring Wrestling Stars as Max C rebranded it in 1991) but they had well and truly slunk to second behind All Star after TV ended.  Stax could still draw a crowd for either promoter or Orig.

If you don't count Davey Boy as WWF as of early 94 then he probably had the edge at that point as Daddy's replacement at RWS, while Kendo had retired.  Like Daddy, he was loaned out to other promoters like Premier, Scott Conway's Southeastern Wrestling Alliance (the future TWA) and possibly Orig although he wasn't on Reslo ever AFAIK.  

By the late 90s it was all over the place, tribute shows, ageing actual ex WWFers, you name it.  Robbie Brookside was back in Britain and mostly back as a blue-eye over here and was usually a decent draw for All Star or TWA.   Johnny South's "Legend of Doom" act was a draw even away from the tribute shows,, he ended Marty Jones's final World Mid Heavyweight title run in Bristol, April '99.  By about 2002 All Star had gone over to just advertising a show rather than the bill except for a few mega title matches like when Brookside won the All Star British Heavyweight title from Doug Williams in Liverpool Sept 2002 or the big World Heavy Middleweight title tournament in 2003.

14 hours ago, Cutting Edge of Bluntness said:

Where did this fit in exactly? Clearly not a tribute show but very much influenced by WWF at the time.

Early example of "Americanised" New School promotion.  Jackie Pallo's Wrestling Around The World a couple of years earlier was the first. WAW (at least in terms of their initial manifesto), Hammerlock, EWA (Jason Harrison) UWA, FWA, GBH, 1PW,  IPW:UK, IWW, UKW, LDN (except the Academy/"Sprit league" sub-brand), RPW, WOSW and all the rest followed up to the present day.

From about the mid 80s there were effectively two wrestling fandoms in the UK.    There were the fans of (traditional British) Wrestling like myself who lived for Sat afternoon on ITv and their local hall and liked watching clean matches like Johnny Saint vs Vic Faulkner.  And then there were also a lot of "American Wrestling fans" in the UK who traded tapes of territories and who DESPISED the old British wrestling.  Fin Martin seems to have been one.  By the 1990s these people were doing their own American Style shows and hoping to wipe out the post-ITV traditional British wrestling culture forever by replacing it with generic American indie wrestling.  Like most American indie wrestling from the mid 90s onwards, they would generally style themselves after ECW. Powerslam used to champion these promotions as the "future" of wrestling in the UK at which point they would fall flat on their behinds.  These days they usually make a big hullaballo about how British Wrestling "died" in 1988 (a big fat lie worthy of a whole essay unto itself!) and that they are the GREAT REVIVAL of wrestling in this country.  They typically get a TV show with some obscure local cable network, last about 2 years then keel over, often from trying to run some big overpriced mock-PPV event.

Meanwhile All Star remains the biggest and longest running company in the UK and looks likely to continue, especially now it has outlived even Brian Dixon himself.  (And John Freemantle's uncompromisingly old school Premier Promotions down in Sussex carries on as the second oldest surviving company. And there's Steve Barker's Rumble Promotions from the 90s has made a comeback since the pandemic and is doing OK for itself.)

On 2/13/2021 at 7:24 PM, DAVEYJONESGIANTSQUID said:

Hi everyone I am new to the forum.  I am interested in finding some information around the UK wrestling scene in 1993 for a project I am working on. 

Big Daddy retired- as stated his last match was 29th Dec Margate vs The Undertakers.

Kendo Nagasaki retired the second time just as he was about to have a second feud with impersonator King Kendo (Bill Clarke) who had allied with Lloyd Ryan after he fell out with Kendo.  Instead Lloyd Ryan managed Dale Preston as King Kendo against all Nagasaki's old enemies like Haystacks, while Clarke also retired.  Before all this Paul Neu (ex PN News) came to Britain as the American Avalanche and teamed with Nagasaki against Giant Haystacks and Scrubber Daly early in the year.

James Mason made his professional debut.

Robbie Brookside's Video Diary was filmed.  The Liverpool Lads lost the British Tag Team title to Vic Powers and Steve Prince after Doc Dean and Robbie Brookside banged heads in the ring and knocked each other silly (I believe this was a shoot accident, hence them being urinated off about it at the start of the video diary.) Prince and Powers lost it to the Superflies a few months later.

Prince also bear Doc Dean that year for the British Welterweight title and held it until 2000 when TWA set up a new version which Storm and Fleisch passed back and forth between them in the early Noughties.  British Lightweight title went Tony Stewart > Jimmy Ocean > Steve Grey (opposite of 1991).  Tony StClair won back the British Heavyweight title from Dave Taylor.  Mal Sanders lost Mick McManus'sold Euro Middleweight title to Steve Grey but won the Euro Welterweight title after Danny Collins moved up the weights-he spent the next year passing it back and forth with Jason Kashmir Singh.

Ricky Knight and Saraya launched WAW.

Ann Relwsykow's promotion in Scotland (the only bit of Joint not owned by Max C) did two more TV tapings for Grampian/STV as other people have mentioned.

 

On 2/14/2021 at 9:59 AM, Statto said:

I remember enjoying (or enjoying hating, they were heels opposite Daddy most times I saw them) the Undertakers act when I was a kid - I would have been 10/11 in 93.

Father/son team better known respectively as Pitman's Hercules (father) & Johnny Angel (son, he of the FWA comeback with the crackling entrance music).

They were done up more like Paul Bearer than Taker really - white faces with dark round the eyes, black suits etc. Instead of an urn they carried a tiny (infant, I assume) coffin, which frequently got used as a foreign object.

I don't recall ever seeing the Johnny South "Hawk" Legend of Doom in person, but I have seen Ricky Knight doing the "Animal" version a few times.

The  Undertakers were Big Daddy's last ever opponents - 29th December 1993 in Margate vs Big Daddy and Tony Stewart.

Adams senior was also Crazy Dave Adams from the 1992 Battle Of The Brits VHS (later 2 volume DVD series).

Johnny South as the LOD eventually beat Marty Jones to end his final World Mid Heavyweight title reign April '99 (That make two people who had to get into fancy dress to beat Marty for his title after Steve Wright as Bull Blitzer on ITV.) 

Dave Duran was a heel Animal Legend of Doom around this time - the gimmick evolved out of his Road Warriors tag team with the late Jim Munroe who lost on ITV to Brookside & Regal about 6 months from the end of ITV wrestling.

He was actually Booker for Joint Promotions 1975-1986 - he only finally bought the promotion in '86 from its parent company at the time, state bookmakers' William Hill.

Below is the obit I wrote for the Wrestling Heritage forum:

Condolences first and foremost to the Valentine brothers Greg and Scott (Steve and Spencer Crabtree) on the loss of their dad.