The majority of pro wrestling documentaries are produced each year either in-house by WWE, by Vice’s popular Dark Side of the Ring series, or by the occasional indie production.
A new documentary about pro wrestling has an unlikely pedigree: It’s a production of the PBS station in the Raleigh, N.C., area about the history of pro wrestling, most specifically the Mid-Atlantic territory and Jim Crockett Promotions, at Dorton Arena in Raleigh.
The doc is called When Giants Walked Here. Directed by North Carolina-based filmmakers Cliff Bumgardner and Chris Lea, it follows the rise and fall of those wrestling cards from the 1970s to the late 1980s and more recent successful attempts to bring indie wrestling cards to the arena.
If you’re unfamiliar with the “territory era” of professional wrestling, wrestling in most parts of the country was controlled by individual promoters, most of whom were affiliated with the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA).
That system blew up in the early 1980s when Vince McMahon’s WWF sought to go national from its base in the north, while Jim Crockett Promotions, whose territory included Raleigh, made a similar attempt from the south.
When the shows were held in Raleigh, they featured the likes of Ric Flair, Rowdy Roddy Piper, Dusty Rhodes, and most of the other leading lights of the NWA in the waning days of the territory era.
This push coincided with the glory days for Mid-Atlantic and Raleigh specifically, although Crockett crashed into money problems. Ted Turner bought the company in 1988, turned it into World Championship Wrestling (WCW), and set the stage for the Monday Night Wars era in the 1990s.
There’s a lot about the unique architecture of Dorton Arena, which doesn’t look like any other wrestling venue I’ve ever seen. We hear from wrestling figures like Jimmy Valient, Bobby Fulton and George South, and the famed ex-referee Earl Hebner.
The film is different enough from the style of both WWE’s in-house docs and Dark Side of the Ring. And I hope this leads to more local PBS stations looking into their local pro wrestling histories and mining stories from that.
When Giants Walked Here debuted Thursday on Raleigh’s PBS station and can also be viewed on its website here.
