You were in a great area for wrestling! In the NE we pretty much got WWF and that was it.
Crockett ran a good show, but you are right: when the territories died and Turner bought into Crockett and it became WCW, it was never the same. WCCW in the early 80s was on fire, as was Bill Watt’s Mid South and later UWF (which was great wrestling).
In the summer of 1986, I think, or maybe 1985, as WWF wrestling was exploding, a UHF channel in the NY area (U68) ran wrestling from NWA, Mid South/UWF, Memphis, and WCW every weekday at 7pm. For a 17 year old fan like me, it was the best summer ever since I had only rarely seen those territories, and relied on the magazines and their fanciful backstories for my fill of wrestling outside of the WWF.
I have said many times that one problem with wrestling today is that they try too hard to be funny. These days, WWE and TNA just try to write comedy skits for their charactrers, and it’s too deliberate.
Back in the day, it was more that the characters were funny and therefore the situations were funny. Gino Hernandez, ‘the Handsome Halfbreed from Highland Park,’ insisting to the fans that hated his guts that he was ‘your champion!’ was priceless. It was naturally funny. He didn’t need a script or a contrived storyline to get that across - he did it on the strength of his character.
Sorry to bring up Gino, who too died in suspicious circumstances almost 20 years ago now.
Anyway, that distinction seems lost of promoters these days - now it’s characters doing funny things (often not very funny), as opposed to funny characters just doing things that are funny. Know what I mean?
I do & I miss the old days dearly. When I was uh...younger, the Boogie Woogie Man could always get a laugh out of me running around acting crazy calling Tony Schiavone “Tony Sha-van-toe”
Growing up in the ‘70s in central Virginia, I religiously watched Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling, out of (I think) Greensboro, NC. Chief Wahoo McDaniel, Rufus R. “Freight Train” Jones, a young Ric Flair, and Ricky Steamboat and Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka, Paul Orndorff, Ole and Arn Andersen...to me, pro wrestling still has never gotten any better than seeing those guys go at it in some crappy Greensboro TV studio in front of 100 people. I gave up on it in the early ‘90s.
}:-)4