Return to the Mid-Atlantic Gateway
Return to Smoke Filled
Rooms
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"Time slips away and leaves you with
nothing but boring stories of glory days."
-Bruce
Springsteen
July 14, 1984 - my 23rd birthday.
After a day with my family, I settled
in to watch Gordon Solie and Ole Anderson host World Championship
Wrestling out of Atlanta, what over the years had become a
highly anticipated weekly ritual. Instead, on that fateful day,
Vince McMahon strolled onto the WTBS set, took the microphone from
long time Georgia sideman Freddie Miller, and the wrestling world as
we knew it changed forever. Black Saturday.
Nine months later, in the spring of
1985, Tony Schiavone stepped out onto the same studio floor with
long time Crockett Promotions television broadcaster David Crockett
and welcomed us back to the major leagues of professional wrestling.
A new day had dawned. NWA wrestling was back on the Superstation.
Years before, in the early-80s, I moved
from North Carolina to live and work in the state of Alabama,
hundreds of miles away from Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling and
Jim Crockett Promotions that I loved so much. After Black Saturday,
I had lost all connections to the brand of wrestling I had grown up
with. Mid-Atlantic Wrestling on Saturday afternoons and Georgia
Championship Wrestling on Saturday nights had been a special part of
my weekends for as long as I could remember. So when Crockett
Promotions acquired the wrestling slots on WTBS in Atlanta in 1985,
it was like having them both back in one sweet moment. And
this new product was getting ready to set the country on fire.
This also marked the return of Crockett
wrestling to the cozy confines of a television studio, something
also sentimental to me. From the late 1950s through the summer of
1983, Crockett Promotions had taped wrestling in various TV studios
across the Mid-Atlantic area, primarily in the studios of WRAL-TV in
Raleigh NC. In the summer of 1983, Crockett moved TV tapings out of
the studio to small arenas. Crockett's return to the studio, this
time in Atlanta, was a nostalgic turn.
In 2004, I began work on a website
called "The Glory Days" dedicated to documenting that wonderful
period from 1985-1988, the last four years of Jim Crockett
Promotions. While my favorite period in wrestling will always be the
mid-to-late 1970s, the Crockett/TBS era ranks a sentimental close
2nd. And there is no arguement that some of the TV that came out of
that era was some of the very best TV wrestling ever.
The Four Horsemen and J.J. Dillon, The
Midnight Express, Magnum TA, Buddy Landel, The Varsity Club, Barry
Windham, The American Dream, the Russian Nightmare, Mulkiemania, the
Great American Bash, the Crockett Cup, Starrcade, it's all going to
be there on the Glory Days, week after week, month after month. The
angles, the matches, the interviews, the memories.
Join me as we tell old stories of Glory
Days.
This article is a modified version of
the introduction to the now defunct Glory Days website, published in February of
2004.
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