Say what you want about Roy Shire (and everybody does) but Roy knew what he was doing when it came to promoting Professional Wrestling throughout Northern California.

Beginning in the 1930s and for the following three decades, National Wrestling Alliance promoter Joe Malcewicz owned the Northern California territory. But he was starting to get old, and he wasn't spending as much time as he used to at work, and crowds at his wrestling shows were not what they once had been. San Francisco and the surrounding territory had been a strong, profitable base of wrestling fans, but it still took a lot of work to get them to the box office.

Roy Shire came out to San Francisco and saw a territory that was being neglected. He was anxious to stop wrestling himself and wanted to start promoting wrestling. It was easy for any wrestler to see that promoting was where the big money was, and it was a lot easier on your body, too.  Shire contacted Malcewicz and told him he wanted to stop wrestling and get into the promotion end of the business. Roy made several offers to Malcewicz to buy the territory or buy-in as a partner, but got nowhere.

Joe Malcewicz was making a comfortable living as a promoter, and he seemed happy letting his promotion run on remote control. He wasn't
working real hard promoting his shows anymore, and he was still making money.  I guess he wasn't too worried about Roy Shire, then, either. As a member of the National Wrestling Alliance, he "owned" the Northern California wrestling territory and unless he wanted to sell it, Roy Shire was going to promote wrestling here.

Needless to say, he underestimated Roy Shire. Roy decided to start an "outlaw" promotion and run in opposition to Malcewicz's NWA promotion. This has historically been a very risky entry into the business, but Roy had arranged to get money from what he called "eastern investors" and made a deal to use television tapes and wrestlers from a promotion located in the midwest.

Roy knew he needed to get television exposure if he was going to have a chance of developing the type of promotion he wanted. During the early 1950s, television and wrestling had helped each other grow tremendously, and all four major TV networks at the time had wrestling shows running in prime time. In most parts of the United States, viewers were able to watch wrestling five nights a week from all over the country. That was how wrestling promoters and TV networks discovered that too much of a good thing was not that good.  People did not have to buy tickets to watch good wrestling, and after a while, they were not watching it for free, either. Business went down in many cities.

In the late 1950s, when Roy Shire arrived in California, Joe Malcewicz had a TV show running in San Francisco, but there was not a lot of competition on TV anymore. But before Roy could hope to compete with the NWA, he had to get on TV, too. He apparently had a good wrestling show on tape to offer, and started making the rounds of TV stations in San Francisco hoping to find a station who would broadcast his tapes -- for free.

KTVU Channel 2 was a very new independent television station located in Oakland, across the San Francisco Bay from The City. But it had a
very strong signal and could be viewed throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. KTVU says they started running programming with Roy in about 1958. Roy was borrowing tapes from a promotion in the Midwest and was using some of their stars in live shows he started running in Northern California cities. Roy was still wrestling himself then, too -- when he had to.

As soon as Roy had several cities running regularly and he could support his own stable of wrestlers, Roy started producing his own weekly show at the Channel 2 studios in Oakland. "All Star Wrestling" started broadcasting LIVE every Friday evening at 9:00pm from Channel 2's brand new studio in Oakland. At first, Roy was flying up an announcer from Los Angeles to host his show, but the expense bothered him. It wasn't long before Roy introduced a new announcer, Walt Harris, to Bay Area fans. Roy and the fans loved Harris, and he remained the host of All Star Wrestling throughout it's run on
Channel 2.  More...