by Bob Backlund
I have two siblings. My older brother Norval is four years older than I am, and my younger sister Mary is four years younger. Neither was very athletic. Norval was a prettyboy who loved spending time with the ladies and always had to have a fast car. I think he used those things to escape the reality of our lives. He worked in construction most of his life. Mary was a nurse at a local hospital. Both still live in Princeton.
My parents were first-generation Swedish immigrants who were used to working hard for every dollar and saving everything that they possibly could—but the truth of it is we pretty much lived day-to-day. There were no luxuries in our lives as we grew up in the ’50s and ’60s. We didn’t have a television, and we only had one old car, and we ate whatever we could grow off the land or raise in our barn.
Until I was two years old, I rarely left my crib and didn’t get the opportunity to socialize with other toddlers. I was left to just lay there, which, I was later told, may have affected the structure of my spine, giving me my unusual upright posture. Because I just laid there, I never raised my head up, and because your head is the heaviest part of your body, this prevented my spine from forming a proper “S” shape.
We had outdoor plumbing, and I can remember, even as a small child, going outside to pump the water from the well and hauling it into the house in buckets. You’d always want to make sure you went to the bathroom before it got dark out because it was a long, cold walk to the outhouse. During the long Minnesota winters when I was growing up, my brother and sister and I would huddle around the fireplace with our mother at night and listen to Gunsmoke on the radio. It was really cold in the house, which wasn’t very well insulated and was heated entirely by wood. At night, we slept under piles of heavy covers trying to stay warm.
As I was growing into a boy, my father’s three brothers would often come over to the house, and they would all start drinking. Eventually, one of them would say, “there is something wrong with him,” referring to me. I would often overhear them talking, which made me feel really bad about myself, and I would retreat to the basement to get away from them. I felt worthless and unloved and very much alone.
I got my first pair of shoes from Ernie—the man at the dump. They were cowboy boots, and one of them had a hole in it that I patched with a piece of cardboard, which didn’t help much. In the winter, the snow would get into my boot so my foot would be cold and wet all day at school, but it was all I had.
My dad worked at a concrete fabrication plant that made bridge beams, and also did some farming and worked on various construction crews. He was a good man when he wasn’t drinking—but that wasn’t very often.
We never knew when the “monster” was going to come home. Dad had a violent temper, and that was very hard for my mom. Dad wasn’t a good drinker, and when he came home in that condition, anything could happen. There were far too many nights growing up where we would wake up in the middle of the night to hear my mother screaming, and things crashing in the house. When our father was finished with our mother, I would hear his heavy, shuffling footfalls on the squeaky stairs of our house as he trudged up to the second floor where my bedroom was. Some nights, he was so drunk that he would fall on the stairs and tumble heavily back down to the bottom and lie groaning there for awhile until he managed to pick himself back up and try again. When I heard him coming, I would always pull the covers over my head and try to hide. On the nights when he made it to the top of the stairs, he would come into my bedroom, stinking of alcohol, and sit on the edge of my bed mumbling to himself or talking gibberish while I hid there under the covers shaking.
I couldn’t ever have people over, because I never knew when my dad might come home in that violent condition. In all the years I was growing up, I only had a person stay over one time—and that night was so horrible, he never wanted to come back again. The next day at school, he told everyone what he had seen and heard at my house, which made me want to crawl into the deepest hole and be away from everyone making fun of me and my family. After that, I was too embarrassed to have anyone over and no one would come over anyway. One time, when Norval was seventeen or eighteen, my father was beating my mother so severely that Norval had to jump into the fight to save her. That was the night that years and years of anger came out of Norval, and he beat my father so severely that the next day, my father had bruises all over his face.
We suffered in silence for years, trying to block out the horror of what was happening in our home.
People have often wondered why I was so shy and reserved, kept to myself so much, and had trouble being confident, or looking into the camera. The fact is that when you grow up in an environment like the one I grew up in, you are constantly hiding from the world, not wanting anyone to know the truth about what is going on in your life. I went to school hoping it would be a better and a safer environment than I had at home, but school was just as bad for me, but for a different reason. In school I was very scared because I couldn’t answer the questions the teachers were asking me. I was a very poor reader and I couldn’t remember anything, so I was always looking down at my feet, trying to hide, hoping that the teachers would call on someone else, and praying that I could just get through another day without being noticed. I got held back in third grade, which made things even worse, because I was no longer even with the same group of kids. All of this just reinforced my feelings of being a complete and utter failure.
