When Bill Watts made his very own Louisiana Purchase in 1979, it was a brash, take-no-prisoners move. It would prove an apt introduction to what became a promotion known for punching above its weight with a hard-hitting style.
Until that point Louisiana had, along with Oklahoma and Mississippi, been part of Leroy McGuirk’s Tri-State promotion, in which Watts was a junior partner. McGuirk had built-up the territory despite having been blinded decades earlier, relying on listening to the crowd to judge which wrestlers were getting over.
Watts was by this point 16 years into a career highlighted by turning against Bruno Sammartino and headlining Madison Square Garden for a three-match series just than three years after his debut. While wrestling, he paid close attention to the approaches and styles of promoters such as Verne Gagne, Roy Shire and Eddie Graham.
Watts would come to use this education, particularly Graham’s emphasis of maintaining credibility in the product, when he split with McGuirk and took over part of the territory to launch his own promotion, Mid South Wrestling. In time, he would buy McGuirk out completely.
As Ted DiBiase explained to FSM, Watts had a management style all of his own. “Bill knew talent and knew how to groom talent. [He] was a great coach and teacher when helping his talent become great wrestlers. He knew how to pull the best out of you. Often times, like a Vince Lombardi, it was through intimidation and yelling, but it worked, [though] Bill could be a real bully at times.”
Mid South wrestlers certainly had a tough time of it. The road schedule was brutal: not only were the territory’s towns far apart, but the scheduling of the shows made more of a criss-cross pattern than a circuit (Jim Cornette was at one point driving around 9,000 miles a month) and the roads in the region were notoriously poorly maintained.
Grapplers also had to follow a tough set of rules. Babyfaces and heels being seen together in public was strictly forbidden. Wrestlers had to be at the building long before the show started and had to remain until the last match ended, in part to provide protection for main event heels if needed.
Watts held back two weeks of pay for each grappler to be handed over only when they left the territory after giving adequate notice — minus any fines for violations. Dewey “The Missing Link” Robertson later noted he was fined $500 for missing a match, $60 for breaking a ringside table without permission, and even charged $80 for what he had assumed was a complimentary promotional jacket.
Most famously, there was a long-standing Watts rule that any wrestler who lost a barfight to a member of the public would be immediately fired. Whether any performer actually received such a punishment is hotly debated, but it certainly made wrestlers aware of Watts’ desire that they maintain a public persona of being a tough guy.
That said, writing in his own autobiography “Hacksaw”, Jim Duggan noted that “for a guy who was such a forceful boss, Bill Watts was actually receptive to the guys who had ideas.” And for those who didn’t, Watts had plenty of ideas of his own, none more successful than that of the Junkyard Dog.
Sylvester Ritter had debuted in 1977, working the Tennessee circuits before making his name in Stampede as “Big Daddy” Ritter. Upon entering the Mid-South era he was renamed from a lyric in the popular song “Bad Bad Leroy Brown” which went: “badder than old King Kong, meaner than a junkyard dog.”
Originally the Junk Yard Dog gimmick was literal, with him coming to the ring wheeling a barrow full of scrap iron and often taking his fallen opponent out the same way. While this aspect was later toned down, Watts went full blast on JYD’s push, noting his immense popularity with African American fans. Promoting a black performer as the number one star was almost unheard of in the territorial era, particularly in the Mid-South region where racism was often rife, particularly among corrupt public officials responsible for licensing and local promotion.
JYD got over big time, especially at the weekly shows in New Orleans where he was a regular and reliable draw for around four years. Rowdy fans, who turned particularly violent if heels prevailed, would modify a popular chant from the city’s sports scene, asking “Who dat think they can beat the Dog?”
The television act was refined with the still-novel addition of ring music, Queen’s “Another One Bites The Dust”, an appropriate choice given JYD would consistently win bouts in a couple of minutes and sell little, much like the later Goldberg streak. One local promoter who booked him in a 20-minute draw to test his in-ring ability to work was promptly threatened with firing by Watts and informed that “proving” a wrestler was unable to work was completely missing the point.
