Jim Crockett Promotions, at times branded as Eastern States Championship Wrestling and Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling, was a family-owned professional wrestling promotion headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, United States. Founded in 1931, the promotion emerged as a cornerstone of the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA). By the 1980s, Jim Crockett Promotions was, along with the World Wrestling Federation (WWF, now WWE), one of the two largest promotions in the United States. The Crockett family sold a majority interest in the promotion to Turner Broadcasting System (which was acquired by Time Warner in 1996, later became WarnerMedia from 2018–2022, now known as Warner Bros. Discovery), resulting in the creation of World Championship Wrestling (WCW) in 1988.
History
Early history (1931–1952) Jim Crockett (1909–1973) was a promoter of live events including professional wrestling, music concerts, plays, minor league baseball, and ice hockey. In 1931, he founded his own professional wrestling promotion, Jim Crockett Promotions. Crockett built JCP as a regional promotion centred on the Carolinas and Virginia.
Although the business was always called Jim Crockett Promotions, it used a variety of pseudonyms as brand names for specific TV shows, newspaper and radio ads, and even on event tickets, themselves. Among those brand names that JCP created were "Championship Wrestling", "All Star Wrestling", "East Coast Wrestling", "Eastern States Championship Wrestling", "Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling", "Mid-Atlantic Championship Sports", "Wide World Wrestling", and "NWA Pro Wrestling", NWA World Wide Wrestling", and "NWA World Championship Wrestling" following its membership in the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA).
Early membership in the NWA (1952–1978) 1950s to 1960s Crockett joined the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA) in 1952, and his "territory" covered Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina. The name "Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling" became JCP's primary brand name in print, radio, and other advertising (the name was also used for its main television programs). The business was incorporated in the 1950s.
1970s Jim Crockett died in 1973. He left JCP to his family, with his eldest son, Jim Crockett Jr., taking over as chief executive.
Led by the younger Crockett and under the guidance of a new creative force—former wrestler-turned-match-booker George Scott—the promotion moved away from generally primarily featuring tag teams, to primarily focusing on singles wrestling (although tag-team matches continued to play a big part in the company).
By the early-1970s, JCP had gradually phased-out its multiple weekly television tapings in such cities as Charlotte, North Carolina, Greenville, South Carolina, and High Point, North Carolina, consolidating its production schedule into just one shoot (a Wednesday night videotaping at WRAL-TV in Raleigh, North Carolina), and then syndicating the broadcast to several local TV stations throughout the Carolinas and Virginia. In 1981, JCP moved to the WPCQ-TV studios in Charlotte (a station once owned by Ted Turner).
The local shows hosted by announcers like Billy "Big Bill" Ward (from WBTV in Charlotte) and Charlie Harville (at WGHP in High Point) gave way to Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling (known briefly in 1978 as Mid-Atlantic Championship Sports). Mid-Atlantic was hosted by Bob Caudle, (a long-time WRAL weatherman). Caudle was joined by a rotation of co-hosts (everyone from Les Thatcher all the way to Dr. Tom Miller), before David Crockett (another son of Jim Crockett Sr.) became Bob's permanent co-host/color commentary man (after ending a very brief career as a wrestler, himself). For a brief period, a secondary show, East Coast Wrestling, was taped at WRAL; it was basically a re-packaged version of Mid-Atlantic, and it was also announced by Billy "Big Bill" Ward.
In 1975, JCP premiered a new, syndicated show, Wide World Wrestling (renamed World Wide Wrestling in 1978). The original host of this show was former Georgia Championship Wrestling announcer Ed Capral. Subsequent Wide World/World Wide announcers included Les Thatcher, George George, Sandy Scott, and Dr. Tom Miller. It was also hosted by the team of Rich Landrum and Johnny Weaver. In 1978, JCP later added a short-lived show, The Best of NWA Wrestling, which was taped at the WCCB studios in Charlotte (across the street from the now-Bojangles' Coliseum, a regular venue for Mid-Atlantic live events) and featured then-active wrestler Johnny Weaver sitting down with top stars in a "coach's show" format (in which host and guest did running commentary over 16 millimeter film footage of matches from local arenas). Rich Landrum and David Crockett appeared on "Best Of", doing promo interviews for local arena shows.
Regional expansion (1978–1983) JCP gradually began to expand, running shows in eastern Tennessee, parts of West Virginia, and even Savannah, Georgia. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, it ran regular shows in Cincinnati and Dayton, Ohio. Crockett and Scott also bought minority shares of Frank Tunney's Toronto-based promotion, Maple Leaf Wrestling. Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling also aired on WUTV in Buffalo, New York, enabling the Tunney/Crockett/Scott enterprise to bring a full slate of shows to Ontario and upstate New York.
