This month - 'Tomcat' Kevin O'Neil

1 - What annoys you about British wrestling? (from FCW Forum)
The amount of promotions there are, especially the ones that are being run by kids that don’t have a clue. There is much more to a wrestling promotion than being able to rent a ring and having the email addresses of the workers. In the Midlands I recently counted about 12 different promotions running in the area, it’s oversaturated and some of them are not that good. Having these big ‘supershows’ that never lead to anything and let’s not even get into 1PW.

2 - When did you start wrestling? (from FCW Forum)
See above, it was much harder to get into wrestling when I started. There were only about five promotions in the country that I knew about back then, and only one training school.

3 - Who was your 1st match against? (from FCW Forum)
My first match was against ‘Excalibur’; now know as Blade at The Bath Pavilion on August 21st 1998. I won :)

We met each other in our day jobs and both loved wrestling so decided to start training at Hammerlock in Kent. After about 6 months training a promotion opened up near us called Commonwealth Championship Wrestling (CCW) in Kidderminster. We joined them and the rest is history.

4 – What do you think of the current state of British Wrestling? (via email)
There are a lot of good promotions and a lot of bad. There are a lot of good workers and a lot of bad. The fact that we have a dedicated wrestling/MMA TV station in this country enables the better promotions of having something to strive for. LDN are doing good stuff on TWC Fight, and it’s something I want for Future Championship Wrestling in the future.

5 - What is you favourite promotion to work for? (via email)
I’ve been to a lot of places, but in all honesty I think that FCW is the best place that I have ever worked.

6 - What is the hottest crowd you have worked in front of? (from FCW Forum)
I've worked a lot of holiday camps over the years and the crowds there are always great, but for a regular hall show the hottest crowd was in Melksham in the West Country. Whilst I was with the FWA, we ran an 'inter-promotional' show with Combat Sports Promotions (CSF). We (FWA) were invading CSF for the night, and we were all well and truly hated. I was in a tag match, that pitted myself and Blade (The Black Country Militia) against local favourites Gideon and I think Max Carnage.

The crowd were nuts, shouting profanity at all the FWA guys. They were throwing around beach balls and blow up dolls, but the weirdest sight was seeing the fans going to the bar to buy beer just to throw at us.

It was also on that night that the seeds for a 'Messiah' character were sowed. During our tag match, the crowd were all calling me Jesus, in fact the particular chant was - 'Jesus is a wa**er'. After i left the FWA, the whole 'Messiah/Jesus' gimmick was given to Brandon Thomas (who was also in attendance that night).

I had parked my car outside the venue, and it had a huge 'FWA' graphic on the back. We had to keep someone on guard because we legitimately thought that the windows were going to be smashed. I remember 'Guv’nor' Carl Conroy writing something about this particular night and it was all absolutely true.

7 - You are mostly a heel, have you ever wrestled as a face? (via email)
Of course, loads of times, but I much prefer to work heel :)

8 – Have you ever been injured? If so, what was the worst? (via email)
It’s only been the past couple of years that I’ve had any real injuries, I was pretty lucky up till that point. Since then I bruised up my ankle real bad at Sedgley, it swoll up real bad and went black. I broke my thumb clean at the tip in November, but the worst was fracturing my arm in a match with Laken Xander at AWW in 2005. I still haven’t been able to watch a tape of it.

9 - What do you think of Myspace?(from FCW Forum)
From a promotional point of view I think that MySpace is great, and we have made a lot of invaluable contacts through it. However some people seem to spend their whole days on there. They are sitting in front of the PC when suddenly a thought pops into their head, what do they do, post it as a bulletin! How many times have I read a bulletin, when all it says is something stupid like 'shit, i ate ice-cream too fast and I've got brain freeze'.

It looks even worse when these things come from UK workers, some guys (and gals) really need to look at the way they are coming across, especially when they have many fans on their friend’s lists.

10 - Who are your heroes? (from FCW Forum)
In wrestling, I love watching wrestling from the 80's NWA and Mid-South. So basically Ric Flair, Barry Windham, Ted DiBiase, Dusty Rhodes, Road Warriors, Magnum TA, Rock and Roll Express, Midnight Express so on and so forth.

We would like to thank Kevin O’Neil for his time.

# NEXT UP for the month of March we have Celt Kennedy!