Undeniable proof that, despite his lack of polished ring skills, JYD had the mythical “it factor” came in a feud with the Fabulous Freebirds, a Shield-style three man combo of Michael Hayes, Terry Gordy and Buddy Roberts. At the conclusion of a hair vs hair bout, the Freebirds went after JYD partner Buck Robley’s locks with what was billed as “hair removal cream” but it somehow wound up in JYD’s eyes. The ambiguity about the Freebirds’ intentions was a vital element of the booking: Watts believed that for credibility’s sake, if it was clear the heels had meant to go for JYD’s eyes, it would make no sense that they kept their jobs.
JYD was billed as having been blinded and remained indoors at home for the next few weeks to sell the injury, an aspect copied by ECW with the Sandman in 1994. Fans were even told that the injury had not only ended his career, but had even meant he was unable to witness the birth of his first child (a daughter, who really was born at this point.) Some fans were so distraught they even began mailing cash into the Mid South office to help out in the same way they might do with a work colleague.
The Freebirds appeared on TV and not only refused to apologise for the “accident” but outright mocked JYD, with Hayes wearing dark glasses and a cane. The crowd was so infuriated that an angle to be shot at JYD’s first public appearance, billed as a retirement ceremony, had to be cut short after a fan rushed the ring with a drawn gun pointed at Hayes. To make things worse, JYD was unable to talk down the would-be attacker as his supposed injury meant he couldn’t logically know about the weapon. Fortunately arena security were able to subdue the man.
The story inevitably led to JYD coming out of retirement to fight Hayes at the Louisiana Superdome in a dog collar bout, the logic being the chain would help him track down his opponent despite his vision problems. The resulting crowd was reported at 36,000 and though somewhere around 30,000 may have been a more accurate figure, both the attendance and the ticket revenue figures were among the biggest in wrestling history at the time. It was all the more amazing as not only was Mid-South not considered a big money territory, but Hayes was just 21 and both wrestlers were just a couple of years into their careers.
Although the most successful, this was by no means the first Mid-South show at the Superdome, the home of the New Orleans Saints football team. With the regular venue of the Downtown Municipal Auditorium holding only around 8,000 fans, and no large arena in the area, the Superdome was the only real option for the climatic matches in particularly hot feuds.
Following an experimental debut in 1976, the promotion began running the stadium several times a year from 1978, breaking the 20,000 attendance barrier nine times. It wasn’t until 1985 that crowds at the venue regularly dipped below the 15,000 barrier as the promotion declined. The Superdome, rebuilt after damage from both the 2005 Hurricane Katrina and its subsequent use as a refugee center, will of course house WrestleMania XXX next year, where the 34-year record held by JYD and Hayes will finally fall.
The ability to draw such large crowds wasn’t just impressive because of the relatively small population of New Orleans (compared to other regions’ wrestling capitals), but because it meant Mid-South television had successfully defied the “rules” of how wrestling broadcasts had operated for the past 25 years. The conventional wisdom was that TV should consist of one-sided squash matches, with clashes between stars saved exclusively for the live arenas.
Mid-South instead regularly featured headliners facing one another: given the relatively small population in the region, Watts believed it was more important to use big matches to attract viewers than it was to avoid giving away too much for free. It certainly seemed to do the trick, with the show in some markets reportedly attracting as many as half of all viewers watching TV at that specific time.
It should be noted that although viewers saw stars and rivals wrestle, they rarely saw conclusive resolutions on television. Indeed, many main event matches went off air mid-bout, something that was partly designed to avoid top stars being seen to lose, and partly because Watts felt it unrealistic that matches should always finish right around the time the broadcast was scheduled to finish.
That’s not to say matches were the sole focus of the show. As Watts wrote in a memo to staff that was reprinted in Jim Cornette’s Midnight Express record book, “Your interviews many times are more important than the TV bout… in every gimmick bout it is necessary to 1. Explain the bout [and] 2. SHOW THE GIMMICK, ie the dog collar buckled to the throat and pulling on it, [for a] taped fists [bout] the fists should be taped, [for] come dressed as you are, dress that way, AND SO ON!”
