The Championship BELT That Made Ric FLAIR A Star: Where Is It Now?

On July 4, 1974, a twenty five year old Ric Flair won the first championship of his career in the Greensboro Coliseum. Seven months later, the company that created that belt retired it in a single night and left it in a drawer for 622 days. Today nobody knows where those belts are. This is the complete history of the NWA Mid-Atlantic Tag Team Championship, the regional tag team title of Jim Crockett Promotions, from its origin as the Atlantic Coast Tag Team Championship in June 1968 through its rebranding in October 1973 and its silent death in 1985. It is not the NWA World Tag Team Championship that Crockett also promoted in the Carolinas and Virginia. It is the other one. The belt a team had to win before anybody in Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling took them seriously, and the one the office kept sacrificing whenever something bigger came along. Inside this documentary: the phantom match in Washington D.C. that created the title in 1968, the five year war between Rip Hawk and Swede Hanson and the team of Johnny Weaver and George Becker, the night the Minnesota Wrecking Crew of Gene and Ole Anderson won the belts and retired them on the spot, the 434 day reign of Paul Jones and Ricky Steamboat, the two ring battle royal in Charlotte that ended their partnership, the revolving door of the early eighties, and the last champions, Ron Bass and Black Bart with James J. Dillon in his corner. We also look at the hardware itself. No studio photograph of this championship has ever surfaced. What survives are pictures of the men who carried it, which means the shape, the plates and the materials have to be reconstructed from the replicas being built today. No craftsman has ever been credited with building it. No chronology of its versions has ever been published. And we close with the question nobody in wrestling has answered: where did the belts go when Jim Crockett Promotions moved to national television and stopped saying the name. A documentary about the territory era, the NWA, Jim Crockett Promotions, and what the wrestling business threw away on its way to becoming WCW. CHAPTERS 02:48 The Territory That Ran on Tag Teams 05:45 The Name Came From a Car 08:11 The Gold Nobody Photographed 11:55 The Execution 14:08 Resurrection by Necessity 17:15 The Revolving Door 20:43 The Long Silence 23:48 Where Is It Now 27:03 Close Subscribe for more forgotten wrestling history. Tell us in the comments which championship or which buried rivalry we should investigate next.