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 idea that professional wrestling might not be a legitimate sport. I had already accepted that some wrestlers would take a dive (how else could Hulk Hogan pin Ric Flair?) but as I cheered on Shawn Michaels to Royal Rumble victory, my excitement was somewhat tempered as I suspected his triumph was an artistic rather than sporting victory. In short, I was beginning to accept that wrestling was fake.
Then I went to an All Star Wrestling show in Croydon, watched Dave Finlay wrestle, and realised I’d been right all along: wrestling was 100% real.
This was of course simply an illusion created by a skilled performer, albeit one whose style can be described as high impact. Even at this point, just before before starting a 15-year stateside run, Finlay had already built up more experience than many wrestlers achieve in an entire career.
It’s something of a cliché to say that wrestling is in your blood, but Finlay is not only a second-generation professional but a fourth-generation grappler. His grandfather worked as a riveter on jobs including the Titanic and family lore is that he would spend his lunchbreak wrestling colleagues with a bottle of beer at stake.
After more than a decade of learning amateur wrestling as a hobby, Finlay’s father (also called Dave) turned professional in 1963, wrestling in his native Northern Ireland and in Wales. He later began promoting in Northern Ireland, covering even more remote and rural areas. According to Finlay Jr, such promotion thrived simply because few forms of entertainment were available in Northern Ireland during the era with those from outside the province wary about visiting during the height of the political unrest.
With most of the family playing some role in the promotion such as refereeing, Finlay Jr’s course in life was set: he always knew he would become a wrestler and says he can never remember a time when his father wasn’t training him. Said training was of the amateur persuasion, however, and in a story that’s often heard from British performers of the era, Finlay claims to have been unaware of how professional matches were put together when debuting in 1974.
Still in his mid-teens, filling in for an absent grappler on short notice and wearing a hotch-potch of borrowed ring gear, Finlay says he entered the ring against Bruce McDonald under the impression he was engaging in a legitimate contest. What he didn’t realise was that McDonald was skilled enough to control proceeding to provide an entertaining affair for the crowd. “I felt like Superman,” Finlay later said, describing his confused reaction to the bout. “All I had to do was touch him and he fell down!”
Four years later, Finlay moved to the UK and became a full-time professional, backing up his no-nonsense in-ring style with a professional attitude backstage. Although ribbed during his teen years (by colleagues acting with the permission of his father), he made it clear he detested bullying and would only use his legitimate grappling skills to keep wayward wrestlers in line rather than to intentionally hurt people. All Star Wrestling’s promoter Brian Dixon says that among wrestlers, Finlay’s reputation for toughness was largely based on his proven amateur background.
While Finlay has commented that “the day you think you know it all is the day to pack it in” and said it was not until his mid-20s that he felt he’d really got to grips with being a professional wrestler, it was soon clear that the way he carried himself was the key to his success. WAW promoter Ricky Knight says that “Finlay is so good because everything he does looks so real. One kick from Fit is better than twenty from any other pro.
“He can threaten to do something and get maximum heat. He looks [like a] legit hardman you don’t want to mess with. Even when he is chain wrestling, he looks like he is killing his opponent.”
But while an opponent of Finlay will likely feel the effects of the aggressive style, that doesn’t mean he was dangerous to work with: he appears to follow a policy explained by William Regal to a group of Tough Enough trainees: “I hit people very hard in safe places.” Indeed, FSM’s own Lance Storm insists that “I would take a thousand piledrivers from Finlay over one snapmare from some workers.”
Having originally established his reputation with Brian Dixon’s All Star group, he later jumped to Joint Promotions, who were able to pay higher wages thanks to their TV income: Dixon says the move was understandable as Finlay will have wanted to treat Joint’s television as “a shop window for his talents.”
It wasn’t just aggression that made Finlay’s name, but also the sheer pace of his matches: Joint promoter Max Crabtree dubbed him “Fit” Finlay, which soon became his ring moniker.
Robbie Brookside, who’d tangle with Finlay in the 1990s, told “The Wrestling” author Simon Garfield that “I can raise my performance ten-fold going on with Finlay. He can go from first to fifth gear without even thinking. If you’re on with Finlay it’s very hard, because he’s always dictating the pace on account of his fitness.”
1982 proved something of a breakthrough year for Finlay as he not only became a regular on ITV’s wrestling coverage, taking on the likes of Chris Adams and Young David (the future Davey Boy Smith), but also began touring New Japan, a gig he’d return to over the next decade. As he told FSM last year, it was a natural fit: “Every time before I went through the curtain they would go ‘Aggression, aggression!’ You don’t have to tell me twice.”
