Dave LaGrecca and ECW Legend Tommy Dreamer break down the legacy of the territories and delve into international wrestling association.

Welcome to busted opens legacy of the territories myself and the walking pro wrestling encyclopedia the landlord at a house of hardcore and a heart and soul of pro wrestling Tommy Dreamer.

And Tommy on legacy of the territories today, this is going to be an interesting one because I think it's a territory that a lot of people don't talk about and when you talk about the top territories, you probably don't list this certain one.

But if you look at popularity, there's no doubt this is one of the biggest ones of all time and that's the IWA, the Montreal Territory Tommy.

Well, we all know about the Montreal screw job, but we a lot of us don't know about the history of Montreal wrestling. It's an island upon itself. And when I say an island, no, it's part of a country, but it's, um, we don't have a lot of information. My information came from not so much even pro wrestling, uh, illustrated the after magazines, a lot from Georgia, Palatano's magazines.

And again, how history always repeats itself, Montreal was kind of this like uncharted territory in the sense of they had AWA and WF, it was kind of this and stampede wrestling, it was kind of the

forbidden door, if I can steal from Tony Khan and gave you these main events that like you would not see elsewhere, it was like all the politics of all the different companies kind of went away for a bit, just for the benefit of the Montreal fans. And I mean, of course the legend, Andre, the giant, you know, this was his first territory comes when he, you know, after he's, you know, cutting his teeth in Europe and then, you know,

there's also a big guy that, you know, the Don Leo, Jonathan's, that was the big few there, but giants and this is when, you know, you'll see these young pictures of Andre moving and drop kicking. This is where this all started from.

You can look and find this on YouTube. And I hope our guests coming up have more information how we can find this stuff, because I know you and I when we were told we were going to talk about this territory, we kind of did and we found some interesting matches.

Interesting startups, you know, like, you know, King Tonga, who later became Haku Rick Martel. I mean, there's a lot of wrestlers.

At the end of the territory, became national figures to the world, but they were national figures to wrestling fans, you know, just because of you would see them, because a lot of them would work other places.

Japan, AWA, because of that was really the mix.

You know, and, you know, our guests for this episode are going to be Pat LaPride and Bertrand A Bear. And when you hear those names, they're probably not familiar names to a lot of people who are listening to this, because they're authors.

They're not actually a pro wrestlers. And I think, and they have a great amount of books that are absolutely must reads for any wrestling fan.

But what they did, Tommy, is they were fans like us, where like, they didn't feel like that this was being remembered for whatever reason. And they looked at the golden era of that territory.

And they're like, you know, we need to do something about this. And they did a deep dive as fans and found out information that they had no idea events that were huge sell out events that nobody ever spoke about or talked about.

Because over to over to just over time, Tommy, it's been forgotten about because with the victors becomes the rewriting of history. And unfortunately, over time, the Montreal Territory isn't one that's talked about very often.

Why? Maybe because it's not part of the high territories that a lot of wrestlers talk about. But man, it should be. And I'm glad we're having the opportunity to talk about it today.

Me too. And you know, people like Pat Patterson cut their teeth there. And you know, Pat goes on to, you know, worldwide fame. But I remember reading his book, which Bertrand wrote with Pat.

And it talks about Pat being a young kid and being like, from the circus. And then I got to go out.

Excuse me. I have to go out and I don't want to live my life here in the sense of I need to become something better for myself. And then just the things that he went through for being a gay wrestler back then.

I mean, I remember reading his book and saying that he was on like the FBI's list for trying to get deported because he was a homosexual male.

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