As Duggan recalled, “For Bill Watts, you weren’t just going to do one generic interview — you were going to do one for every city you were going to, and you had to get across the story of the match…. And Watts ran a tight ship — if you didn’t get your points across well enough, he’d have you do the interview over. And over. And over…”
Another element of the TV booking that Watts was particular keen on — and something that was later a key part of Paul Heyman’s ECW — was the idea that different feuds should blend into and influence one another, rather than the different tiers of talent having little interaction. This was particularly clear when one well-remembered angle led into another in 1984.
Magnum TA was a young babyface who had been mentored by local veteran Mr Wrestling 2. The pair had won the tag titles together but began experiencing tension until, in a title defense against the recently-debuted Midnight Express, the masked man walked out mid-match, making the championship loss inevitable. The treachery was worsened by the fact that the stips of the match meant the losers would be whipped 10 times by the victors. Wrestling 2 refused to return to take his share of the whipping, with Magnum agreeing to take all ten shots with the strap until Terry Taylor volunteered to step in and share the punishment. (This part of the angle, in a slightly modified form, was rehashed in ECW where it played a key role in getting Tommy Dreamer over as a tough guy to the cynical fans.)
The Midnight Express, made up of Dennis Condrey and Bobby Eaton had previously been singles stars in Memphis but had come to Mid South as part of a talent trade in which Watts also picked up the established team of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Express, young manager Jim Cornette, and Bill Dundee who, although too small for Watts’ tastes, was given the booking role.
Watts’ picks from Memphis were largely based on a realisation that he needed to do what the Memphis crew crudely described as “booking more blowjobs”: in other words, to widen his roster of tough, athletic-looking grapplers to add more good looking young babyfaces who would attract younger female fans, who in turn gave young males more reason to attend live shows. With Memphis picking up an inexperienced Rick Rude, Jim Neidhart, and Masa Ito and Hacksaw Higgins on the other side of the trade, it was described as one of the few times somebody got the better of Jerry Jarrett in a deal.
Watts put Cornette, Eaton and Condrey together to form what became one of the biggest drawing tag teams of the decade. That record began almost immediately when, the week after taking the titles from Magnum and Wrestling 2, Cornette held a party on television to celebrate. As was inevitable when a cake appeared on TV in the era, Cornette wound up face-first in the icing.
Although that set up a Midnights-R’n’Rs feud, this would come some months down the line. Instead the immediate disagreement came between Cornette and Watts, who took great delight in showing a replay of the cake incident. That led to a physical confrontation in which Watts slapped Cornette. In a later interview, Cornette and the Midnights attacked Watts and left him on the floor in his own blood.
Not only did Watts vow to come out of retirement to seek revenge, but he sought the help of the Junk Yard Dog — or rather Stagger Lee. JYD was barred from the promotion for 90 days as a stipulation after losing an earlier bout to Mr Wrestling 2 (the finish playing into the slow-burning heel turn) and, just as he had done in a previous angle, returned under a mask, taking the name from another popular folk song.
The tag bout was booked to take place in 15 towns over the next five weeks under the banner “The Last Stampede”, with the same stipulations in each venue: either Stagger Lee would have to unmask (which would mean a permanent ban for JYD when he was revealed to have breached the stipulation) or Cornette would be forced to wear a dress. The latter result happened every night in what was undoubtedly the most successful run of matches in the territory’s history. On one day alone, the feud drew sell-out crowds in Oklahoma City and Tulsa, setting gate records and leaving several thousand fans turned away.
Cornette alone made more than $4,500 that week, compared with a standard weekly take of $300 in Memphis the previous year. As he recalled in the Midnight Express book, the money was the main reason he rethought his initial reaction to the Tulsa bout:
“It was Bill Watts’ hometown, so while every Mid South crowd was rowdy, this was the most chaotic, and inebriated, I had ever seen. I remember thinking at ringside that if we won the match, we would never have gotten out of there alive, and as it was, I promised myself that if we made it back to the locker room without serious injury, I was quitting the wrestling business and going home.”
While such heat was partly down to the type of fans that Mid-South attracted, it was also likely the result of Watts’ intentional efforts to keep the business as credible as possible while remaining entertaining. He liked to have a logical explanation for even the strangest quirks of pro wrestling, once commentating on a match where Jim Cornette bumped for a dropkick that clearly missed and immediately telling the story that the sissy Cornette had fainted in fright the moment he saw the kick coming.
