Territories booking the champ back in the day

By Scott Keith on August 29, 2018

Hi Scott,

Question about booking the world champion in territories other than the home territory.
So when Flair worked outside of Mid Atlantic did Crockett get a cut of the booking fee/gate for letting his guy work elsewhere? Did the NWA get a cut for any show the title was defended at?
Or did they get their cut from franchise fees for being part of the NWA?
Just curious about how much the champ actually took home and how much ended up going elsewhere.

Yup, everyone got their cut. The NWA champion was guaranteed a certain amount of money to work the show, plus a percentage of the gate. And usually the territory promoter would pay a booking fee to assorted people with their palms out (the NWA, the home territory of the champion, his manager, whoever) because there was a lot of shady math involved that made promoters rich and wrestlers less so. Where things got REALLY spicy is when Crockett basically took over all the booking of Flair as champion and the other territories stopped getting dates on Flair completely. And then they'd complain to the NWA about Jim Crockett and NWA President Jim Crockett was like "My decision is that you're pretty much fucked."

Anyway, the champion did well for himself. Guys like Flair and Race were still clearing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in the early 80s, which was big money. By the mid-80s Flair was exclusively contracted to Crockett and it was a moot point anyway.

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