San Francisco #6 Page #2
All Star Wrestling was a big success. It became one of Channel 2's most popular shows and it was drawing great crowds to Roy's house shows. It was All Star Wrestling that made Roy Shire's bold move to promote a show at San Francisco's Cow Palace possible. Roy announced he would present a big wrestling card at the Cow Palace in March, 1961, a move that most pundits thought was crazy. Professional Wrestling had been popular in San Francisco, but had never been promoted at the Cow Palace, a gigantic auditorium located in Daly City. Capable of seating over 14,000 wresting fans, few people in the business thought Roy could sell enough tickets to avoid losing a fortune. But with his shrewd booking on All Star Wrestling and using angles that Bay Area fans had never been exposed to before, Roy did the impossible! Not only did Shire make a profit with his first Cow Palace card, he sold every seat, and standing room! Over the next two years Roy Shire was selling more tickets and making more money than any other wrestling promotion in the world.
Joe Malcewicz kept promoting his shows, too, but little by little, his crowds disappeared. I have found a few ads he ran in newspapers in early 1962, but he must have stopped promoting soon after that. The National Wrestling Alliance, however, remained angry with Roy Shire for running in opposition to one of its members, and despite many attempts to join them, they would not let Roy join for the NWA for another eight years.
While Channel 2 had a fantastic signal and covered the Bay Area and coastal cities, it could not be viewed on the other side of the Coastal Mountain Range, in the Sacramento Valley. Roy started producing a second weekly wrestling show at KCRA Channel 3, an NBC affiliate in Sacramento which reached most of the Central Valley of California. Channel 3's Big Time Wrestling was taped on Thursday evenings and aired on Saturdays. Roy asked Walt Harris to host that show, too, so Harris hit the highways every Thursday to Sacramento to tape Big Time Wrestling.
Sometime during it's run at Channel 3, Walt Harris decided to drop out of his position on Big Time Wrestling and Roy brought in Hank Renner to host the show. Hank had been known to local boxing audiences as a ring announcer for some time, and he made an easy transition to becoming a First Class wrestling announcer as well. In 1969, Hank Renner and Big Time Wrestling moved to another Sacramento TV station, KTXL Channel 40, a new independent station that had just started broadcasting in Sacramento. Sometime later, KTXL joined the Fox network. Channel 40 was the first independent station in the United States to broadcast their signal by satellite, and was carried by Cable TV systems all over the western half of the U.S. Viewers in many western states were able to watch Big Time Wrestling and Hank Renner and they enjoyed a huge viewership. Big Time Wrestling remained a top hit and was Channel 40's top rated show for most of it's ten-year run there. Hank told me that no matter where he travelled west of the Mississippi River, people recognized him from watching Channel 40 and Big Time Wrestling on their local Cable TV networks.
Roy Shire had kept busy expanding his territory throughout the years. By the time Big Time Wrestling moved to Channel 40 Roy was taping several versions of Big Time Wrestling for stations in other markets. The Sacramento "version" of the show was taped before a live audience on Thursday evenings for many years. That Thursday taping was broadcast to several cities where Roy was booking his wrestlers, including Sacramento, Stockton, Modesto, Redding, Placerville, Richmond, Red Bluff and Reno, Nevada.
For other cities Shire was promoting, Roy customized Big Time
Wrestling by taping special interviews and editing them in where the original Sacramento interviews had been. After the Sacramento show had been taped before the live audience, the extra interviews for each city were taped in an empty studio after the audience went home. Special interviews were done for a Fresno, CA edition, Bakersfield, CA Edition, Hawaii edition (with Ed Francis fronting for Roy Shire), Anchorage, Alaska edition, Salt Lake City edition, Las Vegas, Nevada edition, and Phoenix, Arizona edition. That was a lot of extra interviews to do and the boys often got out of the studio very late on Thursdays (actually early on Fridays!).Later in the 1970s, Big Time Wrestling was broadcast in Sacramento LIVE, on Monday evenings. On Mondays, the wrestlers came into the studio early to do some of the extra interviews early, before the show was broadcast. After the show, they completed the balance of the interviews.
