Pro wrestling is back at the Cow Palace. It's about time.

Its signature shows, “Dynamite” and “Rampage”, will be broadcast live on network television channels TNT and TBS. Its “Revolution” pay-per-view will be shown at the Chase Center.

The traveling show’s SF debut is part of an ongoing revival of the Bay Area’s historic fight-sports scene after years of confinement to the independent wrestling circuits. AEW events are entertainment on par with WWE, said pro wrestling broadcaster Sam Leterna.

“Fans can expect two nights of back-to-back action featuring some of the biggest and bright stars in the world of pro wrestling, and maybe even some hometown favorites being given a shot under the limelight for the first time,” Leterna said.

Northern California has not been home to a syndicated wrestling league for over forty years, but in its half-century-long heyday, San Francisco was the epicenter of the region.

Will “Powerhouse” Hobbs, an AEW athlete from East Palo Alto, grew up watching wrestling with his family. His grandparents lived a few blocks from the Cow Palace when it was home to Big Time Wrestling, Hobbs said, and they never missed a show.

“I would hear stories from my grandparents about the ring (...) and it mesmerized me,” said Hobbs. “Ray Stevens using his patented knee drop ‘Bombs Away’ on Pat Patterson while covered in blood, Kenji Shibuya putting a spell on Stevens, who was my dad’s favorite wrestler (...) Those stories from them definitely got my attention.”

Fighting sports like boxing and wrestling rivaled the popularity of team sports in The City until the 1950’s, with a thriving underground counterpart to the official clubs in North Beach, the National Hall in the Mission (also known as the “Bucket of Blood”) and the Fillmore.

Team sport players in San Francisco often had wrestling gigs on the side. Several famous boxers came out of the Bayview, like Jimmy Lester (the “Bayview Blaster”) and Sam Jordan, who went on to run a bar and became the first Black American to run for mayor in San Francisco.

The “Utica Panther” Joe Malcewicsz of upstate New York founded the National Wrestling Association of San Francisco at the Civic Auditorium in 1935 — the first large-scale pro-wrestling promotion in The City.

By then, “wrestling” and “pro-wrestling”, which are considered distinct by virtue of predetermined outcomes and level of theatrics, had begun to diverge. The NWA was primarily the latter, and Malcewicsz enjoyed exclusive broadcasting rights to dozens of towns in northern California and Nevada, which amplified The City as a center for the sport.

In 1961, local heavyweight “Professor” Roy Shire founded Big Time Wrestling in the Cow Palace, in direct competition with the NWA. Malcewicsz started to promote live events on KTVU in retaliation, but Shire’s BTW eventually won out — largely thanks to its “red-hot angles”, “good TV”, and the charisma of its magnet star, Ray Stevens.

BTW was liquidated and removed from television in 1979, and with it went the northern California pro-wrestling scene.

In the post-Big Time era, Hobbs describes his early career in the “NorCal Bubble” as incredibly frustrating — mainly because without a central hub for the sport, he had to drive all over the state, or rely on out-of-state outfits to take a chance on him.

“California is so large, and there’s not that many promotions here,” said Hobbs. “I would reach out to other promotions across the country, but they’re not willing to fly you out because you’re not a big name. There’s times I had to get my own flight and would maybe make 20 bucks.”

Hobbs is confident that the audience for pro-wrestling in the Bay Area is ready for it to come back in a big way. His evidence is that San Francisco’s history of fight sports leaves big shoes to fill, and no one does it quite like The City.

“I’ve been all over the country wrestling, and I think each city has its own vibe and swag and feel. But me, being from the Bay Area, I just think that we have a different swag from any other city.”