The World Tag Team Championships in Stage 5: Consolidation 1966
In 1966 the NWA did not have one World Tag Team Championship.
It had a filing cabinet of them.
Each member booking office could hang “NWA World Tag Team Champions” on a local pair, defend the belts only inside its towns, and still stay inside the Alliance. They could also invent regional tag team championship and attach the NWA brand to them if they were a member office.
That was not a bookkeeping error. It was the Consolidation-era solution to a problem the singles world title did not have: two men cannot tour the continent the way Gene Kiniski could with the NWA World Heavyweight Title..
What follows is the 1966 map of those belts, plus the regional NWA tag titles that did the weekly work when the “world” straps were too expensive to change in the year of 1966.
How the NWA treated tag gold
Pictured: NWA World Tag Team Title belt from the Amarillo\West Texas Territory
The Alliance recognized one traveling World Heavyweight Champion. It never imposed the same monopoly on tag teams. From the early 1950s onward, territories created their own NWA World Tag Team Championships whenever a booker needed a prize that felt bigger than a state title. By 1966 the surviving versions were concentrated in the offices that still ran deep tag divisions: East Texas, West Texas/Amarillo, Florida, Georgia, Mid-America, Detroit, and, newly, Vancouver.
A team could therefore be “world champions” in Atlanta and jobbers in Tampa the same month. Fans rarely noticed. Television was local. The belts looked the same on camera.
The heat was real.
