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Don Muraco
Don Muraco (born September 10, 1949) is an American retired professional wrestler and podcaster. He is best known for his appearances with the World Wrestling Federation from 1981 to 1988, where he held the WWF Intercontinental Heavyweight Championship on two occasions and was crowned the inaugural winner of the King of the Ring tournament in 1985. He was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame class of 2004 and the Professional Wrestling Hall of Fame in 2014. Professional wrestling career Early career (1970–1981) Muraco was born at Sunset Beach, Oahu, Hawaii in 1949 and is of Native Hawaiian heritage. A Hawaii state amateur wrestling champion for Punahou School in 1967, Muraco chose professional wrestling over football. He spent the first year of his career learning the ropes in Vancouver, Portland, Florida and Los Angeles before getting his first big break, for Verne Gagne's American Wrestling Association (AWA).Don's actual height was 6 feet tall and he weighed in around 255 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sunset Beach (Oahu)
Sunset Beach on Oahu's North Shore Sunset Beach is on the North Shore of Oahu in Hawaii and known for big wave surfing during the winter season. The original Hawaiian name for this place is Paumalū. It is a two-mile (3.3 km) stretch of mostly beige sand located at 59-104 Kamehameha Highway in Pupukea, 39 miles (63 km) driving distance from Waikiki. Lifeguards are usually present. Like many beaches on Oahu's North Shore, Sunset Beach is considered dangerous for inexperienced surfers, due to extensive coral formations near the surface that present the risk of serious injury. Trade winds will be an advantage and a disadvantage, at the same, as the offshore breeze will make paddling for a wave a difficult task. Conditions for swimming change depending on the particular location and season. Generally speaking, the water is flat as a lake in the summers and has waves in the winters. All the surfing contests take place in the winter around December and January, that being the time of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Native Hawaiians
Native Hawaiians (also known as Indigenous Hawaiians, Kānaka Maoli, Aboriginal Hawaiians, First Hawaiians, or simply Hawaiians) ( haw, kānaka, , , and ), are the indigenous ethnic group of Polynesian people of the Hawaiian Islands. Hawaii was settled at least 800 years ago with the voyage of Polynesians from the Society Islands. The settlers gradually became detached from their original homeland and developed a distinct Hawaiian culture and identity in their new isolated home. That included the creation of new religious and cultural structures, mostly in response to the new living environment and the need for a structured belief system through which to pass on knowledge. Hence, the Hawaiian religion focuses on ways to live and relate to the land and instills a sense of communal living as well as a specialized spatial awareness. The Hawaiian Kingdom was formed in 1795, when Kamehameha the Great, of the independent island of Hawaiʻi, conquered the independent islands of Oʻ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ivan Koloff
Oreal Donald Perras (August 25, 1942 – February 18, 2017) was a Canadian professional wrestler, better known by the ring name "The Russian Bear" Ivan Koloff. He was the third wrestler to hold the WWWF Championship. Early life Perras was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada and raised on a dairy farm in rural Ontario along with his six brothers and three sisters. Since first watching professional wrestling on TV at the age of eight, he wanted to become a wrestler, and would often wrestle with his brothers growing up. At age 18, he left high school and joined Jack Wentworth's wrestling school in Hamilton, Ontario, where he would lift weights and learn wrestling holds. He stood tall, and weighed approximately . Towards the end of his career, he dropped a considerable amount of weight and was tipping the scale at . Professional wrestling career Early career (1961–1967) Perras debuted as an Irish rogue villain character named Red McNulty, billed from Dublin, Ireland and wr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Larry Hennig
Larry Hennig (June 18, 1936 – December 6, 2018) was an American professional wrestler. He was the father of "Mr. Perfect" Curt Hennig, and the grandfather of Curtis Axel and Amy "Ms. Perfect" Hennig. He worked in the American Wrestling Association, National Wrestling Alliance, and the World Wide Wrestling Federation. Hennig was known by the nickname, "The Axe", a nickname he had because of his signature, often finishing move of dropping a full weight elbow onto his prone opponents. Professional wrestling career American Wrestling Association In the early 1960s, Hennig entered the American Wrestling Association (AWA) under the tutelage of Verne Gagne. He eventually found some main event success and shared a brief Tag Team Championship reign with Duke Hoffman. But due to frequently losing to rougher, more experienced wrestlers, he began questioning the scientific style instilled into him by Gagne and looked toward a different approach (in kayfabe). During the summer of 1963, Hen ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jimmy Snuka
James Reiher Snuka (born James Wiley Smith; May 18, 1943 – January 15, 2017) was a Fijian American professional wrestler. He is better known by the ring name Jimmy "Superfly" Snuka. Snuka wrestled for several promotions from the 1970s to 2010s. He was best known for his time in the World Wrestling Federation (WWF, now WWE) in the 1980s and was credited with introducing the high-flying style of wrestling to the WWF. He was inducted into the WWF Hall of Fame in 1996, but was quietly removed from the Hall of Fame section of WWE's website, in 2015, after he was arrested for the murder of his girlfriend in 1983. Snuka was the inaugural ECW World Heavyweight Champion (a title he held twice) in Eastern Championship Wrestling (later Extreme Championship Wrestling). His children, Sim Snuka and Tamina Snuka, are both professional wrestlers. Snuka was indicted and arrested in September 2015 on third-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter charges in relation to the May 1983 death of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tag Team
Tag team wrestling is a type of professional wrestling in which matches are contested between teams of multiple wrestlers. Tag teams may be made up of wrestlers who normally wrestle in singles competition, but more commonly are made of established teams who wrestle regularly as a unit and have a team name and identity. In most team matches, only one competitor per team is allowed in the ring at a time. This status as the active or legal wrestler may be transferred by physical contact, most commonly a palm-to-palm tag which resembles a high five. The team-based match has been a mainstay of professional wrestling since the mid-twentieth century, and most promotions have sanctioned a championship division for tag teams. History The first "World" tag team championship was promoted in San Francisco in the early 1950s. Tag matches with three-man teams were developed, and in some territories, a championship division was instituted for these teams, but the concept failed to become wi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Face (professional Wrestling)
