The Story of Buddy Rose's Portland Wrestling video collection
Pro wrestling territory history preserved
Buddy Rose had a rich pro wrestling history in the Pacific Northwest for Portland Wrestling.
That territory was where he spent the most time in his wrestling career that spanned from 1973 to 2005. Rose first began wrestling for Portland Wrestling in the late ‘70s and wrestled there throughout different portions of the ‘80s, always in a prominent role.
To review how he performed in TV matches and on promos, Rose had the habit of tape recording the weekly Portland Wrestling TV show.
In the process, he created a video library of over 400 hours of Portland Wrestling TV footage, spanning from the late ‘70s to the early ‘90s.
It was a common practice among pro wrestling enthusiasts in those eras to record the wrestling shows off TV, but presumably for most not with the prolificity that Rose did.
Most likely the vast majority of wrestling fans reused the cassette to tape record over the shows after they had watched a wrestling show.
Not Buddy Rose.
He never recorded over the wrestling shows. For many years Rose’s collection of videos of Portland Wrestling’s weekly TV show remained in boxes in his garage, as well as a large duffel bag.
The tapes likely would have ended up disposed of, lost in time like much of the territory wrestling footage from those same eras, if not for the efforts of a dedicated fan of Portland Wrestling who wanted to watch the footage.
Discovering Portland Wrestling
Rich Patterson first started watching Portland Wrestling in 1970.
“My three older brothers and my dad watched it, so it was on every Saturday night in our house,” Patterson told The Pro Wrestling Exuberant.
“Looking back, I really don't know what attracted me to it. Perhaps it was because of the action and/or because my family watched it. Portland Wrestling was the only promotion that was available in the Portland area at that time. The two guys I remember vividly were Kangaroo Johnny Boyd and Bull Ramos. Both were bad guys that scared me. There was something about them when they were screaming on an interview that I believed them!”
Portland Wrestling left a lasting impression on Patterson. He can still vividly recall his favorite early memories as a fan of Portland Wrestling from action he saw over 50 years ago.
“Three things still stand out vividly for me,” said Patterson. “First, was July 4th weekend in 1971 when Johnny Boyd beat Kurt Von Steiger to win the PNW Championship. After the match, Kurt and Karl Von Steiger attacked Boyd. During his post-match interview, he was covered from head to toe in blood. Boyd screamed that he was going to bring his cousin to town. The next week, Norman Fredrick Charles III came to the area. Even though Portland Wrestling was still broadcast in black and white at this time, I remember being grossed out.”
Paterson’s second favorite memory of Portland Wrestling is the first live event he attended for the promotion.
“It was November 1971, and I went with my brothers and some of their friends,” recalled Patterson. “The main event was The Royal Kangaroos, Boyd and Charles, against Ed and Bill Francis. It was a blood bath. Not wanting to see all the blood but still wanting to not seem like I was scared, I was making it look like I was watching the ring. In fact, I was staring into my brother's shoulder.”
His third favorite memory of Portland Wrestling is from early 1972.
“Tony Borne and Lonnie Mayne were being interviewed,” said Patterson. “With them was Lonnie's Dad, Kenny Mayne. During the interview, Kenny started telling Tony that he didn't like how Tony was treating his son. Tony ended up attacking Kenny, and Kenny started bleeding. I couldn't believe that someone would attack someone's dad so viciously.”
The Longevity of Portland Wrestling
Portland Wrestling had a long run as a territory promotion with a weekly local wrestling TV show that ran for decades, first airing in 1953.
It was also one of the final territory wrestling promotions to cease operations, a part of the seismic shift in the landscape of pro wrestling in the United States that began as part of the WWE’s ‘80s era national expansion. With that, professional wrestling shifted away from a system of regional promotions around the country that had full-time rosters of wrestlers with a weekly local TV show and nightly live events.
I have been fascinated by the concept of territory promotions since becoming a professional wrestling fan in the ’80s. By that point, though, the territory system was already collapsing so I never got to directly experience it as a fan.
Among the many territory promotions that existed, Portland Wrestling has always held a certain mystique to me and has been better documented in writing in recent years than most of the other promotions from that era.
What made Portland Wrestling so special to viewers who saw it as it aired live and what was it that has made the promotion so legendary among territory promotions to fans like me who never directly experienced it?
“Interesting questions,” said Patterson.
“Except for a short time in 1966-67, Portland Wrestling was on Portland TV for around 40 years. It was always very highly rated. I guess, like any TV show, there has to be something that draws viewers. Portland Wrestling was always very entertaining.”
Don Owens was the promoter of Portland Wrestling.
