The first time I went on the mat with Bob all the old-timers were there. I had been going for a year, and I hadn’t been on the mat with any of the top men. Bob had an appointment for a private match. He was getting ready, and he wanted somebody to train with. Riley said, “Okay, Billy, get on the mat with him.” So I get up to wrestle Bob after he’s worked out with all these other guys, and everybody’s gone except the old-timers. Bob takes me down, half-halches me, plays with me a bit, takes me down again, and then lets me get halfway up. While I am half bent over, I notice that his weight is entirely on his heel and that he has taken his toes completely off the mat.
Now I’m on one knee on the mat, and with his toes in the air, I’m thinking about going underneath, grabbing his foot, and getting an ankle lock roll to finish with an ankle submission. As I put my hand underneath, he just changes his weight on top of my hand. Now I can’t get the hand out. All the old-timers are laughing hard. He then just turns me over like nothing, gets a top wrist-lock on the other arm, and makes me submit. I get up. I say, “Bob, you tricked me that time.” One of the old-timers said, “Yeah and he’s going to trick you a few more times before you get done.” That’s how it was back then.
Syed Said Shah was one of the great Gusti wrestlers from India. He wrestled an hour draw with Goga, one of the Gama’s nephews, and he was going to wrestle Bob. They were promoting, and Shah was saying, “I can get anybody’s leg.” Well, everyone told him he couldn’t get Bob’s leg. So they get into the ring, and straight away Shah goes for the leg. Bob moves the leg out of the way. He stuck his leg in front of him again and pulled it away about three or four times. Each time he did it, he slowed down taking his leg out of the way. So, about the fifth time, Shah was going for the leg and his fingertips got about two inches from Bob’s knee. Bob took his knee back at the same speed as Shah’s arm so Shah still thought he could get him, until he had overreached. Then Bob just plopped him over and made him submit with a wristlock.
Bob Robinson was both British and European heavyweight champion, and many experts thought him to be the best technical wrestler of all time. He had long string-bean arms, his hands hung lower than his knees, and he had big thighs but no calves. He was one of the nicest guys around. He wouldn’t even swear. In England, “fucking hell” was a common expression among the working-class people; he wouldn’t even say that. If he really got mad at something, he’d just take a few deep breaths and stutter out, “kin’ hell!” That was the closest he’d get to swearing. He was very quiet-spoken. In a bar or out on the street, he’d be a real mark for some of these guys who thought they were tough. Bob could beat a person so fast without using any energy; he was just unbelievably good.
Let me tell you about Jimmy Hart, the nicest guy in the world. He had only basic takedowns, but he was a good control artist, a very good leg rider; he’d hook his opponent with one leg deep, hook the ankle with the other, get a scissors on the other ankle, and squeeze the knees together. It’s what we call the top ride. It would only take him about a minute to get me down and get his legs in. He’d cross-face me one way, slip the elbow over my head, then back-elbow my head all the way back. My spine and neck would go click, click, click, click, click, until he couldn’t go any farther, and then he’d slip the back elbow over, cross-face me again, and do it the other way. If I was on the mat an hour, this torture lasted an hour. All I could hear him say was “Never mind, lad; you’ll have an 18-inch neck before you’re 16 years old,” and those were my Friday nights. Back then, I used to catch the train home. I’d have to walk about a quarter of a mile up a steep hill to the bus stop to go to Ashton on the other side of Manchester. I’d have to stop five or six times on those Friday nights just to lean against the wall to rest my neck. It was that beat up.
But that isn’t the worst train story I have from those days. Billy Riley uesd to pick me up at the train station and tell me what he wanted me to work on that day. I’m like six-foot-two, 191, and in great shape. Well, I’m walking up the street from or to the station with this 72-year-old guy, and he’s grabbing me from behind or hooking or grapevining a leg and reaching around my face. And then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, the Irishman in him would have him singing all these old songs, like, “Whatever did Robinson Crusoe do with Friday on Saturday night? Where there are wild men, there have got to be wild women, so what did Robinson Crusoe do with Friday on . . .” I mean, I’ll never forget it, because every time we went to the station, after he had finished mauling me, he’d be singing this song for more mortification, until people stopped and stared at us like we were homosexuals. It was so embarrassing! Mind you, homosexuality in those days was against the law in England. This was around the time when Lord Montagu did time in prison for it, even though he was the queen of England’s first cousin.
