Orig Williams spent years promoting bogus “WWE wrestling stars”. But barely a year after his death, he has finally produced the real thing.
Williams was both a wrestler and, for around four decades, a promoter. Undoubtedly the most prominent wrestling figure of his era in his home country of Wales, he promoted across the globe, produced a TV show for Welsh channel S4C for eight years, and was among the first to promote so-called “tribute” shows featuring knock-offs of WWE characters. He was a nationally recognised figure with a column in the Daily Post and was honoured for his efforts in promoting the Welsh language.
And yet despite all these achievements, Williams wrote in his 2010 autobiography El Bandito, his dream was still to find a Welsh-speaking wrestler who could make it on the international stage. Enter Barri Griffiths.
Griffiths was born in 1982 and grew up in Tremadog, a village near the North Wales coast. While Griffiths will never be Tremadog’s most famous son (that honor belongs to TE Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia), his was certainly a small-town upbringing. To put things into context, Griffiths made his WWE TV debut as Mason Ryan before a crowd of 6,000 people; Tremadog’s population is classed for census purposes as part of nearby Porthmadog, which is home to just over 4,000.
That would have seemed positively bustling to Williams, who grew up fifty years earlier in the village of Ysbyty Ifan, around 20 miles inland from Tremadog. Even today Ysbyty Ifan contains barely 200 people, and Williams wrote of a life dominated by neighbourly conversation, religion and sport. Indeed, after completing his national service in the RAF, Williams’ first job was as a professional footballer with clubs including Oldham and Shrewsbury, plus a spell as player manager with Welsh side Nantlle Vale. His aggressive style of play led to multiple appearances before a disciplinary committee, the last of which saw him informed that he had been sent off more times than any other Welsh player on record. Given what was effectively a final warning before a lifetime ban, he decided it was time to make a voluntary transition to the world of wrestling.
Griffiths also spent time in football, playing centre back for Porthmadog, with his career ending in less spectacular fashion through a knee injury. But the game was to have a lasting effect on him: it was as part of his football training that he turned to weighlifting, which became his main athletic focus once his playing days were over. The result was a ripped bulky physique that made him about as different in appearance to the short and stocky Williams as can be imagined.
While he would eventually make his living from his physique, Griffiths exercised his mind at a further education college and then Cardiff University where he studied construction management. While that stood him in good stead to potentially one day take over his family’s carpentry business, he began working for the firm as an entry-level trainee. The family also runs a funeral business, for which Griffiths carried out duties that could surely serve as the basis of a feud with a certain WWE headliner.
But it was a return to Porthmadog’s stadium Y Traeth that would change Griffith’s career forever: not for a football match this time, but rather a fundraising wrestling show supplied by Williams. While Griffiths was initially too shy to introduce himself, an alcohol-fuelled friend was less intimidated and instigated a conversation. Considering that in a BBC documentary shown ten years before Griffiths’ birth Williams had explained that when it came to grapplers, “the bigger the man the better: you’ve got to be larger than life”, it’s no surprise he was immediately interested in a man who could be credibly billed as 6’6″ and 280lbs.
While Williams’ initiation into the wrestling business came on the travelling fair circuit fighting members of the public in Cornish rings “sandwiched on the field between the Wall of Death and the stripping ladies”, Griffiths had what is now a more conventional grounding. Each weekend he trained at the All Star promotions school in Birkenhead, where promoter Brian Dixon says he “entered with a good attitude to learning — it was all very new to him but his natural strength and ability soon shone through.”
The formal training was soon bolstered by live show experience, with Griffiths estimating he worked 50 shows for Williams in his first year alone, including tours of Ireland. Meanwhile he picked up dates for All-Star under the names Celtic Warrior and Smackdown Warrior, not just working arena dates but spending a summer season wrestling at Butlins holiday camps, an experience Dixon describes as “invaluable” as it required learning to appeal to an audience where most members were not dedicated wrestling fans.
That mainstream appeal was exactly what was needed when Griffiths received his next major career break in 2008. During filming of a Welsh television show covering his wrestling work (no doubt brokered by perennial TV contributor Williams, whose daughter Tara had just competed in the BBC talent show I’d Do Anything), a producer mentioned that Sky was looking for new cast members for the upcoming second season of its revival of Gladiators.