Roy Shire suffered a great setback in 1970 in his television operations when Channel 2 told Roy they would not let him produce All Star Wrestling at their studio anymore and that they were dropping All Star Wrestling from their weekly lineup. This was devastating to Roy's plans to have his show televised to wrestling fans all over the San Francisco Bay Area and Coastal areas. Why did KTVU Channel 2 cancel the most popular program on their schedule? There were a lot of rumors making their way around the arenas as people tried to make some sense of this critical development. One of the rumors going around was that Channel 2 employees did not like Roy spitting his Snuff juice on the floors in their offices and studios. That was no rumor, that is what happened! Roy, who lived on a cattle ranch, always had a bit of snuff in his mouth and he always needed a place to spit the juice out. It was no problem for Roy, the floor worked just fine for him, no matter where he was. KTVU employees however, did not like having to clean up after him. Management spoke to him about it on several occasions and it came down to one last warning. If Roy spit on the floor anywhere in the KTVU Buildings again, All Star Wrestling would be cancelled.
I don't know if it was because Roy did not like being told what to do, or he didn't believe they would cancel their top rated show, but he HONKED out a big one and that was the SPLAT heard around the world (the wrestling world, anyway.) Roy had lost his San Francisco Bay Area show and a very strong TV signal. His biggest shows at the Cow Palace had no TV build-up!
The next Cow Palace show had a very small gate, and Roy handed out leaflets to everyone asking them to call or write KTVU Management and plead for the return of All Star Wrestling. But the pleas fell on spotless floors and management was unmoved. Saturdays at 5:00pm now belonged to Star Trek.
Roy (and Pat Patterson I heard at the time) went door to door to the San Francisco TV stations, trying to find a new home and studio for All Star Wrestling, and after a month or two of searching, nothing could be found. They did find the next best thing -- they found a UHF station who would play his tape if he could tape it somewhere else. So for the first time ever, Hank Renner and Big Time Wrestling started appearing in the San Francisco Bay Area! Unfortunately, Roy was also moving from the strongest television signal in the Bay Area to one of the most limited signals. Many of the communities that could receive Channel 2, could not receive UHF station KRBK Channel 44, and Cow Palace gates suffered for the remaining years Roy promoted wrestling.
Hank Renner and KTXL Channel 40 were now producing a San Francisco edition of Big Time Wrestling, too. Big Time Wrestling continued to be taped at KTXL until it's production was finally halted in 1979. Roy had had a long, rough time with station management there, too. For the last year of his promotion, Roy tried borrowing tapes from other promoters, and then flying their stars into San Francisco for shows at the Cow Palace.
Roy first brought in some tapes of Portland Wrestling, but the partnership proved to be a disaster, and it broke up before they could hold their first show at the Cow Palace. He then started showing tapes from a midwest promotion on Channel 44, but it, too, did not work out and ended badly before a Cow Palace show could be held.
Roy's last partnership was with Eddie Graham, the NWA promoter in Florida. Graham began sending his tapes to Channel 44 for Roy and they did produce three shows at the Cow Palace. It was very expensive to fly the wrestlers in from Florida each month and even though there were a few Bay Area-based wrestlers Roy could use to hold down expenses, the shows did not continue.
Roy started advertising for his annual 18 Man Battle Royal to be held at the Cow Palace on January 24, 1981. Fans attending that night did not know they were attending the last wrestling show Roy Shire would ever promote -- Roy had decided the Battle Royal would be his last show. After two decades of selling out the Cow Palace for his Battle Royals, without a TV show, he was only able to draw 6,000 fans for his last show. Roy proved himself right -- without good TV, he could not draw fans to his shows.
NEXT MONTH:
I will tell you about some of the big wrestling stars Roy Shire promoted over the years. If you can think of a topic you would like to read about, please let me know. You can contact me through my web site about Roy Shire's promotion at http://homepage.mac.com/viktor2/btw