Pacific Northwest Wrestling

Pacific Northwest Wrestling

Acronym	PNW
Founded	1925
Style	American Wrestling
Headquarters	Portland, Oregon
Founder(s)	Herb Owen
Owner(s)	Herb Owen (1925–1942) Don Owen (1942–1992) Sandy Barr (1992–2001) Frank Culbertson (2001–2007) Don Coss (2007–present)

Pacific Northwest Wrestling (PNW) (also known as Big Time Wrestling and Portland Wrestling) is the common name used to refer to several different professional wrestling companies, both past and present, based in Portland, Oregon, United States. The first such company (that would later become Portland Wrestling) was founded by Herb Owen in 1925.^[1] It was the Northwest territory^[2] of the National Wrestling Alliance from the Alliance's inception in 1948 until 1992.^[3] The area was brought to its prime by Herb's son, Don Owen, and this version of Pacific Northwest Wrestling saw many of the top names in pro wrestling come through on a regular basis. The Pacific Northwest was considered one of the main pro wrestling territories from the 1960s to the 1980s.

Portland Wrestling was forced to close its doors in July 1992. The closure came as a result of a slowdown in professional wrestling during the early 1990s, a declaration of bankruptcy by Portland Wrestling's main television sponsor, and negative fallout from a shift in regulatory emphasis by the Oregon Athletic Commission. The telecasts, which originated on Portland station KPTV, ended in December 1991 and were replaced on KPTV by syndicated WWF programming.^[3]

Portland Wrestling's referee Sandy Barr purchased the company from the Owen family in 1992 and continued the tradition of professional wrestling in the Pacific Northwest under the name "Championship Wrestling USA."

A new wrestling promotion emerged in 2000, calling itself "Portland Wrestling" and claiming to be a restart of the original Pacific Northwest/Portland Wrestling. It stressed a title lineage (through Len Denton) to the old NWA PNW Championships. Unlike the Don Owen promotion, the new incarnation of Portland Wrestling was not an NWA member. Due to legal problems the company's owner encountered, the promotion was forced to close down in 2007 and the owner sold his ownership rights to former announcer Don Coss. Coss, in conjunction with Roddy Piper, one of Owen's biggest latter-day stars and a Portland-area resident, launched a new promotion in 2012 centered on a television program entitled Portland Wrestling Uncut. This program also originated on KPTV, though it would later move to another Portland television station.