William Regal is arguably Britain’s most popular wrestling export to the United States. While Drew McIntyre is a former WWE Champion, Regal has had over thirty years in the US since debuting with WCW, working on screen and behind the curtain for WCW, WWE, NXT and AEW.
However, his roots will always be in Blighty in his home country of England. This is where the young Regal grew up and became a wrestling fan, watching in awe as Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks flung their enormous bodies at one another with reckless abandon, and grapplers like Johnny Saint tied his opponent in knots.
William Regal Grew Up As A Fan Of British Wrestling
A young William Regal, who was then known by his real name of Darren Matthews, grew up in England in the 1970s. He was born in the small village of Codsall Wood in Shropshire and was raised by his father, following his mother walking out on the family when he was seven.
Regal grew up as a wrestling fan, watching it every week at 4 pm on a Saturday afternoon on World of Sport. He cites “Cyanide” Sid Cooper as one of his favourites, admiring the way he could have the crowd laughing one second to hating his guts the neck. He later admitted that he was a big fan of Big Daddy and felt like a nine-year-old again when he heard “We Shall Not Be Moved” playing when he tagged with Big Daddy as a wrestler.
Wrestling was in William Regal’s blood. His grandfather William, known as Bill, was a wrestler. According to Regal, his grandfather did “a bit of wrestling, a bit of boxing, a bit of fighting – anything to make a few quid”. He packed the wrestling in 1933 due to illness and was a key part of Regal’s life until his death in 1990.
As he grew up, the young Regal had three aspirations in life. He wanted to either be a wrestler, a clown or a comedian. He ended up doing all three as a wrestler, but when he told his career officer in school what his goal in life was, they told him to come back when he wanted to talk some sense.
His first experience of live wrestling was in the Civic Hall in Wolverhampton, which in 1977 was the site of the infamous Kendo Nagasaki unmasking. At these shows which were run by Dale Martin, he saw all the top stars of the day, including one of his all-time favourites in Sid Cooper.
These trips inspired him to become a wrestler and caused his career adviser much stress. By the time he turned 15, he was travelling alone to wrestling shows as far as Rhyll in North Wales to see the Orig Williams-promoted shows. Soon after William Regal broke into the business, although there was a bit of luck involved.
He Broke Into The Business By Wrestling On Blackpool Beach
His uncle Eddie drank in the pub with a local wrestler, who took Regal along with him to help put the ring up. He’d hang around enough until they let him in the ring and “fall around a bit”, using his prior knowledge in Judo to help him bear the brunt of the thick wooden rings. He eventually went home and built his own makeshift ring in the back garden to practise on.
A 15-year-old William Regal wanted to be a wrestler in Blackpool after seeing their shows as a youngster. These wrestlers would challenge members of the crowd to fight them while offering a cash prize for anybody who could last in the ring with the professionals. For a three-round contest, they offered £10 per round you could last with the wrestler or £100 if you managed all three or knocked him out.
He wrote in his book “Walking A Golden Mile”, Regal detailed exactly how the wrestling shows at Blackpool Pleasure Beach were contested.
“The way it worked was this. The wrestlers lined up outside – just as they had when I’d see them as a nine-year-old – whole Steve Foster from Wigan, the man on the microphone, would get everyone going. Punters were challenged to get in the ring with the wrestlers.”
“First a smaller guy, one of our plants, would step up to accept the challenge. That would get the crowd going. Then Steve would ask ‘Is there anybody else?’ and a bigger guy would step in. Now the crowd would be on the hook. They’d ooh and aah, thinking the big guy was bound to have a great chance. Then everyone would file in and pay their money to see the matches.
The trick was that most of the people chosen from the crowd were plants. When Regal finally plucked up the courage to ask Bobby Baron to make him a wrestler, he employed him as one of the plants in the crowd who made the “real wrestlers” look formidable. This was after the initial traditional wrestling welcome, where he beat William Regal up to see if he would come back, testing if he really wanted to become a wrestler.
William Regal’s first match was against a man called Colonel Brody. Regal claimed the man threw him around the ring, clubbed him over the back of the head and forced him to tap out to a Boston Crab. They sent him away, but a young Regal was enthralled. He came back for more and that was his introduction to the inner workings of the wrestling business.
As he worked more regularly in Blackpool, William Regal was employed by Bobby Baron to work the Pontins circuit. Pontins is a British holiday resort, similar to Butlins (where Bryan Danielson wrestled during his time in the UK). It is a cut-priced holiday destination that was a favourite of British families during the 20th century when foreign holidays were unfordable to most.
