Description
Collector's Note – Why This Issue Matters
The March 1985 issue of Pro Wrestling Illustrated arrives at what many historians of the sport consider the single most explosive moment in professional wrestling's transformation from regional attraction to national phenomenon. The WWF's expansion under Vince McMahon was rewriting the industry's geography in real time, WrestleMania was just weeks away from its inaugural event on March 31, 1985, and the territorial system that had governed professional wrestling for decades was under existential pressure from a promoter who understood television, celebrity, and spectacle in ways his competitors could not match. Against that backdrop, the two men on this cover — Ric Flair and Roddy Piper — represented something important and distinct: they were the proof that the territories still mattered, that the richest character work and the most compelling in-ring storytelling was still happening outside the WWF's expanding orbit, even as that orbit grew larger by the week. Collectors building a serious archive of vintage Pro Wrestling Illustrated magazines treat early 1985 issues as essential primary documents of this inflection point.
Ric Flair in March 1985 was the reigning NWA World Heavyweight Champion and, by almost any measure, the finest professional wrestler on the planet. His feuds across the NWA territories — with Dusty Rhodes, Magnum T.A., and a rotating cast of regional challengers — were generating the kind of sustained, emotionally invested crowd responses that the WWF's celebrity-driven product could not yet replicate at the in-ring level. The Nature Boy was at the absolute peak of his first great championship reign, and his presence on a PWI cover was a statement about where the magazine's editorial loyalties and readership interests remained anchored. Roddy Piper, meanwhile, occupied a unique dual position in early 1985 — he was simultaneously one of the WWF's most essential heel performers, a central antagonist in the build toward WrestleMania, and a figure whose sharp, unpredictable promo style had earned him a crossover cultural profile that transcended wrestling fandom entirely. His appearance on this cover alongside Flair, in the context of a "votes" feature, speaks to PWI's role as the sport's democratic record-keeper — the publication where fan opinion was solicited, tabulated, and published as a matter of journalistic record. For collectors specifically focused on the Ric Flair magazine archive, this issue captures him at a moment of peak NWA dominance, just before the WWF's national expansion would permanently alter the landscape he had ruled.
The "votes" framing of this issue is itself historically significant. Pro Wrestling Illustrated's annual awards — Wrestler of the Year, Most Hated Wrestler, Most Popular Wrestler, Match of the Year, and others — were the closest thing professional wrestling had to an objective popular record of fan sentiment during an era when kayfabe was still largely intact and the internet did not yet exist to aggregate opinion in real time. The results of those reader polls, published in issues like this one, are now primary sources for historians trying to understand how fans actually perceived the performers and events of the mid-1980s. That Flair and Piper were the faces of this particular votes issue tells you everything about who the readership considered the dominant figures of their respective promotional worlds in early 1985 — a snapshot of consensus that no amount of retrospective revisionism can alter. Issues from 1985 represent the last full calendar year before WrestleMania permanently restructured wrestling's hierarchy, making them invaluable documents of a world on the verge of irreversible change.
About the Publication
Pro Wrestling Illustrated was founded in 1979 by the Philadelphia-based sports publishing company London Publishing, and rapidly established itself as the most widely read and editorially credible professional wrestling magazine in the United States. Where competitor publications leaned heavily into kayfabe-reinforcing storyline coverage, PWI developed a reputation for attempting genuine journalistic engagement with the sport — publishing reader polls, maintaining historical rankings, tracking title changes across multiple promotions, and eventually producing the annual PWI 500, a ranked list of the top professional wrestlers in the world that became one of the most debated and referenced documents in wrestling culture. Its readership in the mid-1980s spanned the full demographic range of wrestling fandom, from casual television viewers following the WWF's national expansion to hardcore territorial devotees who appreciated the magazine's willingness to cover the NWA, the AWA, and the regional promotions that the WWF's growing media dominance was beginning to crowd out. The magazine's covers from this era — featuring the biggest names from across the promotional landscape — function as a reliable visual record of who the sport's most significant figures were at any given moment, making individual issues important reference points for collectors and historians alike.
Key Highlights Inside
- Cover feature on Ric Flair and Roddy Piper in the context of PWI's reader votes — documenting fan sentiment toward two of professional wrestling's most dominant and culturally significant performers at one of the most consequential moments in the sport's history.
- Pro Wrestling Illustrated's annual reader poll results, which served as the sport's most widely recognized measure of fan opinion during the pre-internet era and now function as primary historical documents for researchers studying mid-1980s wrestling culture and audience perception.
- Coverage spanning multiple promotional territories at a moment of dramatic industry consolidation — with the WWF's national expansion, the NWA's territorial structure, and the AWA all competing for audience attention simultaneously, PWI's multi-promotional editorial scope made it uniquely valuable as a cross-promotional record of the era.
- Editorial content situating Ric Flair's NWA World Heavyweight Championship reign within the broader competitive landscape of early 1985 — a reign that represented the territorial system's last great sustained challenge to the WWF's growing dominance of the national wrestling narrative.
- Coverage of Roddy Piper during the critical pre-WrestleMania build period, when his heel work in the WWF was generating mainstream media attention and helping to position professional wrestling for its unprecedented pop culture breakthrough of 1985.
- Note: Specific additional article titles and interior features beyond those referenced in the listing have not been independently confirmed for this issue. The above reflects what is verifiable from the cover, the publication's well-documented editorial format, and the historical record of the named subjects during this period.
Condition & Rarity
Pro Wrestling Illustrated from the mid-1980s was printed on standard newsstand magazine stock — coated cover paper over interior pages with a moderate acid content — and was consumed by an enthusiastic readership that read these issues repeatedly, passed them between friends, and stored them in conditions that ranged from meticulous to entirely indifferent. Four decades of that kind of history means that surviving copies in genuinely high grade are considerably less common than the original print run might suggest. When evaluating any copy of this issue, the newsstand designation carries real weight: label-free copies retain the full visual integrity of the cover without the address blocks, ink stamps, or subscription markings that reduce the aesthetic appeal and collector desirability of mailed copies. A Very Good to Excellent grade on a 1985 PWI indicates a copy that has retained its structural integrity — tight spine, flat pages, no significant creasing or moisture damage — with only the minor surface wear that is entirely consistent with careful storage over four decades rather than neglect. The protective plastic sleeve represents appropriate basic conservation for a magazine of this age, limiting ongoing exposure to light oxidation and handling wear. For collectors grading this issue against others in a run, the priority attributes are cover gloss retention, spine tightness, and page block completeness — all of which distinguish a genuinely high-grade example from the more commonly encountered reading copies that make up the majority of surviving inventory.
Looking for More Issues Like This?
A March 1985 Pro Wrestling Illustrated with Ric Flair and Roddy Piper on the cover, in Very Good to Excellent newsstand condition, is exactly the kind of issue that serious collectors of mid-1980s wrestling memorabilia pursue deliberately — it sits at the intersection of two legendary careers and one of the most important transitional moments in the sport's history, and clean copies don't surface every day. If this particular issue has already found a home, the Ric Flair magazine collection at OriginalMagazines.com is the natural next stop, with issues spanning the full arc of his extraordinary career across multiple decades and promotional affiliations. The complete Pro Wrestling Illustrated archive offers the broadest possible selection for collectors building a run of the publication itself, while the full 1985 magazine collection provides the wider cultural context of that pivotal year for anyone assembling a thematically focused mid-decade archive.