When I was seven years old, I started playing tee-ball in the local town league as a way of getting out of the house. To get to tee-ball practice, I would ride an old rusty bicycle I found at the dump about 4 miles to town over the soft, sandy farm roads. The roads were so soft that the tires of that bike would sink down into the sand so I had to stand up almost the entire time just to keep the bike moving. I’d have to stop and rest a couple of times on the way, so I was always exhausted and late by the time I got to practice. The coach was an impatient and unkind man, and he would yell at me for being late and tell me to go play right field—but I didn’t know where right field was, so he would yell some more and embarrass me about that. Every time he yelled at me, it reminded me of the monster I was living with at home, which made me even more anxious. I was a very uncoordinated child. During my first tee-ball game, I struck out twice despite the fact that the ball was sitting motionless on a tee right in front of me—and everybody laughed at me.
After tee-ball practice, I would stop on the way home and visit my grandmother at the old-age home in Princeton. She was totally blind by the time I was born, so she never actually saw me physically, but she used to love having me sit with her, and hold her hand, and tell her about my games. I was often reluctant to go see her, because I was so embarrassed that I never had anything positive to tell her. She loved baseball, and I wished so much that I could tell her about getting a hit or making a good play so she would be proud of me. But I never made plays like that, and I didn’t want to lie to my grandmother. I would then ride my bike back home through the sand again, and by the time I got home, I was so tired, I would often fall asleep. One time I fell asleep in the barn next to my bike, and when my father found me, he whipped me for sleeping before I brought the wood in for the night.
My mother did what she could to protect me. One day she tried to save me the ride on my bike by dropping me off at practice. The problem was, our car was so old it made a lot of noise and was falling apart, and when the kids at practice saw us, they all made fun of our car and of how poor we were. Things just felt so hopeless to me.
I started wrestling when I was in fourth grade (ten years old) for Coach Bill Shultz. Technically, I was supposed to spend half of the physical education period playing basketball, and half of it wrestling, but I was so uncoordinated and inept at basketball that he allowed me to spend the entire period on the mats. I really wasn’t any better at wrestling and got whipped by the other boys in the wrestling drills, but something about wrestling felt different to me.
When I got to sixth grade, we moved to the hi
gh school and I started to fall in with the wrong crowd. I was hanging around with people a lot older than I was, primarily kids I met working on the farms. Those kids were a big influence on my behavior, and I started skipping school, drinking beer, getting into a lot of fights, and staying out all night—but any of those things was better than going home.
Fighting became a badge of honor for me. I had so many negative things going on in my life that simply getting some positive attention from someone else, even if it was just someone patting me on the back after I got badly bloodied in a fight felt good to me. Home was a disaster. School was a disaster. My social life was a disaster, but this group of “friends” was giving me a place to go other than home. I finally felt like I had found some people I could trust. My life on the edge continued like that for nearly two years until one fateful night when everything changed for me.
It happened at a place called the Kitten Club, in a little town called Longsiding, Minnesota. You had to be twenty-one to get in, but they didn’t card me, because the owners were really just interested in whether you had money to buy beer. There was a motorcycle gang from Minneapolis there looking for a fight. I was with a group of my older “friends” who agreed to fight the gang and asked me if I was willing to help them, and of course, I readily agreed. The would-be combatants spilled out of the club onto Highway 169, stopping traffic in both directions. As I went out into the middle of the highway and got ready to brawl, I glanced behind me and froze.
I was the only one out there.
None of my “friends” had actually come out on to the highway to back me up. Turning back to the reality in front of me, I looked at the gang of bikers with their chains and tire irons and didn’t know what to do. I stood there, trying not to show that I was paralyzed by fear and praying that someone would come out to help me … but no one did.
After some tense moments, the lead gang member just gestured at me to go. I think they actually respected the fact that I was willing to go out there by myself to fight them. But that was the moment that I finally realized that these “friends” of mine weren’t really going to stand by me, and weren’t the kind of friends I wanted to have.
I was very fortunate that learning that lesson didn’t get me killed.
I walked the 7 miles home from the Kitten Club that night. During those three hours, as I walked in the dark on the side of the road, I struggled to figure out how to know whether somebody was really your friend or not.
After that night, I trusted no one for a very long time.
The beginning of the eighth grade produced the first of several major turning points in my life. I had been given a football physical exam form but hadn’t yet gone to see the doctor. I was going to give it back to my football coach, Mike Scavinack, who was also my science teacher. I went to see him after school to tell him that I was not going out for the football team because I wanted to spend my time wrestling. That was a lie. The truth was that I wasn’t committed to putting in the kind of time and effort necessary to be successful in sports, or in anything else.
When I left Mr. Scavinack’s room that day, though I still had the physical exam form in my hand. To this day, I’m not sure what he said to me to convince me to go get my physical and channel my energy into football—but that’s exactly what happened. I took the physical, tried out for football, and made the team—and that probably ended up saving my life.
If I had quit football that day, I would have dropped out of school and become a statistic. On a number of occasions, I had been an eyelash away from making that choice. I owe a lot to Mike Scavinack. I hadn’t really shown him anything to justify him spending the time with me trying to convince me to play football, but he was a teacher—and he had that special something in his heart that made him want to try.
