NWA World Title Tournament
| NWA World Title Tournament | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
The ECW Arena.
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| Information | ||||
| Promotion | NWA Eastern Championship Wrestling | |||
| Date | August 27, 1994 | |||
| Attendance | 1,000 | |||
| Venue | ECW Arena | |||
| City | Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US | |||
| Event chronology | ||||
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In professional wrestling, the NWA World Title Tournament was a live supercard held by the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States-based professional wrestling promotion NWA Eastern Championship Wrestling on August 27, 1994. The event featured a tournament for the vacant NWA World Heavyweight Championship. The commentator for the event was Joey Styles. Highlights from the event aired on the August 29, 1994 episode of ECW Hardcore TV, while the tournament final appeared on the 2012 WWE DVD release ECW Unreleased: Vol 1.
The event is known for the speech given by the tournament winner, ECW Heavyweight Champion Shane Douglas, who threw down the NWA World Heavyweight Championship belt and proclaimed the ECW Heavyweight Championship to be a world championship. Douglas' speech preceded the emergence of ECW - renamed Extreme Championship Wrestling shortly after the event - as a nationally recognized promotion and the continued decline in the power and profile of the NWA. The event has been described by WWE as "one of the most controversial incidents to ever occur at any sports-entertainment event". Douglas described his throwing down of the title as "the defining moment for my career".
The NWA World Heavyweight Championship is the principal championship recognized by professional wrestling promotions affiliated with the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA). By the early 1990s, the largest NWA affiliate was World Championship Wrestling. In 1993, the relationship between WCW and the NWA board of directors began to deteriorate. In September 1993, WCW withdrew from the NWA and the NWA World Heavyweight Championship - held by WCW employee Ric Flair - was vacated.
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