What common factors are found in the magazines Pro Wrestling Illustrated and The Friend?
Pro Wrestling Illustrated Pro Wrestling Illustrated ("PWI") is an American produced, internationally sold professional wrestling magazine that was founded in 1972. "PWI" is headquartered in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania and published by Kappa Publishing Group. The magazine is the longest currently published English language wrestling magazine. The "PWI" publishes monthly issues and annual special issues such as their "Almanac and Book of Facts".
1980s professional wrestling boom The 1980s professional wrestling boom (more commonly referred to as the Golden Age) was a surge in the popularity of professional wrestling in the United States and elsewhere throughout the 1980s. The expansion of cable television and pay-per-view, coupled with the efforts of promoters such as Vince McMahon, saw professional wrestling shift from a system controlled by numerous regional companies to one dominated by two nationwide companies: McMahon's World Wrestling Federation (WWF, now WWE) and Ted Turner's World Championship Wrestling (WCW); the latter in the 1990s, as by the time the WWF were in the top during the 1980s and early 1990s, the WCW was still a National Wrestling Alliance (NWA) territory. The decade also saw a considerable decline in the power of the NWA, a cartel which had until then domineered the wrestling landscape, and in the efforts to sustain belief in the verisimilitude of wrestling.