David Mantell

They did this every now and then when they had a tournament to hurry along some of the elimination rounds. First 10 bodyslams wins was a variation of this He's also heeling it up (like Dynamite Kid did against Marty Jones a couple of months earlier) playing the compaining whining heel This is actually a rematch of Davey's TV debut where a skinny 15 year old Davey took on a promising 18 year old Bernie. This was the second Steve Logan - not Mick McManus's old tag partner the Iron Man. This Steve Logan, from Birmingham was the classic blue-eye technical whizzkid. His real name was indeed Steve Logan which the first one was not. When he first appeared on the circuit there were complaints from some fans of him being an imposter. This ended when he appeared on ITV in 1980 and his debut appearance was trailed by a nice TVTimes appearance hyping "the New Steve Logan". As I said, I rank him alongside Caswell Martin as people who never got a title but should have. He did get a few shots including one at Fit Finlay's World Mid Heavyweight Championship, mainly remembered for defeated ex champ Marty Jones parading at ringside with a sign saying "Finlay Is A Fake". He also made it to the finals of a tournament for the vacant British Light Heavyweight title before losing to Alan Kilby in early 1985. (The same thing happened to the original Steve Logan in 1952 and 1955 both times losing out to another perennial holder of the title Ernie Riley.) In later life he started up the K-Star chain of martial arts gyms in the West Midlands which I believe he still runs (there is one along my bus route to and from work - the Travel West Midlands X1 on the Coventry Road going past the Wheatsheaf junction.) K Star also did pro wrestling training and ran a promotion, albeit of the Americanised variety, in the Noughties with Steve Logan as a Mr McMahon type heel commisioner figure. i was watching quite a good short match with him just this morning against Greg Valentine (Steve Crabtree not John Wisniski) Re. Brody, no I don't think ITV was going to get away with having the full Brody character from German camcordings (check back a couple of pages for Brody vs Johnny Saint.) He could be a solid enough heel, I like his match with Owen Hart on Eurosport New Catch from 1991. He was also Steve Regal's first opponent at Bobby Baron's wrestling booth at Blackpool Pleasure Beach Horseshoe Showbar - something that Bordy aludes to in the promos before Brody vs Regal on a German CWA episode of New Catch - "He had a big mouth at the beginning of his career but tonight his career is over."

He was a bit of a national institution by this point and people would go to see him do his heel routine, particularly "The Ears" (selling opponents' attacks on his swollen cauliflower earlobes.) Some people would still go to a John McEnroe tennis match on the seniors circuit even today just to hear him tell the umpire that he cannot be serious.

Keith Haward, Commonwealth Games medalist in Greco Roman. Worked a very old fashioned style of match even by purist standards. Jon Cortez was the best opponent for him as he had the best grasp of Haward's style. His bout with Tim Fitzmaurice gets discussed later in the thread. Quite a lot of the techniques in both those bouts were old moves which had evolved beyond recognition by 1980, so his matches give a real glimpse into the past. Haward, along with 50s/60s Wigan Snakepit man Tommy "Jack Dempsey" Moore was the sort of wrestler you would cite in response to a claim like the one early in this thread about British wrestling being descended from a variety/music hall tradition. Haward was strictly a "gym boy" a former amateur GR champion turned catch wrestler and pro wrestler whose legit wrestling skills were his main - perhaps his only - credential for the job. There were only a handful of Catweazles and King Kong Kirks but there were dozens - perhaps hundreds - of if not Keith Haward himself then certainly Diet Keith Hawards. serious no nonsense guys whose acts were entrely based on their sport wrestling abilites adapted for an exhibition. From a career perspective, Haward did pretty handsomely - they put Mick McManus's old European Middleweight Championship that McManus had lost to Mal Sanders on him in 1981 (bypassing longtime British champion Brian Maxine.) and he kept hold of it for several years dropping it back to Sanders. I imagine most American fans would write him off as a Bob Backlund style "abomination". but it's nice to think that a serious athlete like him was able to make forward porgress in the pros without selling out his particular integrity as an athlete. (There is one bout where he gets a bit sly and liberty-taking much like Billy Joyce's heel work, and eventually gets a public warning.)

Saw buses in London last weekend with advertisments for the AEW Wembley Stadium Show and remembered that the last time I saw a double decker red bus done up with adverts for a wrestling show was 43 years ago for the untelevised middle Wembley show of 1980 featuring Quinn and Yasu Fuji against Daddy and Bridges. I liked Yasu Fuji - like with Grand Vladimir I was upset, even at age 6, when they threw him to Big Daddy like that. It's been good to see bouts of his from France and Germany lately.

