catch

Review: @chaos_wrestling , Bristol, September 2022

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I’ve written quite a lot on this blog (and upset plenty of people in the process!) about the deep connections between performance, ritual, religion, theatre, entertainment and martial arts, particularly in the Chinese martial arts traditions. But it’s not only the Chinese martial arts that function as this one-size-fits-all container for self defence techniques, self development techniques, pugilism and good old-fashioned raucous entertainment. There are strong traditions of wrestling-based entertainment in almost all cultures. Whether it was the gladiators of Ancient Rome or the Jujitsu mania that swept early 1900s Victorian England and America alike, or the recent ADCC 2022 grappling championship with a 14,000-strong audience, for as long as men (or women) have wrestled, sparred or boxed there have been other men working out ways of getting people to pay to watch it.

A section of Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) court painter Lang Shining’s painting depicting a wrestling contest in the royal court, performed as entertainment for the emperor.

England is no different, and so I find myself at Total Chaos, in Kings Oak Academy, a secondary school in Bristol, England, for my first visit to a real life Pro Wrestling event. I’m here ostensibly because of my 13-year old son and his obsession with WWE, which he watches almost every day, but I can’t deny I’m curious to see what all the fuss is about myself; to see what martial arts looks like when the performance elements aren’t hidden, disguised or denied, but brought to the fore and celebrated.

It begins: the first match is between the heel – the obvious bad guy – Tate Mayfairs – and the face, the obvious good guy, Joseph Connors. In terms of audience participation knowing who you need to boo for and who you need to cheer for takes a lot of the mental load off you, and you can just relax and enjoy it going along with the various chants that spontaneously break out amongst the crowd. In that way it’s a lot less stressful to watch than MMA, and a lot more family friendly and less bloody.

Tate Mayfairs about to be thrown by Joseph Connors

And the skill level is really impressive. Mayfairs and Connors are engaged in a ‘strap match’, in which they are tied together with a strap at the wrist which they both utilise in very technical ways that reminded me of the rope dart techniques found in Chinese marital arts.

As a child I used to watch wrestling religiously on World of Sport every Saturday morning in the 70s and early 80s, when it was on one of the only 3 TV channels you could watch in the UK. That was the era of Giant Haystacks, Mick McManus, Catweazle and Bid Daddy.

Things have come on a long way since then. Joseph Connors really looks the part of a modern day WWE wrestler: he’s lean, strong and his hair is long. Although Chris Hemsworth-lookalike Charlie Sterling who comes on next has even more hair, and even tighter pants.

Charlie Sterling being dropped by Sam Doyle

There are surprises throughout the night. The central conceit of Total Chaos is that you don’t know who is coming on next, you have to see who the Chaos Generator throws out – we get to see current King of Chaos champion Danny Jones vs Mulligan (who was a properly nasty heel) in a match to be decided by who got smashed through a table first, and then there is the surprise inclusion of “Jack from the bar” a comparatively skinny teen who had been serving drinks all evening from a small hatch in the foyer. Jack gets thrown into the show to make his Chaos debut in a male vs female match against the formidable Ava White, which was great fun. The poor boy didn’t stand a chance, but what a way to go.

Ohhhh Jack from the bar-ohh.

There was an all-female match up with Kanji vs Rayne “Make it rain!” Leverkusen, a tag-team event featuring the DEAD SAD BOYS and, surprisingly, 3 other wrestlers, (whose names, I apologise, I forget) and then a surprise final bout – Wait! It’s not over! – as “All Wales Champion” Brendan ‘Bronco’ White storms the stage to take on Eddie Dennis. These guys really brought the house down with incredible back flips from the top ropes.

Verdict: The athleticism and skill is real and it’s fantastic entertainment. There are moments of comedy, danger, tragedy, heroism and the wrestlers put it all on the line. Throughout the show the plot line of two rival wrestling factions, personified initially by Mayfairs and Connors, is weaved and developed into a feud, building to a grudge match tag team event bringing in Danny Jones and Mulligan, that will be decided in November at the next Total Chaos event: All or Nothing. I can’t wait! I just hope my 13-year old son still wants to go, or I’m going to have to go on my own…

But that’s not all – there are two shows that day with the first being to decide the new Maiden of Chaos Champion. Don’t miss it!

Catch as Catch Can – The British Chen Taijiquan

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I listened to the Raspberry Ape podcast this morning on the way to work. It’s a BJJ podcast by Daniel Strauss, one of the UK’s leading competitors and BJJ personalities.  The episode I was listening to was with Danny Williams, who as well as possibly being the most tattooed man in judo is also a British judo Olympian and Commonwealth gold medalist.

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Danny Williams

After taking a while to get going, the podcast gets very interesting and they discuss things like Ido Portal, Conor McGregor, fads and fashions in the Judo and BJJ world. The thing that interested me most was when Danny mentioned that he’d been teaching some no gi techniques that he picked up from Russian Sambo last night at Daniel’s club in Mill Hill, London. Danny also mentions that he found the same techniques in a video he watched of a Catch wrestling seminar. It’s entirely possible that that’s where the Sambo guys got it from.

Catch is a wrestling style from the North of England. Its name “Catch as catch can” implies it is a more open style than the local variants it grew out of, and you could apply a submission hold (a “catch”) as and when it was available. Its origins are amongst the working class of the region. Despite never being that popular amongst the rest of the population it has gained a reputation for being brutally effective at international level. It reached the United States in the late 19th Century where it has gained a foothold, spreading through carnival wrestlers. In modern times practitioners like Eric Paulson and Josh Barnett, amongst others, have achieved a level of fame using it in the MMA world.

The big difference, of course, is that the Catch seminar Danny watched was attended by “two fat men and some kids”, while the local football pitch was probably full of men running around kicking a ball. The irony here is that in Britain we’ve got a truly remarkable indigenous martial art that has some of the most effective techniques in the world, and nobody is interested in it. Catch wrestling is dying in Britain. There’s probably a handful of people left that practice it. Why is that?

The most obvious answer is that it’s not attractive to people. Let’s look at some vintage footage of the famous Catch Wrestler Billy Riley at the Snake Pit, the home of Catch wrestling in Wigan to find out why:

 

“they’d meet in the pub and arrange fights, then fight in the fields the next day, not on mats”, “a small hut” – it’s not very glamorous, is it?

One wrestling style that has become incredibly popular in the UK is Brazilian Jiujitsu – if you look at what that’s doing right then you can see why it’s successful. Generally, BJJ gyms are clean, welcoming, and friendly places. It doesn’t matter if you’re 40 years old and never done anything before, if you join a BJJ gym, you can learn without much risk of getting injured. As a business model, it suits the customers and it’s been very successful.

So, what needs to happen for Catch to catch on? I think it’s going to take a major victory on a world stage (as BJJ had in the UFC) to bring back a revival of Catch, or maybe it needs somebody to come up with a more people-friendly version – a Catch Light – perhaps, that can be more popular amongst ‘normal’ people.

I don’t know what the answer is, but it’s a shame that we’re letting something that in China would be described as a “national treasure”, like Chen Taijiquan is, die out due to neglect. Catch as Catch Can is our Chen Taijiquan, and it needs to be protected.

 

Notes:

The Snake Pit in Wigan has its own website and is doing what it can to revive Catch.

Incidentally, Billy Robinson who died in 2014, and features in that earlier film can be seen here in this film, still teaching in old age.