The LDN wrestling show hit Rye Creative Centre on Saturday January 21 and proved the best wrestling event that I have attended.
I took along Dec, the 10-year-old year old son of my friends, who had never had the pleasure of seeing one of these shows. Neither of us really knew what to expect but we were certainly not disappointed.
The first match featured Bristol hard man Jekyll battling the high flying Ethan Silver. Jekyll was first into the ring and after some showing off to the audience he grabbed the microphone and began to abuse the fans with the crowd giving back as much as they were receiving. Fan favourite Silver then hit the ring to cheers from the crowd. The see-saw match saw the Jekyll brawling his way to the 1,2,3 for the win. Afterwards the crowd sang “Happy Birthday” to Silver.
The next bout saw former seven-time LDN British Champion Alan Lee Travis facing newcomer the “Bollywood Dream” Hari Singh in a two-out-of-three-falls match. As in the first match, bad guy Travis verbally abused the audience, who again returned it in equal measure at which he stormed off. LDN MC Sanjay Bagga threatened to fire him if he did not return to the ring in 10 seconds which he did, with a second to spare. Then his opponent Singh came down to the ring while Bollywood dancing. Before the match began, both participants showed off their dance moves which ended with Travis attacking Singh and winning the first fall. The second fall was won by Singh and after both men had the advantage, Travis finally got the third pin fall for the victory.
After the interval we had a championship match in which Toby Dynamite was defending his recently won LDN Capital Championship v “Ravishing” Robert Sharpe. Before the match, self-proclaimed world’s sexiest man Sharpe removed his robe to the sounds of The Stripper, to which one man in the audience couldn’t resist dancing.
Toby won the first fall with Sharpe getting the next fall. Toby performed the 619, a move which involves stringing an opponent on one of the ropes. He runs to the other side of the ring, picking up momentum. On the return, he uses the ropes, swinging through them and kicking his opponent square in the face. He then performed the RKO which is a move that can come out of nowhere, waiting, in a four-legged stance, for his stunned opponent to rise into position. The wrestler then darts forward and grabs his opponent by the head, before dropping to the canvas, smashing his opponent’s chin on the ground. Both moves were made famous by wrestlers Rey Mysterio and Randy Orton respectively. The match was over shortly afterwards, with Toby still LDN Capital Champion.
At the end of the match, the Jekyll and Alan Travis ran down to the ring and attacked Toby Dynamite. This brought Hari Singh and Ethan Silver to the ring to make the save and clear the ring. MC Sanjay Bagga subsequently entered the ring and announced a six-man tag team elimination match for the main event of the evening, pitting Jekyll, Travis and Sharpe against Dynamite, Singh and Silver. The match quickly erupted into a brawl outside the ring with bins and even a crutch of mine were used as weapons. The first elimination was Sharpe, swiftly followed by Dynamite, then Singh was eliminated, leaving Silver against the Jekyll and Travis. The Jekyll was next to go, following some high-flying moves and Silver managed to get the pin fall on Travis to win the match.
Afterwards, we met the wrestlers, a particular highlight for Dec as he was able to talk to Silver, whom he proclaimed his favourite wrestler of the night. For me, however, as an admirer of the bad guys, I was happy to meet the Jekyll, who is one of the best and scariest I have seen. So that was the end of my young friend’s first live wrestling show, and I’m happy to say he is now even more wrestling crazy than before. Fingers-crossed that Rye will be lucky enough to see LDN in town again.
Photos: Dan Lake and Bev Ham