In the 1980s, Crockett, Jr. began consolidating the Southern member promotions of the National Wrestling Alliance. Discarding the Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling brand, he began promoting his events simply as NWA shows, although his promotion remained distinct from the larger NWA entity. In August 1980, Crockett, Jr. was elected president of the NWA, and the next year (the same year Crockett moved his TV show tapings from Raleigh to Charlotte), former (and future) Georgia Championship Wrestling (GCW) booker Ole Anderson took over as Mid-Atlantic's booker. In 1981, Anderson booked both JCP and GCW simultaneously.
In 1982, Crockett partnered with wrestlers Ric Flair and Blackjack Mulligan to start Southern Championship Wrestling, a secondary company out of Knoxville, Tennessee. The promotion featured such stars as Mulligan; his son Barry Windham (then billed as Blackjack Mulligan Jr.); Kevin Sullivan; Wayne Ferris; The Mongolian Stomper; Terry Taylor; Tim Horner, and others. The enterprise lasted less than one year, however.
National expansion (1983–1985) By the 1980s, American professional wrestling was undergoing seismic and rapid change. The old, NWA-sanctioned system of separate, regional "territory" promotions was collapsing under increasing competitive pressure from Vincent K. McMahon's World Wrestling Federation (WWF, now WWE)—itself a family-owned territory promotion covering the northeastern U.S. — which was aggressively expanding into a nationwide promotion. Crockett had similar expansion goals, envisioning a united NWA through JCP's buyout of or merger with all of the NWA's regional promotions.
Ted Turner, whose Atlanta television station WTCG would become distributed nationally via satellite starting in 1976, had realized the value of professional wrestling for cable television in the early 1970s. WTCG aired Georgia Championship Wrestling's programming on Saturday evenings, and wrestling provided his then-fledgling enterprise (the future SuperStation WTBS) a source of cheap live entertainment which was well-suited to the station's target demographics. Turner could run per inquiry advertisements (for products like Slim Whitman albums and Ginsu knives) and take part of the sales profits just by providing the big viewing audience delivered by pro wrestling's loyal fanbase (wrestling generally did not attract large ad revenues at that time, due to negative industry perceptions of its lower-income target demographic).
SuperStation TBS's parent company, Turner Broadcasting System, had asked Georgia Championship Wrestling to change its public brand name to World Championship Wrestling, helping fuel rumors that the Jim Barnett-controlled company would go national itself; GCW acquiesced to the World Championship Wrestling name change in 1982. Meanwhile, by 1983, JCP went from recording its weekly shows in a television studio to shooting on-location, in between matches at live arena events. After purchasing a mobile television production unit for $1 million, Crockett unveiled what became the NWA's dominant annual supercard, Starrcade.
In 1984, McMahon's WWF purchased controlling interest in GCW from a number of its co-owners (including Barnett and brothers Jack and Jerry Brisco), thus gaining control of GCW's flagship Saturday night time slot on TBS. This tactic—co-opting the time slots of rival territories in their own "backyard"/local TV markets—was part of the WWF's national expansion strategy. To McMahon's surprise, however, the move backfired with TBS. When the WWF aired its first show on TBS on July 14, replacing World Championship Wrestling, viewer backlash was severe, as the show's Southern fans were incensed to see their beloved stars suddenly replaced—without advance notice—by an "invading force" of wrestlers from "up North", an event that has since become known in pro wrestling lore as Black Saturday. In response to the ensuing deluge of complaints, TBS granted an upstart promotion called Championship Wrestling from Georgia (backed by holdout GCW shareholder and NWA member Fred Ward and former GCW wrestler/booker Ole Anderson) an early Saturday morning time slot so that the local stars could still be seen. Championship Wrestling from Georgia's television show (which had the same name as the promotion itself), along with that of Bill Watts's Mid-South Wrestling (to whom Turner had also granted a time slot), easily surpassed the ratings for the WWF broadcast, which only featured clips and wrestler promos instead of original matches. The steep decline in ratings for the Saturday evening WWF show, and viewers clamoring for GCW's return, began to make the WWF's move a money-losing one. Eventually, McMahon cut his losses and sold the time slot to Crockett for $1 million. Although this gave Crockett vital national exposure, it also allowed McMahon to finance his own marquee wrestling event, WrestleMania. This chain of events was critical in Turner's eventual decision to purchase JCP and form World Championship Wrestling (WCW) in 1988.
An extra sense of urgency was added to Crockett's national expansion ambitions when, after Frank Tunney's death, his nephew and successor Jack joined forces with the WWF. Crockett would now have to either find other willing partner-promoters or buy them out if he wanted to run shows outside the Mid-Atlantic territory. This period also marked Crockett's first attempt to create a national promotion; Crockett and other wrestling companies needed this opportunity after the WWF buyout of the Toronto territory occurred, as well as after the airing of the WWF program The War to Settle the Score on MTV to high ratings. Together with the Minneapolis-based American Wrestling Association (AWA), Championship Wrestling from Georgia, and Memphis-based Jarrett Promotions, JCP created Pro Wrestling USA. However, the organization fell apart in January 1986.
Consolidation of the NWA (1985–1988)