For those who don't know, the USWA was a wrestling promotion than from 1989-1997. It was formed when Jerry Jarrett's Continental Wrestling Association (CWA) had merged with Fritz Von Erich's World Class Championship Wrestling (WCCW) as an attempt to create a third national promotion to compete with Ted Turner's WCW (World Championship Wrestling) and Vince McMahon's World Wrestling Federation (Now World Wrestling Entertainment). During it's existence the USWA managed to unify the WCCW's Heavyweight title with the American Wrestling Association Heavyweight title, thus creating the USWA Unified World Heavyweight Championship, and also managed to have a talent exchange deal with the World Wrestling Federation in which the WWF would use the USWA to groom upcoming talent and the USWA could feature WWF starts like the Undertaker.
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| Still from USWA Championship Wrestling |
During it's lifespan the USWA went through many ownership changes. Fritz Von Erich pulled the WCCW out of the USWA, so therefore leaving Jerry Jarret soul ownership, and leaving the USWA with primarily the Memphis area. Jarrett then sold the company to the main star of the promotion Jerry "The King" Lawler who then sold the company to Larry Burton and Burton's financial backer Mark Selker. However, due to the USWA being unable to compete with WCW and the WWF, the USWA folded. Afterwards there was a lawsuit between Selker, Burton, and Lawler and this is where ownership of the library gets a tad fuzzy. Now Jerry Lawler has stated on his podcast that he owns the CWA tape library, but does not think he does with the USWA library, so it can be safe to assume he does not own it. Which leaves Larry Burton and Mark Selker. Selker at the very end backed out according to Lawler and sued Larry Burton for deceit and damages (due to how quickly the USWA became defunct) and won. So the question is if Selker got the company and it's assets from that or was he was just financially compensated? Well from what I could dig up, it seems he was just compensated financially. This leaves Larry Burton who through this en devour let the USWA become defunct, and got sued in the process, one would think he would have the ownership of the footage, however that can not be confirmed since he himself if he did own the footage while buying the USWA, he could've sold it to someone. However there is still the factor that the TV station/studio that broadcasted USWA's TV probably owns the footage as well so further investigation would have to be done
With this all being said why should anyone care? Well the reason being it's a large part of wrestling history. Not only did the USWA showcase up and coming WWE wrestlers like Brian Christopher,
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| The USWA Unified World Heavyweight Championship |
Jeff Jarrett, Glen Jacobs (Kane), and many other, but the USWA had footage of legends outside the WWE like Eddie Gilbert, Bill Dundee, Danny Davis, Dutch Mantell, and the list goes on. Also a big factor is the USWA is one of the few tape libraries that the WWE doesn't own or have the rights to use, so therefore an indie promotion could buy the USWA tape library and stream the footage as a source of revenue or even just buy the company totally and revive it, similar to how Billy Corgan revived the NWA (although the NWA was not completely defunct, it just had it's glory days way behind it). Regardless it's an interesting mystery and hopefully we can get answers soon.
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