In 1962, Grizzly Smith met Luke Brown and the pair formed a tag team known as The Kentuckians. Together, Smith and Brown would travel around the continent, collecting tag team championships together, including the AWA Midwest Tag Team Titles, the NWA Southern Tag Team Titles, the WWA Tag Team Titles and the TSW United States Tag Team Titles, which they won in April of 1971 from Waldo Von Erich & Karl Von Brauner. They replaced Bill Watts and Billy Red Lyons in a Best-of-5 series and were eventually stripped of the titles until they decisively defeated Von Erich and Brauner at a later date. The Kentuckians would hold the belts for a brief time until they lost them to the Spoilers.

For approximately a decade, the Kentuckians engaged in a feud in various territories around the nation with the Assassins. In one instance, the feud sold out the then-new Tulsa Convention Center. Smith would also feud in Canada with the Assassins and team with Don Leo Jonathon to defeat them for the NWA Canadian Tag Team Title while competing under the name Sky Hi Jones. But the Kentuckians’ biggest win over the Assassins probably occurred out in California when they won the WWA Tag Team Titles in 1965. It was the only time that Smith & Brown defeated the masked competitors for a title and they held those belts proudly for several months before losing them to Gorilla Monsoon & Luke Graham.

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