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The NWA World Tag Team Championship is a professional wrestling world tag team championship created by the National Wrestling Alliance. From 1948 to 1982, the NWA allowed member promotions to create their own territorial version of the "NWA World Tag Team Championship" without oversight from the board of directors. The first of these NWA World Tag Team Championships was created in 1950 in the San Francisco territory, which while billed as a "World" title was essentially restricted to the specific NWA territory. In 1957 as many as 13 versions of the NWA World Tag Team Championship were confirmed to be in existence. In 1982 Big Time Wrestling, based in Los Angeles, closed and abandoned their version of the championship. The following year, the World Wrestling Federation, an NWA member at the time and which had its own World Tag Team Championship, split from the NWA in acrimony. This meant that only the Jim Crockett Promotions' NWA World Tag Team Championship was active within the NWA, but still being controlled by JCP, not the NWA board of directors. In 1991 that championship was renamed the WCW World Tag Team Championship.
William Fritz Afflis was an American professional wrestler, promoter, and football player, better known by his ring name, Dick the Bruiser. He was a fifteen-time world champion in professional wrestling, having held the AWA World Heavyweight Championship, the WWA World Heavyweight Championship thirteen times and the WWA World Heavyweight Championship once.
Houston Harris was an American professional wrestler, better known by his ring name Bobo Brazil. Credited with breaking down barriers of racial segregation in professional wrestling, Harris is considered one of the first successful African-American professional wrestlers.
Robert H. Friedrich, better known by the ring name Ed "Strangler" Lewis, was an American professional wrestler and trainer. During his wrestling career, which spanned four decades, Lewis was a four-time World Heavyweight Wrestling Champion and overall recognised officially as a five-time world champion. Considered to be one of the most iconic and recognizable sports stars of the 1920s, often alongside boxer Jack Dempsey and baseball player Babe Ruth, Lewis notably wrestled in over 6,000 matches and lost only 32 of them.
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Giacomo Costa was an Italian Australian professional wrestler best known by his ring name, Al Costello. Costello was the first professional wrestler to be nicknamed "The Man of a Thousand Holds" because of his innovative and very technical style.
Laurence Roy Heffernan was an Australian professional wrestler. Roy Heffernan toured all over the world, but is most famous for being one half of the original version of the tag team the Fabulous Kangaroos. The Kangaroos used an "Ultra Australian" gimmick complete with Boomerangs, bush hats and "Waltzing Matilda" as their entrance music. The first incarnation of the Kangaroos is the most famous of all the Kangaroo versions and is often credited with popularizing tag team wrestling in the late 1950s and 1960s. Costello and Heffernan are also regarded as one of the top tag teams to ever compete in professional wrestling.
Leroy Michael McGuirk was an American amateur and professional wrestler, and wrestling promoter. He was involved in professional wrestling for more than fifty years. As one of the longest surviving members of the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA), he was affiliated with the promotion from 1949 to 1982, where he was a one-time NWA World Junior Heavyweight Champion.
Francis Martin Tunney was a Canadian professional boxing and wrestling promoter, based in Toronto.
Wilbur Snyder was an American football player and professional wrestler.
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Bert Ruby was a Hungarian/American professional wrestler, professional wrestling trainer, and wrestling promoter.
Dennis A. Coralluzzo Sr. was an American professional wrestling promoter for NWA New Jersey and former president and board member of the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA).
Big Time Wrestling was a professional wrestling promotion headquartered in Detroit, Michigan in the United States.
Lawrence Robert Tillman (1909-1997) was an American professional wrestler and promoter. He competed throughout the United States and Canada, primarily within the National Wrestling Alliance territories, winning the NWA World Junior Heavyweight Championship in 1946, and promoted professional wrestling in Calgary, Canada.
Big Time Wrestling – also known as the American Wrestling Alliance (AWA) or National All-Star Wrestling – was a professional wrestling promotion headquartered in San Francisco, California in the United States. Founded by "Professor" Roy Shire (1921–1992) in 1960, the promotion emerged as one of the most profitable in the United States thanks to its "red hot angles" and "good TV". The promotion's heartland was the San Francisco Bay Area, with the Cow Palace as its core venue, but it also ran regular shows in cities including Fresno, Las Vegas, Oakland, San Jose, and Sacramento. Shire folded the promotion in 1981.
Fred Kohler Enterprises, Inc. was a company established by businessman Frederick Koch (1903–1969) – known professionally as Fred Kohler – to promote professional wrestling in Chicago, Illinois in the United States.
Albert C. Haft was a wrestler, wrestling and boxing promoter and wrestling trainer who was a prominent promoter in the United States from the late 1910s until the 1960s, running his operations primarily from Columbus, Ohio. He founded the Midwest Wrestling Alliance and was one of the founding members of the National Wrestling Alliance in 1948.
References
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Tim Hornbaker (2007). National Wrestling Alliance: The Untold Story of the Monopoly That Strangled Professional Wrestling. ECW Press. pp. 282–283. ISBN 978-1-55490-274-3.
- 1 2 3 4 5 "Meet Nabob of Gnomes: Detroit's Own Mr. Light". Detroit Free Press (via Newspapers.com). Knight Newspapers. February 1, 1959. p. 39. Retrieved January 1, 2018.
- 1 2 3 "Harry Light". WrestlingData.com. Retrieved January 1, 2018.
- 1 2 "Harry Light". FamilyTreeNow.com. Retrieved January 1, 2018.
- ↑ "Detroit". Kayfabe Memories. Retrieved January 2, 2018.
- ↑ "Ten Pounds of Gold: The history of the NWA Heavyweight Championshuip". Last Word on Pro Wrestling. December 10, 2017. Retrieved January 2, 2018.
- ↑ Television, Volume 5. Frederick A. Kugel Company. 1948. p. 22.
- ↑ John Grasso (2014). Historical Dictionary of Wrestling. Scarecrow Press. p. 8. ISBN 978-0-8108-7926-3.
- ↑ Bertrand Hébert; Pat Laprade (2005). Mad Dog: The Maurice Vachon Story. ECW Press. p. 70. ISBN 978-1-77305-065-2.
- ↑ Gordon Castelnero (2006). TV Land Detroit. University of Michigan Press. p. 7. ISBN 0-472-03124-4.
- ↑ Steven Johnson; Greg Oliver; Mike Mooneyham; J. J. Dillon (2013). The Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame: Heroes and Icons. ECW Press. p. 500. ISBN 978-1-77090-269-5.