National Wrestling Alliance (eBook)

The Origins of a Wrestling Monopoly During the 1940s, professional wrestling was predominantly controlled by two shrewd promoters: Tom Packs of St. Louis and Paul Bowser of Boston. Driven by the prospects of making money and increasing their share of the market in the United States and Canada, they presided over a jagged period in the sport's history. Their influence was amplified due to their personal management of the NationalWrestling Association (NWA) and American Wrestling Association (AWA) champions, and it was widely accepted that Packs's Bill Longson and Bowser's Frank Sexton were the top two heavyweights in the business. In many regards, Bowser's status was secondary to Packs's because of the latter's connections to the leaders of the NWA, an impressive gallery of state athletic commission members. The NWA authorized Packs to supervise the direction of their prized championship, which dated back to 1930, and the St. Louis promoter happily seized all of the power that came with such an endorsement. Having officially booked the champion since 1939, he was the catalyst behind the title reigns of acclaimed wrestlers Lou Thesz, Bronko Nagurski, Ray Steele, and Sandor Szabo. Known as an assertive capitalist, Packs was respected for turning St. Louis into one of the finest wrestling cities in the world. His amazing success, coupled with a czar-like attitude, infuriated many of his fellow Midwestern promoters, and by the early 1940s, a rival movement began to take hold in the region. The outsiders each may have been slow in devising an effective cohesion, but their passion to sustain their operations without having to rely on Packs to send talent or his champion Longson was truly a motivating factor. Orville Brown was the first major player to declare his independence. A hardworking family man and up-and-coming wrestler, he took a job in Kansas City as a booking agent for promoter George Simpson in 1940. Although he had a farm in the Columbus, Ohio, area and worked regularly for Al Haft, Brown was eager to return to his home state. He wanted in on the business end of wrestling in addition to holding a claim to the heavyweight championship, and on June 13, 1940, he beat Bobby Bruns at the Memorial Hall to capture the Midwest Wrestling Association 'world' title. As the territory's principal fan-favorite for the decade to follow, Brown drew great crowds for his matches against dynamic opponents. Soon thereafter, Brown's booking enterprises expanded to St. Joseph, Topeka, and Wichita. Wichita, incidentally, was the headquarters of Billy Sandow and Maxwell Baumann, a brother tandem who fronted the second group to stray from Packs's syndicate. While Sandow and Baumann had ill feelings toward Brown for running opposition in their town, it was their dislike of Packs's tyranny that spurred their actions in January 1941. Using a colorless derivative of the National Wrestling Association name, the siblings started the National Wrestling 'Alliance,' a sanctioning body under the control of a handful of businessmen. To give their immature promotion footing, they gave Packs's champion Ray Steele until February 9 to consent to a match with Roy Dunn, the superstar of their faction, or be stripped of his title. The threat, limited to clubs in Kansas, wasn't overwhelming. Dunn's credentials were respectable, but he had had a tough time making his mark in professional wrestling, and lacked the flamboyance and connections to rise to the top.