http://slam.canoe.ca/Slam/Wrestling/2005/07/21/1141424.html

We here at wrestlingfigs send our sympathy and condolences to Lord Alfred Hayes family, friends and fans....

Lord Al Hayes dead at 77

By GREG OLIVER - Producer, SLAM! Wrestling

Remembering Lord Alfred Hayes -- who died Wednesday at age 77 -- as just the buffoon second-banana on the WWF Tuesday Night Titans is to do a huge injustice to one of the greatest wrestlers ever to come out of the United Kingdom.

Beginning to wrestle in the early 1950s in Britain, the 5-foot-9, 238-pound "Judo" Al Hayes was a top-notch heel wherever he wrestled in the 1960s and 1970s, including Florida, the Central States territory and Texas. He was usually billed as being from Windermere, England.

Then, in 1982, he joined the expanding WWF under Vince McMahon Jr., and upped the Britishness of his act. He was in countless skits on Tuesday Night Titans, The Bobby Heenan Show and the various WWF programs, as well as serving as commentator on matches on those shows. He recalled the skits in a 2000 interview with the Wrestling Perspective newsletter. "Yeah, I didn't mind doing those at all. They were good. One or two of them I didn't because I didn't want to and that was okay. Vince [McMahon] said, 'Okay, we'll get somebody else to do that.'"

Besides his work as a wrestler and announcer, Hayes served as a heel manager in the American Wrestling Association as well.

"I did some managing that I didn't really want to do, but I did it up in Minneapolis. Verne Gagne persuaded me to," Hayes said in Wrestling Perspective. "I said to him, 'No, I don't want to be a manager because when you?re a manager, you go in and you do the main event and the wrestler gets the money and you who do all the work and all the talking get nothing.' So he said, 'I'll pay you what the main event gets.' So that's how much he wanted me to manage."

After his time in the WWF came to an end in 1995, he faced a number of health challenges. At the 2001 Cauliflower Alley Club reunion, he was in a wheelchair.

For the last number of years, Hayes lived on his own in Dallas, Texas. When a stubbed toe led to an infection, which led to gangrene, he had to have part of a leg amputated.