Written By Alfredo Esparza

I decided to sign up with a Fantasy Wrestling Booking League from one of the wrestling forums I frequent. I visit a couple of forums, but usually don’t really have much to contribute outside of answering a few questions or in the case of one forum, annoying people with my very biased Lakers views! One day, I notice they are starting up a Fantasy Wrestling league based on the NWA from 1982. So, there is about 20 or so territories. The idea is that all territories are under the NWA banner and didn’t split up, so WWE, AWA, World Class, etc. are still part of the NWA. There were I believe 11 people signed up to be ‘promoters’ and I thought, well I’d like to join. I email the person in charge, he gives me the okay to not only join the league, but to post it on my site since I thought some people would like to read it. Since I joined late , I couldn’t take part of the first draft, which I was okay with since I noticed that I could pick from 1 or 2 territories that were not part of the draft and really showing up late to join anything would add to my fantasy booking rep as a lucha promoter! AMIRITE?!?! The other territory, I thought about was Georgia. It got taken later, but wasn’t part of the draft.

They held their draft and midway through I realized I could really have fun fantasy booking EMLL starting out in 1982 because well, no one else had a lucha fed going. 4 more people were planning on joining in. So, I believe the league is up to 15 territories, which happen to be:

• AMERICAN WRESTLING ASSOCIATION (AWA)
• BIG TIME WRESTLING (BTW)
• CHAMPIONSHIP WRESTLING FROM FLORIDA (CWF)
• CONTINENTAL WRESTLING ASSOCIATION (CWA)
• EMPRESA MEXICANA DE LA LUCHA LIBRE (EMLL)
• GEORGIA CHAMPIONSHIP WRESTLING (GCW)
• GOLDEN STATE CHAMPIONSHIP WRESTLING (GSCW)
• MID-ATLANTIC CHAMPIONSHIP WRESTLING (MACW)
• MID-SOUTH WRESTLING (MSW)
• PACIFIC NORTHWEST WRESTLING (PNW)
• SOUTHEASTERN CHAMPIONSHIP WRESTLING (SECW)
• SOUTHWEST CHAMPIONSHIP WRESTLING (SWCW)
• STAMPEDE WRESTLING
• WORLD CLASS CHAMPIONSHIP WRESTLING (WCCW)
• WORLD WRESTLING FEDERATION (WWF)

It should be interesting to see what everyone else comes up with because I think everyone in this fantasy league started watching wrestling at different points and are of different ages.

From what I understood, each of the first 11 territories were automatically allowed to have their champion be apart of their group, so Flair was in Mid-Atlantic, DiBiase in Mid-South, Backlund in WWF, Bockwinkel in AWA, etc. You also had to recognize the current NWA World Champions at the time like Race (NWA World), Tiger Mask (NWA World Jr.), Steamboat & Youngblood (NWA World Tag Team), Brody (NWA Brass Knuckles) and Moolah (Women’s). You have to schedule any of the World Champions ahead of time to appear in your territory. You also have to have at least one weekly house show and tv show. There’s some other rules and conditions within the league, but I think I’ll let the committee handle that stuff.

Basically, what I’ll be writing for this fantasy league is the following:

• A weekly newsletter keeping everyone else informed of your territory (upcoming shows, results, news, Roster updates with returns/departures, etc.)
• 1 house show (I’ll probably switch every other week with a Sunday or Tuesday show at Arena Coliseo)
• 1 tv taping (Friday Arena Mexico show for me and only 2 matches!)

PLEASE REMEMBER THAT IT’S FANTASY BOOKING AND NOT SOMETHING THAT REALLY HAPPENED! ANY PROMOS OR NONSENSE I WRITE IS ALL FANTASY! Maybe I should spend 15 minutes talking about this on the podcast, like Karl Stern. I’m probably not nearly as enjoyable to listen to about this sort of thing like he is.

You can only have a maximum of 32 wrestlers and 3 managers. They did 2 rounds of the draft and when it was over, there were still over 100 wrestlers to choose from on the free agent list. Several (or should I say most) were from Mexico!

With that being said here’s the 32 wrestlers in my roster (along with Dr. Alfonso Morales!):

I was surprised the Twin Devils and Black Gordman were available considering I was far more familiar with them from wrestling in Los Angeles and in the Southwest region. When I sent in my 32 choices for the roster, I noticed I had screwed up by not including Cien Caras. Some other luchadores were selected by other people. Most notably, El Canek going to World Class, Mil Mascaras, El Santo, Blue Demon and La Parka to Los Angeles (Yeah I know what you are probably thinking. I asked about La Parka and got no response. Its fantasy and I’m not gonna ruin someone else’s fun.), Fishman, Negro Casas and Dr. Wagner (Sr.) to Georgia.

Japan doesn’t exist at the moment and that’s kind of surprising given the number of puro fans online. I thought about fantasy booking UWA as well, but don’t know if they’d be okay with me running two territories and really don’t know if I would have the time to do it. Then again, adding the fantasy league to my site probably means I’d have added incentive to keep this going (i.e. more content, more traffic, more google ad pennies).

For those of you still reading, another reason I’m doing this is that it helps me learn more about some of the plugins and features that are available for wordpress. Take for example the pics above. That’s actually a gallery feature. All I did was click ‘gallery’ and it adds it. No extra html coding to write. Plus, it gives you the option to have it show photos at random. I’ve also figured out that twitter plugin you see at the top of each post AND audio and video plugins that I can add to the site. So remember, when reading the fantasy section, its all meant as fun. Feel free to skip it. I won’t be too upset about it.