A little-known aspect of Finlay’s career came in 1985 when he took part in a tour with the Universal Wrestling Federation, a breakaway group of former New Japan stars including Akira Maeda (who’d wrestled Finlay in England under the name “Kwik Kick Lee”) and Yoshiaki Fujiwara, who Finlay refers to as one of his favourite opponents.
The promotion was one of several Japanese groups during the 1980s and 90s to use a more realistic style in an attempt to portray their matches as legitimate contests rather than “fake” wrestling. Again Finlay was an obvious fit, though he maintains that adjusting to the different style wasn’t an issue: “I always brought my own style everywhere [I went]. I figured if they want me there, they want me for my style.”
1985 also saw Finlay’s first trip to Europe after impressing Austrian promoter Otto Wanz when the pair had both appeared on the same show at the Royal Albert Hall the previous autumn. This proved the first of thirteen trips to the continent, which would prove to become a major part of Finlay’s annual schedule.
As well as working for another promoter in Linz, Austria, Finlay would wrestle for Wanz in Vienna and then the German towns of Hannover and Bremen. However, these weren’t tours as such. Instead the promotion would appear at the same venue every night for several weeks on end, often running a points-based tournament. The gig meant Finlay was guaranteed work for several straight months at the end of the year, gaining both money and experience.
The unusual scheduling brought both benefits and challenges. Most wrestlers loved the experience as they had no travel to worry about and could instead live in a caravan or trailer near to the venue. That left plenty of spare time to concentrate on working out, spending time with family who could come along for the trip, or recovering from a hectic nightlife, depending on your tastes.
In the ring, however, appearing before the same audience every night was a major test of abilities. Even more so than territorial wrestlers who’d work towns weekly, Wanz’s crew could not rely on simply repeating moves or routines each night and had to keep their act fresh. On the other hand, the tournament schedule meant each wrestler would gain experience working with a wide range of talent rather than simply be paired up with the same opponent for weeks on end.
One such opponent in the mid-90s was Lance Storm, who said of the experience that Finlay “is without a doubt the most talented wrestler I’ve ever stepped in the ring with. He was not only the best worker there, he had the most heat, the most presence, drew the most money and had the most respect. He carried himself as a veteran and gave this business credibility and earned it respect as a result.”
Writing at stormwrestling.com, Lance explained that despite his superior talent, it was a healthy lack of egotism that made Finlay so successful: “He once told me that as a heel, he preferred, in big matches, to do the job, because he felt he got more out of the crowd that way. Putting the baby face over and hearing the roar of the crowd was the best reward and a sign of a job well done.”
That attitude would be tested back on home soil where Finlay’s working ability, along with the crowd-baiting skills of his new valet (and wife) “Princess” Paul Valdez had inevitably brought him to the now-traditional Joint Promotions main event: the Big Daddy tag match. While at least one of Daddy’s opponents would usually be a powerful brute, such matches nearly always required a skilled youngster teaming with Daddy and a villainous counterpart, there to provide the action before the belly bumps.
Finlay not only filled this heel role successfully but even achieved tag victories over Daddy on 18 December 1984 and 8 April 1986, both time in Wolverhampton. Those dates are notable as they were two of only a handful of losses in the last 16 years of Daddy’s career; indeed, Finlay’s total record in matches against Daddy was two wins and 138 losses.
That run ended in 1987 when Finlay returned to All Star Promotions, which had now secured roughly one slot a month on the ITV show once Joint Promotions lost its broadcast monopoly. Here he began a regular rivalry with Eddie “Kung Fu” Hamill, who was actually a family friend who had trained in grappling at Milo’s Gym in Belfast alongside Dave Finlay senior nearly 25 years earlier.
Finlay Jr continued to establish himself as a full-on villain in All-Star rings, with opponents including Fuji Yamada (a young touring Jushin Liger) and Steve (now William) Regal whose autobiography described Finlay’s in-ring work as “extremely believable-looking wrestling, just the style I liked…. [Finlay and opponents] used to work so hard and when they came out of the ring, drenched in sweat, it looked like they’d had a real battle. They used great psychology too.”
When it came to a hard and fast style, perhaps the only time Finlay met his match was in fellow heel Mark Rocco, with the pair’s series of matches leaving crowds having to decide who to back. “Every venue was different, but they generally got behind Rocco,” Brian Dixon told FSM. “I think it was because he had Princess Paula with him. It was like having two hate brigades against one hate brigade, and the crowd decided to support the man who was at a two-on-one disadvantage.”
Indeed, whereas Finlay may well have intimidated fans who might have thought of turning their disapproval physical, Dixon says Princess Paula’s work at ringside “led to a few hairy moments”, though notes that in that era a fan who tried to start trouble “would come off second best to any wrestler.”