Possibly, looking at the pic. There was continuity between Duran and Monroe's Road Warriors ripoff on ITV in 1988 and Johnny South's Legend of Doom trubute act and we know Duran was *an* Animal Legend Of Doom circa 1993. I think Ricky Knight would have been a bit too small to be a convincing Road Warrior/LOD member myself, but there you go. Talking of the Knight Family, if you read Daniel Bryan's book "Yes" with his account of working for All Star in 2003-2004, Guy #1 and Guy #3 were, of course Ricky Knight's sons Roy and Zak Bevis and the diva relative was Paige/Britani Knight/Saraya (or Saraya Junior as some British fans call her to disambiguate from her mother Sweet Saraya). Roy and Zak wrestle as the UK Hooligans doing a skinhead gimmick as heels and occasionally as blue-eyes. There's a Superflies (Ricky Knight & Jimmy Ocean) match with a very early Saraya Senior in their corner up on Youtube from Reslo 1992 but I'm holding off posting it because I think the bout gets reviewed elsewhere in this thread, so I shall deal with it when I get to it.

You may be right, but he definitely called himself a Vicar. not a "Priest"

He was Church of England so he was a vicar, not a priest. He appeared as cornerman/manager for Big Daddy on quite a few times in the 1980s including as a counter to Tony "El Diablo" Francis the time Francis, as I said earlier, "actually did a wierd crossover with his managing work when he appeared in Drew McDonald and Rasputin's corner as guest cornerman wearing the El Diablo mask (or rather a purple/silver version of - he usually used red and blue as his colours) AND his "Tony The Brain" lounge lizard suit." Actually, wrestling vicars were not that unusual - see this Newsreel from 1963, about the earliest colour UK footage around: (Consider also Rafael Halperin, promoter and lead babyface of the Israeli wrestling scene who became a Rabbi in later life.)

Ray Steele - About my favourite match of his is the final of this 4man KO tournament: (fast forward past the semifinals to 21:45) One of the same slimmer "move like lightweights" kind of heavyweights as Pete Roberts, Tony St Clair and 1970s Kendo Nagasaki.

Here's a shot of South in The Legends of Doom: (Not sure if that's Dave Duran as Animal, some reports say he's been replaced by Welsh wrestler Boston Blackie by this point.) This however definitely is Duran as Animal Legend:

Incidentally that's the same Dave Duran that Regal wrestled a lot (and got bashed in a lot by) during his earliest bouts on the holiday camps. His real name is John Palin, his dad was a star in the 1960s, Harry Palin.

Johnny South's career really took off in the 90s when he became a blue eye Road Warrior Hawk tribute act The Legend Of Doom. (You may remember his opponent here from WCW - yo baby yo baby yo.) (incidentally, "Jesse James" is a young James Mason with hair. This is rare professional TV footage of his early career. Orig Williams thought the actor James Mason was boring so insisited on giving James Atkins a different ring name) He eventually ended Marty Jones's final title reign as World Mid Heavyweight Champion in Bristol April 1999. (It wasn't the first time Jones had lost his title to a fine wrestler doing a silly gimmick - he lost it to Steve Wright in 1987 which should have been good except Wright appeared as German skinhead character Bull Blitzer for the title win. And then didn't defend it, leading to the match where Jones beat Owen Hart to get back the vacant title.) This was right around the time that the REAL Hawk was doing the whole Alcoholism angle with Darren "Puke" Drozdov so it was a bit odd that the tribute act was playing the post-Big Daddy kids' hero. South originally did the gimmick as Hawk Legend Of Doom along with Dave Duran as Animal Legend of Doom. Originally Duran and "Bad News" Jim Monroe had been in a tag team called The Road Warriors but more resembling mid 80s southern US tag team The MOD Squad. (At this time in 1988, few UK wrestling fans knew about the real Road Warriors, it was just borrowing the name from imported wrestling magazines - a practice going on many years, the most famous case being Martin "Luke McMasters" Ruane being rebranded as Haystacks Callhoun in 1972 by Brian Dixon - this would eventually evolve into Giant Haystacks by the time he made it to Joint Promotions and TV in 1975.) Sadly Monroe died a couple of years after this and so South replaced him. Then they decided to make their ripoff more authentic and started wearing the shoulder pads, paint and the two original names. Then Duran dropped out and South was turned blue-eye. He carried on doing the act into the early Noughties.

