That idea, seems to be pretty much dead in the water then?
‘’McManus's introduction to the sport began in 1947 when he joined the John Ruskin Amateur Wrestling Club. Two years later he won his first title, the British welterweight championship, but had moved up to middleweight by the late Sixties and clinched the British middleweight championship in 1967 and the European equivalent the following year.”
Before I’m told to write one hundred lines of “I must try to not write misleading titles” I shall in my defense point out, that over the years, here on Heritage, Mick’s claim has popped up every so often and I was hoping to put a stop to it. However, perhaps I could muddy the waters by asking, was it Mick who first presented the claim? (Poster and and handbill experts from around the country will be frantically perusing their collection to winkle out the dastardly promoter who may have propagated the lie).😎
Apologies to those who may have thought they were to be reading a list of Mick’s Down Under scuffles, based on my errant ‘thread title’
It's the title of the thread that's misleading.
It suggests the content is about wrestling in Australia but there is no mention of that in the text.
We discussed this at length and found no evidence of McManus in Australia.
European equivalent, when? I don't know whose inverted commas those are, but I trust you haven't found them on Wrestling Heitage!
Mick was one of the biggest liars going - and there were plenty. Alan Garfield would take a leaf out of his book a couple of years later and even bill himself from Sydney for a decade or so ... because he could. Garfield chose Sydney for the crazy reason that he had never been to Australia. I love that, it tells us so much about wrestling, all the more so in pre-internet times.
McManus probably invented those Australian details late forties to disguise the fact that he was in fact a complete novice, even though he was in his late twenties.
Who, in 1949, could have stood up and challenged what Mick claimed? Nobody, and Mick knew it.