"Cowboy" Frankie Laine wrestles Doug
Somers (with referee Tommy Young) in the short wrestling clip seen
on the opening title segment of Mid-Atlantic Championship
Wrestling. This opening of the show was seen every week by
wrestling fans from 1977-1983, making it one of the most familiar
visual cues for fans of that era.
When Mid-Atlantic Wrestling debuted its
new musical theme and opening sequence in 1977, it was a sharp
departure from the show opening Jim Crockett Promotions had used for the previous
several years, which was a montage of wrestlers and wrestling maneuvers from the
TV show. This new opening featured three distinct graphics and one
brief wrestling scene,
each one scaling down into a screen divided into four equal
segments.
The four segments were as follows:
the familiar Mid-Atlantic Wrestling
logo on a blue background
a short wrestling clip, shot in an
dimly lit arena
the title Mid-Atlantic
Championship Wrestling with a small wrestling icon
and five states that represented
the Mid-Atlantic Wrestling area, in yellow on a red background.
From the beginning, at age 15, I was
fascinated by one of these four scenes in particular, the short wrestling clip,
one wrestler cradling another for a pin, because I couldn't clearly
identify the wrestlers. At the moment I first saw it I thought it
might be Jack Brisco and Terry Funk from their NWA title match in
Miami Beach in 1975. In that match, Brisco went to apply the figure
four and Funk cradled him for the pin. In that brief opening
wrestling clip, it looked at first as though perhaps the same thing was
happening. Or maybe not.
The segment with the wrestlers only
lasts about 2-3 seconds, and is full screen for less than a second. Keep in mind, in 1977 we didn't have
VCRs yet. There was no way to replay the clip or to pause or
freeze-frame the clip so as to better examine it. All I could do was
wait until next week's show and try to get a quick look at that 3
seconds again. The scene was a dimly-lit arena
shot. And in the low-definition world of 1977, with small sets and
spotty reception, it was hard to take a good look in those three
seconds each week.
The wrestler on the mat had curly hair,
and at a quick glance looked very much like Terry Funk did when he won the NWA title
in 1975. The wrestler on one knee has his back tuned to the viewer, and
then he is cradled by the wrestler on the mat, so it was nearly
impossible to see his face. For me, at age 15 and having seen very little of
Jack Brisco in the roughly three years I had been religiously
watching wrestling on TV, it could have been Brisco as
easily as it could have been anyone else, even though the wrestler
on one knee had what appeared a horseshoe on his trunks, and I was
pretty sure from seeing him in wrestling magazines that Brisco did
not have a horseshoe on his trunks. What also had me doubting my
guess at that time, however, was the referee in the shot sure looked like Tommy
Young. And I knew Tommy Young was not the referee for the
Funk/Brisco match.
Several years later, after having the
opportunity to look at it on paused VCRs, to run it in slow motion over and over, freezing the frame
(and to have any number of people tell me that I needed to get a life
while doing so), it became clear the wrestler on one knee wasn't
being cradled when applying a figure four leg lock or a spinning toe
hold, it was clearly from a hammerlock on the arm into the cradle.
It was also now clear it wasn't Brisco and Funk.
In 1999, after first discovering
wrestling message boards on the internet, several of us speculated
on who the two could be. The transcript of that 1999 message board
thread is found in the Potpourri section of the website.
Then, when first launching the Mid-Atlantic Gateway
in 2000, I began collecting photographs and reviewing old
material I had. I came across a photograph of "Cowboy" Frankie
Laine and
saw the familiar horseshoe on his trunks and decided then he must be
the wrestler on one knee. Other than a little
transcript I once had in
the Potpourri section of the site, I had not really given this much
thought for a long while.
When the WWE started airing complete
episodes of Mid-Atlantic Wrestling, the crystal-clear digital
transfer from the master tapes allowed a much closer look at the short clip that
had originally begun airing three decades earlier. At that point it
sure looked like the wrestler on the mat was indeed Doug Somers. The
digitally captured image on the WWE transfers basically verified
both Laine and Somers as the wrestlers in the sequence.
I recently received an email from a
visitor to the website who asserted that the wrestlers in the
opening were indeed Frankie Laine and Doug Somers. I realized I still
had the original Potpourri article up with the unresolved
speculation, and decided to update the information, which led to
this article.
If there had been a contest, and
winners were announced for the first correct guess, I'd have to
award the prizes to Richard Sullivan for first guessing "Cowboy"
Frankie Laine in that Wrestling Classics message board thread from 1999, and Randy
Elrod for his more recent identification of Doug Somers.
"Cowboy" Frankie Laine and Doug Somers
were seen more times on Mid-Atlantic Wrestling than any others
wrestlers ever. The thing is, most of us were never aware it was
them.
Here is that opening theme sequence:
* The original theme music from 1977
used with this video opening was different than the more familiar
music
heard here. This combination of theme music and video ran together
from 1979-1983.