Our History

Once upon a time there was a wrestling organization running in the midwest, specifically the Chicago area, called True Talent Wrestling, or "TTW" for short. It was run by an individual named Ed Raymond who was very good at creating controversy through various means, which undoubtedly made him a fantastic wrestling promoter. TTW ran well and was successful, but not as successful as it could be financially, and so Ed Raymond partnered up with businessman Rob Belote. Belote entered the venture with a bit of a background in the wrestling business himself, having run a fairly successful organization years ago before getting into a car accident and relinquishing control of his roster's contracts one by one. Between the time of the accident and joining into partnership with Ed Raymond with TTW, Rob was involved in other wrestling ventures, but only in very small ways.

With other creative ventures being presented to him on a nearly daily basis, Ed Raymond decided it was time to go off and persue those other ventures instead of continuing to run his wrestling promotion. Having just reacquired a taste for wanting to work in the business full time and with TTW becoming increasingly more profitable, Rob Belote decided to continue to run the organization. For various reasons, Rob renamed the organization "LEGACY".

For various reasons it took some time to change things from "TTW" to "LEGACY", most notably concerning wrestler contracts. Because of this, Rob Belote had to cancel a number of the shows TTW was to put on, cancelling out of the contracts with some of the arenas which had already been booked. For each of those cancellations, Rob Belote had to pay a certain percentage of the downside guarantee to each of those venues. Due to the amount of money he had to spend in this manner, Rob was unable to renew some of the contracts of some of TTW's competitors. He was, however, able to sign most of his roster to "per appearance" deals or shorter term contracts, suring up most of the TTW roster for LEGACY.

Another problem arose, however.

Paying the downside guarantees to those venues was not the only problem LEGACY encountered by cancelling those shows. By cancelling those shows, Rob Belote had no footage to provide HBO to air during the Shockwave timeslot. They cancelled the contract between Rob Belote and their network, leaving Rob Belote to find a new network on which to broadcast the LEGACY product. After spending lots of long hours in his office on the phone with network executives, Rob Belote finally secured a deal with the FX Network, who has been trying to reach the demographics that professional wrestling pull in. Belote was able to secure the deal by low-balling the deal, asking for a much lower price than HBO paid for TTW.

Due to the lower financial resources available because of the TV deal with the FX Network, Rob Belote had to cut production costs, implementing measures which included running LEGACY as a regional tour throughout New England and airing his regular programing on FX as a recap show of live events.