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I always say to myself, right?
"This next match,
I'm going to have a beast of a body.
I want to look amazing."
Do you know what I mean?
And then I will try at it.
I will try and I'll try and I'll try.
And then eventually I'll end up going out,
getting drunk,
hangover for about three days,
eating an Indian,
eating kebabs,
and then that's me right off the bandwagon,
and then it gets closer to the match time
and I'm just like that,
go down to Brian's and get myself a cheeseburger,
know what I mean?
Right up to the B&Q car park
to the chuck wagon.
Get myself some sausage and tatty scone doublers,
little bitty onions.
It's the best burger van in the whole of Ayrshire,
possibly Scotland.
They do a mean roll and slice, with...
Do you know what slice is?
It's like squared sausage?
Come and I'll show you. It's the business.
How we diddlin' Brian?
Brian's seen my YouTube videos, haven't you, Brian?
- When Graeme first started coming here,
he was a two-stone weakling.
Look at him now.
He's ready for anything!
This is where I get all my protein,
this is where I come, build the body that,
the wrestling body that I need, you know?
Are you on tonight, Graeme?
Aye, I'm wrestling at The Garage tonight in Glasgow.
See that? See when you get that down you.
- Aye.
- Knock them dead.
- There you go.
You have that.
I'm beefing this guy up!
Cheers for that!
Tidy!
He's the king of the
bacon rolls.
Nothing better than a roll and a square sausage
on a Sunday morning
before your wrestling match.
Yeehah!
One of my favourite wrestlers in ICW is Wolfgang.
He is the man.
*** this, come on!
My name's Wolfgang in the wrestling industry,
but
I don't think of myself as Wolfgang
or this big wrestler.
I'm just
Barry Young working in the pub.
Wolfgang is probably one of the most underrated wrestlers in the world.
He's genuinely one of the nicest guys
I've ever met in my life.
You can always go to him for advice.
He's somebody that I've become really close to
in the last couple of months,
because I think he's somebody
who's actually kind of believed in me.
He's always said,
"Look,
You're never going to be Batista,
you're never going to be Triple H.
What you need to work on
is just being Grado.
Be yourself.
Because it's entertaining enough.
You don't need to be
one of these guys who are
flipping and flopping all over the place.
Just work on being yourself.
Work on being Grado."
- I work here at the La Cala bar
with my dad.
We've run this place for five years.
It's a wee typical Glasgow East End pub.
I don't want to go to WWE,
or anything like that.
I mean with this place,
it's just, it's a normal life.
Luckily enough I get the weekends off to wrestle,
but every other day I'm in here.
It's a hobby for me.
You know, I enjoy doing it,
and that's as far as I want to take it.
- I was out the back there, being sick.
I'm not nervous or anything like that,
it just
must be a bug.
Up until, maybe two months ago, I was getting "You got teabagged" chants
off the crowd because Kid Fite teabagged me during one of the matches
and it just stuck, like, the crowd absolutely loved it.
- At the end of the day, I'm in this ring,
Wolfgang, Lionheart, I'm there to win.
Sure, if we teabag somebody, whoa ho, cheap pop!
- It's the big bag ball drop!
People used to bring hundreds and hundreds of teabags out to the ring
and there were just showers and showers of teabags.
Luckily enough it died down because
the ring didn't get cleared and you'd slip all over them.
I was getting booed and then I started,
I started to get over more with the fans,
I don't know what it was that changed,
but
every so often, every show,
there was more and more of them cheering for me.
And then the bookers just made the decision
to make me be the face and the good guy.
In ICW the fans sort of determine
if they don't like you, they won't cheer for you,
if they like you they'll cheer for you, so
rather than the booker saying,
"Right, you're going to be a good guy
and you're going to be a bad guy,"
there's only so much they can do that.
So now, all I need to do is come out and smile.
That's it.
- What can go wrong in a wrestling match?
Well,
the number one thing you don't want to happen
is get yourself injured
and that is always a fear
because there are injuries happening left, right and centre.
You could break your neck, technically,
from taking a clothes line.
It's just things like that,
you've got to keep yourself safe.
Two bones broken in my ankle
and I literally had to get gaffer tape,
and basically tape my ankle up,
and I had to do that every day for two weeks.
Pulled my groin,
cracked ribs,
I've got chipped bones floating around in my elbows.
Smacked me in the face.
Teeth gone.
So now everything's false up there.
We'll all end up in wheelchairs by the time we're 35.
- Obviously, split my head open numerous times.
Broken my nose four times.
Torn all the muscle fibres in my neck.
Nerve damage to some fingers, I can't feel.
Obvious scarring.
This here, that was done by a massive,
oversize corkscrew that I carry about.
An endless list.
It's a great escape, it really is, to be that different guy,
if there are five hundred people in the crowd,
or fifty
or fifteen.
The only difference is there's less of them.
They still paid the same amount of money.