In professional wrestling, a face (babyface) is a heroic, "good guy" or "fan favorite" wrestler, booked (scripted) by the promotion with the aim of being cheered by fans, and acts as a protagonist to the heels, who are the villainous antagonist or "bad guy" characters. Traditionally, they wrestle within the rules and avoid cheating (in contrast to the villains who use illegal moves and call in additional wrestlers to do their work for them) while behaving positively towards the referee and the audience. Such characters are also referred to as blue-eyes in British wrestling and ''técnicos'' in ''lucha libre''. The face character is portrayed as a hero relative to the heel wrestlers, who are analogous to villains. Not everything a face wrestler does must be heroic: faces need only to be clapped or cheered by the audience to be effective characters. When the magazine ''Pro Wrestling Illustrated'' went into circulation in the late 1970s, the magazine referred to face wrestlers as " ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
American Wrestling Association
The American Wrestling Association (AWA) was an American professional wrestling promotion based in Minneapolis, Minnesota that ran from 1960 until 1991. It was owned and founded by Verne Gagne and Wally Karbo. The territory was originally part of the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA), becoming an independent territory in 1960. History Early years Anton Stecher, brother and manager of former World heavyweight champion Joe Stecher, was a founding member of the NWA in 1948 and had promoted wrestling in Minneapolis since 1933 through his Minneapolis Boxing and Wrestling Club. In 1952, he sold a one-third interest in the promotion to his son Dennis and Wally Karbo. Stecher died on October 9, 1954, and control of the promotion passed to Karbo and Dennis. Verne Gagne, an amateur wrestling champion, had become a well-known and popular wrestler nationally in the 1950s as a result of his appearances on the DuMont Network. He aspired to become NWA World Champion, but political sentiment ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Verne Gagne
Laverne Clarence Gagne (February 26, 1926 – April 27, 2015) was an American amateur and professional wrestler, football player, wrestling trainer, and wrestling promoter. He was the owner and promoter of the Minneapolis-based American Wrestling Association (AWA), the predominant promotion throughout the Midwest and Manitoba for many years. He remained in this position until 1991, when the company folded. As an amateur wrestler, Gagne won two NCAA titles and was an alternate for the U.S freestyle wrestling team at the 1948 Olympic Games before turning professional in 1949. Gagne was an 11-time world champion in major professional wrestling promotions, having held the AWA World Heavyweight Championship ten times and the IWA World Heavyweight Championship once as the IWA World Heavyweight Championship was considered a world championship in Japan. He has also won top professional wrestling promotions World Heavyweight Championships such as the World Heavyweight Championship (Oma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
NWA Hollywood Wrestling
NWA Hollywood Wrestling (sometimes referred to as NWA Los Angeles) was a professional wrestling promotion headquartered in Los Angeles, California in the United States that promoted professional wrestling matches throughout Southern California. It was founded in 1958 as the North American Wrestling Alliance, a member of the National Wrestling Alliance. It broke away from the NWA in 1959 and was renamed Worldwide Wrestling Associates in 1961. In 1968, it rejoined the NWA and adopted its final name, remaining a member until closing in 1982. History In 1942, Frank Garbutt, vice president of the Los Angeles Athletic Club, hired former California State Athletic Commission inspector Alvah "Cal" Eaton as the promoter of the Grand Olympic Auditorium at the advice of his secretary, Aileen LeBell. Eaton and LeBell married in 1948, and over the following years the couple became major professional wrestling and boxing promoters in Southern California. By the early-1950s, the Eatons, along with ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Championship Wrestling From Florida
Championship Wrestling from Florida (CWF) was the corporate and brand name of the Tampa, Florida wrestling office existing from 1961, when Eddie Graham first bought into the promotion, until 1987, when it closed down. It is also referred to as ''Florida Championship Wrestling''. When Mike Graham tried a return to promoting, the rights to the name had been acquired by an outside party, forcing him to use another name, ''Florida Championship Wrestling''. History Founding The original owner and promoter was "Cowboy" Clarence Preston Luttrall, a former journeyman heel wrestler who once fought a widely publicized boxing match, resulting from a wrestling angle, with a forty-something Jack Dempsey. It worked but Cowboy took a severe beating. Cowboy opened the office in 1949, and Eddie Graham bought into the promotion in 1961, then took over completely in 1971, because of health reasons with Cowboy. The office was a member of the National Wrestling Alliance during the entire CWF era, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pacific Northwest Wrestling
Pacific Northwest Wrestling (PNW) (also known as Big Time Wrestling and Portland Wrestling) is the common name used to refer to several different professional wrestling companies, both past and present, based in Portland, Oregon, United States. The first such company (that would later become Portland Wrestling) was founded by Herb Owen in 1925. It was the Northwest territory of the National Wrestling Alliance from the Alliance's inception in 1948 until 1992. The area was brought to its prime by Herb's son, Don Owen, and this version of Pacific Northwest Wrestling saw many of the top names in pro wrestling come through on a regular basis. The Pacific Northwest was considered one of the main pro wrestling territories from the 1960s to the 1980s. Portland Wrestling was forced to close its doors in July 1992. The closure came as a result of a slowdown in professional wrestling during the early 1990s, a declaration of bankruptcy by ''Portland Wrestling's'' main television sponsor, an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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