Question: Sydney Mervin "Merv" Batt was a frequent opponent for many foreign wrestlers travelling overseas including NWA World Heavyweight Champions such as one who was called, "probably the greatest champion of the 20th century." by who?

Context articles: WWC Universal Heavyweight Championship
Steve Rickard
Kerry Von Erich
Starrcade (1986)
Abe Jacobs
Satoshi Kojima
Jack Brisco
NWA World Tag Team Championship (Chicago version)
National Wrestling Association
List of NWA World Heavyweight Champions

The WWC Universal Heavyweight Championship is a professional wrestling world heavyweight championship and the top title contested for in the Puerto Rican professional wrestling promotion, the World Wrestling Council.
 The championship was established in July 1982, as the WWC World Heavyweight Championship, when the company was named Capitol Sports Promotions.
 The championship received its current name following a match between Carlos Colón (WWC World Heavyweight Champion) and Ric Flair (NWA World Heavyweight Champion) where the "Champion of the Universe" was supposed to be determined.
 The first champion was Abdullah the Butcher, who was billed as champion upon the title's creation.
 Since being established, the WWC Universal Heavyweight Championship has been held by forty-nine different wrestlers and has also been held up on nineteen occasions and vacated or stripped thirteen times.
Sydney Mervin "Merv" Batt (3 September 1929 – 5 April 2015), best known by his ring name Steve Rickard, was a New Zealand professional wrestler, trainer and promoter.
 As a wrestler, he travelled throughout the world during the 1960s and '70s, often visiting countries where professional wrestling was unknown such as southeast Asia, and was one of the top competitors to come from New Zealand during that era.
 Rickard was a frequent opponent for many foreign wrestlers travelling overseas including NWA World Heavyweight Champions such as Jack Brisco, Dory Funk, Jr., Harley Race and "The Nature Boy" Ric Flair.
 He also had high-profile matches with Karl Gotch, Killer Kowalski, The Destroyer, André the Giant, Abe Jacobs and King Kong as well.
Kerry Gene Adkisson (February 3, 1960 – February 18, 1993) was an American professional wrestler under the ring names Kerry Von Erich, The Modern Day Warrior and The Texas Tornado.
 He was part of the Von Erich family of professional wrestlers.
 He is best known for his time with his father's promotion World Class Championship Wrestling (WCCW), where he spent eleven years of his career, and his time in World Wrestling Federation (WWF).
 Adkisson held forty championships in various promotions during his career.
 Among other accolades, he was a five-time world champion (a four-time WCWA World Heavyweight Champion and one-time NWA World Heavyweight Champion), and a one-time WWF Intercontinental Heavyweight Champion.
Starrcade (1986) took place on November 27, 1986 from the Greensboro Coliseum in Greensboro, North Carolina and The Omni in Atlanta, Georgia.
 It aired live on closed-circuit television.
 The main event saw NWA World Heavyweight Champion Ric Flair put the championship on the line against the NWA United States Champion Nikita Koloff in a rare for the time champion-vs-champion match.
 The dual location saw six matches take place in each location, with the Greensboro Coliseum main event being a steel cage match between defending NWA World Tag Team Champion The Rock 'n' Roll Express (Ricky Morton and Robert Gibson) defended the championship against the Anderson Brothers (Arn and Ole Anderson).
 The "Skywalkers" tag line came from one of the featured matches of the show where The Road Warriors wrestled The Midnight Express in a scaffold match with both team fighting atop a 20 foot tall scaffold erected across the top of the ring.
Abe Jacobs (born 1938) is a retired New Zealand professional wrestler.
 He was one of the first men to follow fellow New Zealander Pat O'Connor to the United States where, like O'Connor, Jacobs became a major star in the National Wrestling Alliance during the "Golden Age of Wrestling".
 One of the most recognisable "babyfaces" during this period, he was billed as the "Jewish Heavyweight Champion" and wrestled in a number of high-profile matches with many stars of the era including numerous bouts against NWA World Heavyweight Champions Lou Thesz, Gene Kiniski, Buddy Rogers, Dick Hutton and Pat O'Connor.
 His bout against O'Connor in 1961, which aired on Capitol Wrestling's weekly television show, was the first time two New Zealanders wrestled for a championship title on foreign soil.
Satoshi Kojima (小島 聡 , Kojima Satoshi ) is a Japanese professional wrestler, currently signed to New Japan Pro Wrestling.
 As a singles wrestler, he was the first wrestler to hold NJPW's IWGP Heavyweight Championship and All Japan Pro Wrestling's Triple Crown Championship simultaneously, and one of three wrestlers to hold the IWGP Heavyweight Championship, Triple Crown Championship and NWA World Heavyweight Championship (the other two being Keiji Mutoh and Shinya Hashimoto).
 As a team, he and Hiroyoshi Tenzan are six-time IWGP Tag Team Champions and became the first team to win G1 Tag League and World's Strongest Tag Determination League on the same year.
 He and Tenzan are also former National Wrestling Alliance (NWA) World Tag Team Champions.
 Between the NWA, AJPW, and NJPW, Kojima has held 19 total championships.
Freddie Joe "Jack" Brisco (September 21, 1941 – February 1, 2010) was an American professional wrestler.
 He performed for various territories of the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA), becoming a two-time NWA World Heavyweight Champion, and multi-time NWA Tag Team Champion with his brother Gerald Brisco.
 Brisco is considered one of the top wrestlers of his era; in 2005, Don Leo Jonathan called him "probably the greatest champion of the 20th century."
The Chicago version of the NWA World Tag Team Championship was a professional wrestling championship promoted by the Chicago based Fred Kohler Enterprises, a member of the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA).
 The championship was for two-man tag teams only.
 While the NWA Board of Directors mandated that there would only be one NWA World Heavyweight Championship, they did not regulate the use of championships labeled "NWA World Tag Team Championship", allowing any member that so desired to create their own local version.
 As a result, as many as 13 different, regional versions were active in 1957, the highest number of active NWA World Tag Team Championships in existence at the same time.
The National Wrestling Association was an early professional wrestling sanctioning body created in 1930 by the National Boxing Association (NBA) (now the World Boxing Association, WBA) as an attempt to create a governing body for professional wrestling in the United States.
 The group created a number of "World" level championships as an attempt to clear up the professional wrestling rankings which at the time saw a number of different championships promoted as the "true world championship".
 The National Wrestling Association's NWA World Heavyweight Championship was later considered part of the historical lineage of the National Wrestling Alliance's NWA World Heavyweight Championship when then National Wrestling Association champion Lou Thesz won the National Wrestling Alliance championship, folding the original championship into one title in 1949.
The list of NWA World Heavyweight Champions is a chronological list of wrestlers that have held the NWA World Heavyweight Championship, the National Wrestling Alliance's (NWA) professional wrestling world heavyweight championship.
 Its lineage has been traced from the first World Heavyweight Championship (Catch as Catch Can version; 1905–1957), which traces its lineage to George Hackenschmidt's 1905 title which Frank Gotch won from him in 1908.
 This effectively makes it one of the oldest surviving wrestling championship in the world.