It was sitting here watching the NXT premiere on the USA Network and memories got me thinking about wrestling back from a few decades ago in the Global Wrestling Federation. Shown on ESPN on Weekday afternoons back in the early ’90s and it brought back all the fun memories I had.
The GWF was a wrestling federation that took over wrestling in the Dallas Sportatorium after Memphis promoter Jerry Jarret gave up his control of the building around 1991. A number of Memphis based wrestlers that Jarrett was using said that the travel between Memphis and Texas was brutal and not really worth it, and also Wrestling itself was out of the 1980s wrestling boom and the glory days of WCCW were far behind them. Jim Cornette tells the story that the GWF started as a scam and that someone promised a lot of money to get wrestling back in Texas and that announcer Joe Pedicino and his wife Boni Blackstone were tasked with getting the GWF of the ground. The money wasn’t there and it appeared to most that the whole company was built on a lie, but that still didn’t stop them from producing some fun wrestling on ESPN.
One of the big things told to fans, especially in the early days, was that the GWF represented this big worldwide group, sounding a lot like the NWA, I remember the story of the team of the English Lords being in an auto accident along the Autoban in Germany for the reason of holding a tag team title tournament (That was won by Steve Simpson and “Conan” Chris Walker) or the story they told during the North American Title tournament (won by the masked Patriot) that the GWF would soon hold a World Title tournament that never happened. You have to wonder if the GWF was world wide and events happening around the world wouldn’t there already be a World champion? Even as a kid I thought that whole world wide thing was a bunch of crap but they soon dropped all that and focused more on what we were actually watching, not a made-up international influence.
The names and faces we saw in the GWF were the major part of watching 5 days a week. I was a big magazine reader at the time so while there were wrestlers I had seen in the WWF or WCW like Bad News Brown, Jonny Ace, Makhan Singh (the former Norman the Lunatic from WCW), “Wild Bill Irwin”, and others. I also got to see a lot of faces I had only read about at that point like The Simpson Brothers, “Hollywood” John Tatum, and “Adorable” Adrian Street. Added to the names I knew about were those debuting at a big platform and would go on to even bigger things like The Ebony Experience (bothers Booker T and Stevie Ray), The masked Patriot who was the big hero in the early days of the GWF, A young light heavyweight known as the Lightning Kid would a few years later would pin Razor Ramon on Monday Night RAW and become X-Pac, A masked ladies man in The Handsome Stranger who would better be known as Marcus Bagwell not long later in time, a young announcer named Scott Hudson, and a bunch of others. Some made it big like Booker T or the Lightning Kid, while there were other not so famous names Like Kalvin Knapp or Manual Villalobos. Either way, they all made fun memories.
The end of the GWF on ESPN was really sad. It was in early 1993 and I remember old-time Texas villian The Angel of Death coming to the ring and claiming he had metal inserts surgically implanted into his hand to give him the strongest claw hold in wrestling. Of course, talking about claw holds in Texas would bring up the Von Rich name and Kerry was scheduled to be there. Sadly the news broke that the day when Kerry Von Erich was set to debut at the Sportatorium he had killed himself. Soon after the GWF show in ESPN was canceled, whether the two were related to each other or not I am not sure. The GWF lasted another 18 months and was still making TV to be seen in Texas with stars like the Freebirds before it finally closed shop for good in September of 1994. The Sportatorium had a big fire in December of 2001 and it was torn down completely in 2003. The GWF still gets brought up in WWE documentaries, mostly from the people who were there. You can still hear stories of what happened there in shoot interviews and things like that you can find on Youtube or buy online.
The WWE probably won’t be making any DVD collections or have specials on the WWE Network but the memories still live on in many who experienced it, from the names who were there to a little kid on the other side of the country in Maine watching things unravel on ESPN every weekday and 4 o’clock after getting home from school. The images and the memories live on and never left.
