For this wasn't WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment and formerly WWF - World Wrestling Federation), it was British wrestling on Saturday afternoons on ITV hosted by Kent Walton who also did a rock music show called Cool For Cats which was also the name of Walton's show on Radio Luxembourg. Who remembers Radio Luxembourg - the radio programme that played rock/pop music and where the reception was so bad at times it disappeared altogether and then faded in and out?
The usual scenario for British wrestling was the goodie versus the baddie. Big Daddy was a goodie despite having the girl's name Shirley as his real first name. He was so big that I bet people didn't take the mick out of his name. But he was relatively small compared to Giant Haystacks whose real name was Martin Ruane. He also went under the name of Luke McMasters which makes it all very confusing.
Who will ever forget the day Giant Haystacks ripped off the mask of Kendo Nagasaki whose real name was Peter Thornley? He got disqualified for simply doing what we all wanted him to do. It was one of those strange things that we desperately wanted to see what Nagasaki looked like only to be mightily disappointed when he turned out to look like a normal human being!
But Thornley was himself quite a complex character - never talking about his role as Nagasaki until he wrote an autobiography. But as usual we digress.
Saturday afternoon wrestling was all part of a weird sporting mish-mash programme on ITV entitled World of Sport. The BBC had Grandstand which seemed to feature all the top sports of the day. World of Sport on the other hand was quite laughable. It ran from 1965 until 1985 and featured amongst many others ten pin bowling, kart racing, lacrosse, water skiing and ice speedway. Wrestling came on at 4 pm and lasted until the football results came through at 4.45 (remember the days when football kicked off at 3 pm on Saturdays and always ended between 4.40 and 4.45 pm?) World of Sport did feature some major sporting events, however, including the annual FA Cup Final.
Kent Walton always introduced the wrestling with the immortal words "afternoon grapple fans" or something like that. Would you believe that a match up between Mick McManus and Jackie Pallo in 1967 attracted an amazing audience of over 23 million?
Walton himself was an interesting character. A presenter, a DJ and also a director of sexploitation films - a role he tried to keep quiet about. These were soft core porn films which featured nudity.
But let's get back to the wrestling. The lighter wrestlers like Royal and Faulkner were nimble and athletic. The big guys just seemed to stumble around the ring. Big Daddy, whose real name was Shirley Crabtree, weighed in at around 26 stone. He was 6ft 6 in tall. Before becoming a wrestler he was a professional rugby league player. Giant Haystacks was 6ft 11 in and weighed well over 40 stone. When Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks got into the ring together, the bout mainly consisted of them running at each other until one was knocked off his feet. It wasn't greatly subtle.
Nevertheless, I well remember watching the wrestling on Saturday afternoons and getting excited at the contest between good and evil. On occasions I probably shouted at the TV.
Many many years later I was holidaying in a luxury caravan at Hagerstown in Northumberland with the family. There was a wrestling night so I went along with my two sons. It was the usual good v bad contest. "These guys must really hate each other" we agreed until we went outside at the end of the event and saw all the wrestlers getting into the same minibus - what a sickener.
Then along came American wrestling and the boys were hooked spending hundreds of hours watching it. WWE took the entertainment to new heights of danger but the contests and everything else were all carefully scripted. Carefully scripted that is but still dangerous as was illustrated when Owen Hart, who was just 34, died in the ring after a stunt went wrong.
I did have a sneaky like of the Undertaker though. He had long lank hair and was another monster-sized human, being 6ft 10 in tall. His real name is Mark Calaway which sounds a lot less threatening than Undertaker. His manager was called Paul Bearer (say it quickly). His real name was William Moody!
WWE continues to this day. They changed from WWF to avoid confusion with the World Wildlife Fund who quite rightly pointed out that they had the initials first. I haven't watched American Wrestling for years - somehow the shouting, the posturing and the aggression and some of the ridiculous storylines summed up America all too well.
Would love to hear some of your memories about British wrestling in the 1960s and 1970s.
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The other photographs are of yesterday's Steward's Stroll from Hethersett to Wymondham. Tomorrow I will have photos of my walk around the village where I knocked another four miles off my 100 mile lockdown target.