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LOCAL WRESTLING ON TV (MOSTLY 50's-60's-70's)

gregg75

gregg75

Local wrestling was big in my area in the 60's. On Saturday afternoons one channel (WTVM 9) had about 90 minutes of it from the city auditorium (I believe it was live)! You could always stir up an argument in school as to whether it was FAKE or not. Many were convinced that it was the real thing.

I suspect it was very easy to produce and probably quite profitable as well. Here's my questions:
Did the station get a part of the admission price?
Was this put on by the station or was the promoter simply BUYING AIR TIME?
When did the bottom fall out for local wrestling?

I also remember in Atlanta didn't WTBS have about 6 hours of wrestling on Saturday nights in the early 80's....................or was it on 36, 46 or 69? Seems like it was on two channels at one time.
 
Channel 11 in Pittsburgh (WPXI, then WIIC) ran it on Saturdays throughout the 60's and into the early 70's.
Done live from their studios, which were so tiny at the time it is kind of amazing they were able to pull that
off. Bill Cardille was the host, perhaps the busiest guy in local TV at the time as he also hosted Chiller Theater,
worked as a booth announcer and a weather guy. Former Pittsburgh Pirate great Pie Traynor co-hosted for a
time (though he was getting so old, he is best remembered for losing his train of thought in the middle of
live spots). I think the ratings were kept high by the fact that Bruno Sammartino, the longest running champion,
was a Pittsburgh local.

I remember they used to give an address at the end of the show where you could send a self-addressed, stamped
envelope to get tickets. I don't recall that they charged for those (though they could probably accommodate less
than 40 people on folding chairs). By 1975 or so they had ended the local production and were running syndicated
wrestling from some other city (my brother got his self-addressed stamped envelope sent back to him saying they
no longer hosted matches in their studio). They did have a number of local sponsors.

Who can? Ameri-can! American Heating...
 
gregg75 said:
Local wrestling was big in my area in the 60's. On Saturday afternoons one channel (WTVM 9) had about 90 minutes of it from the city auditorium (I believe it was live)! You could always stir up an argument in school as to whether it was FAKE or not. Many were convinced that it was the real thing.

I suspect it was very easy to produce and probably quite profitable as well. Here's my questions:
Did the station get a part of the admission price?
Was this put on by the station or was the promoter simply BUYING AIR TIME?
When did the bottom fall out for local wrestling?

I also remember in Atlanta didn't WTBS have about 6 hours of wrestling on Saturday nights in the early 80's....................or was it on 36, 46 or 69? Seems like it was on two channels at one time.
Click to expand...

Ch. 69 had wrestling from about 8 PM to 2 or 3 AM on Saturday nights in the early '80s.

I feel certain that the station got paid by the promoter for the air time, but I'm not sure the station got a cut of the ticket sales. It's somewhat complicated; strictly-for-broadcast shows with studio audiences such as "The Price Is Right" or Oprah are not, by law, allowed to charge admission. But an event that a station or network goes in and picks up, such as the Grand Ole Opry or an NFL game, can and does charge admission, although in that case I doubt if the station or network carrying it gets any percentage of the ticket sales.

Likewise, if the wrestling show you mentioned originated at the studio, tickets would be free. WRAL used to make a big thing of that when telling viewers how to obtain tickets for the Wednesday-night taping.

Local wrestling shows pretty much died, I think, when Vince McMahon obtained a virtual monopoly on the business.
 
Perhaps the most notorious in-studio wrestling show would have to be from WMC-TV (NBC) channel 5 of Memphis. Jerry Lawler notwithstanding, it's the one I've seen the most footage of. :)
 
KML-224 said:
Perhaps the most notorious in-studio wrestling show would have to be from WMC-TV (NBC) channel 5 of Memphis. Jerry Lawler notwithstanding, it's the one I've seen the most footage of. :)
Click to expand...
...actually, I'd say the most famous local wrestling series would be the AWA All-Star Wrestling that was produced for a couple of decades in the studios of WTCN-TV/11 Minneapolis-St. Paul, moving to KMSP/9 in the big network shift of 1979 in that market. The AWA show was syndicated from Chicago to San Francisco and Winnipeg to Phoenix, certainly the largest coverage that a local wrestling show ever got...
 
In Louisville, the NWA/AWA Nick Gulas & Roy Welch organization held sway in both the live and televised wrestling scenes. We got the studio wrestlng from Memphis over the years on WAVE, WLKY and later WDRB-TV.

I believe the AWA and NWA had a contract for 48 Tuesday night live cards per year at the old Louisville Gardens downtown arena, capacity around 7,000...once in a while, they'd try Freedom Hall (18,865) when The Gardens wasn't available.
 
Local/regional wrestling shows usually aired on a barter basis - stations were given the show for free, provided they gave up a few minutes of commercial time to promote the upcoming card at the local coliseum/armory/whatever.
 
Regional wrestling still exists (kind of). Here in Tampa we have "Florida Championship Wrestling", airing on Bright House Sports Network (cable) in Tampa Bay and Orlando. It's owned by WWE, and used primarily for talent development.
 
FreddyE1977 said:
Channel 11 in Pittsburgh (WPXI, then WIIC) ran it on Saturdays throughout the 60's and into the early 70's.
Done live from their studios, which were so tiny at the time it is kind of amazing they were able to pull that
off. Bill Cardille was the host, perhaps the busiest guy in local TV at the time as he also hosted Chiller Theater,
worked as a booth announcer and a weather guy. Former Pittsburgh Pirate great Pie Traynor co-hosted for a
time (though he was getting so old, he is best remembered for losing his train of thought in the middle of
live spots). I think the ratings were kept high by the fact that Bruno Sammartino, the longest running champion,
was a Pittsburgh local.

