It’s not unusual for wrestlers to get into the business by following in the footsteps of family members. But for Frankie Sloan – a cousin of Robbie Brookside – the kinship brought him few if any advantages in his early years.
“These days my son or my daughter or my best friend, whatever, if they said ‘I fancy this’, I’d say ‘Alright, come on down, I’ll get you in, not a problem.’ Robbie was like, ‘If you really want to do it, go and do it yourself.’ It was a lesson in itself because he never got in easy. He had to find the hard way in, as did everyone else in those days.”
Sloan instead followed another familiar path, training in both judo and amateur wrestling. “That was a good few years before I got my foot in the pro wrestling door and it was only after I got in that I found out that one of my trainers was in pro wrestling and he never even told me! I wanted to do it, I enjoyed it, I liked it. I still watch it on the Olympics: people find it boring but I quite like it. It was a way of keeping fit, having your core strength.”
He then approached Bobby Barron, an independent promoter based in Blackpool who gave many pros their start. Like many before him, Sloan found his amateur grappling background something of a mixed blessing. “When you’re first linking up, you’re going in heavy. There’s certain different ways, your head goes in first, leaning in and things. So I had to get out of that habit quite a lot.
“When I first went to pro training it was all about break falls and that, so handily enough I’ve been to judo and that’s all break falls. Amateur wrestling’s not a billion miles away from judo, but in amateur, you’re trained not to fall on your back. When I first got there, I was twisting in the air [rather than bumping right]. They said ‘What are you doing, you knob? It’s time to change.’ And change I had to.”
In 1992 Sloan began working regularly for Brian Dixon’s All Star Promotions and Orig Williams, both of whom still looked to Barron’s crew for future prospects. “I used to fritter between Brian and Orig, never so much Max Crabtree. I had a couple of shows for him and he said he’d give me a try but I was never that bothered because Brian and Orig always gave me a lot of work.”
Over the next few years Sloan made his name thanks in part to teaming with Brookside and Doc Dean who, as ‘The Liverpool Lads’, were spearheading the tag team scene. Sloan would effectively become the third member of the team, allowing Dixon to continue to put on tag bouts as both Brookside and Dean began taking on more overseas bookings. Even with this experience, Sloan still took a long time to become comfortable with his in-ring performances.
“I would say it took seven years. I was comfortable in front of the crowd: that only took a year or so, because I had a lot of help tagging with the Liverpool Lads and everybody loved them. Your natural charisma comes through and that was easier than being comfortable with my wrestling. It took a long time for me to be anywhere near halfway confident about wrestling ability and not being bothered who I had to wrestle and just going out there… that took 7, 8, 9 years. It wasn’t like when guys like James Mason or Ringo Ryan came along and you think ‘They look like they’ve been doing it for years.’ I got the interaction and the crowd work down a lot quicker than, shall we say, wrestling skills. I had them, I could do all the moves, but confidence-wise I was lacking. Though I had a way better body then, so you’d think it would be easier!”
Gaining confidence was made harder by a sharp decline in business, due in part to the end of the TV slot making wrestling “out of sight, out of mind” for many viewers. “When Brian Dixon first took me on in 92 I was working every day, four years after the TV. But by 1995, 1996, 1997 it was shit. They were traumatic times: you were like ‘Oh God, what’s going to happen?’ You do what you’ve got to do to get by, get what wrestling shows you can when there weren’t many; there wasn’t many camps even at that time, that’s how bad it was.
“Then when you get a resurgence, you’re like a little kid again with a new toy. It’s like getting a new bike when the old one’s knackered and you ride away on the new one with a smile on your face because it’s all coming back to you and it’s like it was. If a bomb drops and you survive, you start again.”
Perhaps the only upside of those dark years was that it made a lengthy layoff through injury a little more bearable. “It would have annoyed me to be out for that length of time if the lads were out every day. It was me ankles, me feet, all my ligaments. I was going to my own doctor and he’d try something and you’d go back two weeks later and he’d try something else and that’s not working. I went to the hospital for six, seven, eight months and they’re trying the same things.
