Today’s Favorite Quote: Life is short, but life is also long. You have to live with your choices - Unknown
Happy Birthday to those who have passed on and to those great wrestlers still with us:
In Memoriam:
Crusher Verdu 1940
Happy Birthday:
Miss Linda Street (80)
Harvey Whippleman (60)
Bobby Fish (49)
RIP Memorial: We stop & remember those who have passed on this day and gave themselves to the business for us, the fans. We salute you and thank you.
Rudy Dusek 10-27-1971 at the age of 70
Anthony Samizarro\Tony Santos 10-27-1984 at the age of 62
Kay Bell 10-27-1994 at the age of 80
Significant Pro Wrestler Debut
10-27-1978: Jim Neidhart vs JJ Dillon at the Victoria Pavillion in Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Pictured: A young Jin Neidhart and wife, Ellie Hart
7 Stages of the Territory Era
Stage 7: Disintegration (1985-1995)
Year Two Month Ten
October 1986: The End of Magnum TA’s Career
The accident did more than end one wrestler’s career. It forced Jim Crockett Promotions to invent a new main-event structure in real time, turned a hated foreign heel into a top babyface overnight, and revealed how little margin for error remained inside the last strong NWA office.
The Immediate Rewrite
Magnum T.A. had been the clearest non-Hogan, non-Flair babyface on the national circuit in 1986. Two-time United States champion, athletic, photogenic, and already positioned as the man who would take the NWA World title from Ric Flair at Starrcade. The Great American Bash tour had built the Koloff feud as the company’s summer centerpiece. Magnum was the planned payoff.
On October 14 he was gone. Crockett and Dusty Rhodes had roughly six weeks until Starrcade. They could not invent a new top babyface from scratch. They used the man who had just beaten Magnum for the United States title.
Pictured: The Fall edition of Wrestling 86
Nikita Koloff’s turn was not purely an emergency invention. Merchandise sales during the Bash had already shown that Koloff moved more shirts as a hated Russian than most babyfaces moved as heroes. Some in the office had been looking for a way to flip him. The accident supplied the cleanest possible reason. Television told the story that Koloff heard about the crash while in Japan, called Rhodes, and the two men found common ground. On screen it happened in public. In Philadelphia on October 18, Rhodes walked out with Koloff as his partner for a steel-cage match against Ole Anderson and J.J. Dillon. The crowd reaction was the sound of a territory absorbing the news in real time. The Super Powers were born that night.
Starrcade was rewritten. Flair versus Koloff replaced Flair versus Magnum. The first-blood match between Rhodes and Tully Blanchard stayed. The scaffold match between the Road Warriors and the Midnight Express stayed. What disappeared was the specific succession plan. Crockett still had depth. It no longer had the particular star it had spent months building as the company’s next long-term face.
The Super Powers and the Rest of the Card
Pictured: The Super powers, Nikita Koloff and Dusty Rhodes
The Super Powers worked because both men were already over for opposite reasons. Rhodes was the established American hero. Koloff was the foreign monster who had just ended Magnum’s reign and now claimed to be finishing Magnum’s unfinished business. Their partnership gave Crockett a fresh tag combination that could main-event while Flair remained the traveling champion. It also created an internal Horsemen problem: Ivan Koloff and Krusher Khruschev suddenly looked like the relatives who had lost the family asset.
The accident did not invent the scaffold match or the first-blood stipulation. Those were already in the planning. It did change the emotional center of the show. Starrcade ’86 became the event where the company proved it could survive the loss of its top babyface. The Greensboro and Atlanta crowds still came. The matches still delivered. The larger point was visible to anyone who watched the October television: the office’s future was now being written around whoever was still available on the loop.
Personal and Industry Aftermath
Pictured: Jim Crockett, Jr visits Magnum TA in hospital and presents him with the issue of Wrestling 87 “I cry for Magnum TA” cover.
Magnum spent months in the hospital. Doctors told him he might never walk. He did walk again, first with a cane, later without, but the in-ring career was finished. He later worked as a commentator and in booking roles. The letters that arrived at the hospital ran into the tens of thousands. That volume was itself evidence of how far the NWA television product had already traveled by 1986. A regional star from five years earlier would not have generated that mail.
Talent Availability
For Stage 7 the accident mattered because it was not absorbable the way an injury once was. In a healthier territorial system a top draw’s absence hurt one office for a few months. Other offices still had their own protected stars. By October 1986 the remaining independent offices were already thin. Crockett had absorbed Central States. World Class was running half-empty stadium shows. The UWF was fighting the oil collapse. The AWA was running in front of three-figure crowds in buildings it used to own. When Magnum was removed, there was no second Magnum sitting in another territory ready to be elevated. The company had to convert an existing heel and hope the audience accepted the conversion.
I remember, at the time, I was hoping for Ted DiBiase to come to Jim Crockett Promotions. In later interviews, Ted confirmed that Dusty did try to get him to come in. However, McMahon was already in talks with DiBiase to come to the WWF and he’d get the “greatest gimmick in the history of wrestling>’ McMahon would not divulge details of the gimmick until DiBiase signed his contract. When DiBiase consulted with his mentors, The Funk Brothers, they advised him to go to the WWF rather than Crockett. This tells you what long time insiders were thinking at the time, that Funks did not believe Crockett Promotions had any chance in the National Expansion War with Vince McMahon.
Thw Nikita babyface conversion worked on television and at the box office for a short while. The Super Powers were a genuine success. Koloff’s face run gave Crockett a new program that lasted into 1987. I never thought the Koloff turn was a wise move. Sure it got a short term pop at the Charlotte Coliseum that night, and there were strong points about Magnum’s bitter enemy turning good to support him. However, I thought it would kill Koloff’s career long term, he waas never comfortable ot good as a babyface. I thought, “how is this Russian nightmare wrestler, who was almost invincible, supposed to get sympathy?” Nikita never had to really sell much and in the subsequent months it showed.
In addition, the larger structural problem remained. The office that still looked like the strongest alternative to the WWF had just demonstrated that its succession plan could be erased by weather and a telephone pole. In a system already losing control of its own television and its own towns, that kind of fragility was no longer an isolated tragedy. It was the condition under which the remaining territories were now operating.
Thank You for Watching and Listening
I’m Tony Richards, Pro Wrestling Historian, Author and Storyteller. I share pro wrestling historical items in each issue of the Time Tunnel Pro Wrestling History Newsletter and each episode of our podcast show. Thanks for your support! If you enjoy my information on select events, matches and insights, please share with folks you think might like to be a subscriber!
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