Classic wrestling doc series "Tales From the Territories" coming Oct. 4

No Dixie Wrestling?

Old UWF was entertaining. And the birthplace (if I remember correctly) of Sting and The Ultimate Warrior. Wish they had covered that.

I will watch them all but look forward the WCCW episode. The Von Erich story is still unbelievable this many years later.

My favorite guy on Midsouth was announcer Reisor Bowden.

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Mid South was produced Jim Ross, Jim Cornette, Ted DiBiase, JYD, Dr Death Steve Williams, Big Boss Man, Ernie Ladd, The Midnight Express, Buddy Landel, Mr. Wrestling II, Magnum T.A., The Rock’ n’ Roll Express, Kamala, Butch Read, Hacksaw Jim Duggan, snd numerous others.

Unreal for such a largely rural territory in the south.

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The secret to the Southern territories is that they swapped talent among themselves. Paul Orndorf, as an example, started in Florida but Eddie Graham sent him to Memphis to get him polished. He learned the basics there, then went to Mid-Atlantic (Paul in Mid-Atlantic is a trip to watch, he's thirty pounds lighter and his finisher was back flipping out of a body drop and then hitting a bridging side suplex). Then he beefed up and had a huge run in Mid-South.

You had all these guys circulating across the various promotions and picking up different styles.

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The secret to the Southern territories is that they swapped talent among themselves

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Yeah, where I live we had Georgia Championship Wrestling and while we had some regulars like Mr Wrestling II, Tommy Rich, Buzz Sawyer, Superstar, Stan Hanson and a few others we would also get some come through for a short while like Orndorf, Harley Race, and even Ric Flair occasionally.

It was a pretty cool time for the sport back then

I still don't know how Vince didn't get beat to hell or killed over his predatory, invasive practices during the territory takeovers.

He would literally call up local affiliates thousands of miles from NY-metro area and pay them boat loads of $$ NOT to air the local territory wrestling in their traditional timeslots, and instead put in WWF or something else unrelated in the slot.

Without TV, he knew most of the Territories would fold... Which theybl did.

He also essentially had a monopoly on PPV throughout the 1980s. It was unreal how dirty he got.

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Mid-South Wrestling

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Growing up in the late 70s and into the 80s in North La, that promotion was fricking legendary. Every young male knew the names of JYD, Mr. Olympia, The Grappler, Paul Orndorff, Ted DiBiase, Magnum T.A., etc.

I can still remember watching Duggan, dressed in a gorilla costume, interfere to help take the tag titles from JYD & Mr. Olympia.

Good times.

With regard to PPV, he got dirty but Crockett and Dusty had their own issues that wouldn’t have helped matters if the shows got full clearance.


Starrcade 87 and Bunkhouse Stampede 88 were subpar shows. Jim Cornette jokes that the latter actually being shown widely would have been more damaging to the product than it losing out to Royal Rumble on USA.


Vince blocking PPV caused a lot of cash flow issues for Crockett but he and his team were making a lot of stupid moves such as buying up territories in Florida, Central States, UWF, etc, and doing tons of TV tapings to fulfill those contracts in hopes of selling ads rather than doing arena shows in the Carolinas and Virginia which would draw big money.

It was pointed out that running Gaffney, SC, may only gross about $50K but you don’t have the high building costs or transportation costs of running there that you would on a $100K show in Los Angeles.

I think Vince picked his spots on a lot of that.

Verne Gagne and Bob Geigel weren’t going to do that kind of thing.

Harley Race, who had money in the Missouri territory though? He supposedly pulled a gun on Hogan in that timeframe when they came to promote in Kansas City or St Louis.