RE-POST: WAW Diary Part 1 (Originally Written in 2001)

Part 1; A fat kid on a bus, Jerry Springer, and a chance finding of a video.

SUMMER 1991

It was a hot July day as I got on the bus to travel to the nearby coastal town of Sheringham. Back then I worked as a kitchen porter at a local hotel, hardly a rewarding job, as many will probably tell you.

I found myself seated near a group of young children, in the 12-14 age group. They seemed full of the joys of summer, and were busy discussing a comedy programme they had seen on BBC2 the previous evening.

It surprised me because the programme they were discussing was "A Bit of Fry and Laurie". Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie were, and still are, two of Britain's finest comedic talents, and it surprised me that these kids had watched such a programme, because I thought they would be more acustomed to the toiley humour of Hale and Pace. As noted actress Kathy Burke once said in her Waynetta Slob character - "they don't say willy, they say penis."

There was one boy that really stood out from the rest though. One boy that made me take notice. It wasn't because of the way he was talking, or the clothes he was wearing.

It was because he was so damn huge. The boy was about the same height as me, but took up two bus seats by himself. I tried to guess how much this boy weighed, but decided against it in the end.

And, needless to say, his impression of Stephen Fry left a lot to be desired.

Getting off the bus in Sheringham, the image of this humongous boy stayed with me for a couple of hours. I had no idea at the time that I would be taking a great interest in the boy's career some ten years later.

SUMMER 2000

Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!

News had reached me that the icon, the show stopper, the great one, the master of sleaze television, Jerry Springer, was coming to Britain to film some shows, and joy of joys, he was filming them in the nearby city of Norwich, at the studios of Anglia Television.

At the time, I had a friend who was working for Anglia, and a group of us talked about going to one of the tapings, using our...ahem...contact to secure some tickets.

For some reason, Jerry's plans changed, and instead of filming the shows in Norwich, he decided to film them in London. Damn, I thought. My chance of joining the masses as we chanted the name of our hero was gone.

The first show was given a prime-time airing. There were the usual "trailer park" types, bemoaning the fact that their wives/husbands/gay lovers no longer found them attractive. The usual sort of stuff.

The last segment, however, was the one that caught my eye. Jerry introduced us to a man called Ricky Knight, a professional wrestler. This name sounded very familiar to me, but I couldn't quite place the name.

Ricky told us his story, of how he had trained his wife, Julia, as a wrestler, mainly as a joke, but now he hated the fact that, as an attractive woman, she now earned more money than he did.

Sounding like a reject from a Guy Ritchie film, and dressed in a rather shabby looking suit, Ricky complained that today's wrestling fans only wanted to see Julia because of her T&A value, and not because of her wrestling skills.

And so Julia, dressed in her wrestling attire, came out to the cheers of the audience, and the argument began. Ricky said he was disgusted by what Julia did, and bemoaned the fact that this was the sort of thing the modern wrestling fan wanted. Ironic when you consider what he said about wrestling a year later.

And so the show ended. As was the custom, Ricky and Julia fielded questions from the audience. From the way he spoke, I half expected Ricky to call the audience a bunch of muppets, but it never happened.

FEBRUARY 2001

Having been fed a staple diet of the World Wrestling Federation, with small side dishes consisting of WCW and ECW for nearly twelve years now, I didn't really feel the need to seek out British wrestling action. By all accounts, British wrestling was very, very poor, and hardly a substitute for the likes of Steve Austin and Triple H.

I had, though, been aware that a British wrestling promotion operated virtually on my doorstep, in Norwich, and that a certain "fat kid" I had seen all those years ago, who now stood six foot tall and weighed close to 500 pounds, workd for this promotion along with his slightly smaller older brother.

But the name of the World Associatio of Wrestling hardly stirred the cockles. I knew they ran bi-weekly shows at the Norwich Corn Exchange, a building, so I had heard, was close to falling down. Not surprising, really, when you see the size of some of the men who threw themselves around within the confines.

I had considered going to a few of these shows. I had seen promotional posters in Cromer, in local newsagents, and in my local tourist information office. But for some reason, they didn't really appeal to me. A lot of this was probably due to the fact that some of the wrestlers seemed to be playing a game of "Stars in Their Eyes", dressing themselves as American wrestlers. Oneposter I had seen saw one man resembling X-Pac, and another, the "fat kid's" older brother, was dressed as Vader.

The thought of watching a cheap imitation of an American wrestler did not appeal in the slightest. If I had wanted to see American wrestlers in the flesh, I'd go and get a ticket for a WWF event in this country, and not watch some cheap facsimile.

So, content to give WAW something of a wide berth, my brother Mark, a wrestling "mark" if ever there was one, told me he had found a WAW video in Sheringham, and when he had the money, and if the shop still had it, he'd buy it.

At the time, I wasn't really that interested, until Mark told me that the "fat kid", Mike Walters, aka The Bulk, and his elder brother, the Vader-alike, known as Big Dave, were on the video. Intrigued, I awaited my brother's pay day. Hey, I'm a cheap skate! Why waste my hard earned money on something I probably won't like.

And so, on Mark's pay day, he travelled to the video shop, and purchased WAW October Outrage 99, recorded at the aformentioned falling-down Corn Exchange. It was about ten o'clock at night, I watched this sixty minute wrestling extravaganza.

And I could not have been more disappointed. And this probably had a lot to do with my wrestling diet over the past twelve years.

The first thing that interested me was that Julia Knight, under her ring name of Sweet Saraya, was one of the announcers. However, she didn't actually appear on screen. Ricky Knight obviously wanted this video to sell on the wrestling content, and not his wife's T&A value.

To be honest, Saraya wasn't that bad as an announcer. But her broadcast collegue was so damn dull, so f*#+ing boring, that I couldn't even remember his name! An example of his work was "Oh look! He's hit him with a chair! That's not nice now, is it?" Come on! Put some bloody passion into it!

The promos could only be described as one thing - dire. Wanting to destroy your opponent because you "don't like the look of him" is hardly a good enough reason. You would hardly see such a feud beginning on Raw or Smackdown now, would you?

The matches themselves were far too long, and some of the stipulations were laughable. A steel cage match between Danny "Boy" Collins, who could hardly be called a boy after all these years, and the ageing Skull Murphy consisted of a cage brought directly from a local builder's merchant. The funny thing about this match was watching the entire WAW roster trying to hold the cage up after Collins was Irish whipped into it.

The main event, a hardcore match between Ricky Knight and Big Dave, would have made the most ardent hardcore fan cringe, because it was contested under the rounds system, and like the rest of the matches, it was far too long. During her commentary Saraya stated that Ricky was more hardcore than Cactus Jack. Having watched the god that is Mick Foley in action over the years, I couldn't have aggreed less.

I had heard some time ago that WAW were putting together a video, in the hope of selling their product to the American market. If this was the video in question, then I wasn't surprised that I'd heard nothing from WAW stateside.

In short, I was not impressed, and my planned trip to the Corn Exchange was put on the back burner. In short, I wasn't interested in drinking Ricky Knight's koolaid.

But a few weeks later, Mark told me he had found two more WAW videos.

TO BE CONTINUED......