R I.P. LOW'S Exotic Adrian Street at 82
SLAM WRESTLING ARTICLEFamily confirmed his passing to the BBC on Monday, July 31. According to the BBC, Street died at Cwmbran’s Grange University Hospital, shortly after brain surgery.
Born in Brynmawr, South Wales, on December 5, 1940, Street left school at the age of 15, heading off to London to try to become a wrestler and avoid working in a coal mine like his father. Instead, he struggled to get by, working in a factory, sweeping up Wembley Stadium and sleeping on park benches when he couldn’t pay for a room. A bodybuilder from the age of 11, his dream of bulking up to 200 pounds to be a wrestler wasn’t compatible with his meager diet, and he actually lost 30 pounds. Desperate, he found himself boxing in a touring carnival for a pound per bout.
At the local gym, he’d pulled around with the cauliflower-eared veterans of the British mat wars, and unable to break onto the main Dale Martin’s circuit, he took whatever bouts he could, debuting in 1957 as Kid Jonathan. Within a couple of years, he was invited to bigger venues, and started working under his real name as “Nature Boy” Adrian Street. But success didn’t truly find Street until he found his image.
Emerging from the dressing room, Street would pause just outside the doorway, allowing the commoners in attendance to take in his long, blond hair, elaborate outfit and garish facial make-up, complete with embedded sequins and rhinestones. “I’d go in the ring looking like a French poodle, and I’d carry on like a French poodle, but as soon as the bell went and I’d done my little bit of prancing about, and the time was right, I’d turn from a French poodle to a pit bull,” Street said.
Playing up an unmanly character was a challenge, but Street always knew what he wanted to portray. Interviewers would hone in on his sexuality, but “The Exotic One” would answer ambiguously. “Whenever someone infers that I’m effeminate, it makes me want to scream.” Over the years, various characters like Goldust (Dustin Rhodes) and Rico Costantino used Street’s gimmick. In Rico’s case, he actually went to study from the master.
In 1969, Street met Linda Gunthorpe Hawker, who would later become woman wrestler Blackfoot Sioux, and later his valet, Miss Linda. Linda added a different dimension and added more mystery. She would allow him to step on her back on the way into the ring, straighten the robe of her “perfectionist pansy,” and occasionally interfere by pulling a leg or bringing out a foreign object.
Adrian and Linda set off for the North American market in 1981, beginning in Calgary, then Mexico and Los Angeles before finding a real home in the southeastern U.S. Promoters and bookers didn’t always know what to do with him. “Adrian would do anything for attention. He would have shown his private parts on television if he thought it would have done him some good,” British promoter Max Crabtree said in The Wrestler. As the booker in Florida for a time, Bob Roop admitted he didn’t understand the gimmick. “I didn’t feel like the kind of solid, long-term heat that you needed to draw with as a bad guy, I didn’t feel that type of gimmick could carry it. That might have been my limitations as a booker.”
Street has no problem explaining what he nuances of what he was trying to achieve. “My idea of a bad guy is possibly different than a good many others. To me there’s no reason why a bad guy’s got to get cheap heat all the time, where he’s got to growl and scream at everybody, jump in the ring, poke somebody in the eye, kick them in the balls as the first move, and scream and shout until his eyeballs pop out. My own way of doing it was to go into the ring and wrestle, and show the people what a good wrestler I was,” he said.
Rip Rogers was the heel in a year-long feud with Street in the Florida, Alabama, Mississippi area. “You had to go with the flow with Adrian. Me and Adrian never talked over a match,” Rogers said. “All that mattered was the finish, and what we were coming back with. The rest was ad lib out there. No prearranged bullshit like they there is today.” Terry Taylor was the good-looking babyface working with Street in the Mid-Atlantic territory. “Adrian was a guy who looked like couldn’t bust a grape, and in real like was probably one of the toughest wrestlers around,” he said, explaining the problems working with Street’s style. “It was very difficult, it was very awkward, different timing, different execution of moves. In the old days, when we prided ourselves on having good matches with anybody, and Adrian was the kind of guy that, if I had a match with Kamala one night, he was limited by what his character would let him do, and Adrian was limited, honestly, by what he could do. But he knew exactly who Adrian Street was.”
There needs to be acknowledgment on Street’s role in popularizing wrestling merchandise too. He record an LP, complete with a poster that folded out. Later it was a series of autobiographies, T-shirts, and more.
But back to the record. At one point, he was wrestling in Liverpool Stadium — a rough place, the type of arena where the wrestlers had to fight their way to the ring — against Joe Cortez. Street and Cortez decided to try something new. After parading to the ring in one of his fancy-dan outfits, Street saw that Cortez had a copy of his record. Though he tried to never acknowledge his opponent before a match, Adrian gave him a nod of approval for his obvious good taste.
“Next thing is, he starts to rip up the poster into pieces and throws it all over the place,” Street explained. “He gets a hold of the record, and breaks it over his knee, smashes it up and throws it to the people. I’m screaming and shouting, going nuts. Jon says to somebody, ‘Get me another record.’ The people were running and lining up in bloody hundreds to grab the record and bring it down to Jon. They were bringing them down, and he was breaking them up, showing me the poster, breaking them up. I made more money than night than I had wrestling in about six months on the records, just to break the damn things up. Now I couldn’t care less what they did with them. I was just interested in the money and getting rid of the bloody things.”
It was key to one of Street’s philosophies on the business. “You’ve got to give the people a chance to react to what you’re doing, and give the people a chance to perform,” he said. “The only difference between the wrestler and the people is that the wrestler is paid to perform and the people pay to perform.”
By the late ’80s, Street had settled in the Gulf Coast region, where he lived for many years. He and Linda made a living primarily by making custom-made ring attire through their bizarebazzar.com website. Street has taught wrestling as well at his Skull Crushers Wrestling School, which blew away during a hurricane a couple of years back. Street battled off throat cancer in 2001. In The Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame: The Heels, Street said that retirement was not an option. “I can’t do nothing. I’m not intelligent enough to do nothing.”