Regal worked a regular circuit of the UK which would see them drive the length and breadth of the country, working 12 shows a week across England and Wales. This was hard work, which he didn’t mind, but Regal simply wasn’t learning how to be a good wrestler. His opponent David Duran would just beat up the youngster for the entire match, not teaching him at all about actual wrestling.
William Regal Began To Tag With Big Daddy On ITV
He eventually met Max Crabtree, the booker for Dale Martin Promotions and eventual head of Joint Promotions, who got him set up to learn “proper wrestling” from Marty Jones. After spending every Sunday in Rochdale training with Marty Jones, Crabtree employed Regal to wrestle some matches for him, which included some matches on ITV (but not on World of Sport, as that had been cancelled in 1985).
He was given the name Roy Regal, which he admitted to hating. He initially wanted to call himself Steve Regal which was stolen from an American wrestler, although Crabtree noted that they had too many Steve’s in the promotion already. After a few live matches, he was given a spot on TV against his trainer and mentor Marty Jones in September 1986.
The match is available to watch on YouTube and is a very good one. However, you will not recognise the skinny teenager standing across from Marty Jones. At just 18 years old, Regal looked stick thin and lanky, with his bright blond mullet a look that I think we’re all glad he didn’t keep throughout his career.
You’ll notice that Kent Walton on commentary calls this a handicap match. This meant that the two men were in different weight classes and not a two-on-one match, as we consider it to be nowadays.
Marty Jones won the match by knockout, as Regal failed to answer the referee’s ten count. It was a quick match comparatively, but was a decent showing for a teenage Regal just starting out in the professional wrestling business.
After that appearance, William Regal began to work more regularly for Max Crabtree so was given the honour of becoming Big Daddy’s regular tag team partner. Big Daddy (real name Shirley Crabtree) was the biggest star British wrestling has ever seen and the punters flocked to see him in whichever town he went to.
However, this wasn’t the dream role for Regal. While it meant extra money and a huge audience watching him wrestler, it wasn’t what he wanted as an up-and-coming wrestler. The matches consisted of the two or three heels beating him up for the entirety of the match before he tagged in Big Daddy to clear the ring and win the fight with his Splashdown finishing move.
It didn’t help that Big Daddy was about a decade past his physical prime at this point and was in his mid-50s. What he could do in the ring was limited, which made Regal really earn his money in these tag team matches.
He made £10 per bout, but a whopping £60 a match if it was shown on TV. That was big money for most wrestlers but Regal knew that the only way to get better was actually wrestling, rather than just selling and bumping for Big Daddy.
It was a match in Blackpool that finally convinced William Regal to pack in work for Max Crabtree. Regal tagged with Big Daddy against Rex Strong and Drew McDonald at Blackpool Tower where the English beating was beaten to a pulp by Strong and McDonald.
A joking remark from Big Daddy to a woman in the crowd while Regal was being stamped on in the corner is what convinced him to give Brian Dixon a call.
Brian Dixon Put Regal On With Some Of The Best Wrestlers In Britain
Brian Dixon was what was called the “opposition promoter”. He ran a wrestling company outside of the Joint Promotion bubble and was considered in opposition to the monopoly. Traditionally, wrestlers would not be able to work for both, and working for the opposition meant you’d be missing out on wrestling on TV for Joint Promotions.
However, Regal knew he had to face the best wrestlers if he was to get better and travel around the world. He joined All-Star Promotions in a career move that Max Crabtree said would be the “biggest mistake of his career”. By this time, All-Star shared the ITV wrestling slot with both Joint Promotions and the American WWF promotion, so it wasn’t too big a risk.
An 18-year-old turning down the chance to keep wrestling alongside Big Daddy on TV was unheard of but was the best thing William Regal ever did.
Once he signed with All-Star Promotions, Brian Dixon put the newly-christened Steve Regal to work. He booked him for 15 dates a month and put him against some of the best wrestlers in Britain. Stars like Fit Finlay, Marc Rocco and Kendo Nagasaki faced him in the ring and helped make Regal a better wrestler.
He even managed to wrestle twice on TV for All Star Wrestling before Greg Dyke brought the axe down on British wrestling on ITV. 1988 saw the final airing of wrestling on ITV until the failed reboot was shown on New Year’s Eve 2016.
Despite the decline of British wrestling, things were looking up for William Regal.
