Greeks vs Turks, who wins? Ahhh, this brings back memories!
Back in the mid to late 80's, kickboxing was doing the rounds at The Palace and Fame (two old Melbourne nightclubs) during its infancy stages. Back then the stars were the teenage amateur Stan Longinidis as well as local faves like Charlie Arnautovic, Percy Lanciana, the Zackaria brothers etc. Most of these early shows featured some sort of Greeks vs Turks teams event. With Australia being heavy on multiculturalism, the ethnics used to pack the place out. Everyone used to go off during those team events. Funny thing was that those team events weren't actually kickboxing like the rest of the card (the kickboxing was FC rules back then as well) but a sort of semi-contact taekwando style thingy. Sounds boring, but you should have seen it! Guys would leap around in the air throwing all sorts of crazy shit! Racial pride was on the line here! LOL! Sometimes things got nasty! Guys would lose their temper and start smashing eachother full on in the face, wrestle etc. Primitive, but those were fun days!
Another fave was the Greeks vs the Aussies team events.
Last time we saw one of these Greeks vs Turks events was on a Stan the Man undercard in 1989, at this time Stan had been training at the Jet Centre and being touted as the next big thing. About 7000 were in attendace that night as kickboxing was starting to take off with the media coverage and interest in Stan, and they decided to put one a team event on the undercard since they had been crowd favorites on the local scene for some time. None other than Tarik Solak was on the Turkish team. When the Greeks won, Tarik grabbed the microphone and started to complain!
Yeah, they were fun days.