Tony Earnshaw’s wonderful British Wrestling Archive site (relaunching at https://www.britishwrestlingresults.com/ in 2024) has compiled a near-complete career record of Britain’s most famous wrestler, Big Daddy. It throws up some intriguing statistics about his career.
The first thing that leaps out is his extremely heavy workload. Covering July 1975 (when he returned to action after a lengthy absence from the business) through December 1993 (when he retired through ill-health), the site lists 4220 matches, an average of 228 a year. Indeed, between 1978 and 1986 he never dipped below 250 matches a year.
To put that in perspective, in 1981 Daddy worked 261 dates. Fellow British grappler Mal Sanders (who had a similar number of televised matches, though obviously nowhere close to the mainstream exposure) worked 152. In the US, Ric Flair and Hulk Hogan worked 209 and 109 dates respectively according to historian Karl Stern’s research. And last year Batista was the busiest WWE wrestler with 162 dates.
That said, Daddy’s athletic output was far less taxing as just two of his matches that year were singles bouts. Although he worked many singles bouts at the start of his push, amazingly including several ladder matches in 1977, he was pretty much a full time tag wrestler by the turn of the 80s.
Daddy’s partners were usually smaller men who would work most of the match, take a beating, and allow him to come in for the finish. Such a position required athletic performances before a heated crowd, so it’s no wonder that so many Daddy partners went on to international fame, including Dynamite Kid, Bruce Hart, Davey Boy Smith, Chris Adams, Sammy Lee (Satoru ‘Tiger Mask’ Sayama), Bret Hart and Kwik Kik Lee (Akira Maeda). Considering Maeda famously became disillusioned with ‘sports entertainment’ grappling after working with George Steele on a 1984 US tour, you do have to wonder what he made of Big Daddy.
Another notable point about Daddy’s 1981 is that he worked 132 different venues, an average of just under two appearances in each building a year. This can certainly be argues as a strike against his well-regarded drawing power, strongly suggesting he was a novelty act. In most of the established weekly venues he made only a few appearances, and those venues he did work more often tended to be seaside resorts where the audience may well have been dominated by visiting holidaymakers.
One such town, Bournemouth, was Daddy’s joint most-visited venue with six dates. Ironically, the other venue with this tally was Manchester’s Belle Vue, which had been running shows regularly (sometimes two or more times a week) since the 1930s. However, the building stopped running wrestling at the end of 1981. As well as suggesting Daddy’s drawing power didn’t extend to keeping a popular venue in business, it was symbolic of the theory that Daddy’s push was counterproductive in the big picture.
Even though the number of dates run across the country had declined greatly (from well over 3,000 in the mid-60s to around 1,200 in 1983), it was impossible for one man to carry the entire business; Daddy was only available to work on about 20% of the total shows. The argument went that pushing one star so strongly was incompatible with a business based around running many venues as regularly as possible and profiting via quantity rather than individual mammoth gates.
The most obvious example was the two biggest matches of Daddy’s career, selling out the 10,000 seat Wembley Arena in 1979 and 1981. It is true that these gates were drawn with heavily increased prices, ringside tickets going for double the most expensive regular venue, London’s Royal Albert Hall. (Aside from these shows, it appears Daddy’s name was not used to put prices up at venues, promoter instead relying on increased attendance.) To put it in context, though, the much-vaunted second Wembley Arena show drew a reported £48,000 (approx $100,000) which is equivalent to about £128,000 (approx $250,000) in today’s money, a figure beaten by virtually all WWE UK tour dates today.
And while the two crowds of 10,000 are impressive, they lose their luster when you realize the second came in the same year as the closure of Belle Vue, a 5,000 seater venue which had previously run 50 or more times a year, often with large and even capacity crowds. It was clear promoters viewed Daddy as a novelty attraction – and one who was undoubtedly successful in that role – rather somebody who could draw the same fans on a regular basis.
Given that Daddy usually wouldn’t be returning to a venue quickly, it’s understandable why promoters wanted good to vanquish evil: casual fans needed a happy outcome, and there was no intention of building up a return match. And that was lucky because Daddy’s match outcomes were in little doubt. After 1977, the year in which he turned babyface, Daddy has just five recorded losses. His longest unbeaten streak ran from 17 March 1983 through 18 October 1987, a staggering 1,180 matches without defeat.
Daddy is best remembered for his feud with Giant Haystacks, originally his villainous tag partner. The pair had a handful of matches against each other before starting their feud proper in 1977 and continued facing each other across the next 11 years. In all they faced off (largely in tag matches) no less than 614 times, with Haystacks winning just five bouts.
However, Daddy’s most regular opponent was actually Tony ‘Banger’ Walsh, who worked against him in 637 singles and tag matches. From what the researchers at British Wrestling Archive can gather, the final score was Daddy 637, Walsh 0.
And while Haystacks and Walsh were the most common Daddy victims, no career retrospective would be complete without mention of his stranger opponents. One argument has it that the traditional grappling villains lost their drawing power thanks to the Daddy push. An alternative view has it that Daddy appealed to an audience who appreciated unusual and outlandish characters. Either way, particularly in the latter years of TV wrestling and then into the end of Daddy’s career, he worked with some truly unconventional characters.
To name a few: The Bulk, Mr X, Anaconda, BattleStar, The Ringer, Rasputin, The Emperor, El Diablo, The Samurai, Red Ivan, Sgt Texas, Count Von Zuppi, Brother Frank, Mighty Yankee, Destroyer, Bounty Hunters, Doctor Death, US Assassins, Kamakazi, Warlords, Red Devil, Undertakers, Terrible Ted, Tokyo Joe, Mad Jocks, Ring Rebel, Masked UFO, Masked Exorcist, Masked Marauders, Masked Ghoul, Masked Riot Squad, Masked Barbarians, Masked Outlaw, Masked Klaw, Masked Spoiler, Masked Infernos and (the presumably unimaginative fellow under) The Mask.
(Daddy and many of the wrestlers mentioned in this article are profiled in my book Have A Good Week… Till Next Week)