But the tables were turned when Sky revived the show in 2008 and began recruiting from wrestling. As well as hiring amateur grappler Jemma Palmer (Inferno), who later had a WWE developmental run, the show brought in FSM’s very own Nick Aldis to perform as Oblivion.
According to Aldis, “Gladiators provided us with a platform to showcase ourselves to a much wider audience and give some credibility to British wrestlers, as we could show that we were elite level athletes and entertainers. We were selected out of hundreds of people who tried out, including Olympians and pro athletes: we had to prove ourselves physically before we were even allowed near a microphone or camera.”
It wasn’t just the athleticism that made pro wrestlers a good fit for the show, however: ” I made the producers realise that our wrestling characters leant themselves perfectly to Gladiators, and they translated well on TV. The fact they brought in two more wrestlers for season 2 of Gladiators was no accident.” One of this pair was Daniel Singh (Warrior), who has worked for All-Star Promotions as well as on independent shows in North Carolina and Mexico. The other was Barri Griffiths.
Not only was Griffiths now required to grow a full beard for the duration of filming (in line with his new image as the ultimate villain), but as with all cast members he needed a new name. Billed as three inches and 36 pounds larger than the horde’s next biggest member (Singh), it didn’t take much imagination for Griffiths to be revamped as Goliath.
Fictitious personas aside, there has never been any serious suggestion that the outcomes of contests on Gladiators was determined by show producers. Yet, given Griffiths’ new moniker, any scriptwriter would have been delighted with the results: the winning male contestant for the season was, almost poetically, named David Staff,
While Gladiators was not renewed for a third series, Griffiths continued to make the most of his exposure to an audience that had peaked at 750,000. He kept the Goliath name while working All-Star dates, in many cases forming a tag team with Aldis/Oblivion. The role also opened up a series of media and public appearances.
Some were relatively low-key such as a judging role at a Dragon’s Den-style event in a Welsh school where he discussed how being a wrestler meant being your own boss. Other were more high-profile: he appeared alongside Catherine Tate on Channel 4’s Sunday Night Project, as well as competing against Aldis on Sky One’s Guinness World Records Smashed show, where Griffiths was billed as breaking a world record by holding a 20 kilogram weight at arm’s length for just one second shy of a minute.
But ironically one national television appearance turned out not even to be his biggest career break of the day. It was while Griffiths was in a London studio for an appearance on Channel 4’s Paul O’Grady Show that he received a call from WWE officials who, having become aware of his media exposure, wrestling background and imposing appearance, invited him to meet and greet company bigwigs including Shane McMahon at that night’s RAW taping at the O2 Arena.
Whatever McMahon was looking for that evening, it appears he found it: six months later the news broke that Griffiths had signed a developmental contract WWE and that he would be making his way to the Florida Championship Wrestling training centre as soon as the paperwork could be completed. Griffiths began winding down his British dates, though still made sure to put in an appearance in Porthmadog on October 26th for Orig Williams, who could finally celebrate achieving a long-standing goal of finding a Welshman who could make it in the US major leagues.
(Said Williams in his autobiography: “I [had] also harboured a huge ambition of making it in the USA, but it wasn’t to be, so instead I made it up. I told people that I had auditioned for the WWE in Madison Square Garden… I said the story so often that I think I believed it in the end.)
Sadly Williams was never to see his protégé work in the US. The Porthmadog show proved to be the last he ever promoted: Williams died 17 days later of a heart attack, aged 78. As well as obituaries in both the provincial and regional press, he received a personal tribute from the deputy first minister of Wales. He was buried the following week, with Griffiths among his pall bearers.
Griffiths’ working visa was now in order and, after three final dates for All-Star, he began 2010 by reporting for duty in Florida where once again it was time for a new name. Given that the sons of former stars Haku and Sika had been renamed Donny Marlow and Roman Leakee respectively, Griffiths shouldn’t have been surprised to receive the bland and seemingly-random moniker of Mason Ryan.
With the developmental group’s booking based more on development than building money-drawing superstars (a somewhat redundant goal in a territory running tiny capacity buildings), there was to be no Goldberg-esque push for Ryan. He certainly won his fair share of bouts and was portrayed as a killer, but had he suffered from an overzealous ego it would surely have been tested in losing to such little-known names as Cable Jones, Johnny Prime and Hunico.
But while it may not have been the most traditional marches to the top, by July 22nd Ryan found himself the extra man in an impromptu triple-threat title match with Florida champion (and future Miz-lackey) Alex Riley and scheduled challenger Johnny Curtis.
