Staged Death Matches

 When I was a lad and TV always seemed to be in Black and White .....

When Wrestling Was King

...... in other words pre 1969, which is when regular colour TV programmes started broadcasting in the UK (but only if you had a colour TV .... everyone still rented TV's back then, so colour came as rentals became only colour) .... so many people didn't get colour TV until the early 1970s. 

The two mainstays of Saturday afternoon TV (on before Dr Who), was either horse racing or wrestling (the other regular winter TV sport was Rugby League with Eddie Waring), both in black and white .... so wrestling it was for me and my sibling.

The main wrestlers that come to my mind from that black and white era are Jackie Pallo, Mick McManus, and Kendo Nagasaki ..... this was before Giant Haystacks and Big Daddy who were from a later era (wresting survived on UK TV until 1988, but I had grown out of it by the late 60s). Now of course it all WWF and big show business again, but back then it was men in swimming trunks and forearm jabs and grunt inducing body slams. 

Of course, then as indeed now, the fights were all rehearsed and the result fixed  .... but it was a more innocent time and people really did think (against all common sense when you think on it, if they had been real fights there would have been broken noses, blood and black eyes every where), they were real matches, indeed a 1963 bout between Jackie Pallo and Mick McManus was watched by over 20 million people on British television.

So in the 1960s I would watch the TV fights with some interest thinking that it was 'real' ..... until one day my Dad, who had been working in the Isle of Man for a season (as a musician) told us that he had watched the wrestlers rehearsing the bouts on the hotel lawn .... they also took turns to be the masked wrestler .... that killed the 'sport' on the spot and I doubt I ever watched it on TV again. Now it would have happened sooner or later, but there you are .... killed by my father.

Pits Of Punishment Poster

I have never watched it again, nor have I watched the scripted WWF matches  ...... so my eye was taken by a small story from May 2022, about a wrestling match where the gloves were off so to speak. The bout was between 'Blizzard' and Ronnie Thatcher at Seaham Conservative Club in County Durham. The bout was under Colliery Championship Wrestling (CCW) promotion and was billed billed as a 'Pits of Punishment' fight and offered a family discount for parents wanting to bring their children. May be 'Pits of Punishment' was a warning or a bit of a clue.

Anyways it appears that at some point during the match, either tempers were lost by both men, or more likely there had been a terrible misunderstanding between the wrestlers and the promoters, about the show that was to come, because the match became a very real graphic '18+ death match' without anyone at first realising what was happening.

Blood Trickles And Scratches
Appear As Strimmer Is Wielded

Then the flying blood started appearing and some families started moving and trying to find cover (while others cheered the men on on the video I saw), as the two men laid in to each other with weapons, using drinks glasses, glass lighting tubes, wooden sticks, and even a garden strimmer, and this only stopped when both men were heavily bleeding. The police were called and an investigation was launched.

One of the wrestlers has since admitted they 'went overboard' - but is 'f*cking sick of apologising'. While the promoter James Barrass claimed the wrestlers only suffered from a 'couple of scratches here and there', and the blood was dealt with .... one of the men allegedly went out for a meal with his girlfriend the next day. 

The fight was caught on video but as YouTube videos are often taken down, I will only link to the version that was up when I wrote the story rather than embed the video. But what struck me about this was that even this was actually a staged violence, this was more like what wrestling would have been like if they were real fights and real violence being exerted ......