Category: Profiles & Interviews

What’s the biggest factor in making yourself a main event star rather than just another wrestle?   I tell the young people coming up that what makes the difference is: wrestle with your heart, not your head. They’re so busy doing memorisation that they forget that the moves in wrestling are just a way to…

WWE chief Vince McMahon has often commented that in the professional wrestling business, perception is reality. That’s most definitely the case with the career of the Ultimate Warrior. In the immediate aftermath of his death he was widely cited as one of the all-time biggest stars in wrestling history, something neither the calendar nor the…

During a 16 year career with the WWF, Tom Buchanan likely worked more than 10,000 matches across the United States and around the world. But he was no professional wrestler: instead he was the promotion’s chief of photography, a role that gave him a unique insight into the development of the business.   After leaving…

It’s a long way from the corner of Industrial and Cadiz in Dallas to Green Square in Tripoli. But for Mickey Grant, that journey is part of a career in which the unique world of pro wrestling has shaped the way he has put everything on the line to tell stories that might otherwise go…

You’re about to visit the UK for a series of Q&A events. What can we expect from the tour?   Well, I gotta be honest, I don’t have any idea what kind of questions to expect. I have only done a handful of the Q&As. I’m sure there’ll be some questions that we sort of…

For better or worse, Sabu was a true innovator in the wrestling business. As he returns to British shores, John Lister explores the legacy of the “suicidal, genocidal, homicidal maniac”.   Terry Brunk was once literally a backyard wrestler, but while he may have shared a reckless disregard for his own wellbeing with the derided…

The saying goes that Paul Heyman would rather climb a tree to lie than stand on the ground and tell the truth, and it was a lie that broke him into the business aged just 13. He phoned the headquarters of the WWE (then WWWF) and managed to convince a receptionist that Vince McMahon Senior…

Like many former WCW and WWE stars, Dave Finlay has used his TV stardom to gain independent wrestling and training bookings. But as John Lister explains, the two decades he wrestled before hitting North America make such bookings even more productive.   At the start of 1995, I was starting to come round to the…

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…