“He did an amazing job of bringing in performers that clicked with viewers/fans,” said Patterson. “Not having access to any other wrestling on TV, fans really believed that when a champion like Dory Funk Jr. was coming to town to face one of ‘our guys’ for the NWA title, our guy, be it Jimmy Snuka, Dutch Savage or Bull Ramos, could win it! Great talent and great booking kept that magic alive for fans.
As far it being a legendary promotion, I don't think it was thought of one at the time when it was operating. It was rarely, if ever, mentioned in any magazines. When there was a profile of a wrestler that got their break in Portland, and moved on to major promotion, their time in Portland was never mentioned.”
Much of the footage of territory era wrestling shows from the ‘70s and ‘80s, Portland included, are lost in time.
For the modern fan seeking to experience Portland Wrestling, the footage to be found online has largely been sporadic and often of poor quality. This is what I directly experienced when searching online for Portland Wrestling footage of J.W. Storm as part of my research for the post J.W. Storm: Chasing Pro Wrestling Superstardom in the Early '90s
What scant footage I did find though intrigued me and left me wanting to see fully intact Porland Wrestling TV shows to experience the storylines playing out week-to-week.
What happened to territory era footage from Portland and other such promotions and why was it not preserved?
“Promoters didn't want to pay for tapes to keep their shows,” explained Patterson. “I know that was the case for Don Owen. Then again, in Owen's defense, who would have thought that anyone would want to watch a Portland Wrestling show in future years? KPTV did always keep one past show on hand, just in case there were any technical difficulties with the feed on any given week. Other than that, they were all recorded over.”
A friendship with Buddy Rose
In the late ‘90s, Rich Patterson craved watching the old Portland Wrestling TV shows again.
Tape trading was popular in this era in the U.S. and the way for fans to experience bygone promotions of different eras or to watch current footage from wrestling promotions, be it domestic or foreign, that they did not have access to.
Patterson, though, found it difficult to find what he was looking for.
“Every Portland show I got looked like a tenth generation copy and was nearly unwatchable,” said Patterson.
Then someone told him that Buddy Rose had some Portland Wrestling tapes.
“At the time, Buddy was hosting a sports talk show on a low power radio station here in Portland,” said Patterson. “Knowing Buddy was a big sports fan, I called him after his show and asked about the tapes. He said that he had quite a few. Since I worked for the Portland Trail Blazers, I offered him some prime seats to a Trail Blazers game in return for letting me borrow some tapes. From there, we became good friends.”
Rose enthralled Patterson with stories about Portland Wrestling and the pro wrestling business in general. They spent many hours having conversations.
“He didn't kayfabe me at all. I learned the psychology of a match and an angle, like why losing was a good thing and when to use blood. One thing I found very interesting is how he said that he had some of his best programs with people who were good friends of his. Roddy Piper, Rick Martel and Jay Youngblood were a couple of examples he gave me,” said Patterson.
In his garage, Buddy Rose had “boxes and boxes of VHS tapes,” recalled Patterson.
The two talked about watching the footage someday to see what was there.
“The really big moment for me came when I mentioned that I'd really love to see some footage of Lonnie Mayne wrestling in Portland, but I told Buddy that I knew it doesn't exist,” said Patterson. “That's when Buddy told me that he had some. He went digging through his garage to find a big duffel bag full of video tapes.”
After digging through the bag, he said, ‘Here it is!’ Sure enough, there was a tape that had ‘Wrestling 11-19-77 Buddy & Mayne’. I had never seen a tape format like what he showed me. At that moment, I knew that I had to find a way to see it.”
Buddy Rose told Patterson he could have all of the tapes if he wanted them. Rose was planning on putting them out with the garbage because they were taking up so much space in his garage.
The process to restore and preserve Buddy Rose’s video collection required a great deal of effort and dedication on Patterson’s part.
Patterson said he spent over two years and over $1000 to retore the Quasar footage from the collection simply because he wanted to see it.
I was unfamiliar with the Quasar video recorder only recalling the VHS and Beta recording systems of the ‘80s and had thought those were the first wave of video recording systems that allowed people to first tape shows off television.
Patterson explained that Quasar predated Beta and VHS.
“It was called ‘The Quasar Great Time Machine’, although it took me a long time to even find that out,” said Patterson. “Between 1980-2000, Buddy’s Quasar tapes sat in a damp storage locker collecting dust and lots of mold. The original player for this format of tape disappeared in the late 1970s and has become beyond rare, thus there was no way to view Buddy’s tapes in that format.”
For Patterson, the motivation to preserve the footage would soon expand beyond doing so to just personally watch it.
“I worked for the Portland Trail Blazers and with some of the top video engineers in the country,” said Patterson. “When I showed them one of these tapes, they had no idea what it was. Quasar tapes are about twice the size of a VHS tape. One of the engineers was also a longtime Portland Wrestling fan, so he started to help me search to identify the tape format. Then, once I found out what the format was, I had to find a player or someone that had a player.”
