by Bob Backlund
What happened that night certainly diminished my respect for Jack. He was the NWA World Heavyweight Champion, and was supposed to be a role model both for the fans and for young wrestlers like me. In that way, he certainly let me down. But it was a good learning experience for me to encounter that kind of behavior at the very highest levels of our sport, and among the people I most respected. I guess that’s why I ultimately became kind of a lone ranger in the wrestling business. I wanted to control my own environment and to be responsible for my own decisions.
I never rode with those guys again, and I was never asked.
After that title match with Jack, I faced Gerry Brisco around the circuit in a series of babyface matches, most of which went to the time limit. We put on a chain wrestling clinic that the fans really seemed to enjoy. It was always dicey to do those babyface matches, because there was always the potential that the crowd would side with one of us over the other and push one of us to become the heel. If the crowd had taken one of us in that direction, we would have gone with it—but fortunately, it never actually happened. The crowds kept us both babyfaces and just cheered us both pretty much everywhere we went—so ultimately, Jim Barnett decided to go with what the people wanted and turned us into a babyface tag team!
Once that happened, Gerry and I traveled around the territory working together, and soon received a title shot at the Georgia Tag-Team Championship which, at that time, was held by Dick Slater and Bob Orton Jr. (later Cowboy Bob “Ace” Orton in the WWF), managed by Gary Hart. Both Slater and Orton could really work, and we had a number of very entertaining tag-team title matches with them around the territory. Gerry and I eventually beat them and enjoyed a brief run with the belts in the fall of 1975.
In Georgia, the heels and babyfaces were kept separate all the time, so I only got to mingle publicly with about half of the roster—which was really too bad, because there was such an abundance of good young talent in the Georgia territory at that time. Night after night, I found myself in the ring with incredibly talented guys, and wrestling in the upper half of the cards, so it was all about making it look good and listening to the crowds, figuring out what they wanted, and learning as much as I could from guys I would never have imagined being in the ring with.
I have always been grateful to Jim Barnett for giving me those opportunities.
During my first stay in Georgia, I continued to develop a pretty close friendship with Les Thornton. Les and I would go to the gym and play a game with a deck of cards where we would take turns turning over a card and do however many squats the card required. Aces or Jokers were thirty, face cards were ten, and everything else was face value. We had a lot of fun with that—and it was a way of keeping our workouts interesting.
During that time in my career, I was lifting heavy weights, benching, and doing a lot of deadlifts to help me execute the short-arm scissors. I never did a lot of running because of all the pounding on my hips and knees. Squats were good for wrestling, though, because you are up and down so much. Les also continued to teach me more and more shooting skills.
At the end of the fall of 1975, Jim Barnett called me into his office and told me that Sam Muchnick had called and asked to get some bookings with me in St. Louis. I knew from the chatter I had heard in the other territories that being invited to wrestle for Sam Muchnick in St. Louis was a very high honor, so I was excited to get the opportunity. Barnett explained to me how different the St. Louis territory was from the other wrestling territories in the NWA, in that it was essentially a one-city, one-day territory where you only wrestled twice a month. You’d fly in, tape the Wrestling at the Chase TV program, which they used to set up all of the angles, wrestle at the Kiel Auditorium, and then fly back and continue to work in whatever territory you had come from.
I wanted to go back home again to Minnesota to visit my parents, so I asked Jim if there was a way to work all of that out. Jim set up a tryout for me in St. Louis in December 1975, explaining to me that if it went well, Mr. Muchnick would probably ask to use me more often. Jim gave me about a month off to spend some time at home, explaining that he wanted me back in Georgia the first week in February 1976 for an additional three-month babyface run. After that, he explained that I would head back to Florida Championship Wrestling to do another run with Eddie Graham. So as Corki and I drove out of Georgia for our long-awaited trip home, I had a scheduled tryout with the NWA’s premiere booking office, and about six months of additional work in Georgia and Florida lined up ahead of me. Things were really starting to build a head of steam.
It made for a happy drive, and a pretty good holiday season!
9
I’ll Be Home for Christmas (AWA, 1975)
“Time is relentless in preserving the seed of an equivalent benefit that hides within a defeat.”
—Napoleon Hill, “Learn from Adversity and Defeat”
When I returned home to Minnesota, I again called Verne Gagne to see if I could get booked in the AWA territory while I was at home just to stay in ring-shape and to keep up my timing. Verne used me during those days mostly as enhancement talent to get his stars over. To be fair, though, we both knew I wasn’t going to stay in the AWA for long, so there was no reason he would have put me over.
Verne was a bit of a control freak, and unlike a lot of the other regional promoters, he actually went to many of the towns on the AWA circuit, so he got to see me wrestle personally quite a lot. Every night, I would get to the building, go into the dressing room, and figure out where my match was on the card, and see who I would be putting over. To some, this might seem like a step backward given where I had already been, and how I had been treated in the other territories where I had wrestled. But I didn’t see it that way. To me, it was simply an opportunity to stay in shape, keep up my timing, make a good impression on another influential promoter in my home region of the country, and keep a few dollars in my pocket. Moreover, since the AWA was not broadcast into Florida or Georgia, there was no danger of any harm to the reputation Eddie Graham and Jim Barnett were building for me.