Billy at 17 after having won the British nationals.
There were so great wrestlers at Riley’s gym—Billy Joyce, Joe Robinson, the Carroll brothers, George Gregory, Mel Ryss, Tommy Moore, John Foley, Ernie Riley (Billy’s son), and of course Karl Gotch (Karl Istaz). Karl was a generation ahead of me; he was in the 1948 Olympics, and I won the 1957 Nationals. After the Olympics in 1948, Karl turned pro in Belgium. My uncle Alf went to Antwerp to wrestle Jack Sherry for the World Championship. Karl was on the same card. They started talking about Wigan and submission wrestling, and Karl didn’t believe it. Alf invited him over. So Karl came and stayed at our house when I was a young kid.
And when Karl went to Wigan, it was exactly the same as when I went to Wigan a few years later. The guys at the gym played exactly the same thing. Karl looked at Dempsey and Foley, then Billy Joyce and George Gregory; he thought they were too small or too old. After a short while, they had all beaten him easily. George and Billy played with him. Remember that Karl hadn’t learned submissions or catch-as-catch-can yet. He was just a very good amateur wrestler. “That’s it,” Karl said; he didn’t even go back to Belgium. He lived in Wigan for the next six or seven years.
I first met Karl when I was 10 or 11 years old. And then I sparred with him. He needed sparring partners, and I was the only guy who turned up. Anyway, he beat me very easily. He made me submit, but I kept on coming back. He was getting pissed, but I wasn’t going to quit, not with my dad watching. When I say “quit,” I mean I wasn’t tired, so I didn’t want to stop, no matter how hard it was. Afterwards, I had to take three days off work because of the abuse to my body.
One of the toughest and best matches I’ve ever seen was a supposedly friendly workout between Foley and Dempsey. It was unbelievable—great technique, great moves, and hard. They got black eyes, their noses were bent, there was blood coming out of their ears and mouth, and they were still the best of friends afterwards. But neither would give up; nobody was going to bow down to anybody.
There was a certain attitude at the gym—a lot of camaraderie, even pranks. For instance, there were copper heating pipes going around the gym. They’d get red hot. They had to, because the gym was so cold. With the English weather, no matter how much heat you’ve got, it’s still cold because of the dampness. Well, it was very cold on this particular day, so we lit the gas heater. It took a while for the gym to warm up, but the copper pipes got hot fast. We went in to spar, and I tied up with Bob Robinson. He must have winked, because I could see everybody hitting their elbows and smiling. They knew something was about to happen.
Though I knew something was going on, I couldn’t figure out what. Robinson made me move in such a way that my backside hit the pipes, and those pipes were red hot! I screamed and jumped; as I did, he sent me through the air and made me hit the mat hard. Everybody was laughing. “He’s tricked you again, kid.”
They did a lot of stuff like that. When it was a match between a great guy and a beginner, they’d pull tricks on the beginner, but only if they respected him. When it was two of the best guys coming up, it was like two pit bulls going at each other.
One
time, one of the wrestlers, Billy Howes, had just come back from the Korean War and had just started to work out at Wigan again. What he did was he wired the end of the big steel barbell in the gym to this machine, where you couldn’t see the wires, and when someone picked up the bar, he’d turn it on, and they couldn’t let go of it because of the dc current. He caught me and almost everybody else with it.
Alf executing a hype on a young Billy Robinson.
