The Bahamas Wrestling Association: Black Wrestling and the Birth of a Nation
By Ian Douglass, TheRinger.com
“I’d never heard of that until you told me!”
The fact that Omar Amir—four-time Ohio Valley Wrestling heavyweight champion—had never heard of the Bahamas Wrestling Association is an indictment of wrestling history’s preservation shortcomings. After all, as the first authentic Bahamian national to make any sort of appreciable headway in the U.S. wrestling scene, Amir personally embodies the culmination of a 50-year-old dream that Bahamians might one day interact as peers with the wrestlers who visit them from the United States.
As such, Amir also serves as the living legacy of the first pro wrestling organization in the Western Hemisphere that was created by a mostly Black leadership team, and had an almost exclusively Black roster, to cater to the entertainment desires of a majority Black nation.
Unsurprisingly, the first “Bahamian” wrestlers had sprung up in the United States out of a desire to communicate the Blackness of those wrestlers in an exoticized fashion without specifically mentioning it. During a swing through the Rocky Mountain region in the 1960s, Bud Richardson and Willie Love were billed as Bahamas natives, even though both were of Black American descent. It was certainly a safe bet that neither of them would be called out on the carpet by an authentic Bahamian so far from home in that era.
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