I was struggling mightily as a student and was humiliated by my inability to perform in the classroom. I would look at the words in the books but not retain anything. I was only a little better at math but had a really hard time following the lessons. I couldn’t keep up with the other kids in the classroom. Some kids got As, and seemed to be able to get those grades pretty easily. My teachers let me skate by with Cs, even though I wasn’t learning anything, so that I could continue to qualify to participate in athletics. I also joined the wrestling and track teams so I had a sport to concentrate on in every season and someplace to go other than home.
I was committed to not missing a day of wrestling, track, or football practice. No matter how badly things went on the field, on the track, or in the gym, it was always better than facing the reality waiting for me back at home.
He Was Dedicated
Bob Backlund was a quiet, likeable kid. His natural ability was about average as a youth, but the degree of dedication he developed separated him from all the others.
—Jermone Peterson, Bob Backlund’s football, wrestling, and track coach from eighth to tenth grade
Despite my efforts to use athletics to get my life on the right track, things didn’t start happening for me right away. We were too poor to afford to buy any exercise equipment, but around this time I made a barbell out of a pipe and two five-gallon pails filled with cement. When I tried to lift it, though, I was too weak to even move it.
During my sophomore year in football, I was a 170-pound offensive end of little distinction. I also had a mediocre year on a good wrestling team. Wrestling at 154 pounds, I was eliminated from the district tournament in the first round, and winning seemed like an impossibility for me. No matter what I was doing, it seemed like I was being met with failure at every turn.
After the district tournament was over, I went to regionals just to watch the matches and cheer on my teammates who had qualified. When that was over, I went to the state tournament that was held that year at the Williams Arena at the University of Minnesota. There I closely watched a guy named Kirk Anderson, a sophomore like me who was wrestling one class above me at 165 pounds, make it to the finals and win. For a sophomore to win the state tournament at that weight class was virtually unheard of. I thought a lot about what it had taken for him to accomplish that, and about the hard work and commitment he must have been putting in to allow him to accomplish that at such a young age.
Kirk Anderson’s improbable victory became imprinted in my mind. Watching his march to the championship made me realize that I wanted to do that too. I had found a role model; someone who I could really look up to.
Meanwhile, at the same time, a new football coach Ron Stolski had just come to Princeton High. He was a big believer in weight training, and he got me really interested in weightlifting and training in general. My sophomore teammate Ross Johnson and I went to Minneapolis with Coach Stolski and looked at four or five different gyms to determine what kind of equipment they had, and to research the most beneficial programs for high school football players. It was exciting to be asked to travel with Coach Stolski and Ross, just the three of us. It was a great bonding experience, which I had never had before in my life.
When we got back, Coach Stolski started holding weight-training sessions at the school at 6:30 a.m. every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. My mom was a cook at the school, so I would catch a ride with her at 6 a.m. to lift weights until the first bell. Ross and I never missed a day, and then when school let out for the summer, I found myself again having to improvise at home.
I asked Coach Stolski for an old football helmet, and attached a 25-pound barbell plate to the top of it with a bolt and a nut and went for long runs with that helmet on to strengthen my neck. That summer, after doing so much weight training at school, I was also finally able to lift my homemade barbell—which provided me with my first positive reward for my efforts and made me realize that what I was doing was actually working.
Junior year, I had a better season in football. I still didn’t excel, but I played every down of every game. When wrestling season started, I was already in good shape, but I dieted down to 175 pounds from about 190, worked hard with my coaches, and conc
entrated on technique and improving my balance and quickness. I went unbeaten through the regular season and became a crowd favorite because of my enthusiastic approach to every match. I had become so strong that I was able to throw my opponents around the mat with ease.
Before the Princeton Invitational that year, the coaches met to draw up the brackets. The coach from St. Francis was talking up my role model from the previous year, Kirk Anderson, who was the reigning state champ in the 165-pound weight class—now one weight class below me. Anderson’s coach was doing a lot of chirping that there was no one in the Princeton tournament who could give Anderson any competition. So my coach, Dan Brockton said “well, I have this Backlund kid at 175, and he’s undefeated so far, I bet he can give Anderson a run for his money.” So Anderson’s coach moved him up a weight class, and the coaches put us in opposite brackets so that, barring an upset, we would meet in the finals.
Well, as the fates would have it, Kirk Anderson and I did, in fact, meet in the finals. Anderson was the defending state champ in the 165-pound weight class, and I was the undefeated challenger at 175, where we were both now wrestling. There wasn’t a lot to cheer about in Princeton in those days, so the match was pretty built up in the area newspapers. The match was held at my school, and the gymnasium was packed full of people. When I stepped out onto the mat at the beginning of the match, my mind was strangely clear. I didn’t doubt for one moment that I could beat Kirk Anderson. The crowd was cheering and chanting my name.
It was the first time in my life that anyone had ever cheered for me.