Way before that overly-melodramatic Hollywood movie starring Mickey Rourke, came this 70s wrasslin' flick about a promoter(Ed Asner) trying dealing with the mob and the everyday turmoil of the "king of sports". Produced by and featuring world champion wrestler Verne Gagne, who was, in reality, the owner of the Minneapolis-based American Wrestling Association, which was one of the big 3 promotions at the time, this, of course, features a bunch of stars from that area including Dusty Rhodes, Nick Bockwinkel, Larry "The Ax" Hennig, Ray "The Crippler" Stevens(who blatantly kills a guy right in the ring!), The Crusher and a bunch more. If you look really closely you can even see a young fat Ric Flair. Also Vince McMahon's dad Vince Sr. shows up for a meeting of America's top promoters for a super-bowl of champions, which we never actually get to see.
Having been raised in the Northeast on the WWF I always viewed the AWA back then as the weakest promotion and having an old bald-man as your champion was probably the main reason. Well in this movie they sorta deal with that with Mr. Gagne(for some reason under the pseudonym of Mike Bullard) being forced out of the top spot by Ed"Lou Grant" Asner and up and coming grappler Billy Robinson( called Billy Taylor for no discernable reason) . Sadly in real life Gagne would hang on for another 7 years or so as champ. The overall plot in this thing is pretty weak and they shoehorn in a love story with Asner and his secretary, who acts enough like Mary Tyler Moore that it made me feel uncomfortable to watch, that goes nowhere and the mobster angle is also never realized by the time the credits role. Hard to recommend this to anyone who's not an old-school wrestling fan and wants to see whose face will pop up next. Anyone else would probably be totally disinterested.
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