WRESTLING HISTORY

On April 9, 1984, the Brisco brothers sold their shares in GCW, including their prime time slot on the TBS cable TV network, to Vince McMahon. However, GCW's core audience was not interested in the WWF's cartoonish approach, preferring a more athletic style. As a result, when GCW's faithful television viewers tuned into TBS on July 14, 1984 and saw WWF programming instead of the GCW wrestlers they were used to seeing, they were outraged, and sent many complaints to the network, demanding the return of GCW. This day has since gone down in wrestling lore as Black Saturday. Adding fuel to the fire was the fact that, despite originally promising to produce original programming for the TBS timeslot, McMahon chose instead to provide only a clip show for TBS featuring highlights from other WWF programming, a move which angered network head Ted Turner and was a major factor in his decision to discontinue showing the WWF on his network. Luckily for Turner, Ole Anderson had refused to sell his shares in GCW to the WWF, and he teamed with fellow holdout shareholders Fred Ward and Ralph Freed to create Championship Wrestling from Georgia. Turner quickly secured a TV deal with the new promotion, as well as with Bill Watts' Mid-South Wrestling.
Although World Championship Wrestling was a brand name used by promoter Jim Barnett for his Australian promotion,[4] the first promotion in the United States to use the World Championship Wrestling brand name (though it was never referred to as "WCW") on a wide scale was Georgia Championship Wrestling (GCW, although Vincent J. McMahon's Northeast-based Capitol Wrestling Corporation, then also affiliated with the NWA, also sometimes used the name in house show promotion). GCW, owned primarily by Jack Brisco and Gerald Brisco and booked by Ole Anderson, was the first NWA territory to gain cable TV access.