Then one day, Billy Riley and Ernie Riley came in because Billy was going to watch Ernie and me work out. Now, Billy Riley and Joe Robinson had a competitive relationship, even in their older days. Billy Riley didn’t show Karl a lot, but that’s probably a big part of why Joe showed Karl what he did about catch-as-catch-can. That day at the gym, the old-timers at the gym started talking about Joe. So Billy Howes said, “We just watched Joe. He was in here earlier with some other group of guys. He picked that weight up, and when he got it to his chest, he pressed it, and his arms moved so slowly, you could hardly see the weight moving up. Can you do that, Billy?”
“If Joe can do it, I can do it,” Billy Riley said. Off came his muffler, his jacket, and his cap. He pulled his shirtsleeves up, and as he went to pick the weight up, they turned the dc current on. Everybody’s laughing, but what happened was Billy Howes had turned the electricity up too much, so Billy Riley’s body started shaking. Ernie grabbed his dad to pull him off, but because of the electrical current, now Ernie’s stuck to the back of his dad trying to pull him off. It was like two dogs humping each other.
So Billy Howe yelled to me, “Billy, I’m out of here. When I get out of that door, turn it off.” So he ran out, and I turned it off. Nobody was hurt, and there was no ill feeling. It was just hilarious.
We used to have guys there who were very good gym wrestlers but would never make it with the real top catch wrestlers. They were still very dangerous in the gym. Outside it, wrestling in another gym or in a match somewhere, it didn’t work for them, for some unknown reason; but in their own gym, they were good. They were part of the family. They were great sparring partners because they wouldn’t quit. They knew really good basics, and they were better than 90 percent of everyone else out there. Everybody loved them because we could practise our stuff with them. If they ever got in trouble on the street or anything, and you were there, it was like protecting your own family. There was no stabbing in the back, no bullshitting. I never learned anything about that sort of thing until I came to America.
American pro wrestling changed a lot of things for me. The attitude was different. Nowadays, a lot of the younger wrestlers expect encouragement from their coaches. Billy Riley never said anything, not after I won the European Championship, or any amateur championships for that matter. Even when I beat Bob Robinson for the British Heavyweight Championship, Riley never gave me one good word. Finally, when I won the World Championships, he said, “That was good.”
I started to reply, “Mr. Riley . . .”
He stopped me and said, “You can call me Billy now.”
I said, “Billy, thank you. All the time that I’ve spent with you, all these years, all the time—three, four, sometimes five times a week, you never said ‘good’ to me once. When I beat the Olympic team from Sweden, when I beat someone in a private match, you never said a good word.”
He said, “It’s not my place to tell you what’s good. I’m here to tell you what’s wrong and teach you how to fix it. Plus, once you start to believe you’re good, you’ll stop learning.” He really taught me to keep an open mind.
I sparred with a lot of the old-timers. No matter what time of the day it was, there were always old-timers, really great old catch-as-catch-can wrestlers, at the gym. And they’d watch all the young guys wrestling. Some would take a liking to one kid or another, and they’d pull them to one side after the match, or after their sparring session, and say, “Listen, when you do this, if you just change your angle just a little bit here and then drop your hip and get the alignment of your knee and your ankle, you’ll find that you will feel a lot stronger. Now, try it again.”
The big difference nowadays is people want to learn the finishing holds before they learn how to wrestle. The idea of catch wrestling is to know how you can get the finishing hold from whatever position you’re in, not to just go after it openly so your opponent knows what you’re trying to do. Billy used to scream at me, “Don’t telegraph what you are going to do.”
For example, when I cross-face, when I’m turning my opponent’s head, he thinks I’m trying to make him submit with a neck crank, and he’s trying to defend it. But I’m actually pulling him right onto his own ankle. I change suddenly and get the ankle submission from him. Today, a lot of the so-called catch wrestlers and ankle submission guys think they know it all. Sure, ankle submission’s a great submission, but you’d never get in that position with a guy that knows catch wrestling.
Billy’s signature move: the double arm suplex.