They still want to see the same thing.
Red Lightning, you're a wee *** prick!
Grado!
The ICW fans are hardcore fans, they're not stupid.
If your match is a bag of ***,
they'll tell you your match is a bag of ***.
If you make a wrong move,
they're going to know about it.
They're going to chant, "You *** up! You *** up!"
My worst fear would be
if I walked into that ring with Red Lightning
and there was no crowd reaction.
There was no interest in the crowd,
there was no chants,
that would be gutting.
What if people think,
"Who's he? Who's this guy?
Walks straight into ICW and gets a title shot?"
If this match with Red Lightning doesn't go well,
if I *** it up and I stink the ring out,
that's the end of Grado really, because, I mean,
ICW is my stage right now.
So if this match with Red Lightning goes *** up,
then my character's going to go *** up
and I'll probably be absolutely distraught.
You are a *** joke.
And just the same as all of those losers,
all of those fat,
sweaty losers,
you
are a complete
***
joke.
My name is Red Lightning.
Tonight I'm going to be wrestling for
the ICW heavyweight championship,
I'm the current champion,
and I'm wrestling a guy called
Grado.
I think Grado's quite funny,
but I don't think he's actually that talented a wrestler.
He's going to try and boot my balls,
and try and get my weaknesses.
He's going to try and overpower my weaknesses,
he's going to try and pin me straight away,
so he can get up, take his belt and leave,
and think to himself,
"That was easy."
I've got a lot of time for professional wrestling,
and I think ICW
is full of nobs,
like you,
who ruin it.
And if anybody's got a problem with that
then I suggest you join the very,
very long queue.
- He was a comedy character years ago,
he was always the comedy match
at the holiday camps and all that,
and we changed him.
So he's bitter,
and he's like,
"I'm not a joke anymore, I've got the belt,
I'm the champ."
And he's saying I'm a joke,
he's saying Grado is a joke,
so what I've been saying is, well,
Grado reminds me a lot of me,
when I was seen as a joke,
my company was seen as a joke.
Nobody's laughing now.
So it's as if we're all behind Grado,
and it's just built this amazing, emotional story,
and it's going to culminate tonight at this show,
and it's going to be off the scale.
- We've got the
old school rave song
and it's like,
and when that song plays,
it's like we've got the "eight favourite words", we call it.
Here we, here we, here we *** go.
- Here we,
here we,
here we *** go!
- It's time
to get
infected!
- Teabag! Teabag!
- Scottish wrestling is getting better and better by the day.
Watch this space.
It's going places.
We have become infamous,
if not famous yet.
We have a match called the Glasgow street fight.
- Put him in the taxi! Put him in the taxi!
- Where's that scrawny ***?
ICW! ICW!
- Grado! Grado!
- Arsehole!
- ***!
- You *** up! You *** up!
- Obviously my nerves are kicking in a bit.
I'm looking forward to fighting Red Lightning
because Red Lightning is a guy who
I first met nearly ten years ago.
I've trained with him but I've never actually wrestled him,
so the first time I'm going to actually wrestle him
is for a title fight.
I'll tell you right now, I'm the most nervous wrestler
you'll ever meet in your life.
I'm nervous but I'm excited as well.
It's a kind of funny feeling, isn't it?
It's a feeling I've never felt before in my actual life,
you know?
- Grado!
Grado! Grado!
- *** him up Grado! *** him up!
- *** him up Grado! *** him up!
One...
Two...
*** off!
- He's basically anti-ICW,
he's anti the fans,
he's just out there for himself.
He just...
He's not bothered about
making fans laugh anymore.
He's not bothered about having entertaining matches.
All he wants to do
is win the gold.
It doesn't matter how or what way he does it.
He's going to do it.
- You're a ***! You're a ***!
Red Lightning!
You're a ***!
- You bunch of *** arseholes.
You *** touch me again,
I'll knock you out.
I'm out of here.
I remain champion,
so *** off!
- Wee Boot! Wee Boot!
Grado! Grado!
I've gone from being a fanboy
standing in the queue
trying to get myself booked.
I've tried to get wrestlers' attention.
I've then been in the crowd,
and managed to jump that guard rail,
and I was so close
to getting into that ICW ring.
This is the biggest night of my life.
- It's yourself! It's yourself!
It's your *** self!
- One!
Two!
Three!
- ICW!
Please give it up
for your new
heavyweight champion...
It's his self!
It's Grado!
It's yourself!
- Sometimes a wrestler doesn't need to be a great wrestler.
Sometimes it's the story.
His story isn't about
the actual wrestling ability.
His story is about this poor wee guy,
who everybody said was an outcast
was an underdog,
who would never make it.
- If you just kicked about training,
or came to shows
you would have never got on this.
But he has done something different.
And
good on him because it has paid off.
So let's just hope that
he can continue being funny,
and people continue to laugh at him
because I know I will.