Wrestling Pro
American professional wrestler
Edward Leon Baxter (June 4, 1938 – August 15, 2019) was an American professional wrestler who competed throughout the National Wrestling Alliance in the 1960s and 70s. He was best known for wrestling under a mask as (The) Wrestling Pro and also wrestled under the ring name Tarzan Baxter. One of the most popular heels in Gulf Coast Championship Wrestling's history, he had famous feuds with the likes of Ken Mantell for the NWA World Junior Heavyweight Championship and Jack Brisco for the NWA World Heavyweight Championship.
Professional wrestling career
Early career
Baxter, raised in Malone, Florida, was a veteran of the U.S. Navy (where he had also been a boxer) and was working as a deputy sheriff in Houston County, Alabama, when he began his professional wrestling career in Oklahoma under the ring name Tarzan Baxter. Under this name, he wrestled for various NWA territories in the American South, including Oklahoma, Gulf Coast, and Tennessee. Sometimes wrestling friends, like Man Lassiter, a.k.a. Night Hawk. He also pulled double duty as a member of the tag team The Masked Gauchos with Juan Sebastian for Georgia Championship Wrestling and Jim Crockett Promotions. Baxter found early success in Oklahoma, where he feuded with Danny Hodge for U.S. Junior Heavyweight Championship. He became a mainstay for the Mid-South Wrestling Association/Tri-State capturing the NWA North American Heavyweight Championship in 1969.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Wrestling Pro” as american professional wrestler. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as american professional wrestler. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q43353816. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1938, 2019 and 1969.
Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wrestling Pro” 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.