Not only did Ryan walk away with the title, but he was quoted on the FCW website as saying “I did exactly what I said I would. I told everyone that I would be the Florida Heavyweight Champion from day one, because I knew it was my destiny. Now, I will dominate FCW until the whole world stands up and takes notice, and Mason Ryan will become champion of the world!”
That, of course, was the view of Mason Ryan on a storyline event. The opinions of Barri Griffiths on the booking decision couldn’t be more different. According to Dave Meltzer, editor of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, those in the locker room were surprised to find that “when [Ryan] won the title, he openly questioned why they would do that since everyone there was better than he was.”
Meltzer explains that such a humble — and indeed realistic — outlook lies in sharp contrast not only to many pro wrestlers in general, but specifically to the attitude commonly displayed by those recruited into the industry as a result of their size. That was particularly true of those coming from a bodybuilding background in the late 80s and early 90s when gym rats traditionally saw the grappling game as easy money.
Once Ryan had the belt around his waist, he became firmly established as top dog in the promotion. (At the time of writing, he still holds the title.) Despite his inexperience, onlookers quickly began speculating that his appearance would prove irresistible to WWE’s creative department, particularly when the rise of The Miz and the strong initial positioning of the Nexus group made clear that building new stars was now a serious part of the promotion’s intentions, if not always perfectly executed.
It was just three months after his title win that Ryan got the call for a closer look, working against Zack Ryder on Raw house shows, then joining the Smackdown tour of Europe in November where he wrestled Chavo Guererro, which has become almost a rite of passage for new stars on the verge of a television debut. He even worked a couple of matches with William Regal, which would normally be the sign of the promotion wanting to hone a worker’s skills. But whatever qualms the office had didn’t seem to be enough to stop a swift progression to an on-camera position.
Despite Batista having left the company seven months earlier, rumours still persisted that Griffiths would receive some form of on-screen gimmick that portrayed him as a relative. But that theory proved false: in fact WWE’s creative team chose to stick with the Mason Ryan character — if indeed such a role can be described as a character rather than just a big man with a name.
While WWE is sometimes half-hearted with the introduction and development of new performers, it’s tough to criticise the portrayal of Ryan in recent weeks. While the manner of his debut was confusing (that he initially attacked CM Punk to earn him a disqualification victory was poorly explained by the announcing team), he certainly made an impact in his destruction of John Cena.
Speculation that he would challenge for elimination records in the first 40-man Royal Rumble (surely the first WWE bout to feature an Englishman, Scotsman, Welshman and Irishman) proved overly optimistic, but Ryan was again established as the “big hitter” of the new Nexus grouping. And even though he was handed his first televised defeat (at the hands of R Truth) just three weeks after debuting, the manner of his being disqualified for refusing to break a hold that had already earned him a submission certainly did him no harm.
The same cannot be said of the notably awkward match. While some of that can be blamed on his opponent, who seemed visibly flustered after embarrassingly identifying the Milwaukee venue as being “Green Bay”, the bout bore out previous reports of Ryan being both inexperienced and stiff (that is to say, inflexible and plodding, rather than making excessive physical contact).
While the obvious explanation is a lack of experience both as a pro grappler in general and in the WWE style specifically, Nick Aldis believes there may be another factor in play: “From day one he has had people in his ear, telling him how to be, trying to mould him, and so there is still a degree of uncertainty in his body language. When he finally has the freedom and confidence to get comfortable in his persona, he could really be a big deal.”
The optimist would point to the success of Batista, who himself was far from a naturally skilled in-ring performer but, with a combination of charisma, physique, behind the scenes mentoring, and determined and consistent booking, became a genuine big-money player.
The pessimist would point to the fact that for every Batista there are a dozen Jackson Andrews: men who may well have been destined to never click into a headline role, but equally were never given the opportunity to develop the big-stage skills that simply can’t be refined in the TV studios and county fairs of the Florida system.
But while even a man the size of Mason Ryan faces many obstacles to stardom in today’s WWE, he does have the benefit of a very personal incentive, expressed by Orig Williams on the final page of his autobiography: “I think he will surpass anything that I have ever achieved in the sport. His career might not be as interesting or challenging [as mine] but I think and hope that Barri Griffiths will raise the Welsh wrestling flag to greater heights.
“If he doesn’t, he will have to answer to me!”
