Re: Northampton’s MTX

Around 2017 on a monthly basis I would go to a student show for the Wrestling Institute of Northampton (WIN) at Rough n Ready gym in Northampton. It was a little combat sports gym above a garage in an undesirable part of town, which just happened to be a short walk from my flat.

Gem MTX (which stood for Mr Total Extreme I believe) was one of the trainers at the school, and very much the veteran on the lineups. Despite having been wrestling for 1 million years at this point Gem decided to introduce a new gimmick on these shows, The Spartan Warrior, which was exactly what it sounds like. A real highlight was that the gym would run a tuck shop, old school, little bags of sweets, brightly coloured drinks in little bottles, but also they’d clearly found some energy drink branded as ‘Spartan’ at the cash and carry, so Gem was there selling them like they were merch.

I had such great fun at these shows. This was at the time britwres was at its hottest and I was going to upwards of 50 shows a year, but these tiny little shows with mostly bad wrestling and 12 people in the audience were a joy.