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A Mid-Atlantic Gateway Growin' Up Flashback

by Dick Bourne
 


 

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David Chappell and I joke all the time that to this day when Saturday afternoons roll around, our internal clocks still tell us it is time to watch Mid-Atlantic Wrestling on TV. It is a feeling I can't seem to shake, even some thirty years later.

When I was a kid and first got hooked on Mid-Atlantic Wrestling, I would go to a local convenience store called The Garden Basket every Wednesday afternoon after school and pick up the new TV Guide for 25 cents. I wanted to make sure I knew when wrestling was going to come on that weekend. It typically did every weekend at the same time, but I never really felt comfortable about that until I saw it in the listings. Once I knew on Wednesday that wrestling was set for 1:00 PM on Saturday, the rest of my week was good. (Wouldn't it be nice if that was the extent of our worries after we got older?)

The Garden Basket was also, as an aside, the same place I bought my wrestling magazines, as well as the occasional Sievers honey bun and Mountain Dew in those classic old hillbilly bottles. All of these things were childhood delights. In my later teenage years, when Jim Crockett Promotions began running semi-regular spot shows at Dobyns-Bennett High School, the American Legion post that sponsored these events put posters up all over town, including one that was always in the front window of the Garden Basket. I talked the nice fellow behind the counter into letting me pick up those posters on the Monday after those Sunday shows. Like those hillbilly-style Mountain Dew bottles I also collected, those posters are regrettably long gone.

But now I'm way off topic.

GOOD FORTUNE

Sometimes in life, we just get lucky. Such were the circumstances that allowed me to grow up watching Mid-Atlantic Wrestling. Unexplained, pure dumb luck.

I grew up in Kingsport, TN, and by all rights, based on geography alone, should have never had the privilege of watching the glory years of Mid-Atlantic wrestling. But when cable TV came along, our local cable system carried not only the NBC/ABC/CBS network affiliates from our TV market in east Tennessee (Bristol/Kingsport/Johnson City), but also NBC and ABC stations from the Greenville/Spartanburg/Asheville market. Again, only as fate might have it, these two stations were the two stations in that market that carried the two Jim Crockett Promotions wrestling programs, Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling and Wide World Wrestling.

To this day I've wondered why our east Tennessee cable system carried two stations on the other side of the Great Smokey Mountains, an average of 120 miles away.

And consider:

  • The two out-of-market stations were network affiliates: WFBC-4 in Greenville, SC was an affiliate of the NBC network. WLOS in Asheville NC was an ABC affiliate. Our market, of course, had its own affiliates of these networks. Why was this the practice of cable TV at this time? It certainly is no longer the case today. And why was I fortunate enough that they were both Crockett Promotions wrestling affiliates as well? (The first question has an unknown answer, the second is purely rhetorical!)

  • Asheville is approximately 85 miles from Kingsport. Of the two other major network affiliates in that market, Spartanburg is closer to Kingsport  than Greenville, yet Greenville was the second of only two market stations to be included on Kingsport cable. Why would Kingsport cable carry Asheville and Greenville, and not Spartanburg? Had the 2nd out-of-market station been Spartanburg instead of Greenville, I never would have seen Mid-Atlantic Wrestling until years later when they got on Bristol VA TV.

  • Our cable system also carried the CBS affiliate from Charlotte NC, WBTV-3, which also carried Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling. More good fortune.

 Whatever the reason our cable system carried these out of market stations, I always consider it a special blessing that I was able to grow up watching Mid-Atlantic Wrestling.

                                                                                                            - Dick Bourne

 

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Originally published March 2006

Updated March 2008

Special thanks to Carroll Hall who helped me locate an original 1976 TV Guide from my home market.