Pedro Morales

Who is Pedro Morales?

Pedro Morales is a retired Puerto Rican professional wrestler. He began his wrestling career as a teenager in 1959 and won his first important championship, the WWA World Heavyweight Championship, while wrestling for the World Wrestling Association. After joining the World Wide Wrestling Federation, now known as WWE, Morales became the first man in wrestling history to win all three major men's titles in the company, the WWWF Championship, the Intercontinental Championship and the WWF World Tag Team Championship. By also holding the WWWF United States Championship he also became the first performer to hold four separate titles within the promotion, a distictition that later became known as a Grand Slam Championship, despite not being listed as such by WWE. Morales proved to be a popular champion, to the point that he remains the only wrestler to be among the five longest reigning champions in the history of both of the two major titles, holding the WWWF Championship for 1,027 days and the Intercontinental Championship for 619 days.

Like Bruno Sammartino before him, Morales heavily appealed to a specific group, in his case Puerto Ricans and Latinos in general. During his career he also won titles at Mid-Pacific Promotions in Hawaii, Championship Wrestling from Florida and the World Wrestling Council in his native Puerto Rico. In 1995 Morales became the first Latin American and Hispanic to be inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame. His WWWF reign also made him the first Latino in history to win a recognized world heavyweight championship, holding one of the era's "big three", a triad completed by the NWA World Heavyweight Championship and the AWA World Heavyweight Championship.