Mid-Atlantic Gateway
This poster takes us back to the Starland Arena in Roanoke, Va and promotes a card held on Saturday, April 10th, 1976.
The main event was a Texas Death Match between Angelo Mosca and Mr. Wrestling Tim Woods. These type matches were violent affairs and usually only ended when one of the participants could no longer continue. Woods managed to be the man left standing at the end of this one, but on a television taping that aired exactly one week later, Mosca defeated him in the finals of a tournament to crown a new Mid Atlantic TV champion (although Mosca needed a handful of tights in order to pin Woods).
The semi featured tag team action with Sgt. Jacques Goulet and Mike "The Judge" Dubois versus Emanuel and Roberto Soto while the preliminaries consisted of Klondike Bill versus Doug Gilbert, Angelo Poffo versus Randy Colley, and Greg Peterson versus George McCreery.
The poster's vertical layout has all black print over a colorful two tone bright pink over bright blue background with images of Woods and Roberto Soto.
NO. 29 IN A SERIES
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MID-ATLANTIC GATEWAY NOTES
This would have been a fun card. Mosca was a terror in the territory at this point, and his big weapon was a big elbow forearm smash, often times with a foreign object in the elbow pad, undetected by the official of course.
Two of our favorite semi-main event tag teams at this time faced off here. We loved the bad guys, Goulet and Dubois, as well as the popular high-flying team of Roberto and Emmanuel Soto. Emmanuel had previously wrestled at Roberto's partner under a mask as El Rayo. He had unmasked to reveal himself to be Roberto's brother.
The Soto brothers introduced the Mid-Atlantic territory to the lucha libre style of wrestling, which they wove into a lot of their matches. That style proved quite popular. We always thought both teams should have had at least a small run as Mid-Atlantic Tag Team champions. The Sotos had upset the Andersons in a non-title bout and had proven themselves worthy of top contendership. Goulet and Dubois would later make it to the finals of a tournament to crown new Mid-Atlantic Tag Team champions, but could never quite get over the hump.