Parker Cars Magazine: Issue 4

professional wrestling
British wrestlers take
on the South American
luchadores.
Thomas Dawkins is bleeding
profusely. He’s staggering round his
dressing room, half-dazed, like a dog
hit by a passing car. On his top lip, in
an inverted Y shape, is a nasty gash
where, minutes before, his opponent
had knocked him out with a high kick.
Dawkins (stage name, Pure Britannico) is a
professional wrestler. He’s part of an east London
club called Lucha Britannia which tonight is up
against the might of the full-time wrestlers in a
visiting South American promotion known as The
Greatest Spectacle of Lucha Libre. Performing at
Bethnal Green’s York Hall, both groups practise
a very acrobatic and high camp style of Mexican
wrestling called lucha libre. Spanish for ‘free fight’,
it sees combatants – many of them in colourful
masks – going hell for leather at one another in a
series of choreographed kicks, strikes, jumps, tackles
and take-downs. Like American WWE wrestling, the
action takes place inside (and occasionally outside)
a wrestling ring, and follows some vague storyline
about good versus evil. All in all, it’s a bizarre,
high-octane hybrid of boxing, gymnastics, circus,
slapstick comedy, superheroes and pantomime.
Bruises, cuts and concussion, not to mention
split upper lips, are all part of the job, as Dawkins
discovers to his chagrin.
“I was knocked out three times,” he says, still
mopping blood from his lip. “Twice I was slightly
concussed, and the third time I was out cold.”
Dawkins’ wrestling partners look on with more
than slight concern. They are a glorious mix of
eccentric cartoon characters. Legarto de Plata
wears wrestling pants and a lizard-tongue mask;
Malik is an evil Mesopotamian demi-god; El Nordico
Fuego is some kind of muscle-bound Viking type.
The Glamazon Girls are an eye-catching female
24 where to, parker?