Wrestling Territories Quotes

I grew up in Tampa, Florida, and St. Pete, Tampa, the Tampa Bay area, and that was the home of Championship Wrestling from Florida with Gordon Solie, Dusty Rhodes, and it was just... I mean, for storylines and angles and promos, it was second to none.

I grew up in rural Missouri about two hours north of St. Louis, and if the wind was blowing right on a Saturday night, I could catch All Star Wrestling out of Kansas City, which was run by Bob Geigel, and some of the stars there were Bulldog Bob Brower and Ray Candy.

I think, in general, when you talk about great wrestling towns in the history of the world, I think Memphis kind of shoots up there into the top three if not the top two.

Florida was a hotbed of professional wrestling, one of the hottest in the country.

Vince McMahon - he's third generation, and his enormous empire, he ran it much like the territories. The buck stopped with him; he made the decisions. That's how a company should be run. Feast or famine, right or wrong, the WWE is driven off his decision making and always has been.

When I started out, there were many different companies... you could leave and go to a different territory, and there were so many different styles. What we have now is WWE has survived the test of time, and all the other companies have fallen off the face of the earth.

The South is where wrestling was birthed.

My career path is the best I could have hoped for, and that's thanks to independent wrestling and territories across the world.

When WWF and WCW came along, they weren't the only game in town, but to make a good living, you had to work for one of the two organizations. Without a true Number Two, there is no such thing as a Number One. You're just it; you're just there.

All the territories or places I've wrestled are different. There are different styles. The WWE and TV style is also very different.

The thing that people should remember, is that back in the day, because wrestling does not have a season, every week is a week of first run TV. In the territories that I worked in, specifically, we never had a rerun. So those shows that aired, aired one time to their constituency.

For the majority of my career, I worked everywhere but the WWE.

To look back and reflect on the career and sort of look at the seasons of it before I got to the WWF, working the territories and Japan and Texas, Puerto Rico, and then the WWF and WCW, then obviously the TNA years - it's been quite a journey, I'll say that.

I consider Ric Flair to be one of the great comedic minds. But I never got to see him growing up because that was back when they still had territories.