In July of 1985, the Rock & Roll
Express debuted for Jim Crockett Promotions on a hot summer night at
a national television taping at the Shelby Recreation Center in
Shelby NC. They defeated Joel Deaton and John Tatum in their
inaugural match on "Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling". But it was
their match about an hour later that rocked the wrestling world. On their
first night in the territory, Ricky Morton and Robert Gibson
defeated Ivan Koloff and Khrusher Khrushchev to win the NWA world
tag team championships on "Wide World Wrestling".
Nearly 26 years later, on February 25,
2011, a few hours before they would win the Anderson Brothers
Classic Tag Team Tournament in nearby Kings Mountain, Ricky and
Robert returned to the site of perhaps their most famous victory
ever for
a special photo shoot with Eric Stace for an upcoming book. Eric was
nice enough to share a couple of those photographs with the
Mid-Atlantic Gateway.
"The Rock & Roll
Express" Ricky Morton and Robert Gibson outside the Shelby City Park
building (formerly the Shelby Recreation Center) in Shelby NC,
February 25, 2011. (Photos by Eric Stace.)
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