Western States Sports
American professional wrestling promotion
Western States Sports (also known as the Amarillo Territory) was a professional wrestling promotion headquartered in Amarillo, Texas in the United States. Founded by Dory Detton in 1946, the promotion enjoyed its greatest success in the 1960s and 1970s under the management of Dory Funk and, later, his sons Dory Funk Jr. and Terry Funk, with its top performers including the Funks themselves and Ricky Romero. Western States Sports promoted professional wrestling events in multiple cities across West Texas including Amarillo, Abilene, El Paso, Lubbock, Odessa, and San Angelo, along with Albuquerque in New Mexico, Colorado Springs and Pueblo in Colorado, and the Oklahoma Panhandle. Sold by the Funks in 1980, the promotion closed in 1981.
History
Western States Sports was founded by Dory Detton in 1946. Detton staged his first show in the Tri-State Fairgrounds on March 14, 1946, marking the first professional wrestling show to be held in Amarillo in over five years. In October 1951, Southwest States Enterprises joined the National Wrestling Alliance.
In 1955, retired wrestler Karl "Doc" Sarpolis purchased Western States Sports from Detton for $75,000 (equivalent to $901,000 in 2025). He offered local wrestler Dory Funk the opportunity to buy-in to the promotion, which he accepted.
“Western States Sports” enters the record as american professional wrestling promotion. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Western, States and Sports can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q48843127. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1946, 1980, 1981 and 1951.
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This entry incorporates text from “Western States Sports” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.