Portland Wrestling legend Playboy Buddy Rose was a very good friend. When he passed, his widow gave me Buddy’s VHS collection. This consisted of hundreds of tapes that were, for the most part, not labeled. It took me months, but I went through every single tape to find footage of the “Portland Wrestling” TV show. Neither the promotion or KPTV kept any footage of PW. Because of that, the footage Buddy recorded is the majority of what you’ll ever see.
I have put this footage on an external hard drive…over 300 DVDs that equals to almost 500 hours of footage, going back to the days of Lonnie Mayne.
Other wrestlers featured on this footage early in their career include Roddy Piper, Jesse Ventura, Jimmy Snuka, Dynamite Kid, Curt Hennig, Rocky Johnson, Matt Borne, Dizzy (Brutus Beefcake) Hogan, Gino Hernandez, David Schultz, Bryan Adams & many, many more!!!
This also included footage from a format of home video that predated VHS & BETA. It’s a long story, but these particular tapes took me a couple of years & well over $1000 to restore. I posted a picture of what these tapes look like.
Last month, I added over 40 episodes of the syndicated “Big Time Wrestling” to this collection. These 60 minute shows are what were syndicated in Washington state. They consist of the last hour of the Saturday night Portland wrestling card, that was not shown on Portland TV. There is now about 550 hours of Portland footage included on this external hard drive.
If you are interested in what is included, please send me a PM with your email address & I’ll send you the lists of what is included.