Remembering Sue Chuter Parsons By KrackerJak, Australian Wrestling Legend

Remembering Sue Chuter Parsons

By KrackerJak, Australian Wrestling Legend

Without Sue Chuter, there would be no KrackerJak.

That’s right, it’s her fault! She was the one who introduced me to Australian Wrestling and set me on this dark path of incredible wealth and fame that turned me into the debaucherous Australian Wrestling Legend I am today! 

But let’s wind things back to my pre-Sue life and get some context. 

Before I met Sue, I was at least aware of the existence of Australian Wrestling. 14-year old future-Krackers had gotten to see local talent on the undercard of a show headlined by Roadwarrior Hawk and Demolition Smash at least a hundred years ago in 1993, and dammit, I wanted more!

But I lived out in the country – and there was no internet, how the hell did you get to watch wrestling in Melbourne in 1993?

Turns out, Sue was already solving that problem, but I didn’t know that yet. 

For years, I sustained myself on a thin gruel of rented wrestling videos that came out what felt like an eternity after the event had aired. You wanna watch Wrestlemania? Too bad, kid. The video store won’t have it for at least 4 months. 

At last, in 1997, Australia actually had cable television with actual wrestling on it, but there were no wrestling tours on the horizon and I still had no idea that there was a thriving local wrestling scene in Melbourne. 

Until, that is, I moved into a flat in Elwood with my father, in 1997. He knew I loved wrestling – he didn’t approve – but he knew I loved it. And he mentioned he’d met “some woman” who lived in one of the downstairs flats, who’d mentioned wrestling to him. And soon enough, I bumped into a short, middle-aged woman in the driveway, wearing giant glasses and a very old-school ECW shirt, who introduced herself as Sue.

And without much encouragement at all, Sue told me all about herself. Her fandom, her connections, and her flat… 

“You wanna come in, love?” 

Holy shit…The walls were papered with photos of wrestlers, there was an awesome poster of Macho Man on the back door, a Wrestlemania 12 chair, Jerry Lawler’s Slammy!

I’d never seen anything like it. And the videotapes! Thousands of them! Not official tapes either. No, Sue was a bootlegger. Specifically a video pirate, but the best kind, a WRESTLING video pirate! Shelves and shelves of tapes, WWF, WCW, territories and indies…

For anyone not born in a year that starts with a 19, lemme explain how Sue’s business worked. So, say Wrestlemania plays live and someone in Chicago boldly ignores the FBI piracy warning and tapes the whole show from the television. Well that person stuffs that tape into an envelope and posts it to the other side of the planet, where Sue would copy it hundreds of times, selling those copies to hungry wrestling fans who refused to starve for sweet wrestling sustenance. 

But Sue wasn’t just a seller of content, she knew her shit too, and with a depth and breadth of knowledge so far beyond what I had even heard of. And so I started hanging out with this strange wrestling woman, watching old tapes stretched thin with repeated copying, as a signed photo of Dutch Mantell loomed over us from the wall. 

I learned a heap about wrestling in that flat. I even met my first Australian wrestler in there, when Jesse Valentine popped in to pick up a wrestling mixtape. 

When it came to wrestlers, Sue had her favourites… and she had the ones she didn’t like. And man, Sue was not afraid to tell you what she thought of the ones she didn’t like. 

“He’s a piece of shit!”, she’d spit. Someone in wrestling? A piece of shit? Surely not? But yes, apparently so.

At this point, I started to clue into the fact that some of Sue’s opinions on these wrestlers didn’t just come from their in-ring antics, and were shaped more from personal experience. Yes, over the years, Sue had proudly made many successful conquests of wrestling superstars. Sue was pretty coy with me about her exploits, I think because I was still quite young at the time. But I remember years later when American deathmatcher Mad Man Pondo was in town, Sue gleefully delighted him with various names from her little black book. 

Yeah, you go, Sue.

Sue told me where the local wrestling was. Again – no internet. If you didn’t happen to walk past the right pizza shop, you’d never see a poster, and never know where the shows were.
She took me to the I.C.K.A. Club, in Keilor. where I saw wrestlers like George the Hitman Julio, Desert Storm Doyle, Sherri Sinatra, Amy Action, and Psycho Kid Thunder. 

Sue really liked Psycho. I’d seen her get pretty fired up in the flat, talking about who she did and didn’t like. But live? She’d be standing up, yelling: “GET’EM, PSYCHO! GET’EM, PSYCHO!” 

It was pretty intense.

I told Sue I wanted to start training to be a wrestler, so she introduced me to Red Hot Ricky Diamond, and in 1999, my training began. Sue liked to feel like a person of influence – she loved a good name drop – and as I continued to train, I think it tickled her to have had a role in my career. 

Sue was a big deal in Australian Wrestling, supporting shows, curating compilation tapes of wrestling matches for talent (she made me a sweet Mick Foley tape where Terry Gordy powerbombs Cactus on the concrete – nice one Sue) and generally being an excellent example of what we need most of all to give our wrestling purpose: fandom. She was even the focus of a documentary by Megan Spencer, “Lovestruck”, which documented the unique way Sue pursued her passions. A highlight of the film was when they captured Jerry Lawler personally giving a shoutout to Sue, live in-ring, during an American stadium tour in Melbourne. Sue was stoked, and I think vindicated, for every time that someone questioned the authenticity of her Slammy.

Over time, the internet rendered Sue’s video business redundant. Older wrestlers, who’d known Sue, retired, and younger promoters were sometimes unaware of Sue’s importance.

But it always popped me to see her at shows. She’d come shuffling up with her friend Diane, and tell me, with BRUTAL honesty, what she liked… and didn’t like about the show. 

Sue was a supporter. She was a wrestling historian, a tape trader, a patron of the wrestling arts. But foremost to me, Sue was a fan. And I say that with the highest respect. 

Those of us who wrestle, and those of us who once wrestled and were smart enough to stop, we wrestled for a lot of reasons. Our own fandom, a love of the physicality, a love of the violence… but without fans, we might as well just meet up at home and roll around together in our underpants. The fans MAKE wrestling. They validate all the work we do, all the pain we experience. They’re what make us special. 

Sue made us special. And her love and passion for the sport made wrestling special. And there’s every chance that without her, I would have led a very different, much less interesting life. 

When attending Sue’s funeral, I was touched to see the way she had existed in the centre of a community of fans, wrestlers, referees, journalists, and across so many generations too. Wrestling fans, too young to have even met Sue, shared a room with elder veteran Kurt Von Schneider, who walking-framed his way up to the podium to masterfully rock the funeral with the last of the many stories that had been shared that day about this remarkable, prickly but passionate woman. Once again, Sue was a big deal in wrestling. 

Thank you, Sue. Thank you for your fandom, for introducing me to this community, for always asking after my family, and for everything you did to make us professional wrestlers feel like the superstars we try to be. I couldn’t have done it without you. 

(Click here for our tribute post to Sue Chuter)