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THE Dynamite Kid

Anyone who saw Tom Billington’s very humble origins would have thought his nickname a cruel joke.

Born in a room without heat in Wigan, a small mining town in Northern England, he was, nevertheless, likely to become a fighter. His father and uncle were professional boxers. He came from a tough family where a minor misdemeanor earned him a punch in the head.

A Natural Athlete
A local trainer saw Tom had a natural athleticism – he had excelled at soccer and rugby, and had a special talent as a gymnast.

Tom began to train six days a week.
He dropped out of school by the age 14, and two years later, his trainer and mentor christened him with the name he would retain for the rest of his wrestling life: Dynamite Kid.

His father drove him all over the north of England for his matches, until he was old enough to drive himself. But even after winning championship belts, he was earning little more than $25 a match.

A Career Move to Canada
It took little convincing for Tom to leave England to work for Stu Hart at Stampede Wrestling in Calgary. In April, 1978, Tom packed his bags and flew to Calgary with only $50 in his pocket. He told his father he’d be back in June. But it would be 13 years before he returned.

Stu Hart was nonplussed at the sight of the wee lad from Wigan, who weighed little more than 170 pounds. But Dynamite had skills of which Hart was as yet unaware.

In Wigan, he had been primed in the art of submission holds. And he brought to Canada a high-flying acrobatic style which infused the sport with a new kind of energy. Seeing him do flips and leap from the top ropes with an intensity seldom seen, Stampede fans were bringing their friends back for the next match, and the half-filled Stampede arena began to fill once again.

Speed and Steroids, then Pain
Dynamite, ever conscious of his small stature in the company of large men, began to use speed and steroids not long after he arrived, in 1979.

Later that year he took the wrestlers’ well-worn path to Japan, where good performers could earn lots of money and perfect their skills before returning to North America.

Moves like this were popular with audiences, but hard on the body. Billington experimented with ever-riskier moves.
He ignored the pain that increased with every collision, and the demanding fans of Japan rewarded his efforts with wild applause.

“Whether it was the constant pounding on my back from all the suplexes and piledrivers, or whether it was the steroids…at the age of 25, my back was starting to give me some serious pain,” he writes in his autobiography, Pure Dynamite.

“Sometimes my ribs, my kidneys, my whole body, just ached. But I never thought of cutting the high-risk moves out. Never. They were what the people paid to see.”

In the mid-1980s he returned to Canada and to Stampede Wrestling, where matches became increasingly violent. Wrestlers used chairs, two-by-fours and bottles. Blood flowed to the delight of thousands of fans.

Dynamite increased his steroid intake, injecting testosterone “in each arse cheek every day.” And it was producing results: his weight ballooned from 170 pounds to more than 250 pounds.

Frequent ‘Roid Rage
Dynamite’s temper worsened as the cumulative effects of years of steroids went beyond making his body bigger. They affected his mind.

His wife, Michelle, recalls run-ins with her ex-husband as though it were a shopping list. “He took me in holds that would leave no marks….He held a shotgun to my head for six hours while he interrogated me, asking why I didn’t answer the phone.”

Pure Dynamite makes no mention of the abuse, saying only that they had “grown apart.” When asked about the shotgun incident in a recent CNN documentary, Billington replied that it wasn’t loaded.

Joining the WWF Empire
Dynamite joined the WWF (later the WWE) in the mid 1980s with his young cousin, Davey Boy Smith, and together they became the British Bulldogs tag team.

Their arrival was timely. The WWF was growing from a side-show to a North American entertainment empire.

In a sport dominated by big men who wrestled at the ground floor, Dynamite sprang from the ropes across the ring, launching aerial assaults that had scarcely been seen before. His high-impact style opened the door to subsequent, small wrestlers, who invariably borrowed from his arsenal – no one more than Chris Benoit.

Injury in the Ring
But Dynamite’s hard hits were already taking their toll. In December, 1986, he ruptured two discs in his back. Mid-match, he fell to the floor and could not get up.

At the age of 28, Dynamite’s health was in jeopardy. He ignored a doctor’s warnings to find a different line of work, and resumed wrestling.

By now he was addicted to painkillers and consumed a cocktail of other drugs. In his autobiography, he writes: “A normal working day for me was: speed to wake me up in the morning to catch an early flight, valium to make me sleep on the plane, Percoset just before the match, then we’d wrestle, hit the beer, and the cocaine, until the early hours, before taking another valium to sleep at night.”

“I was in good company, because the majority of wrestlers all shared more or less the same lifestyle.”

End of a Marriage, Back to the UK
At home, Tom’s abuse of Michelle had become so bad that in January, 1991, while six months pregnant with their third child, she presented Dynamite with a one-way ticket back to the UK.

The indelible legacy as a wrestler he left behind is summed up by another famous grappler, Bret Hart. Tom became, in Bret Hart’s words, “pound for pound, the greatest wrestler that ever lived.”

Once back in England, Dynamite wrestled in small halls throughout the UK, for a hundred or so pounds a night, sometimes more – nowhere close to the thousands of dollars he used to earn in Japan and North America.

As he soldiered on his health worsened dramatically. Even after having seizures and waking up in hospital, he continued to wrestle. In 1997, the nerve and tissue damage to his lower back and legs was so extensive, he could no longer walk.

He now lives close to where he grew up, near Wigan, a recluse, bound to his wheelchair.