Charting The Territories

This post will finish up our look at 1966 in the territory. I am going to look at numerous interesting pieces of information found while doing my research. ----- VENUES: Fort Smith, AR - Jimmy Lott Sports Arena on Towson Ave Joplin, MO - Memorial Hall (building is still standing; current capacity listed as 3,018) Little Rock, AR - Robinson Auditorium (building still standing; current capacity 2,609) Longview, TX - Gregg County Fairgrounds (capacity in 1966 was 2,500) Monroe, LA - Roll Arena (also ran American Legion Stadium once in May and twice in August) New Orleans, LA - Municipal Auditorium (building still standing; current capacity 7,853) Oklahoma City, OK - Stockyards Coliseum (capacity for the original venue was 5,175; the original building was destroyed by fire in 1930 and a similar-sized venue of the same name was built on the same site the following year) Shreveport, LA - Municipal Auditorium (building still standing; current capacity approx 3,000) Sprin...

This post will look at the championships that were active in the territory in 1966, and attempt to put together a list of title changes. Before we begin, it's very important to understand that putting together a singular, complete, accurate title history for most any territory is virtually impossible. Sometimes they ran angles where a title would be held up due to a disputed finish in one town, and it was only acknowledged in that town. Same goes for quickie title switches that may be specific to one town. Furthermore, I've noticed sometimes the newspaper "goes into business for themselves" when writing out the results. If a challenger wins a title match by dq, the paper might just go ahead and assume that the winner is the new champ, when that usually isn't the case. And sometimes titles changed hands in different towns on the loop, i.e. Wrestler X will defeat Wrestler Y to win the title on Monday, then on Tuesday Wrestler Y will come out with the belt announce...

This week we are going to take a look at the most frequently occurring matchups (I hesitate to call them "feuds" because while many of them were feuds, some appear to be just a series of matches between opponents) in the McGuirk territory in 1966. What were the matchups, over how long a period of time did they occur, which towns did they occur in, and what stipulation matches were used?

This week I will look at all the various weekly towns McGuirk ran in 1966 and attempt to "rank" them. Are there A towns and B towns, or is it more nuanced than that?

Last week, I looked through the data we had for 1966 and surmised that there were definitely "missing" cards, and in all likelihood some of them were from weekly towns. This week, I'm going to see if I can do anything to narrow down the possibilities of what towns they might be.

As mentioned previously, I have the lineups for 456 cards for the territory in 1966 (actually, I found one more since posting that so we're at 457 now). One of the questions I would like to try and answer is: how complete is the data? Can we "prove" how many cards we're missing; more importantly, can we prove the existence of a weekly town(s) that we don't have any data on.

One of the questions I have asked myself about using SPOT ratings is: what is the optimum period of time over which to calculate them? Since wrestling has no offseason, there are no fixed start or end points. A wrestler's SPOT rating is the average of numerous data points, thus it can be calculated for any length of time. So far we've looked at a yearly SPOT rating, but can we learn anything by using a shorter period of time to calculate it?

Let's take a look at some of the other wrestlers who had bookings in the territory in 1966 but did not meet the 'minimum # of matches' threshold to be included in the SPOT ratings.

Here's a look at the wrestlers that filled out the lower portion of the cards in Tri-State in 1966.

Here's some info on the mid-card wrestlers for Tri-State in 1966.

Here's a closer look at the upper mid-carders for Tri-State in 1966.

Here is some brief biographical information for the wrestlers in the Main Eventers category in 1966. Not too detailed, just a little who's who, what territory guys came here from, where they went after they left, etc.

This blog is going to take an in-depth look at the territory run by Leroy McGuirk (and later Bill Watts). Commonly known as Tri-State Wrestling, the promotion actually ran cards in parts of five different states (Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Louisiana and Texas) by the mid-60s.