Believing he was not cut out for the law and looking at other careers, James Morton investigated whether professional wrestling was all that it was cracked up to be


It was my father who, suffering from the stigma that he was in trade whilst his elder and younger brothers were a doctor and an accountant respectively, determined I must have a profession. Within weeks of my entering articles, I realised I was not cut out for the law and began to cast around for what other profession might have me. A lack of mathematics at O-level disqualified me from accountancy, medicine, architecture, a commission in the services and almost everything else, and so I decided to become a professional wrestler. It is true.



In fact, all-in wrestling (although it was not called ‘all-in’ any more) was just beginning to become popular again, with both ITV and the BBC starting to show bouts on a regular basis. Later I discovered the men earned more in a week than did the ordinary newly-qualified solicitor.



As a child I had been taken to the Winter Gardens in Morecambe to see the great villain Jack Pye (known as The Doncaster Panther and the Uncrowned King of the Mat), then in his late 50s, be disqualified in short order for tying the referee and his opponent in the ropes and bouncing off them until a lady in the front row, who looked like my churchgoing Aunt Ada, swore viciously before stabbing him in the buttocks with some sewing scissors. I was hooked. But how could I begin?



In my innocence, I did not know that most wrestled under assumed names and I struck lucky when I rang Vic Coleman of Bromley after finding his name on a poster and then in the telephone directory. ‘You don’t want to be like Jack Pye, son,’ he said, when I explained my mission. ‘Learn properly.’ When I told him I lived in north London, he added: ‘Go to the Ashdown. They’ll teach you.’



‘They’ were Bill and George, who ran the club as an evening class in a school building in the Hornsey Road. The club itself had a great tradition. It supplied every wrestler for the British team at one Olympic Games and it boasted the great amateur George MacKenzie who carried the flag at the 1952 games in Helsinki.



Looking back, I don’t think I ever paid any fee for my tuition as I was taught to bridge, not to pin myself, the Flying Mare and generally get myself fit. What was so good about them was their patience and the fact that there was no question of hours of boring theory. It was straight on the mat – that’s how you learned.



They were also kind. When I damaged my wrist, Bill borrowed some grips to strengthen it. Fifty years later, I still have them somewhere. If you weren’t actually wrestling, you were expected to do exercises and that was where I had a cruel lesson. I was lifting some weights when an old man who had been watching, and who introduced himself as the Middlesex Lion, said: ‘Son, you’ve got it all wrong. You’ve got the strength but you ’aven’t got the technique.’ Sometimes I wonder if it was a metaphor for my legal career.



As the months went by, I progressed, and I thought I was rather good until I was matched with members of the English amateur side who happened to be in the gym. That was when I learned my deficiencies. There was no question of them damaging me deliberately. I just went flying through the air and, when I picked myself up, down I went again.



It was the same with a Hungarian who had come over after the uprising. Up I got, down I went. But Bill and George were always there to encourage me to have one more try. If they had been my law tutors, I might have done a great deal better.



When we wrestled in a match against, I think, the Post Office, my father was so pleased I had been selected – but everyone who was halfway fit was – that he and his co-director came along to watch. To their credit, the others never raised an eyebrow at these two middle-aged men in stiff white collars, furry bowler hats and rolled umbrellas.



There was no side to anyone there. At the end of the evening, Bill and George helped the lowest of us put away the equipment. There were no showers at the school and I don’t remember much in the way of central heating. Throughout the winter we shivered as we ladled pans of lukewarm water over ourselves and each other. Nowadays, social anthropologists or psychologists would point to the homo-eroticism of it all but I think we were just cold.



Towards the end of my second season, I thought I had progressed sufficiently and so rang up the big London promoter Dale Martin in Brixton to see if I could have a trial. ‘Sure, son, come any Saturday afternoon with your kit.’ That Tuesday I was working out with a man who said his father was Mick the Miller (although I thought that was a greyhound) and had wrestled Jack Pye, when I heard a crack and felt a searing pain in my right knee. The kneecap had fractured. It was all a bit symmetrical.



And so in one split second, the prospect of ‘Big’ Jim Morton v Mick McManus at the Royal Albert Hall or, more realistically, v Quasimodo, ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’, in life a most amiable Spaniard, at the Caledonian Road Baths on a Monday evening, was gone for ever. During the weeks in hospital, I had no excuse not to study for the finals. But I still didn’t pass.



James Morton is a former criminal law specialist solicitor and now a freelance journalist