Rich Patterson eventually found just that.
“After some time, I got in contact with a video equipment collector back east,” said Patterson. “Did you ever see the movie "Auto Focus", it was the movie about Bob Crane of Hogan's Heroes? This guy supplied most of the old video equipment they used in that movie. He has also supplied quite a bit of equipment for the TV show, ‘Lost’.
Well, he had three of these machines, none of which worked and there was nobody that could fix them. He sold me one of them in hopes that I could get it fixed, then tell him what could be wrong with his other two machines. As luck would have it, there was a video repair store about five miles away from me that could still work on this machine.”
Restoring the tapes themselves though was an extensive process once the Quasar machine was working.
“Tapes were so gunked up with residue that it gummed up the machine,” said Patterson. “Some of the video tapes were gray from so much mold and mildew on them. I had about 40 tapes to go through. That meant taking the machine in for a cleaning every week or so. Not cheap, but worth it. Since most of these tapes were not labeled, I had no idea what I would see.”
It was an exciting moment for Patterson when he saw the first video of Lonnie Mayne.
“I knew that was something extremely special. Mayne was one of the all-time favorites in Portland Wrestling history, but there was no video of him here,” said Patterson. “When his said his classic line of ‘There's excitement in the air!’, I felt like I had found a Holy Grail of Portland Wrestling footage.”
There were many other memorable moments in Portland Wrestling for Patterson to discover as he watched all the footage, like an interview from March 31,1979 with Roddy Piper, Killer Brooks, Buddy Rose and Ed Wiskowski.
“They brought up a wheelbarrow with all of their belts in it and were bragging about how great they were and singing each other's praises,” said Patterson.
They made a challenge for an eight-man tag team elimination match for the next week. The next week, Wiskowski accidentally hit Brooks with a diving head butt. Piper accused him of doing it on purpose. Bottom line is that started one of the greatest feuds in Portland Wrestling history, Playboy Buddy Rose vs Rowdy Roddy Piper.
More Portland Wrestling videos preserved
A few months after Buddy Rose died in April 2009, Patterson was contacted by Rose’s widow Tammy. She asked what she should do with all of Buddy's VHS tapes that remained in the house.
“She thought about giving them to Goodwill or putting a few boxes in recycling every week. I still remember saying a massive ‘NO!,’” recalled Patterson. “I told her that there was no way I was going to let someone pay twenty-five cents for one of those tapes and then tape over a Buddy Rose/Jay Youngblood strap match!
“I would load up my car with a couple of boxes every month or so. Almost every tape was like Christmas, because most of them weren't labeled. As far as matches of note, a few that stand out is the night Rocky Johnson debuted by beating Stan Stasiak and Buddy. Another one was when Roddy Piper made his return to Portland in June 1981, after losing a loser leave town match with Buddy in October 1980. The crowd was as white hot crazy as I can ever remember. Having Lou Thesz as the referee was a bonus.”
Patterson said that once Tammy had given him all of Buddy’s tapes it became “a quest to preserve something that I know meant a lot to so many people in the Pacific Northwest.”
All total, Patterson estimates that he went through 900 VHS tapes over an eighteen-month period.
“Since I have been able to save/restore this footage, the territory is finally getting its due,” said Patterson.
Now, fans can see what an amazing territory Don Owen had up here. Way too many fans simply think of Buddy as the ‘Blow Away Diet’ guy in WWE. Because of this footage, fans can now see what a fantastic worker Playboy Buddy Rose was in his prime. That also makes his widow, Tammy, very happy.”
Patterson is also gratified that he has been able to give DVDs of the footage to many of the pro wrestlers that once worked in Portland so that they can watch their old matches. Some of the wrestlers he connected with were Roddy Piper, Matt Borne, Rip Oliver, Bobby Jaggers, Fidel Sierra (Destroyer/Assassin/Top Gun) and Rip Rogers.
“They would offer to pay, and I refused all money. I told them that giving them video footage of their work in Portland is the least I can do for all of the extremely hard work and great entertainment they have given us over the years, while not making a ton of money,” said Patterson.
Currently, Patterson has all his Portland footage on an external hard drive. There is approximately 450 hours of Portland Wrestling footage on the drive, he said.
Readers of The Pro Wrestling Exuberant interested in obtaining a copy of the hard drive can email Rich Patterson at portlandwrestlingvideo@yahoo.com for more information and to also receive a complete listing of everything that is included on it.
Here’s my first write-up of a Portland Wrestling TV episode from The Buddy Rose Portland Wrestling video collection… Exploring Buddy Rose's Portland Wrestling Video Collection: June 11, 1983 Episode
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