Once again professional wrestling led the way,
whole-heartedly embracing entry to a Common Market all grapple fans supported
equally enthusiastically, since it had been championed by a Prime Minister with
the same name as a much respected and hard-hitting heavy-middleweight tagster
of the time.
Careful timing on Day Two of British involvement saw
a well-billed tournament with the visitors very surprisingly taking a 3-0
victory over the British grapplers. We
say British but Belfast’s Tug Wilson was not actually from Great Britain and
then as now the clumsily named host country confounded MC and commentator alike
and it is little wonder that Continentals then as now chose to refer to all the
islands of North West Europe as England, since the natives seemed and seem
incapable of any precision and certainly conciseness in describing themselves.
Unsmiling John Naylor was the opening opponent for
Parisian Jacky Ricard. This sturdy
workmanlike heavy-middleweight in the Peter Preston mould displayed perfectly
adequate skills but was opposed by shooter Naylor, the Golden Ace from the very
home of shooting, Wigan, with a whopping ten
years of training at the world famous Snakepit gymnasium behind him. We saw later in the decade what he could and
would do to poor Rip Rawlinson at the Royal Albert Hall, and here we witnessed
a not dissimilar spectacle. He didn’t
sell much of the Frenchman’s few offensives and literally ran rings around him. There were no handshakes, just protests from
Naylor to the referee at occasional and very mild instances of French
frustration.
When Naylor was knocked out in the fifth it was a
clumsy, unconvincing and at best surprising outcome, given he had made fully
95% of the offence in the preceding 20 minutes.
Oh yes, go down to the continental all in the line of Entente Cordiale,
just as the promoter says, but don’t ask how you are going to behave on the way
to the knockout defeat. Watch this bout
as one of the clearest examples of a wrestler unwillingly losing when he could
clearly have won. In some ways, this was
a real shoot, with one wrestler clearly trying to prove a point. The only imponderable is that it is hard to
tell whether Naylor was especially peeved here, since he was so miserable in most
of his bouts.
Having vanquished Naylor, a partisan referee and
commentator alike, it was hard not to feel some relief as Ricard shrugged
Gallickly but clearly relished his moment of victory on his first day in
Perfidious Albion.
When the wrestler in the red corner is wearing red
and his opponent blue, it’s always a sure sign of careful planning and
commitment, and such was happily the case in the centre bout.
Frank Dhondt was making his first ever tv appearance
and it was left to our good friend and fellow Salfordian, Paul Mitchell, to
offer sufficient handshakes in his bout to cover his team-mates’ total lack of
equivalent hospitality. Kent was delighted to have “a good-looking boy”
for the ladies, but this fan was more entranced by a nasty looking scab on the
bridge of the formerly Lancashire wrestler’s
nose. We wondered what would happen were
this to open up, surely it would spout like a fountain. Would the Belgian actually go for it?
(For younger readers, January 1973 marked not only
entry to Europe but also the redistribution of
county boundaries, leaving hitherto unequivocal geographical abodes of many of
our favourites in vulnerable and ultimately terminal predicaments, and the
counting out of some counties altogether.
Thus Salford, Lancs, was now Salford
Greater Manchester. Numerous other
locations fell victim to such unglamourous and unpronouncable dumbing down and
once again wrestling’s administrators wisely led the way in completely
rejecting such atrocities.)
Mitchell now showed how to lead the way graciously
in the face of a slightly and understandably nervous opponent. On several occasions he wanted the Belgian to
come forward, to go with a throw, to co-operate. But Dhondt didn’t. Mitchell sold enthusiastically all his
opponents efforts and looked seriously dazed by a nasty looking bump to his
neck at the time of the deciding fall.
It was a neat pin, just as Paulì’s had been in equalising. The husky tones of Chopper Conroy showed clear
professional appreciation for Mitchell having held the bout together.
Geographical and linguistic confusion continued
during that middle bout. First Kent couldn’t
resist his usual overtrumping of the official, but this time overstepped the
mark in erroneously labelling third man Emil Poilve “Anglo Italian”. And just in case any Continentals were tuning
in, he bamboozled them even further by announcing that natives of the town of
the transmission couldn’t decide amongst themselves on how to pronounce it.
Tug Wilson
was always tremendous value and this bare-footed matman was on his usual wild
behaviour. For a moment he could have
had a premonition of facing his leopard-skin clad namesake Tarzan Johnny, but
the leotard actually belonged to a Sicilian wrestling out of Belgium and billed in the UK as Tino
Salvadore. Tino was well up to the task
and the pair produced a most exciting bout.
Linguistic issues piped up once again, in respect to
Kent’s
second “good-looking boy” of the afternoon.
He assured us, as he invariably did with any true foreigner just off the
plane, that Tino didn’t speak a word of English. Just a few moments later he was listing
precise biographical details and his two speciality manoeuvres; the flying head
scissors and the back drop kick. He must
have been a dab-hand with the sign language!
We witnessed the back drop-kick and it was
spectacular, dangerous and unusual.
The first two falls were unconvincing blots on an
otherwise exciting spectacle. This bout,
after two reasonably clean affairs, suddenly gave the audience a chance to warm
up. In few sports does the crowd play
such a crucial role…. Not since Hughie Green’s clapometer had we seen such
involvement. One cigarette-smoking
ringside gentleman had learnt from Naylor’s unsatisfactory knockout exit and,
when Salvadore went out at the same point, he was up in hands-free mode, with a
lit point coming excruciatingly close to the Sicilian leotard, bundling him
back into the action zone without delay.
Never have you seen a wrestler return so smartly to the ring.
Then, after conceding deciding fall, Tug’s temper got the better of him and
he continued on the attack. A rotund
woman from the other side of the ring, with a shape that would hold its own in
twenty-first century Britain, armed with handbag and shoes and with another
cigarette-smoking acolyte egging her on, had a real go at tugging Tug’s
apparel. But look beyond these rather
obvious interventions and you can detect amongst the ringside-seaters far side
of camera much ongoing mirth and interaction throughout the bout, on topics not
picked up by the mike or the commentator.
This serves to remind us all of the camaraderie amongst the audience,
and also recalls occasions at our halls when the interaction was such that the
wrestlers and the wrestling assumed a rear seat to the banter taking place.
The two voices we heard revealed, perhaps, further
true feelings as we apply the benefit of hindsight. Tug would not receive a wage packet for his
evil-doing. Translated, this meant “well
done son, you have really got the audience furious, great work!” And the commentator gave the Italian only one
round, in which he had acquitted himself perfectly well, before announcing “I
don’t think he’d get far against the rippling muscles of a Viedor or Rocky
Wall.” Yet another sign to reassure us
that, although the home team would be losing 0-3, all that was British was
best. He of course failed to consider
that the continentals in question were, even at home, undercarders, brought in
only to enliven bills through their exoticness.
Let’s face it, they were probably cheap!
Neither Dhondt nor Ricard were able
to Frank the form later the same month, going down to McManus and Kwango in
solo televised bouts. It just makes you
wonder whether the initial victorious displays were planned long-term precisely
to give the visitors a certain element of respect as they toured the Isles, as
well as to enhance their aged home-grown foes even further when they were
subsequently vanquished by the veteran Londoners. Tino went on to defeat the India Rubber Man,
and at the time of writing some doubt remains as to his later career under
differing names ….
Europe versus Great
Britain, Solihull, 2nd January 1973.