In 1956, my first year at the nationals, I came in third. And then, the following year, 1957, I won the nationals in amateur wrestling. Later that year, there was the European Open Championships in Ireland, and I wrestled in two weight classes. In light heavyweight, I beat the fourth-place finisher at the 1956 Olympics, Gerry Martina. Then, in heavyweight, Ken Richmond, the bronze medallist at the 1952 Olympics, beat me. I wrestled Richmond about a month later at the ymca and beat him that time. I was a little bit in awe of him when we first wrestled, which Billy Riley chewed me out for. He said to me, “Listen, son, you’ve won all the cups and the medals. Why don’t you take me out? I taught you how to wrestle. Take me out and buy me a steak dinner?”
I said, “Mr. Riley, I’d love to, but I can’t afford to take you out and buy you a steak dinner.”
He said, “It just goes to show you, kid. You can’t buy steaks with medals. It’s time you turned pro.” And he was right; with all the television and the coverage coming in a little bit later, it was a good choice for me. The only thing I really regret is that I didn’t wait to go to the Olympics. I should have gone. I had beaten everyone who went as part of the British team.
The last three years at Riley’s gym, I was pro wrestling and going to different countries. Eventually, I ended up opening my own gym in Manchester, which was a Lancashire-style catch gym, the same as Billy Riley’s. I was teaching people what Billy taught me.
Turning pro at nineteen was great for me because it allowed me to travel. It was the time when the great Hungarian amateur wrestlers in Germany—Gideon Gida, Josef Kovacs, Joe Mulnar, Michael Nadar, Tibor Szakacs, Peter Szakacs—wanted to take pro wrestling into Sweden. There was no pro wrestling in Sweden in those days, so the Swedish Olympic team said, “No, you’ve got to show us how good you are and beat us first.” Gida called me to help out. Now, Gida had helped me a lot with the Greco and the suplex. He was like family. Though I was originally supposed to go to Japan to help Yoshimura, I couldn’t refuse Gida. So I went to Sweden.
There, I wrestled with Axel Grönberg, who was a two-time Olympic champion and world champion. I also beat Gösta Andersson, who was an Olympic champion. I beat them all at amateur. Then I beat Andersson with submission wrestling because he quit after a minute and said, “Hey, it’s too dangerous for us.” So that’s how we got pro wrestling into Sweden; it was brought in by the Hungarian amateurs and by a Wigan catch wrestler (that is, me) beating their champions.
I began travelling all about. I had gone to school with a guy who was now a pro wrestler, a very well-educated kid, and he was friends with a promoter in Spain, an opposition promoter called Jesus Chausson. He offered me twice as much money as I was earning in England to go to Spain and wrestle, but unfortunately, in England, Joint Promotions were all united, and if you wrestled for an opposition promoter, you were out. So Billy Riley called me and said, “Billy, you can’t go there and wrestle for Jesus Chausson, otherwise you won’t wrestle f
or Joint Promotions again or for the big promoters in Europe.”
I said, “Mr Riley, I’ve got to go. I gave my word.” That was my first disagreement with Billy Riley.
So I went to Spain, and when I got there, nobody was there to meet me! What had happened was that Chausson had packed up his business, so I was left in Madrid with very little money in my pocket and nowhere to go. (Incidentally, about a year later, I had a match with Jesus Chausson in London, and I was still pissed. I gave him nothing; I was all over him. It must have been a boring match to watch for the public, with me just abusing him the whole time. I remember, at one point, I heard a voice with a Cockney accent cry out from the crowd, “Come on, Jesus, for Christ’s sake!” The whole audience broke into laughter.)
Fortunately, an American English professor who was teaching at the University of Madrid had sat next to me on the plane. He said, “Come and stay with me for a couple of days until we get you sorted out.” So I spent a week with him. Then he got me into very cheap hotel lodgings. He also got me a job as a Roman soldier in the movie King of Kings. Being a wrestler and in good shape, and speaking English, I had no problem getting the job. There, I met Sophia Loren and Charlton Heston. They weren’t in that movie, but they came on the set to visit, and I was introduced because I was a wrestler. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in those days.
Physical Chess Page 3
