If you ask about which gym produces the toughest pro wrestlers in history, the Snake Pit is always the first name given out.
The run-down, freezing cold and dirty gym in Wigan has produced some of the finest wrestlers the world has ever seen.
While they didn’t train anybody in the art of professional wrestling, the work done in the gym helped the students to transition into the professional game during a particularly tough time to break into the business.
Billy Riley ran the gym. He was one of the greatest Catch-as-Catch-Can wrestlers in history and taught everything he knew to only the toughest of fighters who came into his gym.
Riley’s Gym became known as The Snake Pit and is one of the most iconic gyms in the history of wrestling.
Billy Riley Was A Wrestling Champion Before Opening The Snake Pit
Billy Riley is regarded as an all-time great in catch wrestling. Growing up in the small industrial town of Wigan, he worked as a moulder, casting metal into solid castings to create tools.
However, in his spare time, he would join his fellow workers, especially miners, in a spot of wrestling. They would fight mainly on grass, with only those betting on the matches able to watch the fight.
This gave the workers an extra bit of income between shifts, as well as keeping in shape and settling any grudges they had.
They wrestled the Lancashire wrestling style, which would evolve into the Catch-as-catch-can style which would become the dominant form of wrestling across the company after evolving in the 1800s.
It was much more violent than other types of wrestling and allowed the wrestler much more freedom, thanks to the rules set out in the Snipe Inn rulebook. You can read more about the origins of wrestling in the UK here.
Once the sport became popular across the UK, Billy Riley became one of the most popular and famous wrestlers there.
Due to a lack of record keeping and a dearth of footage, little is known about the intricacies of Billy Riley’s wrestling career. We know he began wrestling in Catch-as-catch-can in 1910 at the age of 14, before later transitioning into professional wrestling to earn a living in the sport.
In those days, it was murky whether night fights were fixed or legit. Billy Robinson wrote in his book that wrestlers would do a legitimate match behind closed doors before recreating it in music halls all across the country, so there seemed to be a mix of both.
Billy Riley was a big success in the professional game. He held the British Middleweight Championship in the 1920s, plus the World Middleweight title from 1919 to 1923. On a tour of South Africa between 1933 and 1934, he won the British Empire championship from Jack Robinson among a host of other title wins and famous victories, many of which are lost to time.
After retiring in 1946, he first moved into promotion. Billy Riley worked with Jack Atherton, the Midlands promoter who would join forces with the likes of Dale Martin and Paul Lincoln to create Joint Promotions in 1952.
Riley worked as a referee and a promoter, although that is not what he would be remembered for. It was his training
He Opened ‘Riley’s Gym’ In 1948 To Teach Wrestling
After retiring from wrestling, Billy Riley created a gym as a place where wrestlers could practice the art of catch wrestling without bother from the local authorities.
The miners would wrestle wherever they could, in pub gardens, allotments or fields. The police would often move them on, leaving the gamblers with nothing to make money on and the wrestlers nowhere to go.
So, Billy Riley took some of the wrestlers in the area and built himself his own gym. It was simply named “Riley’s Gym” and was created to let them wrestle as well as teach the art of catch wrestling, of which he was the master.
Riley Gym later took on the nickname of “The Snake Pit”. This was not a name that they used officially, nor one that Riley created himself.
Multiple stories have been told about the reason for the name. While the image of a snake pit, where you walk in and see the hissing faces staring at you, warning you away, seemed very apt to what it became to non-wrestlers, there have been other cited reasons for the name.
Karl Gotch is said to have coined the term, although the actual reason has not been given. The later owner of the gym, Roy Wood, claimed that it was the Japanese wrestlers who fought the likes of Karl Gotch and Billy Robinson that came up with the name.
“The Japanese christened it as The Snake Pit, because if you threw a Wigan wrestler, he’d turn onto his belly and bite you!”