“They discharged me and the hospital doctor wrote to my doctor and said ‘He should just go on the rest of his life with a pair of special insoles and painkillers.’ I was only 25 and I thought ‘I’ve got quite a way to go here!’ So my doctor found a private foot expert and once I’d paid the initial consultancy fee he put me back on the NHS and it was sorted with an operation in three months.”
Ironically, while many blamed the dominance of WWE for ‘killing’ the British scene, its mainstream success at the turn of the century trickled down to help boost domestic business through the controversial ‘tribute’ shows where British wrestlers performed in WWE guises. Sloan would take on two such roles.
“One was Xpac, and Marty Jannetty once told me I looked more like him than he did! I also did Matt Hardy which was basically just me in a pair of trousers. He had long hair, I had long hair, and there was no stretch to the movesets because I did most of it anyway. I wasn’t having to be like Jeff Hardy doing swantons, which I don’t do and never have done, or any other mental shit. They weren’t a million miles away from what I did anyway, so I just did me dressed up as them. Obviously Xpac had certain moves that you had to do because everyone knew them and Matt Hardy had one move that everybody knew!
“It was about a year I did them for and we were working practically every day, every night. The promoter was making good money so he was giving us better money than you got being yourself, so basically Frankie Sloan took a year off! Don’t get me wrong, there were times when I didn’t want to do it and was thinking ‘This is no good for my integrity, I’m a wrestler in my own right’ and then my mate said to me ‘Just ride the wave with all the money you’re making.’ Money’s not the be all and end all to me, but while it’s there, it’s nice.”
That’s not to say money has been a driving force in Sloan’s career. “I’ve listened to some lads recently and someone said ‘Are you going to do this?’ and the other guy said ‘No, there’s no money in it.’ [I thought] Fucking hell, I just wanted to wrestle! If I made money doing what I wanted to do, fucking bonza. I just drank it anyway, so it didn’t really matter!
With or without financial reward, things were coming together professionally for Sloan. “I’d had a match with Mal Sanders in Leamington Spa about 1993 where a lot of things clicked and I had that little moment of clarity and you go ‘Bloody hell’ and you’re still sitting in the ring and go ‘Oh my God’ but it still took a long time after that for everything to really click.
“1999 going into 2000, that’s when it seemed… not effortless because it’s never effortless, but it seemed smoother to me, it seemed I wasn’t nervous. I learned a lot along the way wrestling with a lot of different fellows because you learn a lot off everybody good or bad, and there was a hell of a lot of good fellows to learn off in the 90s. I learned a lot of things psychologically more than I did confidence with my wrestling. I wouldn’t say there was a moment [it changed] but that was the year. I always enjoyed it but there was always that niggle of ‘Who am I going to wrestle, is it going to be any good, can I do this and that?’ Now I just went ‘Yeah, fucking sound, let’s go, give me anyone.’”
The growing confidence came alongside more international bookings. “I did India, Austria, Germany, Cyprus… You wake up in Cyprus and it’s like a billion degrees and you’re in a five star hotel: it’s brilliant. Canada, I would never have gone to otherwise, and somebody’s paid me to sit on a plane and then paid me to be there. The crowds weren’t great but it was brilliant to go.
“Dubai was a good one because we went there for the day. On the Monday we did Aylesbury, Tuesday we flew out, Wednesday we did Dubai, Thursday we did Bristol” It’s not often you can write that down in your diary!
Sloan also visited Nashville to work for TNA as part of the World X Cup Tournament where he joined fellow All-Star wrestlers Robbie Dynamite, James Mason and Dean Allmark and worked three matches against AAA opposition. While he enjoyed the travel and was pleased with the matches, Sloan remembers being thrown by the demands of working to the cameras in a building where the crowd was placed on one side of the ring to create the illusion of a packed house
“That was the first time I first heard that phrase, ‘hard cam’. The fellow that was on the Gorilla position, he said ‘When you go out to the ring, face the hard cam and go hooray.’ And I went ‘Oh?’ and he said ‘What?’ and I said ‘All the people are on [the opposite] side.’ And he said ‘I don’t care.’