As I had learned from both the Funks and from Eddie and Jim, when you are asked to put someone over, part of being a success in the business is knowing how to do that the right way. Done properly, it is possible to both make your opponent look strong in going over (which is what the promoters are asking you to do), but also draw the interest and emotion of the fans so that they rally behind you, even in defeat, and even night after night. As I had been taught, you cannot necessarily control the whims of a promoter, or the results and finishes that promoter calls for. What you can control as a professional, however, is how you execute that promoter’s directives. A skillful performer can lose a match on any given night but still win the enduring support of the people.
In the AWA, most of the guys I wrestled were well-known heels, so they wanted to be hated and encourage the people to rise against them. The more successful they were at doing that, the more “heat” they would have with the fans. The more heat a heel had with the fans, the better the bookings they would subsequently get, and the more money they would make.
Conversely, I was trying to get over with the fans as a babyface, so I got to play the underdog a lot and make a lot of furious comebacks that would fall just short—but which would still energize the people and have them on their feet thinking that I might be on the verge of pulling off the upset. When I would fail at this, often because the heel would cheat or do something behind the referee’s back, the people would hate the heel more, which is exactly what the heels wanted. And my comeback, even though it would fall just short, would have fans believing in me—which connected us emotionally to each other—which is what I was trying to accomplish. A win-win situation was achievable in these situations, and as long as I didn’t allow the heels to take all of the action and just squash me, we could both come out with what we needed. Fortunately, because of my amateur background and because of the experience that I had already had, Verne was giving me enough time
in the ring to do this—and most of my opponents realized that they stood to gain more from our matches if we were able to take the energy up higher than it would have gotten if they just used me as a crash test dummy.
Interestingly, even though the AWA was so geographically expansive, we didn’t wrestle every night. At that time, the AWA had its proven towns, and didn’t wander much from that itinerary. There was a lot of travel. In the AWA, we weren’t just crossing one or two states, sometimes we were crossing several states, and if we drove, we weren’t returning home on the same day. You could be in Denver one night, Winnipeg, Manitoba, the next night, and then Green Bay and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, two nights after that. I’m from Minnesota, so the cold and the dark doesn’t bother me very much—and I actually love to drive—but there was more travel in the AWA territory than in any of the other territories that I had been in so far, and winter driving in that neck of the woods can be pretty difficult with the ice and blowing snow. It was certainly a radical change from Amarillo, Florida, and Georgia.
Because of how spread out the territory was, Verne had a plane that fit about six people (and a pilot), and he chose who got to fly with him. Because I was putting Verne’s talent over without complaint and having a lot of pretty compelling matches in the AWA, I was sometimes given the honor of flying with Verne on some of the longer routes. Other times, though, when there was more senior talent in the territory, there wasn’t room for me in the plane, and I’d have to drive.
In the AWA, given how far the driving routes were, in order to make ends meet, it was very important to be able to split the costs of travel by riding with others. If I was the “wheel” (the driver), it was important for me to make sure my seats were filled with people contributing to the costs of gas and paying a little extra for the privilege of not having to pay attention to the roads.
It was during this first brief stint in the AWA that I first crossed paths with Khosrow Vaziri—the man who would later go on to be known as The Great Hussein Arab and The Iron Sheik. Khos had recently emigrated to the United States from his native Iran after competing for Iran in Greco-Roman wrestling at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City. He had also legitimately served as a bodyguard for the Shah’s family. After the 1968 Olympics, Khos’s childhood idol—a former gold medal Iranian wrestler—turned up dead in a hotel room. His death was ruled a suicide, but Khos believes to this day that the man was murdered by the government for political reasons and he was fearful that the same thing could happen to him. So Khos came to the United States on a student visa, won a gold medal in the AAU championships in wrestling, and after that, came to Minneapolis and became an assistant coach to the 1972 United States Greco-Roman wrestling team with Alan Rice.
I always loved wrestling Khos because we could do a lot of interesting amateur moves in the ring and mix them in with the pro moves. We could almost anticipate each other, and we had a very easy time putting on entertaining matches in the ring for the fans. Verne liked it, because he was a big fan of amateur wrestling, so Verne allowed Khos and me to do a bunch of twenty-and thirty-minute draws featuring a lot of chain wrestling and mat work early in the cards that would warm up the crowds for the brawls that came later.
At that time, Khos was very powerful, very disciplined about his diet and his training, and was a very honorable man. Over the years, it has been hard to watch what happened to him, and what the choices that he made did to his career, and his life and his family. It almost makes me want to cry because I had so much respect for Khos, everything that he went through for real in Iran, and how he came to the United States and helped our young wrestlers so willingly with his talent and his energy and his ideas.
