Ernie Ladd

CTL-E-6976 · Person · other · Territory era · 1960s–1980s

VERIFIED evidence grade — build store (JSON graph)

Combined Graph record U-07848 · provenance: build store (JSON graph), record CTL-E-6976.

Ernest Ladd (November 28, 1938 – March 10, 2007) built two headline careers. At Grambling State University — where he arrived on a basketball scholarship — he became a defensive lineman selected by the San Diego Chargers in the 1961 AFL draft; in legitimate professional football he played for the Chargers, the Houston Oilers, and the Kansas City Chiefs, earned four AFL All-Star selections, and won the 1963 AFL championship with San Diego. Alongside football he had begun wrestling in 1961, and after joining the WWWF in 1968 as “The Big Cat,” he became one of the territory era's most effective villains, retiring from the ring in 1986. Ladd entered the San Diego Chargers Hall of Fame in 1981 and the WWE Hall of Fame in 1995, inducted by Bobo Brazil — whom Ladd himself had inducted the year before. Exact season splits for his Oilers and Chiefs years conflict across published sources and are not asserted here.

The record

• Also known as: Ernest Ladd, The Big Cat

Notes

Firsts disposition: No wrestling first asserted. Football honors (four AFL All-Star selections; 1963 AFL championship) are legitimate-sport facts, sourced normally. Photo: CLEARED — 'Ernie Ladd 1973.jpg' (unknown author, 1973), Public domain per Commons API extmetadata. Curator's Judgment (DRAFT): One of the very few athletes to headline in both a legitimate major league and the wrestling territories; both careers are sourced in their own lanes and neither borrows the other's framing. Staged 2026-11-03 in packet W (professional wrestling), temp id — merge assigns the next sequential CTL-E id. No CTL-SPE roster id exists for professional wrestling — the AAES roster's wrestling shelf holds only Olympic wrestling and Bobo Brazil (CTL-E-6902). See the packet memo's roster-addition proposal.

Referenced by

• Grambling State University — has alumnus → this record

Sources

• WWE. “Ernie Ladd.” Superstar profile, wwe.com. (primary source · build store)
• Encyclopedia.com. “Ladd, Ernie.” encyclopedia.com. (build store)
• Grambling State University News. “GSU alumni Ernie Ladd will be inducted into the Black College Football Hall of Fame.” news.gram.edu. (build store)

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Record CTL-E-6976 · Combined Graph record U-07848 · CultureTechLens Knowledge Graph · 3 sources · 1 mapped relationship.
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Researched and maintained by the CultureTechLens research program · CultureTechLens Combined Graph, Release 2026-11-04. Corrections are public: the corrections log.

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