WWE and WCW Were Interested In Signing Him In The Early 1990s
During his time with Brian Dixon, William Regal switched the Pontins tour for the Butlins loop. He wrestled 12 matches weeks across England, Scotland and Wales with a small crew doing this for seven days a week, twenty weeks straight. Regal also kept working at Blackpool Pleasure Beach, right up until he left the country for the United States in 1992.
It was in the Butlins tours with Brian Dixon that William Regal learned to work the crowd, something he became famous for during his later run in the WWE. Brian Dixon would often tell him to “show out more”, meaning he needed to interact with the crowd and bring them more into the matches.
Just as comedians perfected their craft on the Butlins circuit, so did the wrestlers. Regal spent two years (1986 and 1987) touring the various Butlins camps across Britain, alongside British stalwarts like Robbie Brookside and Doc Dean. They would rotate a fourth wrestler each week but those three plus Dixon were the main crew for the tour.
He continued to wrestle for both Brian Dixon and Max Crabtree while also travelling abroad for work. France, Germany and Austria became regular destinations, sometimes paying four times as much per match than Regal was getting in the UK.
He also worked for Orig Williams in Scotland and Ireland, as well as a failed trip to South Africa which saw Regal swindled out of his wages by a greedy promoter.
It was with Brian and Orig that Regal wrestled regularly with Giant Haystacks, a titan of the peak days of British wrestling. Stacks, as he called him, was the top villain in Britain owing to his legendary, if often terrible, battles with Big Daddy. However, he was much older and much heavier at this point, and not at all an easier fella to work with.
In September 1991, William Regal received a letter from the WWE, asking him to have a try-out match. His friend Terry Rudge had recommended him to the company. The letter invited Regal to have a dark match on the UK-exclusive UK Rampage pay-per-view in the London Arena in 1991.
At the show, he teamed with Dave Taylor and Tony St. Clair against the trio of Drew McDonald, Chic Cullen and Johnny South. This was Regal’s first taste of big-time American wrestling, but it would not be his last. Later that year he was invited again to wrestle at the WWF Battle Royal At The Albert Hall, where he wrestled Brian Maxine in another dark match.
While the WWE did not sign him, they kept him “on file”, in case any outrageous gimmick that suited him came up.
William Regal Joined WCW In Late-1992 After Impressing Against Giant Haystacks
Before Vince McMahon could invent some terrible stereotypical gimmick, WCW came calling. Orig Williams offered him a spot on the American company’s tour of the UK. They originally came to look at Giant Haystacks with a view of making him a big monster in the promotion.
Regal had wrestled him a lot over the past year and jumped at the chance. He also wrestled Michael “P.S” Hayes, as well as cutting his first every in-ring promo of his career.
“You just didn’t do it in England, or any other countries I’ve visited” William Regal wrote in his book. He continued touring in countries like Egypt and India before being offered a deal with WCW. He claimed he would have accepted whoever offered him a deal first, the allure of wrestling in America being too much to turn down.
This was a wise move as the British wrestling scene was getting less and less profitable, with promotions closing left and right. Joint Promotions finally closed their doors in 1996 after the British Bulldog returned to the US, while All Star Promotions miraculously still tours to this day.
Regal signed with WCW in late 1992. He wrestled in Germany for most of that year, with his last match for All Star Promotions being a loss to Giant Haystacks for Children In Need 1991. Once he made the move to the US he never returned to live and work in the UK.
Giant Haystacks would join WCW but not for a few years. He flew to America to join the company in 1996 and was hand-picked to be the latest “monster of the week” for Hulk Hogan to overcome. However, Hogan turned down the chance to wrestle him, and after wrestling his last match against the Big Show, he was forced to return home due to a cancer diagnosis.
William Regal’s career in the UK was deceptively short. Despite being seen as a master of the British style, he only wrestled for six years in the country, compared to a 21-year career in the United States.
He was brought in at the tail end of the hottest run in British wrestling when the powers of Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks were just starting to wane. He was born at the wrong time to make the most of the British wrestling scene’s success, but the perfect time to make a name for himself as the American wrestling scene blew up in the 1990s.
William Regal Almost Started His Own Promotion In 1992
If he hadn’t have received an offer to move to the United States with WCW, William Regal had the opportunity to start his own wrestling promotion in the United Kingdom.
A long-time friend of Regal’s offered him the chance to start a new company in 1992 and even fronted the money to kick it off. The business saw an opportunity to market the sport, noting the lack of merchandise and food being sold at the shows.
Regal considered it, but ultimately turned down the chance to run his own company and moved to the US instead. You can read more about that by clicking this link.
