Why wrestling needs the British Wrestling Council

By Johnny Burns, Futureshock Wrestling Trainee

“So, let me get this straight. You want to take professional wrestling, a form of entertainment that is equal parts athletic ability and pure showmanship, and regulate it in the same way as Martial Arts?”
“Yes.”
“Martial Arts which are all about technique and in no way about theatricality, which are defined by guidelines laid out in some cases many hundreds of years ago?”
“That’s it, yes.”
“Well, good luck with that.”
With that he walked away, shaking his head.

This is how a conversation might have gone between me and ‘The Showstealer’ Alex Shane, if for some reason I had been the first person he had tried to explain the idea of a nationwide pro wrestling teaching syllabus to.
Luckily for him, and indeed British wrestling in general, he chose to explain it to someone whose natural, default setting for most things isn’t ‘deeply sceptical’ like mine. As a result of me being in no way involved in the decision process, the idea has taken off with a flourish and looks certain to succeed.
Which is also lucky for me, because now, instead of killing it stone dead in the development phase like some kind of objectionable killjoy, I get to experience it firsthand each week when I turn up to train at the Futureshock Wrestling training school in Manchester every Saturday. And having already taken and passed the Grade 1 exam with the rest of the Futureshock guys, I can see now that it is a fantastic idea, and one that I simply cannot believe nobody has implemented before.
It all seems so simple, so jarringly obvious, and yet at the same time so groundbreaking. If I think about it for any length of time, and it simply staggers me that it has taken this long since the demise of British wrestling as a revered world force (essentially, when World Of Sport died) for anyone to fix the problem of how to get it back on top. What the syllabus will achieve, given time to be accepted as the norm and to bear the fruit of the first wave of trainees to benefit from it – myself included – is exactly that. Essentially, this is the return of British wrestling to its rightful place on the world scene.
Now, before I get ahead of myself, let me clarify what I mean by that. I do not think that this country must usurp America and WWE as the global force in wrestling (though it would be good for our collective pockets we cannot allow ourselves to think that single mindedly any more) but simply become a solid, unified and viable alternative; whilst at the same time regaining at least some of the lustre and worldwide recognition it had in its seventies and eighties pomp and recently has been sorely missing.
The system works like this: each grade represents a level of gradually increasing difficulty that allows the participant to both learn the art of doing the moves, and make them their own by building their character up around them as they go. It is detailed enough that anyone who passes to the highest level will be thoroughly versed in the basics of chain wrestling and will have enough unique aspects to their move set to become rounded wrestlers with viable talents to ply their trade anywhere in the wrestling world; but also simple enough in its learning curve that it will cater to anyone. It doesn’t matter if you were born with a gift for picking up the nuances of wrestling with the lightning pace of Kurt Angle, or if your journey – like mine will be – is destined to be a longer process, the syllabus is set out in such a way that what is required is easy to understand, and thus easy to both teach and learn. What it does is effectively distil wrestling in the clearest, simplest way possible. It takes what for years unscrupulous wrestling school owners would have had you believe was a black art, that they were somehow better than you for knowing and would teach you begrudgingly; and lays it out in layman’s terms in bullet points that anyone can understand.
I can’t state enough how important this is. Being someone who needs to have every move explained in a step by step way before I can even have a go (rather than a natural who can simply watch someone else do it once and copy them straight away) I am one of the ones who will benefit most from this, but that is not to say those who are faster learners will benefit less; just quicker, I guess. The simple fact is people all learn at different speeds, and there’s nothing they can do to change it. What laying out everything you need to know like this ensures is that it doesn’t matter if you pick it up in a couple of hours by doing it all once, or it takes you six weeks of practice and careful repetition, but that you know what you have to do, and when you are ready you can pass your grade one exam and move on to grade two, which is just as clearly set out, at your own pace. You can’t rush these things, as this is wrestling and so of course safety is paramount, and with these guidelines, you no longer have to.
In the future, when there are enough students of a high enough grade qualified and ready to go, any BWC affiliated shows will require participants to be a certain grade before they can compete, and this also makes eminent sense. It will no longer be possible for dangerous wrestlers to be rushed onto shows simply to fill gaps in the card way before they are ready. Let’s pause for a second and use a theoretical example. If a training school has someone who can do a 450 splash that makes the crowd gasp in unison, but is not suitably schooled in the basics to have a competent match which safely builds up to the point where they can show off by hitting that move believably, thus enabling the crowd to maintain its suspension of disbelief, then clearly they are not ready to be on even the opening match of a card people are paying to see. However, up until now nothing would stop a promoter from giving the guy a spot if he wanted to, for whatever reason, just so that the guy can say he is a wrestler and the promoter can say one of his guys does the best 450 splashes around. It is a grounding station for the wrestling business, something tangible by which to say how good a wrestler you are, and perhaps more importantly in an industry driven by them, it is a tethering post for the egos of everyone involved. At the moment, anyone can set up a school and teach wrestling, and then put on shows with the wrestlers they trained, claiming how fantastic they are all the way. The BWC grading system is an accessible, factual yardstick by which to measure those claims and in turn rein them in.
