by David Chappell
Mid-Atlantic Gateway
Catch up on PART 1 PART 2 PART 3
PART FOUR:
The Aftermath
Despite the tremendous buildup for this event, to the point of the President of Jim Crockett Promotions being its TV announcer, the Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling Arm-Wrestling Championship vanished from the scene as quickly as it arrived. To my best recollection, this championship was never defended. In fact, I don’t believe that it was ever even mentioned again after the Avenger hoisted the trophy signifying his championship victory.
The two finalists in the championship match, the Avenger and the Super Destroyer, were in the early stages of an extremely rare program of masked man versus masked man that would go on for a number of additional months. It seems odd that this battle for a championship would not have factored in and played some kind of role in what would become a red-hot feud between the masked men. But, alas, it never did.
There would be several times later in the Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling years where arm-wrestling would work its way into feuds and angles. A couple that come immediately to mind were the Mighty Igor versus Blackjack Mulligan in 1977 and Tony Atlas versus Ken Patera in 1978. If there was ever a time that the Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling Arm-Wrestling Championship would have become relevant again, these two programs should have brought it out of the mothballs. But again, it didn’t happen.
To me, the saga of the Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling Arm-Wrestling Championship will always leave me wondering why this championship was created with such fanfare on television, but was never followed up on despite the fact that the Avenger and the Super Destroyer, the two finalists, were in the midst of a heated program that was about to get a lot more heated. None of that is clear to me looking back. The only thing that is clear to me, is that the “one and done” Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling Arm-Wrestling Championship had to the most obscure championship in the promotion’s history!