In another much-repeated story, Watts was asked how, if a masked grappler’s identity was a secret, the promotion’s management knew to whom it should make the purse money check payable. He explained that the wrestler concerned would simply nominate a post office box and would receive a money order payable to the bearer.
Promoting legitimacy became particularly important to Watts in 1985 when, at the peak of the WrestleMania boom among mainstream media, the show 20-20 “revealed” how wrestling matches really worked. Watts responded with a two part video series titled “Punishment In Pro Wrestling” made up of slow-motion clips of what were billed as example of how brutal wrestling moves could be. This was true, if a little misleading: the clips in question were actually incidents where wrestlers had mistakenly connected with more force than intended.
One of the more outlandish examples of this approach came in a segment where Jim Ross described seeing a chairshot by Don Muraco on Ricky Steamboat on WWF television. Ross disgustedly noted that Muraco hit Steamboat very lightly and that the chair appeared to be a cheap wooden affair that had been pre-sawn to ensure a smooth disintegration. Without outright saying it, Ross implied that this was some sort of scam by the WWF to fool the fans rather than allow the “real” violence that took place in Mid-South.
The promotional attacks continued as Mid-South joined most major territories in falling prey to talent raids by the expanding WWF. Watts re-aired old footage of wrestlers who’d made the leap, showing them in losing efforts (often to current Mid South stars) and even redubbing commentary to give a more negative impression. That tactic was never more evident than when the Junk Yard Dog left for the WWF without giving notice, simply failing to turn up to advertised main events. The TV commentary accused JYD of having fled the promotion because he was scared of his opponent, Butch Reed.
Despite the knocks, Watts tried his hardest to replace JYD as an African American star but soon found that his success had been as much about intangible charisma as it was his skin color. While the likes of Reed were at least credible attempts at a substitute, later candidates for the role appeared more and more desperate, including the likes of Eddie “Snowman” Crawford, who failed to really get over despite Watts bringing in Muhammad Ali to be in his corner for a Superdome show, and George ‘Master Gee’ Wells, better known nationally for a three minute loss to Jake Roberts at WrestleMania 2.
That’s not to say Mid-South collapsed upon the Dog’s departure: in fact 1984 and 85 were arguable the promotion’s peak, just with more of an ensemble cast than a super babyface headliner. The Midnight Express moved on to feud with the Rock ‘n’ Roll Express, while Jim Duggan turned babyface to feud with former partner Ted DiBiase. After a series of stipulation bouts and an angle with a “best dressed man” contest, the pair clashed in a memorably elaborate street fight rules match inside a steel cage, with a coal miner’s glove atop a pole at one corner, both men clad in tuxedos, and the loser leaving town.
In turn, DiBiase became a babyface himself in one of the best remembered episodes of wrestling television ever when he was scheduled to challenge Ric Flair for the NWA title in a rare TV bout. Babyface Dick Murdoch demanded DiBiase step aside and give him the shot and, upon DiBiase’s refusal, slammed his head into the ring post, busting him open. Despite the injury, DiBiase came out for the match and came close to victory before being counted out — at which point Murdoch returned to ringside and delivered a brainbuster suplex on the floor, putting DiBiase out for several weeks.
1985 also marked the first national exposure for Mid-South, ironically thanks to a rivalry between other promoters. As part of his expansion, Vince McMahon had engineered a secretive buyout of Georgia Championship Wrestling and took over its Saturday evening slot on the national cable channel WTBS, much to the disgust of most long-time viewers.
As station owner Ted Turner and McMahon fell out, Turner began looking for other options and created a Sunday evening slot for Watts, with whom he planned to co-promote live shows. Although Mid-South was only on WTBS for 13 weeks, and was simply a re-run of the group’s local television on a four-week delay, it was not just the highest rated of the three wrestling shows on the station, but was often the most watched program of any kind on cable TV. Unfortunately for Watts, the partnership ended when Mid-Atlantic’s Jim Crockett agreed to pay one million dollars to buy out the WWF’s slot as long as Turner made it the sole wrestling programming provider.