Invulnerable Daddy didn't really come about until the beginning of 1979. I saw this on the Content Posted In page and expected it to be the Daddy vs John Elijah strength-based clean match from late 77 I posted a couple of pages back. Nominally Daddy was a heel at this point - although getting cheered by the audience against Kendo and conssequently had a wider repertoire including stomping an opponent on the mat (technically a foul) and booting them in the back of the shoulder blades. His unmasking Kendo made him a star, while at the same time Kendo was able to beat Daddy 2-1 and did not have to job to him even if Daddy got the moral victory. The 1975-1977 Daddy & Haystacks vs Kendo Nagasaki feud that sprung from this match was the prototype for the Daddy-Haystacks and Daddy-Quinn feuds of the next several years. However Kendo may have made Big Daddy but he also destroyed him eventually when the two were the flagships of All Star and Joint respectively in the late 80s/early 90s and All Star overtook Joint as biggest UK promotion.

Logan got across as a heel just by being a brutal surly thug - a Southern version of Colin Joynson when in the Dangermen or even Jim Hussey. He was actually quite a good shooter - Johnny Kincaid recalls seeing him come up with some great moves in the gym. When Kincaid challenged Logan as to why he didn't use those moves in the ring, Logan replied that nobody could love an ugly face like his, as if technical skill was linked to being a blue-eye, although he could have been a "wrestling heel "like Kendo, Rocco, Finlay and others. In any case you can see fans cheer a brawling Logan against Kendo Nagasaki in the above 1976 Royal Albert Hall match and numerous Nagasaki-Logan solo bouts on house shows.

The above match was shortly after Brooks's big DQ win over Collins for the British H-Mid title and of course Rocco was World H-Mid champion so that was actually a battle of World vs British champions. Talking of the Danny Collins vs Ritchie Brooks feud - it was already getting quite heated even before said title change at Croydon. This cage match is an example of how, as the Welsh say, you can get away with ANYTHING as long as it's in Welsh as the people in London (in this case the IBA) won't even notice. In this case, ANYTHING being a cage match, the epitome of what Joint and All Star would claim on ITV was beneath them to ever hold:

Saw this on the smart TV the other night - an interesting illustration of the situation with Ritchie Brooks. Four years earlier than November 1990 this would have been a simple matter - roughouse heel Rocco vs clean cut blue-eyed boy Brooks. However Rocco is getting somewhat popular due to his feud with the hated Kendo Nagasaki and Brooks is getting somewhat hated due to his feud with the popular Danny Collins so the blue-eye/heel dynamic is somewhat convoluted here.

It was actually Max Crabtree. The Quinn feud really established Daddy nationally as the patriotic hero who shut Quinn's filthy yap. ( I remember TVTImes from 1979 with displays of Daddy and Quinn's daily food intake with Daddy apparently having the healthier diet of bread, eggs and milk against Quinn's pints of beer. As any five year old fan of The Mister Men - look them up if you don't know - could tell you in 1979 it was eating eggs that made Mr Strong strong) Quinn was the first, followed by his "friend" (and fellow ex WWWFer) Arion and then in 1980 when Quinn came back he had Yasu Fuji (named MISTER Yasu Fuji in a clear ripoff of Harry Fujiwara) as his sidekick - there to celebrate his world title win over Bridges and the two tagging in the main event of the untelevised middle Wembley Arena show against Daddy and Bridges (ironically, Bridges and "Battling Guardsman" Crabtree had previously been a heel tag team together in 1974). Then finally there was The Missisippi Mauler in '81. Adnan got everywhere. I see there are some later posts about his time as top babyface of Saddam Hussein's gunpoint-booked Iraqi Wrestling promotion - one of two fully grown wrestling territories in the Middle East along with Rafael Halperin's promotion in Israel (which Joynson wrestled for in early '77.)

Actually, crowd riots like the Arion/Joynson bout were a nightly occurence during Kendo Nagasaki's post ITV era in All Star:

I've already discussed the Arion-Joynson match as an example of juice (actually "claret" was the preferred term in the UK backstage) on ITV. Apart from establishing The Iron Greek as a heel (although I myself aged 5 actually cheered for him a lot) it got Colin Joynson such sympathy that he was never able to be a heel again. Which is a pity as he could be a rather good heel, for example in The Dangermen tag team where he was the brutal droog heel to Steve Haggerty's smug smarmy heel. This title was the same one Wayne Bridges would eventually lose to Kendo Nagasaki in 1987 on TV. After Quinn defected to All Star, the semifinal match on the Wembley Arena show headlined by Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks was a match for the vacant World title between Wayne Bridges and passing American The Missisippi Mauler (Big Jim Harris, the future Kamala). Bridges won and shortly afterwards turned heel to defend against people like Pete Roberts before also defecting to All Star and Orig Williams's BWF. Quinn meanwhile lost his version of the title to Tony St Clair and so in early 1983 on the Welsh language Reslo show, there was a confrontation between the two champions: St Clair everntually lost his title back to Quinn at which pont Bridges reverted to blue eye and finally got his revenge on Quinn in a title unification match. The two titles were later split again when Bridges fell out with All Star in 1986 and Quinn won a 4 man tournament on All Star's satellite TV show to become replacement champion and was awarded the black belt St Clair is wearing here (Arion's original belt from 1979) but Bridges came back and reunified the title a year later. By the time of the Kendo loss, Bridges was a year into his fourth World title but ITV recognised the period from his win over Harris at Wembley to his loss to Kendo as one big six year unbroken second title reign. You can see Orig joining in the fun of calling the two titles all sorts of initials including "World Wrestling Federation" - I'm sure Bob Backlund would have been delighted with that, although to be fair back in the mid 70s when the New York WWF was still the WWWF, there was a WWF World title on Brian Dixon's shows which Kendo held unbeaten. By the time of Bridges-Kendo, they had settled on World Wrestling Alliance (an obvious amalgam of WWF and NWAlliance). Hulk Hogan had defended his title against Randy Savage and Bob Orton on WWF specials by that point, hence George Gillette's challenge to Hogan for a title unification bout.

