Tulsa (Tri-State)

NWA Tri-State Wrestling (1958-1982)

Tri-State Wrestling headed by Leroy McGuirk ran successfully for years in this tough area of the United States. The physical area was huge and the population to draw from was small, but many stars came through and developed there over the promotion's twenty year run. McGuirk was a junior heavyweight himself and mainly promoted them with some excellent talents to get behind, namely Danny Hodge and Jack Brisco. The promotion's name, Tri-State, refers to Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana, but Mississippi became a key state and they even ran spot shows in Missouri and Texas. The focal cities were: Tulsa and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; Little Rock and Fort Smith, Arkansas and Shreveport, Louisiana. After struggling in the early 1960s, McGuirk aligned himself with Verne Gagne and Fritz Von Erich for a time and eventually partnered up with Bill Watts and his long-time top star Danny Hodge. The promotion came alive in the late 1960s and was reformed in the early 1970s under McGuirk and Watts, shifting its focus away from being just another NWA territory. They even pulled out of the Alliance and bought out Gagne and Von Erich in hopes of running bigger shows and promoting itself better. New Orleans, Louisiana, became their big money city and Watts felt they had to shift their focus toward it instead of Oklahoma. By this point, the company had split into Northern and Southern operations. Like Tennesee, the old-timer stuck with his main region (the Northern part), while the secondary part (the Southern part) was allowed to grow and it eventually broke away and the old part eventually died off. McGuirk had lost touch and Watts bought the Southern portion of Tri-State Wrestling. George Scott came in to book the remained Northern part and McGuirk's daughter took over promoting, but it struggled for the next few years before Watts bought it in 1982.