“And if you watch me, as I walk out I got to the hard cam for about two seconds and then turn to where all the people are! It was a bit of a shock to the system: it was second nature to them, but that’s why when they come over here they can’t interact with people because they’re not used to doing it. If that person in the crowd they’re ignoring was a hard cam, they’d probably wank it off.”
Sloan even made a WWE appearance appearing on the revived ECW show against the then up-and-coming Vladimir Kozlov. He was under no illusions about his role on the night. “That’s an example of doing as you’re told. You’re there to enhance that chap, not to enhance yourself. I enjoyed it for what it was: I got my own chapter in the DVD! And not at all at any point was I thinking, ‘Oh shit, this would look better if the hard cam was pointing this way.’ I was just trying to stay alive!”
While the Kozlov match was just another bout, Sloan remembers an occasion a few years earlier where he might have been more excited about wrestling an American. “It was one of the times I was more full-time for Orig and we were doing six, seven days a week for a good few years and he came up to me and said ‘Eh, I can get Curt Hennig’ and I said ‘Can you?!’ pretending to play it cool. He said ‘Yeah, I can, but he asked for too much money.’
“I asked him how much and he gave me the figure and I thought ‘That’s not too much money.’ It was higher than what any of us asked for at the time but we were all on good money, we were shitting money, and I know Orig was making money. I said ‘You can afford that,’ and he just said ‘OK, let me think about it’. And then he eventually said ‘Yeah, I’m not having it.’
“I would have fought him because everyone who came in on that team, I was put on with them. I, at that time, could wrestle anybody in any style. So I had a bit of a hardon for a while but then it went!”
Sloan did get the chance to work with another high-profile American in the form of Brian Danielson (now Daniel Bryan) who became a friend and spoke warmly of the holiday camp circuit in his autobiography. “He loved the camps: every time I see him he says he’d come back and do them. Everyone I know that’s left and supposedly gone on to bigger things always wants to come back and do the camps, even for a week or two. It’s fun. There’s pressure to entertain people but not big mad pressure. He just liked it here, it was more relaxed and everybody knew what they were doing: there was no real egos, everybody was working for the show. I’m sure where he’s at at the moment there’s a few egos!”
While Sloan had many years’ experience on Danielson, he didn’t feel like the veteran. “I don’t even feel like that today, although deep down I know I am because I’m 46 and this week I was wrestling a lad who was 17, 18… I’ve been doing it near enough 10 years longer than he’s been born. It’s a weird feeling.
“When I was with Robbie I always looked up to him, I always went to him. When you’re tagging with someone for so long and they’re the veteran, that’s the mentality I had, even though we’d both walk in and the years we had between us would top everybody else in the dressing room collectively. A lot of the lads I’ve been working with have been doing it 10, 12, 13 years and to me they’re veterans, but I’m still just a lad in the dressing room.”
While age has taken a toll, Sloan found that trying to extend his career by branching into refereeing didn’t pay off as planned. “I didn’t really like it. When I was refereeing I just wanted to be wrestling. I was good at refereeing, but with my experience certain people knew I could help lads that were in there in different aspects if something’s going wrong. I think that was my downfall: I’d say ‘Can I wrestle tonight?’ and they’d say ‘No, I now need you in there [reffing].’
“And what I forgot was that you’re in every single match, so my plan to prolong my career was to do every match and be just as knackered!”
Instead Sloan concedes he’ll be lacing up his boots for the foreseeable future. “I probably won’t retire. I don’t call it retiring, I just call it stopping. I don’t see the day when I really want to stop.
“There are days when I don’t want to go and I think ‘I don’t need this anymore’ or it takes me seven hours to get to Whitby and I think ‘Fuck this.’ But then I’ll go and do a show the next day and it will be boss and my life will be reinvigorated again.
“I always want to have my foot in the door — it’s selfish and I can hardly walk at times, or I’m so bandaged up I look like Robocop when I’m going out to wrestle. But I’m not retiring any time soon. Certainly not this year!”