It wasn’t a gym in the modern sense. It was barely a shed. Riley had to warn wrestlers not to turn their back to the fireplace that heated the Snake Pit, as to not risk being pushed in and lose a fall.
There was no ring. Just a canvas covering sand, which over the years had flattened down and become rock-hard to land on. It was unforgiving, but the horrendous conditions bred the toughest fighters in the world.
Wrestlers would train for hours on end to master all facets of catch wrestling. Billy Robinson wrote about how he’d wrestle for hours on end, with Riley sending in new competitors every five minutes to try and wear him down (he never did).
Numerous Legends Trained At The Snake Pit
In the years following its opening, Riley’s Gym trained some of the finest wrestlers the world has ever seen.
Karl Gotch, known as one of the all-time greats in wrestling, says he owes everything to his work under Billy Riley in the Snake Pit.
“In the Snake Pit was where I learned most of what I know today,” Gotch said, “from Billy Riley and his boys, and if I could take the time, I’d go back there right now because there’s lots left to learn.”
Another famous shooter who made it to Japan was Billy Robinson. He spent twelve years in the Snake Pit after switching from boxing to wrestling due to an eye injury.
He called it “the greatest gym in the world”, and said “Billy Riley is the best coach I’ve ever been around,” in his book, Physical Chess.
“Billy Riley is the best coach I’ve ever been around. He didn’t teach me just wrestling. He didn’t teach me only catch-as-catch-can. He taught me how to learn. He taught me to open my mind to the angles, to the metrics, to the alignments of the ankle, the hip, the elbows, the shoulders. He explained how my body worked, how I could get the most power out of my body, how I could save energy and still make my opponent think I was the strongest man he’d ever been on the mat with: he taught me how to break their heart.”
Kendo Nagasaki, another legend of British wrestling, learnt his craft as a youngster in Riley’s Gym after his Judo dreams were dashed after losing a finger.
He was sent by his mentor Count Bartelli to train under Riley at the Snake Pit. Under the coach’s watchful eye, he trained with legends like Billy Robinson and Bill Joyce to become one of the best wrestlers Britain’s ever seen.
It took years of training before Nagasaki graduated from the gym and put on his mask for the first time to embark on a career in professional wrestling.
A slightly more modern graduate of the Snake Pit was the Dynamite Kid. He wrestled there in the 1970s as a youngster and quickly became one of the top students, under new owner Roy Wood. He also taught Davey Boy Smith, who would go on to become WWE Hall of Famer, The British Bulldog.
A number of other legends learnt the art of Catch Wrestling there, too numerous to mention in just this article!
The Snake Pit’s Legacy Is Greater Than Any Other Gym In Wrestling
The influence of Riley’s Gym on professionals is more than any other school in history.
Two of his students, Billy Robinson and Karl Gotch, are credited with bringing Catch wrestling to Japan in the 1960s. Their work with promotions like NJPW and IWE helped create a new style of wrestling, which mixed Japanese martial arts, American showmanship and British grappling in new and exciting ways.
Billy Robinson himself trained numerous students who went on to become all-time greats themselves. He boasts legends like Ric Flair, The Iron Shiek, Josh Barnett, Johnny Saint, Kazushi Sakuraba and Davey Boy Smith Jr, among many others.
Meanwhile, Karl Gotch trained Antonio Inoki, Tatsumi Fujinami, Yoshiaki Fujiwara and Akira Maeda. These were some of the biggest stars ever in Japan, with Inoki founding New Japan Pro Wrestling in 1972.
Without Riley’s Gym, we wouldn’t have Inokism, so it wasn’t all good!
Between the pair of them, they trained all the major players in the revolution of Japanese wrestling. Their style was key in the creation of the new shoot style of wrestling in Japan, with promotions like NJPW, UWFi and more credited to the teachings of Billy Riley’s students.
Billy Ray may be long gone and the Snake Pit is nothing like the small shed in the allotment that once trained the world’s best, but it is still the most legendary wrestling gym of all time.
Even if it was in Wigan.
