wrestling / News

Tiger King Star Joe Exotic’s Connection to NWA Texoma Brought Back to Light

April 8, 2020 | Posted by Jeremy Thomas
Tiger King Joe Exotic

Joe Exotic is the man of the hour thanks to Netflix’s Tiger King, and the new spotlight has brought attention back to his pro wrestling history. VICE has a new feature looking at how Exotic worked with NWA Texoma (now Texoma Pro Wrestling) and held some show at his G.W. Zoo from 2014 to 2018 which he did commentary for.

According to the featur, Exotic got involved with wrestling after meeting Robert Langdon, who runs the Texoma promotion, at a charity event at G.W. Zoo in 2010. The two bonded over their owning exotic animals and it was eventually decided that Exotic should do some color commentary for NWA Texoma shows, streaming them on his Joe Exotic TV. Exotic did this for over three years starting in 2014 and held a show at the Zoo in October of 2014. A second show took place in July of 2016 and had WWE alumnus Charlie Hass as well as former NWA Champion Tim Storm on the show.

Moonshine Mantell, who faced Hass on the show, said of Exotic, “You meet the biggest characters in (wrestling), so when I first met Joe Exotic, it was just another night. I didn’t think anything of the stuff he wore, the tigers, anything like that, I was just like, ‘yeah, this is definitely pro wrestling.’ He fit right in just perfectly.”

Exotic reportedly brought his tigers to wrestling shows in Texas and allowed wrestlers and fans to interact with them both before and after the show. During the zoo show, wrestlers were “given free rein,” according to the article, to interact with the animals.

Exotic’s connection with NWA Texoma ended in 2018 when his situation went sideways, a matter that is documented in the Netflix series. Langdon told the site that he offered to let Exotic live on 20 acres of land he owned after his business partner Jeff Lowe pushed him out of the zoo operation, but Exotic instead moved with his husband Dillon Passage into a motel 6 in Pensacola, Florida. He was arrested a few months later on 17 federal charges of animal abuse and two counts of murder for hire, the latter charges in relation to a plot to kill Carol Baskin.

You can see a couple of the NWA Texoma shows, all of which are still on the Joe Exotic TV YouTube channel, below: