William Regal has revealed who came up with the Blackpool Combat Club name and why a town on the north west coast of England means so much to him.
Despite being born more then 100 miles away, William Regal has been inextricably linked with Blackpool for the duration of his wrestling career.
So naturally when it came time to name the alliance between Regal and Jon Moxley and Bryan Danielson, the Blackpool Combat Club seemed a natural fit. However, despite this, Regal has revealed that the name wasn’t his idea.
Speaking to The Blackpool Gazette, Regal explained that it was John Moxley who came up with the name, while admitting that he initially planned on taking a year off when he left WWE.
“I would love to claim it was my idea, but it wasn’t. It was Jox Moxley’s idea. I had just come into the company after being asked to come in by Bryan Danielson because it sounded like a lot of fun. I was initially planning to take a year off, I wasn’t going to do anything because I haven’t done anything other than wrestling for the last 39 years.
All of a sudden, I heard Jon’s name was involved which piqued my interest even more and it’s ended up how it’s ended up. Straight away there was a chemistry there because in real life there’s a chemistry there. People know a lot about me and Bryan but they might not know as much about me and Jon but these are stories we can tell over time.
Jon came up to me and said he’s got a great idea for a name, because he had come up with different Blackpool things. I told him it’s not about me, it’s about the two of them, I’m just a spare part here and riding on your coattails. But he insisted we called it this,”
Continuing on, Regal broke down why the name means so much to him and how Blackpool has played such a huge role in his life.
That meant a lot because Blackpool has given me everything good in my life and I’ve done everything I can do to make sure that, regardless of where I went, I was always billed from Blackpool.
I moved there when I was 16, I spent time there as a child on holidays, I started my wrestling career there, I lived in Blackpool for 10 years, I had a house for 12 years, I met my wife there, my first two children were born at Victoria Hospital, everything good in my life came from Blackpool.
So Jon and Bryan have always heard me telling these stories and they just wanted to use the name because they feel if it wasn’t for Blackpool, I wouldn’t be wrestling and I wouldn’t be in America.
The way they look at it, they wouldn’t have come around if it wasn’t for me. That’s not the way I look at it though, because I feel I’m fortunate to have them in my life, they think it’s the other way around. Bryan has been to Blackpool quite a lot because he wrestled a lot in England for a lot of years, but Jon hadn’t. But he just likes the sound of it.
I didn’t think it would go any further than that conversation but then we get to television last week and he showed me his phone and he’s got these designs for different stuff. I replied ‘oh, are we actually going to do this then? This is a thing?’ We went out that night and I had no idea he was going to say it on TV, but he said it and the next morning there are t-shirts out, so I ran with it.
When you get an opportunity, you run with it. So that was how it happened.”
After adding Wheeler Yuta to their ranks on April 8th, the group were last in action on May 4th where they demolished The Butcher & The Blade and Angelico.