Tom Dillon
Tom Dillon came into the Frontier Justice League at twenty-one, the year the group expelled Tommy Tucker, and stayed until it broke up in 1982. He worked the Frontier loop for sixteen years and never held a championship.
Tom Dillon wrestled in the Great Western Alliance, the American territory promotion chronicled across this site. He worked the Frontier and Rocky Mountain territories from 1972 to 1988 and spent eight of those years in the Frontier Justice League.
AT A GLANCE
- Name: Thomas Dillon
- Ring name: Tom Dillon
- Born: 1952, Rock Springs, Wyoming
- Billed from: Rock Springs, Wyoming
- Height: 6'1"
- Weight: 228 lbs
- Active: 1972 to 1988
- Territories: Frontier, Rocky Mountain
- Era: Expansion, Golden, Traditions
- Group: Frontier Justice League, 1974 to 1982
- Championships: None
EARLY LIFE
Tom Dillon was born in Rock Springs, Wyoming in 1952, in the coal and railroad country of the state's southwest corner. He took his first bookings on the GWA's Frontier loop on 15 July 1972, three weeks past his twentieth birthday.
CAREER
Dillon worked openers in Cheyenne and Casper through 1972 and 1973, and he took dates in Rocky Mountain in the same years. He stayed on that circuit for the rest of his career, until the Frontier territory closed in 1988.
The Frontier Justice League expelled Tommy "Dusty Trails" Tucker in early 1974, after Ivan Gregorovich planted evidence on him, and Dillon took the open place at twenty-one. He was the youngest man in a group whose other members had a decade on him, and he stayed with them until they broke up at the end of 1982.
Those eight years covered every change the League went through. "The Patriot" Paul Johnson handed the seven-pointed star to the Maharaja Dev Singh in 1979 and moved up to the main events. "Sunrise" Sam Dakota came in as the recruit in 1980, Jacques LeBlanc took Chris Coleman's place in 1981, and Jesse Hawkins took Wendell Briggs's in 1982. Dillon was there for all of it.
He kept taking dates on the Frontier loop for six more years after the League ended.
IN THE RING
Dillon wrestled the Frontier ground style, working the leg and keeping the match on the mat. He gave up size to most of the men he faced and won with cradles and small packages.
He was hard to put away. His matches ran long at the finish, and opponents who had him beaten kept having to beat him again. He wore plain black trunks and black boots.
Announcers were still calling him young Tom Dillon in 1981, when he was twenty-nine.
IN HIS OWN WORDS
"They put me in there with him because I'm the one they can put in there with him. I got up. That's the whole of it."
"Everybody in that dressing room had ten years on me. You don't talk in there. You get dressed and you go out."
He closed his interviews on the same line for sixteen years: "I don't go quiet."
LEGACY
Dillon never held a championship. He worked the Frontier loop for sixteen years, eight of them in the Frontier Justice League, and he was on the circuit from the year he turned twenty until the year the territory closed.
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