Safety in wrestling is paramount, as it involves a level of physicality few other forms of either sport or entertainment can match. Anyone involved will tell you that trust is the number one thing two wrestlers need to have in each other in order for a match to be successful, and trust is never something that should be taken for granted: would you put your safety and potentially your life in the hands of someone you may never have met before? Of course you wouldn’t, but for too long many wrestlers (and especially those at the bottom of the pile) have had to do just that. The reason for this is simple, and it can be eradicated easily. Soon, gone will be the days when the only reassurance a wrestler will have had that their opponent won’t drop them on their heads and end their careers (or worse) because they wanted to show off will have come from the opponent themselves, and we’ll just have to take their word for it. If there is a tangible mark which the guy across the ring from you has reached to show he is competent enough to be there, it will help you to rest a lot easier. A grade from the BWC will form just such a mark, which will eliminate a lot of uncertainty from wrestling and up the safety levels to as high as they can be set. We can’t prevent accidents from happening completely, but by training every wrestler under the same guidelines we can do as much as is possible to minimise the risk of those accidents happening. This, as anyone who has ever put their safety in the hands of someone else in any walk of life will tell you, is a good thing. In fact, it’s more than a good thing, it’s the minimum we should expect as people whose living revolves around trust in others.
Notice in that last paragraph I used the phrase ‘training every wrestler under the same guidelines’. What I feel it’s long overdue I pointed out now is that by that I don’t mean teaching everyone to do everything in exactly the same way. This is the system WWE uses to ensure its ‘Superstars’ work easily in ‘the WWE way’. It is also why so many people so frequently use the term ‘Cookie Cutter Wrestlers’ or, more harshly, ‘robots’ to describe WWE performers, and something it would be easy for a naysayer to assume is what will happen if everyone is taught the same things. The beauty of the BWC syllabus, however, is that it doesn’t work like that. It might be that the same basic set of moves is taught, but that is down to necessity; they are the bare bones moves every wrestler needs to be able to put together a basic match. What people may think, but which is certainly not the case, is that because it is one move, then everyone who does it will do it the same way and this is simply not so.
The Futureshock Trainer Dave Rayne told us why in one session before our first grading. Put simply, it is because there is no right or wrong way to ‘do’ a wrestling move. Everyone who wrestles really should know how to apply something as simple as a hammerlock safely, and this is taught by the trainer at your school. However, you can do any number of little things differently to the person next to you, from the way you apply the move, or the way you apply pressure when it is locked in, right down to the face you pull while you’re doing it. This is what makes wrestling special, and this was not lost on Alex when he created the syllabus. The emphasis is on getting the move executed right initially, but just as much attention is paid to ‘making it your own’, a concept that is vital to help each wrestler be different and thus to make the audience want to see them. The latter stages of the syllabus are even given over to unique moves – moves which are your signature set and that ideally nobody else in your training school should do any of and that nobody else in the world will do all of, much less do them in the same way you do.
This is something which isn’t always focused on in a wrestler’s development, but which Alex Shane recognises as important simply because it is. You can do your level best to look different and stand out to give yourself an edge – and as time goes on even that gets ever harder – but no one will care what you look like, or how different you look from your opponent, if you both wrestle the same way. It is important that both trainers and trainees never forget to look at the whole picture – and hopefully the syllabus criteria will do as they are intended and help them to remember this.
To conclude then, it is safe to say that I think the BWC syllabus is a brilliant idea. As you may have realised, I think it is just the idea that the wrestling industry in this country needs to kick it up the arse and wake it from the slumber it’s been in since the late eighties. The fact that I’m going to benefit directly from it makes it all the better for me, and any other current or prospective wrestling trainee. I can only encourage all of you to think in the same way. The BWC as a whole is a breath of fresh air, and everything they do and endeavour to do to help wrestling to improve (such as performer insurance and helping out retired wrestlers) should be roundly applauded by everyone in the industry. Don’t forget, it was created by a man whose love for this industry is greater than perhaps anyone else in the world today. It just so happens that he is also able to see the bigger picture better than most people, and is not only in the position but also has the desire to see the changes he wants to implement through and lead British wrestling to a brighter future.
All in all then, lucky us, and bring on the future.