By Dick Bourne
Mid-Atlantic Gateway
If you grew up watching wrestling on TV on Saturday afternoons in the 1960s through the early 1980s, you knew full well the havoc traditional sports programming could cause with the schedule when they ran long, with basketball games going to overtime and baseball games going to extra innings.
On January 11 during the bleak midwinter of 1958, Jim Crockett was to debut his brand new live pro-wrestling show on WBTV channel 3 in Charlotte. It was a major development for promoter Jim Crockett to be able to promote his local cards through the relatively new medium of television. Wrestling from Chicago, Los Angeles, and Texas had been a successful staple of national television in the 1950s, but this would be the local Crockett crew for Charlotte.
Charlotte News sports writer Ronald Green wrote about that big news in the local paper in the week before. You can read that article in our earlier post here: "Championship Wrestling" debuts in Charlotte (1958)
The show, hosted by WBTV personality "Big" Bill Ward, did indeed debut on Saturday, January 11, but not at 3:45 that afternoon as originally scheduled. ACC Basketball got in the way. And then there were Spanky and those poor Little Rascals that got in the way, too.
In another Ronald Jordon column recently uncovered, the Charlotte News told the story. Read that entire article below for all the details.
The afternoon ACC basketball game between Duke and NC State ran long
when Duke center Bob Lakata and forward Jim Newcome sent the game into
two overtimes respectively. WBTV producer Gene Burke watched as the
double-overtime contest threw his Saturday afternoon programming
schedule into chaos, delaying the debut of "Championship Wrestling" and
then, with wrestling running over, bumping the popular kids show "Little
Rascals."
It may not seem like much now, but one can imagine the stress producer Gene Burke and wrestling promoter Jim Crockett were under that afternoon with the debut of local pro wrestling on television. It was nice to read Ronald Green's positive nod to the production at the conclusion of the article.
As always, thanks to Mark Eastridge.
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ACC Basketball Note: Duke went on to win the ACC league championship that year finishing 11-3, a game ahead of second place NC State. Forward Jim Newcome, mentioned in the article above, went on to play in the NBA.