Entertainment For Lively Minds
Greetings, Grappling fans!
As a kid I would never miss the Saturday afternoon wrestling on ITV. When I was 8 this was the talk of the playground, as Big daddy unmasked Kendo Nagasaki. It was possibly the most exciting thing I had ever seen on television. Altogether now –Easy! Easy! Easy!
A few years later I was living north Wales, and my dad, my sister and I went to see the wrestling at Deeside Leisure Centre a few times. I once saw the classic fixture of a tag-team bout with Big Daddy on one side and Giant Haystacks on the other, but the thrill had gone. I was a sophisticated 12 year old by now, and couldn’t help but think that some parts of the bouts had been pre-arranged; such cynicism in one so young.
I hadn’t thought about the wrestling for years, but it popped into my head tonight, and I have spent the last half hour watching Youtube clips of overweight men in swimming trunks delivering forearm smashes and administering Japanese strangle holds. What struck me was the lack of pizzazz – where were the lightshows and thundering music? And aren’t the spectators a little ‘mature’ for this sort of show?
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Speaking of wrestling
I'm not entirely interested in wrestling itself, but all the backstage intrigue and politics is absolutely fascinating, and I try to read as much about it as I possibly can.
Bret Hart's autobiography is particularly brilliant.
You've probably already read it ...
... but Simon Garfield's The Wrestling was a good read when I was given a copy when it was published.
I guess..
there just wasn't much competition entertainment wise back in those days. I remember watching that little teleprinter click across the bottom of the screen on World of Sport as it delivered the footy results and other news, (not to mention Dickie Davis shuffling his papers against a backdrop of beavering back office staff - all staged to convey that sense of up to the minute, edge of seat coverage). That's how news rolled back then, we've got Apps for all that stuff now of course. Thanks for the memories!
HMHB
This seems a good moment to quote one of my favorite Half Man Half Biscuit lyrics
She’s the main man in the office in the city
And she treats me like I’m just another lackey
But I can put a tennis racket up against my face
And pretend that I am Kendo Nagasaki
As you were...
And the unmistakeable voice of Kent Walton
At Luke Haines gig the other night
he saing a song called 'Gorgeous George' which is about Kendo's manager. If anyone has seen the brilliant Arena with Peter Blake painting the fighter you will remeber his gruff manager.
I went to see some old style wrestling at the Reading Hexagon when I were a nipper and it was dead exciting. Big Daddy slapped Giant Haystacks around a bit but we met GH afterwards outside the dressing rooms and he signed my programme and was a really nice bloke. We never did get to meet Big Daddy as the fight with that Irish fella with the foxy wife (Fit Finlay?) was on.
Hmmm...
It's never nice to speak ill of the dead, but I recall at least one instance of GH clipping kids round the ear - something which would have got him in a whole different world of trouble nowadays...
I dunno
the little oiks probably called him a fat bastard. A few more thick ears would have done me some good
and...
according to Bret Hart's book, he is very smelly.
Especially...
...nowadays.
Elderly spectators
My Grandma used to go to the wrestling. And boxing. She wasn't remotely interested in any sport that wasn't centred around men knocking the crap out of each other.
Mind you, she also was firmly of the opinion that 'they shouldn't let black men fight white men because the white fellas get cut easier'.
This might be an urban myth
but I've heard several times that back in the 1960s a journalist from the Melbourne Truth newspaper was severely beaten when he was caught taking photos of wrestlers rehearsing a few days before a well-publicised "grudge" match.
I tried looking for something on the net to back me up but the words "Truth" and "wrestling" amazingly appear together in thousands of websites.
That puts me in mind...
...of the glorious clip (regrettably, seemingly absent from the internet) from an edition of BBC Sport's On the Line, where Ray Stubbs raised, to a wrestler's face, the issue of wrestling bouts being fixed and was promptly throttled to within an inch of his life in front of the cameras.
My wife went to see Big Daddy wrestling at Blackpool Tower
The audience was all old women baying for blood, just like normal.
Saw Giant Haystacks in Congleton Town Hall...
...a few years after wrestling had been dropped by ITV. Like Gatz, I loved the wrestling as a kid but still enjoyed as an adult, even though I knew most of it was a glorified pantomime. I didn't think the lack of pizzazz made a difference, the atmosphere was lively and raucous.
Haystacks was 'fighting' Kwik Kick Lee, a little bloke who kept running up to Haystacks and kicking him. Haystacks lolled on the ropes, flicking the Vs at the grannies and the small boys, until he got bored with Lee and fell on him. It was brilliant.
ITV has released two DVDs of the best of old-school wrestling - Big Daddy, Haystacks and Mick McManus are the highlights (as well as Jimmy Saville getting tw*tted) but there is also this: Brian Glover as Leon Arris (the man from Paris) v Les Kellet who, according to Mick McManus on the DVD, was a genuine hard man.
Proper entertainment!
None of these steroid-pumped pretty-boys of WWE. Fat, sweaty blokes from Rotherham. Wearing leotards. Class.