NWA World Tag Team Championship

The NWA World Tag Team Championship is a professional wrestling world tag team championship created by the National Wrestling Alliance. From 1948 to 1982, the NWA allowed member promotions to create their own territorial version of the "NWA World Tag Team Championship" without oversight from the board of directors. The first of these NWA World Tag Team Championships was created in 1950 in the San Francisco territory, which while billed as a "World" title was essentially restricted to the specific NWA territory. In 1957 as many as 13 versions of the NWA World Tag Team Championship were confirmed to be in existence. In 1982 Big Time Wrestling, based in Los Angeles, closed and abandoned their version of the championship. The following year, the World Wrestling Federation, an NWA member at the time and which had its own World Tag Team Championship, split from the NWA in acrimony. This meant that only the Jim Crockett Promotions' NWA World Tag Team Championship was active within the NWA, but still being controlled by JCP, not the NWA board of directors. In 1991 that championship was renamed the WCW World Tag Team Championship.

In 1992 the NWA board of directors decided to sanction one world-level NWA World Tag Team Championship, working with WCW to hold a tournament to determine the inaugural officially recognized, NWA World Tag Team Championship. In 1993, the NWA and WCW severed their relationship and the NWA took with it the tag team championship. The NWA would briefly allow the World Wrestling Federation to control the championship in 1998 but by 1999 that collaboration ended. In 2002 the NWA gave control of the NWA World Tag Team Championship to the newly formed NWA Total Nonstop Action (NWA-TNA) promotion. TNA's control of the championship ended in 2007, with TNA creating the TNA World Tag Team Championship as a result. In subsequent years the championship has been defended on various continents including a period of time where it was held by several teams working for New Japan Pro-Wrestling.

The Skullcrushers (Rasche Brown and Keith Walker) held the championship for 777 days, making them the longest reigning champions in the history of the NWA board-recognized championship. Three teams have held the championship for just one day: David Flair and Dan Factor, Glacier and Jason Sugarman, and The Heatseekers (Sigmon and Elliot Russel).

In 1948 six professional wrestling promoters in the United States joined to form the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA) as a governing body for a number of different wrestling promotions, which then became known as the NWA territories. The promoters, (Pinkie George, Al Haft, Tony Stecher, Harry Light, Orville Brown and Sam Muchnick) formed a board of directors and decided that they would endorse two wrestling championships that all territories would recognize, the NWA World Heavyweight Championship and the NWA World Junior Heavyweight Championship. Those two championships were controlled by the board, who would meet to vote on who should be given the championship next.

At the time tag team wrestling, or matches where teams of two wrestlers would fight each other, was not popular across all territories, so the board of directors did not sanction a specific NWA World Tag Team Championship. This meant that each territory was free to create their own "World Tag Team Championship" as they saw fit and use it within their territory without board approval. Tag team wrestling first rose to popularity on the west coast of the United States, which led to the Los Angeles territory, promoted by Johnny Doyle, creating the first NWA World Tag Team Championship of the territory era when the Dusek Riot Squad (Emil and Ernie) were billed as the champions on a July 14, 1949, show in Long Beach. The following year the San Francisco territory followed suit and created their local version of the championship when Ray Eckert and Hard Boiled Haggerty defeated the team of Ron Etchison and Larry Moquin on April 4, 1950. A month later the Midwest Wrestling Association territory, covering Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and Iowa, created their own version of the championship on May 26, 1950, as the Dusek Riot Squad (Emil and Joe) won that championship.

In 1953 the Chicago-based promoter Fred Kohler introduced the team of Lord James Blears and Lord Lathol Laytham as the local NWA World Tag Team champions, billing them as having won the championship in a different NWA territory before they began working for Kohler. Historic records do not indicate that Blears and Laytham had actually won the championship elsewhere. From mid-1953 the championship became the main tag team championship of the Illinois-Wisconsin territory. A few months later promoter Ed Don George brought in the Chicago champions to his Ohio-Upstate New York territory and used them to bring an air of legitimacy to his own version of the NWA World Tag Team Championship, allowing local wrestlers Bill Melby and Billy Darnell to defeat Blears and Martino Angelo (who substituted for an injured Athol).

In 1954 the Canadian Athletic Promotion, based in Montreal, used the NWA World Tag Team Championship name as well, but by the end of the year they had abandoned it. Also in 1954, Georgia Championship Wrestling introduced the Georgia version of the NWA World Tag Team Championship, using the Chicago version (held by Reggie Lisowki and Art Neilson) to start the Georgia branch.

The following year NWA founders Paul "Pinkie" George and Max Clayton introduced an Iowa-Nebraska version, with the champions splitting their time between George's Iowa territory and Clayton's Nebraska territory. The promoters billed Joe Tangaroa and Guy Brunetti as the local champions, recognizing the championship of the Chicago version up until September 1955, then splitting off in to their own lineage. Also in 1955, the first of two Texas-based NWA World Tag Team Championships was created by the Amarillo, Texas-based Big Time Wrestling, owned by Doc Sarpolis and Dory Funk. They followed in the footsteps of other NWA territories by having the Chicago champions (Lisowski and Neilson) travel to their territory to lose a version of the championship to start the local version. In this case Neilson worked regularly in the territory, while Lisowski left after only a brief stay. The promoters chose to have Rip Rogers replace Lisowski for the Amarillo version of the champions. Another version was introduced around 1955–1956 in the Idaho-Utah territory based out of Salt Lake City. The Indianapolis territory soon introduced another local version by recognizing the lineage of the Chicago version, before splitting it off into a separate entity in 1957 when Nicoli and Boris Volkoff won the championship.