(Originally on Today in Alternate History)
On
May 1st,,
1981 National Wrestling Alliance superstar Tommy Rich, having already
shocked
the
wrestling world once by beating veteran Harley Race for the NWA world
heavyweight title
five
days earlier, made lightning strike twice by defeating Race in an
epic rematch at an NWA
live
card in Gainesville, Georgia. Rich's win in the return bout against
Race solidified his place
in
the company as a bona fide top rank grappler and stunned observers
who had been certain
Race
would easily regain the title from his younger, less experienced foe;
it would also lay the
groundwork
for a third and final Rich-Race showdown at a televised NWA card in
the Atlanta
Omni
arena on June 28th,
1981. The Omni match ended in a double countout when Race and
Rich
fell out of the ring
simultaneously at the 20-minute mark and got into a knock-down drag-
out
brawl in the stands.
Fans
were solidly behind Rich in his battles with Race and his subsequent
clashes against
another
former NWA world champion, Texas native and notorious brawler Terry
Funk, but that
attitude
would change dramatically after Rich lost the title to “Nature Boy”
Ric Flair. His nerves
stretched
to the breaking point by the stress of his feuds with Race and Funk,
Rich proceeded
to
declare war on the new champion-- a war that ended with Rich
regaining the title on March
5th,
1982 in Baltimore and turning on NWA fans with a vengeance. In the
course of his second
tenure
as world champion Rich would become the most hated man in the NWA;
fans cheered
when
Flair regained the title from Rich nearly four months later in Boca
Raton, Florida. He left
the
company for good in October of 1982 and was signed by its archrival
the World Wrestling
Federation,
where he earned the nickname “Psycho” and defeated Bob Backlund
in January
of
1983 to become only the second man in wrestling history to have been
both an NWA and a
WWF
world champion during his career. Rich's WWF world title reign would
end on April 24th,
1983
in spectacular fashion when fan favorite Terry “Hulk” Hogan
demolished Rich in scarcely
seven
and a half minutes at the first Wrestlemania pay-per-view; Hogan
would go on to reign
as
WWF world champion for over nine years, while Rich would be gone from
the WWF in less
than
six months.
After
leaving the WWF Rich would sign up with the AWA; he didn't win any
singles titles there
but
did enjoy two reigns as an AWA tag team champion, first as partners
with Bad News Allen
and
later as one half of the combo the Living Legends with Larry Zbyszko.
Harley Race would
earn
the ire of WWF fans in the mid-1980s as a part of manager Bobby “The
Brain” Heenan's
stable.
In 1990 the NWA would merge with Verne Gagne's American Wrestling
Association to
form
World Championship Wrestling(WCW); WCW would challenge the WWF for
supremacy
in
the wrestling business for at least another decade before it was
itself absored by the WWF
in
2001. The WWF would rename itself World Wrestling Enterprises(WWE) in
2004 to put an
end
to decades of being confused with the World Wildlife Fund and also to
reflect its growing
role
as a multimedia juggernaut.
******
In
reality, Race easily beat Rich in that May 1st
bout to win his fifth NWA world heavyweight
title.
Rich didn't compete in the WWF but did have a stint in the AWA as a
Southern tag team
champion
and Southern heavyweight champion. The AWA went out of business in
1991; the
NWA
took some serious blows to its prestige that same year when several
promoters pulled
out
of the company to form WCW and again in 1994 when a group of East
Coast promoters
quit
the NWA to establish ECW(Extreme Championship Wrestling), but
survived to re-emerge
after
the year 2000 as one of the largest and most profitable independent
wrestling organizations in the world. Tommy Rich continued to wrestle
at indy cards as late as 2010; Harley Race turned from active
competition in the 1990s to concentrate on managing champions like
Big Van Vader and doing TV commentary.
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