His friends called him Luke. Or Louis. Or even resorted to his real name of Martin, which he shared with both his father and the eldest of his three sons. As a wrestler he was introduced to audiences ...

Back in the 1970s, wrestling did not mean tanned, muscle-bound Americans. Grapple fans in the age of flares and the three-day week instead ­celebrated far less honed, rather flabbier, sweatier British ...

The wrestling villain fans love to hate Giant Haystacks packs out the Lakeland Forum in Enniskillen. A record crowd of two thousand came to the Lakeland Forum in Enniskillen to see Martin Ruane the ...

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EVERY Saturday afternoon for 20 years, mulleted men in leotards would fight each other on live TV. They were the lords of the wrestling ring and their grappling on World Of Sport gripped the nation ...

I RAN a picture of the Giant Haystacks, the former wrestling star of the 70s and 80s, and it sparked a few memories. Gerry Floyd from Mell had one. 'Back in the early 80s when Farrelly's Roadhouse, ...

This biographical effort could do for wrestling what the film The Damned United did for Brian Clough’s brief reign at Leeds FC. It tells how two big-tummied chaps became Seventies stars of ITV’s Word ...

Readers of an older pop generation will remember the lugubrious Eighties hit, Spare Us The Cutter, by Echo and the Bunnymen. Well, they are all bunnymen down at the Commons this week as the great ...

It perhaps says more about Sunderland AFC than it does about me, that I vividly remember a match from 36 years ago, while having little recollection of games from a few months back. Did you know with ...

About 30 years ago it was the grapple to beat all heavyweight contests. But watch YouTube clips of 64in-chested Big Daddy and 6ft 11in Giant Haystacks in the ring now and the phrase that leaps to mind ...

At 4.00pm every Saturday, from 1976 to 1988, tens of millions of Britons, and countless more world-wide, were in the grip of an extraordinary sports phenomenon: watching two fat men (a.k.a. Shirley ...