I remember they used to give an address at the end of the show where you could send a self-addressed, stamped
envelope to get tickets. I don't recall that they charged for those (though they could probably accommodate less
than 40 people on folding chairs). By 1975 or so they had ended the local production and were running syndicated
wrestling from some other city (my brother got his self-addressed stamped envelope sent back to him saying they
no longer hosted matches in their studio). They did have a number of local sponsors.

Who can? Ameri-can! American Heating...
Click to expand...

The subject of local Pittsburgh TV wrestling complete with pics of vintage WIIC equipment was featured in the Charles J. Jacques 1984 book "Goodbye Westview Goodbye". Its been awhile since I had read the book but I remember the part that had more/less said that West View Amusement Park was having serious money woes in the 60's & 70's and really the only thing that had brought the crowds to the park back then was those TV wrestling matches. The part I don't remember was if they were done live or on tape from West View.

West View ended up closing in 1977 a victim of those money woes, changing times and of course, the competition from Kennywood.
 
Memfus Rasslin' actually started on WHBQ (Then ABC) 13 and moved to WMC some time in the 70's. When it was on WMC nothing pre-empted it. Saturday morning cartoons were either delayed or dropped, and when NBC carried Major League Baseball, WMC would join it in progress many times after rasslin' was over. But that was typical for WMC in the 70's and 80's to pre-empt NBC programming and do their own thing.
 
Michael Bayus said:
What about Lord Athil Laten, CKLW?
Don't know if I am spelling it right.
Click to expand...
...you may want to check out http://www.canoe.ca/SlamWrestling/layton.html toward that question, Michael...

...then there's Angelo Poffo's International Championship Wrestling (ICW) promotion, which taped their TV show in Lexington, Kentucky at WTVQ/62 (and hung around there long enough to see the station shift channels to 36). The ICW was an "outlaw" opposition promotion that ran its shows (both TV and house) in pockets of Memphis, WWA and AWA territories between Knoxville and Green Bay. ICW would use talent (Ronnie Garvin, Bob and Barry Orton, Bob Roop) that were momentarily on the outs with the "official" territory promotions. I was at one of their house shows in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, at Lourdes High School (one of the spots the AWA frequented four times a year in the mid-'70s) circa '81 - and they were in such rickety shape the ring actually collapsed in the middle of the main event!...a lot of info on that promotion, including info on their WTVQ tapings, can be found on the web at http://www.freewebs.com/icwpoffouniverse/...
 
My first contact with the "sport" was "Live Atlanta Wrestling" (with Ed Caperal (sometimes Freddie Miller)) on Saturday nights in the dingy WLW-A studio. I was an impressionable child, and this stuff was new to me. (Freddie Blassie was in full swing back then.) We would sometimes go the matches at the downtown Armory on Friday nights - not to see the wrestlers - but to see the people who went to see the wrestlers - especially the old ladies (quiet little grandmas who read their Bible every night, standing on their chairs screaming, "Kill 'em!" "Throw him on the ground!" "He ain't nothin'!" "Murder him!" etc. :D) Some even refused to believe it was fake when we saw Sputnik Monroe pull a little capsule from his pants and dab red stuff on his forehead to look like blood (I have a picture somewhere.)

My next "contact" was more personal. Years later, while visiting friend at WTBS's old studios (at the time of their wrestling taping), I walked down the narrow hallway, turned the corner and slammed into Andre the Giant - my face into his navel. He looked down at me, said "Sorry" and moved on.

What were we talking about? :D
 
Someone mentioned local wrestling still happening in Tampa. It's alive and well in Cleveland, too...Sort of. The regional sports network Sports Time Ohio carries "Cleveland All Pro Wrestling". It's bad. I mean, really bad. It's done in what looks like an old grade school auditorium, on cell phone quality video. Everything else on STO is pretty good quality (I think they're owned by the local NBC affiliate, WKYC), but CAPW is horrible.
 
...one outfit that I caught operating in Dallas-Ft. Worth about nine years ago called itself Professional Championship Wrestling (PCW); they had their weekly show on KTXA/21 there. It appeared to have been taped inside a vacant warehouse of some sort near the Six Flags amusement park. I looked for their website and it appears that whoever ran PCW turned it into a developmental spot for WWE for a while and is now concentrating on MMA rather than old-school pro wrestling...
 
Regarding Pittsburgh's Studio Wrestling ...

First of all, I think there is artwork showing "crowds" one still may find at WPXI's studios, or at least had been there when I did a short stint as a weekend news writer in the 1990s.

Not long ago, KDKA-2 followed Bruno Sammartino back to Italy. Sammartino also has been honored by Allegheny County Council, whose members include former wrestlers "Jumpin' Johnny" DeFazio and Chuck Martoni.

Bill Cardille still is on the air in Pittsburgh, middays on WJAS-1320, doing nostalgic music.
 
Here in the Maritimes, the Atlantic (later World) Grand Prix promotion taped their shows at ATV's Moncton station, CKCW-TV into the early/mid 80s, when they decided to tape them at the Cocagne (NB) Arena (apart from at least one TV taping that I'm aware of at the Amherst Stadium). As WGPW, the promotion used Bon Jovi's Livin' on a Prayer as their theme music as shown at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fY1B6hzCPH0 . These days, the CKCW building is mainly used for newsgathering and ad sales, with part of the building now being used for the regional dairy marketing organization Milk Maritimes.
 
KeyTimes950 said:
Bill Cardille still is on the air in Pittsburgh, middays on WJAS-1320, doing nostalgic music.
Click to expand...

Yep. Chilly Billy still going strong on the radio at age 81!
 
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