It was a major turning point for Mid-South, which now had to watch as Crockett used the national exposure to become the main challenger to McMahon and the clear number two promotion. Watts responded by launching his own bid to expand outside his own territory, changing the promotion name to the less regionalised Universal Wrestling Federation; replacing local lead announcer Boyd Pierce with Jim Ross (ironically, because the latter had a less ‘Southern’ accent); moving tapings from the tiny Irish McNeill’s Boys’ Club to full-sized arenas; and buying up television slots around the country so that he could sell syndicated advertising as well as promoting shows.
Despite these ambitions, the UWF was only really successful in branching out to Texas where it worked in partnership with Houston promoter Paul Boesch, and in opposition to the Von Erich clan in Dallas, not just running shows in the area, but taking away talent including John Tatum, the Missing Link, the Freebirds, Missy Hyatt and booker Ken Mantell.
As Missy Hyatt explained to FSM, the raids came at a price: guaranteed contracts rather than the tradition of paying based on the box office takings. ” Within one year, Bill Watts lost Magnum TA, Krusher Kruschev, Rock N Roll xpress, Midnight Express, Jim Cornette and Terry Taylor [to Crockett]. All of those names made Bill Watts a fortune and the same success was duplicated from 1985 to 1987 for Jim Crockett Promotions. Would a guaranteed contract have prevented those names from going to Jim Crockett? The answer is yes. A guaranteed contract of x amount of dollars will usually beat the uncertainty of being paid on the gate or a verbal guarantee with no time table on how long a person’s services would be needed by the promotion.
“When we left Fritz’s World Class Championship Wrestling for UWF, it was for a guaranteed contract and to work in a bigger playing field. WCCW paid decently, had short drives, the wrestlers were local celebrities, and you slept in your own bed on most nights. The crowds were easier to manipulate, rather than work a physically demanding style. The management was laid back… Bill needed to use the contracts to cause a talent exodus from WCCW.”
In the Monday Night Wars era, it was often argued that guaranteed contracts removed the incentive for wrestlers to work hard in trying to attract fans. Hyatt explains that this wasn’t an issue in the UWF. ” The guaranteed contracts did not make the talent lazier. Considering the demands of Bill Watts and the fans on what they expected in the product, a lack of work ethic would cause you to be a target to be screamed at by Bill Watts. It would cause any booker to not put much stock in creating any plans for the person.”
Although the contracts helped attract talent, they became something of a millstone when business started to decline rapidly in 1986 and 1987. It’s often said that the UWF was killed by problems in the oil industry, which devastated the local economy in the Mid-South region. Watts recalls first realising things were bad when a wrestler with a habit of hiring escorts discovered that market had dried up, noting that if you couldn’t find a prostitute in New Orleans, things were really bad.
The economic decline wasn’t the sole reason for UWF’s own woes however: it wasn’t so much the drop in business that was the problem as the timing. Buying up television slots around the country was an expensive business and, although the idea was that live shows in the new markets would eventually become profitable, Watts was reliant on the income from his home base to bankroll the expansion.
The decline in the local business wrecked that plan, leaving Watts at one point losing $50,000 a week. While hardly the worst shape a wrestling business was ever in (WCW at one point was losing more than $1 million a week), it was too much for an individual owner and Watts eventually offered to sell out to both McMahon and Crockett, with the latter taking up the offer for $4 million.
It soon became clear that Crockett was more interested in Watts’ syndicated TV network than his wrestlers. Although Crockett continued operating UWF as a separate promotion for several months, it was more of a token gesture. He and booker Dusty Rhodes showed how highly they valued UWF by putting its titles on the likes of Bubba Rogers (previously portrayed as a bodyguard) and the near-jobber team of Brad Armstrong and Tim Horner. When WCW ran joint promotion shows, UWF stars were usually low down on the card and in the long-run only Sting and Rick Steiner were given serious pushes among the Watts refugees.
But while the UWF went out with a whimper, fans in the region still remember the days when, while the wrestling may not have been “real”, the emotion certainly was, as Jim Cornette recalled. “That type of emotion led to a lot of headaches, but also to big crowds, exciting matches and great paychecks as well.”
