Ole Anderson

This article is about wrestler Ole Anderson. For other people, see Olle Andersson .

Ole Anderson
Data
Ring name	Black Scorpion The Rock Rock Rogowski Ole Anderson
height	183 cm
Fighting weight	116 kg
birth	Minneapolis , Minnesota September 22, 1942
Trained by	Verne Gagne
debut	1967
retirement	1993

Alan Robert Rogowski , better known by his ring name Ole Anderson , (born September 22, 1942 in Minneapolis , Minnesota ), is a retired American wrestler and manager , wrestling promoter and booker . Anderson, whose career spanned from 1967 to 1993, held numerous tag team titles, including eight World Tag Team titles from the National Wrestling Alliance , most of them with Gene Anderson, whose brother he was passed to the public. Anderson was one of the founding members of the Four Horsemen Stables .

Career

AWA, NWA, JCP and GCW

Anderson began in 1967 in the American Wrestling Association (AWA) as "Rock" Rogowski with the wrestling, before he switched to Jerry Crockett Promotions (JCP), a promotion affiliated to the National Wrestling Alliance , as a tag team partner for Gene Anderson . Gene Anderson's previous partner, Lars Anderson , had begun his gradual withdrawal from wrestling, around the gimmick of the tag team "Minnesota Wrecking Crew", which consisted in the fact that the members were related, Rogowski was given the new ring name "Ole Anderson". The "Minnesota Wrecking Crew" mainly competed in the leagues of JCP and Georgia Championship Wrestling (GCW), another promotion affiliated with the NWA. Over the years, Anderson held the GCW tag team title a total of seventeen times and the NWA World Tag Team Champion eight times. Pro Wrestling Illustrated magazine named Gene and Ole Anderson's tag team best tag team of the year in 1975 and 1977.

GCW and JCP

Behind the scenes at the GCW, Ole Anderson was the booker in charge of the match schedules and storylines . 1981 to 1982 he held the same position at JCP, which enabled him to use the wrestlers under contract more freely and mix them for shows. Anderson invested his money in the wrestling business and most recently held a ten percent stake in the GCW, the special significance of which was that it was the first NWA league to have a national television broadcast via a satellite channel.

When the majority shareholders of the GCW sold the promotion to Vince McMahon in 1984 , Anderson did not take this step and founded their own promotion with two partners with the "Championship Wrestling from Georgia". Anderson and his co-owners sold it the following year to Jerry Crockett, the owner of JCP.

Anderson fought on in the JCP, in which he found with " Arn Anderson " (actually Martin Lunde) a replacement for Gene Anderson, who was retiring for reasons of age. With Arn Anderson, his alleged cousin, the superstar Ric Flair and Tully Blanchard , Anderson founded the stable of the "Four Horsemen" in 1986, a group of heels that supported each other. Ole Anderson's active wrestling career was drawing to a close, the next year Lex Luger replaced him as the fourth horseman, as Anderson needed time to look after his son Bryant's amateur wrestling career . In 1988 Ole Anderson announced his resignation, but appeared again briefly the next year as an active member of the Four Horsemen before stepping down to become manager of the Horsemen.

WCW

Anderson worked behind the scenes for the Promotion World Championship Wrestling (WCW), which emerged from the JCP, as a booker, from 1990 as head of all bookers . In the credits of the WCW pay-per-views , he appeared under his real name. As chief booker, Anderson was responsible for the storylines for the entire promotion. He stayed in this position until 1993, when he was dismissed by the WCW broadcasting director, Eric Bischoff . This was preceded by the dismissal of Ole Anderson's son Bryant from a development contract for the doctorate and the attempt by Ole Anderson to get his son a new contract with another doctorate, with the promoter Anderson had met on the premises of the WCW. Regardless of the circumstances of the split, the WCW inducted him into their WCW Hall of Fame in 1994 .

Ole Anderson, unlike many other former wrestlers, stayed away from wrestling after leaving the WCW. In 2003 he published a book Inside Out: How corporate America destroyed professional wrestling , in which he sometimes looked back critically on his experiences in the wrestling business.

Web links

• Homepage of Ole Anderson, u. a. with book excerpts, accessed on April 8, 2014 ( Memento from September 17, 2010 in the Internet Archive )