Wrestling for Top: Part 6

Excerpt

Wrestling for Top, Part 6
©Jack Stevens 2016
All rights reserved

It had been the biggest adventure of their lives.

And if Doug wondered why Geoff wanted to have it then, less than two months after the birth of his son, Terry, he didn’t ask.

They’d both already been wrestling for years. Doug had started after he’d left the merchant navy, which, in turn, he’d joined as soon as he could legally leave his last foster home. Geoff, of course, had been brought up wrestling, the sport having been in his family for literally generations. Grandparents had wrestled in fairground booths, and parents had been wrestlers or promoters under a variety of names. When Doug signed up with the Ryan family their company had simply been known as Power Promotions, without the extra capital letters. (Terry would add those later in an unfamiliar and all too rare burst of creativity.) Mae Ryan and her husband, a former ‘world champion’, ran it though there was some uncertainty as to which weight division. (Mae would sometimes joke that they weren’t sure which world, either.) The then quite sizable roster of wrestlers included one of Doug’s uncles plus two cousins from another aunty who were shaping up nicely, as well as a handful of other regular and semi-regular grapplers.

The only non-wrestler in the entire set up had been Geoff’s young wife, Liz. Doug never found out for sure just where Geoff and Liz had first met. It definitely hadn’t been at a wrestling show—that much he could be sure of. She was a pretty thing, he supposed, which must have been important given that she and Geoff had so little else in common. She seemed to love her husband, and he her, but she had never quite fit in with the rest of the wrestling clan. Although she was never horrid to Liz, Doug could sense that Mae Ryan had reservations about the girl. Natural enough, he supposed, given that she was the first person in decades to come into the family without a wrestling background. However, she very quickly provided the Ryans with the heir to the company they all wanted, and everything seemed good. Power Promotions had its young prince, pro wrestling in Britain was booming, and, much to his surprise, Doug discovered he’d found the home he had been looking for all of his life.

Yet, one day, Geoff had proposed that they tour Europe. Just he and Doug. Mae certainly hadn’t been happy about it, but Geoff wouldn’t listen to any arguments. It was almost as if he felt he had to get away for a while, to put space between him and the family he’d lived and worked with for all of his life. Even his young wife and their newborn son. And if there was another thing Doug really didn’t understand, it was why Liz hadn’t protested more. But she hadn’t. Geoff had his way, as he usually did, and the two of them left, simply packing their kit and the bare essentials into two holdalls, hopping onto the ferry, and beginning to work their way through the wrestling halls of France and Germany, as years later Terry and his crew would.

At first, it worked. Doug picked up a good deal of useful French and German in the merchant navy and was a natural communicator, or at least, he always managed to get what he wanted using words and a forceful physical presence. To begin with, they’d slept rough quite often, gone hungry a lot of the time, and had to do their share of menial physical labour when the money was really tight and the bouts were few and far between. But slowly the bouts had come. They started in the smallest halls with the poorest promotions, but gradually Geoff and Doug worked their way up the pro wrestling ladder as their reputation spread.

Wrestling individually, but most especially wrestling as the tag team they’d established back home, The Bacchus Brothers, they quickly won over their audiences and began to establish themselves on the European scene. Thanks largely to Geoff’s youthful good looks, they mainly played good guys—‘blue eyes’. Geoff certainly was the charming, charismatic one who would bound through a hall and up to the ring, shaking hands with all and sundry, and even kissing some of the women who were bold enough to put themselves forward. Doug played the quieter, older ‘brother’, the one whose dark nature had to be held in check, and who was kept to the path of righteousness and virtue by his good, younger brother, while in turn protecting him from the vicious onslaughts of the various ‘heels’ they encountered. Yet, as they left the halls after each bout, there were always at least as many ‘autograph hunters’, sometimes more, who were as eager to press up close to Doug as to Geoff. The requests that were whispered, pressed into hands, or sometimes even shouted were often for a great deal more than a simple name on a piece of paper. It seemed the lure of barely suppressed violence that Doug offered was strong, for both men and women.