I also worked quite a bit with Bobby Duncam in the AWA, which was quite a contrast from working with Khos. Duncam had been an offensive lineman for the St. Louis Cardinals, and I liked him very much. He wasn’t in the greatest of shape when he was wrestling, but he always worked very hard in the ring and played the role of a rough and tough cowboy very well. That gave us the opportunity to tell a straight hero/villain story, and to sell me as the underdog trying to rally to beat the much bigger and rougher heel. I stayed pretty much to my style, trying to use holds and speed, and by the time our matches were over, Duncam was always gassed—but we worked hard to put on good matches. Duncam was very over as a heel with the AWA fans, so I was asked to put him over every night, but the booked finish was usually some last-minute dirty trick that put the heat on him but allowed me to keep the fans on my side.
I know that Bobby appreciated our matches and the fact that I was willing to sell for him and put him over. Those matches were actually very important for us, because it gave us a base to work off of when Duncam later came to the WWF in 1979 for a series of title matches with me when I was champion. Of course, by then, the roles had reversed, and Bobby was being asked to put me over. This is yet another example of how the tides in wrestling ebb and flow, and why it was so important to play your role well, whatever was being asked of you. The wrestling fraternity was not that big, and people in the business had long memories. If you were willing to put someone else over and make them look good when asked—they would be much more likely to return the favor for you down the road.
The most memorable match of my brief time in the AWA, though, was my first match with Harley Race in Omaha, Nebraska, right before I left the AWA to head back to Georgia. Harley was a really big star in the AWA back then, and I can remember watching him on television. He started wrestling as a teenager in the carnivals taking on all comers—and he was a tough guy both in the ring and out of the ring. Harley had several years on me in the business, and was much more experienced than I was. I was very excited to get in the ring with him and to see what we could do together. When you climb into the ring with an experienced hand like Harley Race, you don’t have to worry about much. What I was focused on that night was what I could learn from how he called the match and got the people—and that is definitely what I was focused on. As a thank-you for my good work for him, Verne let us battle to a time-limit draw, and before time expired, we had the crowd roaring with a couple of pretty-good false finishes. I know I represented myself pretty well in the ring that night with Harley.
That match in Omaha with Harley Race provided three important teachable moments that would reoccur throughout my career in wrestling. First, in the wrestling business of the 1970s, a random one-off match in some forgotten town somewhere that really connected with a crowd and caught the eye of a promoter had the potential to significantly accelerate your career. Second, any chance you got to climb into the ring with an influential wrestler and to have a great match could also change your fortune, because the more-experienced guys often talked to the promoters about the promising new guys. Finally, and most importantly, given those first two things, it was critically important to always be in great shape, look your very best, and be in position to put forth your best effort every night—because you just never knew when an opportunity might come. All you knew is that when it did come, you’d better be ready to take advantage of it.
When I called Verne Gagne and asked him whether I could get a little work while I was back in Minnesota, I knew I wasn’t going to be spending much time in the AWA. A lot of people in the wrestling business would have loafed through those matches for some easy paydays. Many people would have resented being asked to put guys over night after night, especially if they had already tasted success and carried championships in other territories like I had.
I didn’t approach it that way.
My mantra always was, the harder I worked at my craft, and the more I attended to the goal of giving every opponent and every crowd in every town the very best I had to give—the better things would go for me. That was certainly the lesson of my time in the AWA. Verne Gagne was initially jobbing me out to his established stars. But when he saw what I looked like in the ring, and the effort I was giving him, he was impressed. As he watched that night after night, he gave me better and bett
er opportunities to entertain the fans. First, it was just the occasional reward of being able to fly with him rather than make a long drive. Next, it was the chance to wrestle to draws with people like Khos rather than simply putting everyone over. But most importantly, as a thank-you on my way out, Verne gave me a chance to get into that ring in Omaha and have a long match-ending in a draw with Harley Race. At the time, Harley Race was a big star, and had been the reigning Missouri Heavyweight Champion for nearly a year. I, of course, was about to go to the Missouri territory to wrestle for Sam Mushnick. And Verne knew that.
That “chance” night in Omaha would prove to be extremely influential to my career.
By the time we returned to Georgia, I had bought a Corvette, so Corki and I were riding in that and towing Corki’s Volkswagen Bug behind us. Approaching a little town in Tennessee where we had decided to stop for the night, the Bug somehow came uncoupled from the Corvette and went rolling down the road past us.
I watched the Bug go by and turned to Corki and said, “Hey, that little bug that just went by us looks just like your car!”
She took one look at it and said, “Bob, that is my car!”
Corki got out of the Corvette and sprinted down the road after her Bug. It was a hilarious scene. Fortunately, Corki’s Bug rolled harmlessly to a stop in an empty lot without crashing into anything or hurting anyone.
We were lucky … but that was the end of our tandem-travel.
After that, Corki insisted on driving her own car.