RE-POST: Please Bring Wrestling To My Area! (August 2001)

As I write this, it is the height of the holiday season here in north Norfolk. People have come here from around the country, and from abroad, to savour the delights of the area. Just two weeks ago, about 50,000 people attended the Cromer Carnival parade. This parade is second in size only to the Notting Hill Carnival.

However, while walking around my hometown of Cromer, and the surrounding area, in the past few weeks, something became apparent to me - just how damn popular wrestling is.

On one day, in my local Woolworths, in the space of about two minutes, I saw four Stone Cold t-shirts, five Rock t-shirts, two Hardy Team Extreme t-shirts, and one Dudleyville shirt.

This sort of thing has continued on my travels around the area during the past few weeks, and it made me realise that my local area, at the height of the summer holiday season, could really use one thing, one thing that, given the right venue, the right advertising, and the right merchandising, could raise thousands of pounds, and bring possibly thousands of people to the area, which, in turn, would also boost the local economy.

What am I talking about? Something that hasn't been seen in my area for the better part of twenty years - a wrestling event.

There is no doubt that if handled properly, a wrestling event could do wonders for the local holiday trade. Up until recently there used to be regular shows in the nearby city of Norwich, but locals and visitors with young families probably could not always get to these shows.

This is why holding an event, if not in Cromer, then in the North Norfolk area, could do a lot of good. Such an event has not been held in Cromer since the days of the old Dale Martin promotion, when the likes of Clive Myers and Tony St. Clair would grace the old Links Pavilion, just a stone's throw away from my home. But sadly, the Links burned to the ground over twenty years ago - ironically, just a couple of weeks before a certain nine year old was due to attend one of the shows there.

So where could such an event be held in Cromer, forgetting the rest of the area for this part of the exercise. Well, in the US, small indy promotions often hold their cards in high school gyms. Why not hold such an event in the sports hall of Cromer High School? The hall itself is the size of a small aircraft hangar, and could quite easily accommodate a sizeable crowd.

Or if you're looking for an open air event - why not at Bond Cabbell Park, the home of Cromer United Football Club? Again, with properly organised parking and seating, you could get a decent crowd here. But the one thing stopping this could be the fact that Bond Cabbell Park is situated in a residential area, and knowing some of the people like I do, they wouldn't exactly warm to such an event.

So now we have a location for our event, who is going to stage it? Well, my first choice would have been Ricky Knight's World Association of Wrestling promotion. After the success of their Fightmare event at the Norwich Sport Village in April, in which they drew a crowd of 2,000, WAW would have been the perfect choice to stage such an event.

But things for WAW have changed since that great night. Recently, they tried to stage weekly shows at Tiffany's Night Club in Great Yarmouth. Without the help of the marketing men from NRG Films, who co-promoted the Fightmare event, WAW's shows in Yarmouth could be described as nothing more than a failure. A lack of advertising meant that the only people who attended the events were local die-hard fans, who only found out about the shows because one of them worked in the bar below Tiffany's.

WAW's inability to even advertise such events locally led to them cancelling the shows three weeks before they were due to end. This in itself drew the ire of the fans because the cancellations were not actually publicly announced. I myself was due to attend one of these events, and had heard a rumour on the Internet that the events had been cancelled. This was only confirmed when I telephoned Tiffany's.

So if WAW is unable to hold events in Cromer, then who could? I am sure that there are many other promoters in this country who could fill the void in the wrestling market here. Such an event, if handled and promoted correctly, and if the local authorities did not object, could become a huge success. The wrestling fans of North Norfolk really deserve no less.