Phil Watson, the youngest son of Canada’s greatest ever professional wrestler, Whipper Billy Watson, died of a heart attack on January 18. He was 68 years old.
Watson, usually wrestling as Whipper Watson Jr., followed his father into the wrestling business, but never made it big, his lack of size an issue.
“Phil’s problem was his size and everything, right? He just wasn’t big enough,” recalled Hartford Love.
Whipper Watson Jr. and “Bearman” Dave McKigney in 1981. Photo courtesy Terry Dart.
How many second-generation wrestlers ever do compare, really, said Ron Doner. “He wasn’t his dad, that’s all.”
The other son of The Whip (Bill Potts), John Watson, also wrestled for a short while.
Phil Watson wrestled primarily around Ontario, with occasional trips out into the world, as detailed in the 2010 story, Phil Watson shares tales from abroad.
However, his excursions running the Canadian Half-Pints midget basketball team, delivering an anti-bullying message, took him right across Canada and back again.
As well, Watson was a trainer of pro wrestlers based out of Bernie Livingston’s carpet store in Mississauga, Ontario. Among the graduates of “Whipper Billy Watson’s School of Wrestling” are “No Class” Bobby Bass, Goldie Rogers, Danny Marsh, and “Bloody” Bill Skullion.
He had been in poor health over the years, the added weight making him look much more like his famous father. The Canadian Half-Pints business started running into difficulties and Watson suffered. “I got beat up and beat up pretty bad. I ended up having a nervous breakdown over that, and ended up in the hospital,” he recalled in 2009. “Shortly after that, I had a heart attack. I came out of that, my wife got sent to the hospital for three months and then she died. I had a really rough year and a half.”
In total, he had three heart attacks before the fatal one on January 18, 2018.
He had no children. Funeral arrangements are not known at this time.
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