With a capacity of about 300 it was a great venue for wrestling, it had the perfect intimate feeling every time you would walk in the arena. By 1980 the working relationship with the Los Angeles group dissolved and all of a sudden a new affiliation with the AWA and Paul Boesch's Houston Group and thus bringing into the Area top stars like: Tiger Conway Jr., Scott Casey, Tank Patton, Dick Slater, Buck Robley, Killer Tim Brooks, Bobby Duncum, Eddie Mansfield, and the Funk Brothers.

The champions in the area in 1980 were Tully Blanchard who was the SWCW champion, but had some memorable matches with Wahoo McDaniel and they traded the belt 3 times with Tully holding the title twice, after Terry and Dory Funk Jr. arrived midway thru the year in the area they were recognized as the the SWCW world tag team champions. Late 80 brought in some more great stars into the area like Ivan Putski, Manny Fernandez, the late great Bruiser Brody, Moon Mulligan and Kelly Kiniski. With all this talent in the area SWCW was quickly becoming a hotbed of professional wrestling.

At this time SWCW was promoting all over Texas, regular stops included at this time: Houston, Austin, Temple, Killeen, Weslaco, Corpus Christi and of course San Antonio. In San Antonio the TV tapings at the junction were held every Monday night and the big cards at the Hemisphere Cards were held once a month on either Saturday or Sunday night. The TV tapings sold out every week and the cards at the Hemisphere drew pretty good crowds averaging about 6,000 to 9,000 in a 15,000 seat arena.

By 1981 SWCW got a big push with the arrival of AWA world champion Nick Bockwinkle and he became a regular in the SWCW circuit defending his World title against stars like: Tom Jones, Manny Fernandez, and Terry Allen (A young Magnum TA), also making a few appearances in the area this year was the Legendary Wrestler Billy Robinson. Having these two wrestlers in the area gave the territory even more recognition and it was finally getting some coverage it deserved in many national wrestling magazines. Locally word of mouth helped SWCW become even more popular as promoter Joe Blanchard was bringing in many of the top stars in the wrestling.

NEXT MONTH:

I'll conclude my look at 1981 in the SWCW area and talk about many of the feature stars who got started in the area before becoming big national stars. Thanks for reading.