DCP113 – Bobby Nichols and Les Thatcher

Bobby Nichols & Les Thatcher

Territory-Era Tag Team Action — Original Ditch-Cat Photo Print

The Bio

Les Thatcher — born in Cincinnati, Ohio — is one of the most respected multi-hyphenates in the history of professional wrestling: a former junior heavyweight competitor, television announcer, promoter, and trainer whose imprint on the business spans more than six decades. Thatcher first fell in love with wrestling as an eight-year-old watching black-and-white television at a friend's house, later saying, "The action on that little ten-inch black-and-white screen just reached out and grabbed me." He turned professional in the 1960s and worked as a technically gifted junior heavyweight across the National Wrestling Alliance's territory network, capturing multiple regional tag team championships including three reigns as NWA United States Tag Team Champion (Mid-America version) with partners Roger Kirby, Bearcat Brown, and Dennis Hall, and four reigns as NWA Tennessee Tag Team Champion with Dennis Hall, Whitey Caldwell, and Nelson Royal.

In the 1970s, Thatcher transitioned to broadcasting during a run with Rudy Kay's Maritimes territory in Canada, and quickly became one of the most recognizable voices in wrestling. He worked alongside Gordon Solie, Bob Caudle, Lance Russell, and Jim Ross across Jim Crockett's Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling, Georgia Championship Wrestling, and Southeastern Championship Wrestling, helping to introduce broadcast concepts that remain standard in wrestling programming today. In 1995, Thatcher opened Les Thatcher's Main Event Pro Wrestling Camp in Cincinnati and founded the Heartland Wrestling Association, which he ran as a WWF developmental affiliate through the late 1990s and 2000s. His training school produced a remarkable roster of graduates including Matt Stryker, Shark Boy, B.J. Whitmer, Chad Collyer, Charlie Haas, Shannon Moore, Nigel McGuinness, Jamie Noble, Elix Skipper, Rosey, and Umaga. Thatcher also produced the annual Brian Pillman Memorial Show in Cincinnati honoring his late friend and colleague. He continues to serve on the Board of Directors of the Cauliflower Alley Club.

Bobby Nichols was a territory-era professional wrestler active primarily during the late 1960s and 1970s, best documented as a competitor on the West Coast circuit under Roy Shire's Big Time Wrestling promotion out of San Francisco — the same territory that produced legends like Ray Stevens, Pat Patterson, Peter Maivia, and Rocky Johnson. Nichols worked the classic Cow Palace cards in the Bay Area alongside those names during the peak of the territory era, when San Francisco was one of the most consistently successful wrestling markets in North America.

This photograph — captured by Ditch-Cat Photo during their tag team entrance — preserves a moment from the working end of professional wrestling: not the main-event superstars whose faces adorn every book on the subject, but the reliable, professional territory-era grapplers who filled out the cards and put on the matches that kept the business alive night after night, town after town.