During this period Finlay also became the answer to a tough trivia question by wrestling in the first WWE match held on British soil. He teamed with Rocco and Skull Murphy against regular Superstars of Wrestling and Wrestling Challenge losers Al Perez, Dusty Wolfe and Tim Horner in the dark match before a 1989 Sky TV show at the London Arena.
The match was not simply designed to warm up the crowd before the cameras started rolling, but also to satisfy immigration and work permit regulations that meant the US production had to use some domestic talent at televised events. Finlay told FSM that he decided not to pursue potential US work with WWE “because they made us dress in a broom-closet type thing, to keep us away from the ‘superstars’. I’d known a bunch of them before, but they wouldn’t let us mix with them.”
Finlay continued departing British shores regularly, however, most notably appearing in the 1991 through 1994 New Japan Top of the Super Juniors tournament. Held each spring, the events involved a selection of Japanese and foreign grapplers wrestling a round-robin tournament over several consecutive nights. As well as facing some old European circuit foes such as Owen Hart and Chris Benoit, Finlay also took on emerging US talent including Dean Malenko, Eddy Guerrero and Sean “Lightning Kid” Waltman. Generally Finlay would wind up towards the bottom half of the final league table, though the careful booking required to keep the top spots uncertain until the final night meant he had a few victories that would have been unlikely under normal circumstances, including a 1994 win over reigning junior-heavyweight champion Jushin Liger.
I still distinctly remember that as a fan in the era who would wait outside venues after shows to get autographs, it was only a mention of the Super Junior tournament that ever got even a glimmer of reaction: in all other cases, fans would not get even an acknowledgement, let alone an autograph. But while this seemed rude at the time, in hindsight it was all part of keeping Finlay’s aura intact.
However, nearly two decades on, Finlay told the “I Met A Wrestler!” blog that his TV experience — and babyface run — have meant changes: “I was brought up in the old school way where you don’t mix. But I know that it’s moved on and it’s changed, and it’s good to see. I mean, I’ve seen loads of little kids, and last night this little kid came up to me and he was shaking and he had one of those wrestling figures of me, and he’s shaking. These people are seeing TV stars really, when you think about it.”
The combination of that TV stardom after two decades’ international experience has been the foundation of Finlay’s post-WWE run. As with many who are wished well in their future endeavors, he’s picked up paydays through a combination of independent shows and training seminars — but with more success than many.
According to 4 Front Wrestling’s Dave Sharp, who booked Finlay on a recent UK tour, his lengthy and varied career meant that — unlike some former WWE stars or independent circuit sensations — he had a unique ability to draw from three distinct audiences. “The older fans who may have forgotten pro wrestling still exists in this country will have seen the posters and local paper adverts and would have had a bit of nostalgia of the glory days of wrestling in this country when they saw or heard Finlay’s name.
“He would also have attracted fans of the Monday Night Wars era of pro wrestling, as well as appealing to kids who quite recently were watching him perform for the biggest wrestling company in the world.”
That theory proved correct, with Finlay’s 4FW show drawing the largest crowd in the company’s history. Sharp notes his diverse experience also paid off at a seminar for the promotion’s training company earlier in the afternoon: “He taught the 4FW talent vital lessons on what the biggest company in the World would be looking for, as well as teaching some traditional British style wrestling. He also taught the smallest of things that you may never think about but realise how important they are when applied.”
The seminar also showed that Finlay’s no-nonsense attitude also applies behind the scenes as well as before a live audience. “He didn’t hold anything back and told it how he saw it, which can only be a good thing. Pro wrestlers tend to get stuck in a bubble and when someone of Finlay’s calibre points out a flaw then you have no choice but to take a step out of that bubble and take it all on board.”
LDN promoter Sanjay Bagga had a similar experience when inviting Finlay to a training session with his crew: “The seminar was a huge success for me, his wealth of knowledge benefited my wrestlers. His advice and criticism was met very well and I’m looking to have him back over in June where he will be doing daily training with my roster.”
That praise is shared by wrestlers including Sami Callihan who has worked matches with Dave Finlay for the US Evolve promotion and Germany’s WXW. He told FSM: “Finlay is a throwback to everything that is good and pure about the wrestling business… He’s tough, respectful, and scary all at the same time. One of the last true greats left from that generation… I learned more in the ring in 25 minutes with Finlay than in did in all the rest of 2011.”
Indeed, when it comes to the lessons today’s budding grapplers can learn from Dave Finlay, Brian Dixon says it’s simple: “[They can learn] what pro wrestling is all about.”
(You can read profiles of more than 50 British wrestlers in my book Have A Good Week… Till Next Week.)