If I may recommend: Very much Caswell's bout. And the fact that Marty refused the TKO and made it a no Contest so Caswell didn't even lose seems to be a bonus. Caswell Martin, along with the second Steve Logan (the clean young 1980s Logan from Birmingham, no relation to the Iron Man from London above - hopefully we'll get on to Logan mk2 in more depth later) are two guys who never won a title whom I wish had done so.

15:45 of Kendo & George vs McManus and Logan - Kent Walton: "Quite an unusual exhibition of tag wrestling, but it is different." - This was Kent's code (along with "Not too much wrestling just yet") for bouts he disliked or didn't approve of. Mercifully that was George's only time wrestling on TV although he and Kendo did have some non-TV bouts circa 1973 against Shirley Crabtree (pre Daddy, then The Battling Guardsman) and his retired lightweight turned referee (and later MC) brother Brian, which are arguably the earlierst root of the Daddy Tag formula (Daddy and vulnerable lighter blue-eye vs monster heel and snide heel).

This was supposed to lead to Nagasaki and Kung Fu forming a tag team of ex-masked men (they were intending to come to the ring in their old masks and remove them before each bout.) but again as in the decline of the Royal Brothers, Max Crabtree stepped in to ensure that his brother and power ticket Daddy would not be eclipsed. Talking of Daddy, 1978 was a handover year for who got the spotlight on Cup Final day - it was McManus's last Cup Final but Daddy's first as he teamed with Tony StClair to face Haystacks and Bruiser Ian Muir in a bout that ended 2-0 in just 85 seconds: Apparently McManus desperately politicked to have the result of the below partially comedy match from 1976 changed to a draw. Even despite his loss, you will note that it is Logan who takes the deciding fall from Kendo while McManus gets the consolation submission from manager and non-worker George Gillette. McManus was undoubtedly a great heel and an important pioneer in the heel role in Britain just as the Dirty Duseks had been in 1920s America, even if his strongest hold was the office hold. He and his heel vs heel rival Jackie Pallo were pop culture icons- there are pics of McManus hanging out with the Rolling Stones while Pallo's sppearance in a 1970s Royal Variety Performance sketch with Scottish singer Lulu - yes, THAT Lulu - alludes to their feud:

Interesting that all of these seem to be singles scale-downs of famous Royal Brothers battles - versus the South London Hardmen (Logan and Mick McManus), versus the Dennisons (Cooper and Alan Dennison until Dynmaite Kid inspired him to turned blue-eye.) and versus the Saints (Roy and brother Tony). Bert and Vic were an important skilled and popular tag team combination (until Max Crabtree scaled them down so as not to distract from Big Daddy) but Bert solo was mainly notable for being around for a very long time - he was on the first ITV show in 1985 and still around in the early 1980s although in the fullness of time, that's just like seeing someone now who started out in the 1990s - say, James Mason. Between 1966 and 1977 he had four runs as British Heavy Middleweight Champion, with the gap between the last two coming when Logan won the belt off him in Liverpool just eight days after the above listed match - Royal got it back in November. Most of what we have of him is from his later years - except for his apperances on French TV from the 1950s

Footnote to the above- King Ben did indeed defeat Alan Kilby for the British Light Heavyweight title on 25th March 1988 in the Boothmans' home town of Keighley, but Kilby regained it later that year.

Having said that, even the belts for the Mountevans titles seem to have caught up in the modern era. Here is current British Lightweight Champion Nino Bryant with his belt: ... and here is current Mountevans British Heavyweight Champion Oliver Grey (aka Joel Redman)

Thanks and I'm not claiming any authority here, I'm just giving the native perspective as someone brought up to think about wrestling in the old school British wrestling way.