by Bob Backlund
10
A Star Is Rising: Florida and Georgia (1976)
“Going the extra mile makes you indispensable to others … do for them what no one else does.”
—Napoleon Hill, “Go the Extra Mile”
If you’ve read this far, you can see that I am doing my best to tell my story chronologically. I chose to do that on purpose, first, so that you can experience the story the way that I experienced it—as it actually happened—and second, because the successes that I experienced in my life built one on the next as I went from Louisiana to Amarillo to Florida to Georgia to the AWA and then on to St. Louis, as you will read shortly.
At this point in the story, however, the effort to stay chronological becomes difficult, and as such, the telling becomes a bit more confusing. Suffice it to say that the Bicentennial year 1976 was the year of my most significant professional development. During 1976, I worked in three of the most important and influential territories in the National Wrestling Alliance—Georgia Championship Wrestling, Florida Championship Wrestling, and the St. Louis Wrestling Club. It certainly made for an interesting life.
When I got back to Georgia Championship Wrestling in February of 1976, Jim Barnett didn’t have a defined plan for me because he knew that my principal push during that time would occur in St. Louis. So Jim moved me around, giving me some good scientific babyface matches against the Brits Tony Charles and Les Thornton, some tag-team work with Rick Martel, and my first couple of matches against a young Greg Valentine. Jim planned to give me about a three-month run in Georgia and then to send me back down to work with Eddie Graham in Florida again. This gave me a chance to work with more people of different styles, to continue to work on my timing, and in particular, to get more of a feel for working in tag-team matches, which I really hadn’t had that much experience with up until that point in my career.
My babyface matches in Georgia typically ended up being clean matches with handshakes at the beginning and the end, and they usually went off early in the cards, to get the fans warmed up. The fans never pushed me toward the heel role in any of those matches, and Jim Barnett never wanted me to experiment with being a tweener. Barnett simply wanted me to build more experience as a pure babyface, and I was grateful for the opportunity.
I had my one and only match against Abdullah the Butcher down in Georgia. Wrestling Abdullah was a little bit like wrestling George “The Animal” Steele. Although I liked both of those guys personally, I didn’t enjoy being in the ring with them as much as I did wrestling other guys, because I liked to wrestle at least a little bit of every match in the amateur style, and that just wasn’t going to happen in the ring with Abdullah. Abdullah’s gimmick was to use every foreign object he could find around ringside and hide in his wrestling pants to carve you up with—so, by default, the storyline when wrestling him was to try to avoid getting clobbered by whatever weapon he had, try to convince the referee that he had it, and then, when that didn’t work, to get your hands on every equalizer you could find in order to defend yourself.
There were no wrestling holds called in a match against Abdullah. He was the Butcher, and the fans came to see the bloodbath and carnage he provided, so if he didn’t butcher you and leave you with a crimson mask, he didn’t give the fans what they came to see from him. His was a very unique character, and he was very, very over, particularly in Japan where he was as big a star as there was in the business.
Abdullah was very established in Atlanta, so he was the boss and got to call the match. I was definitely leery of him when I learned I would be wrestling him, but as it turned out, I didn’t need to be. I thought he might be heavy on me, but he wasn’t at all. He was very good to me in the ring and he didn’t carve me up with a fork like he did so many other guys, but his character was limited, so there was only so much he could do. Abdullah was very wide at the shoulders and frankly, he was wide all the way down—but he was a good person.
I also wrestled Randy Savage while I was down in Georgia. Back then, Randy was just coming off a pretty good run in minor league baseball in the St. Louis Cardinals and Cincinnati Reds organizations, and his personality was just perfect for the wrestling business. Savage was very charismatic, good with the people, and a great athlete—and we had some great matches together. As I learned from many of my mentors, your wrestling persona is much more credible when it develops and evolves naturally in the business over time. Randy’s did just that. You could see the origins of the “Macho Man” character down in Atlanta—but he didn’t become the fully evolved heel character for another eight years or so. He let it evolve naturally, and that’s why his was such a new and refreshing and great character when he first arrived on the scene in the WWF in 1985.
Our second stint in Georgia went by quickly. I got a nice little respite for about six weeks before I started having to fly to St. Louis for the Kiel and TVs, and had a pretty easy schedule until the beginning of May, when I headed back down to Florida to work with Eddie.
In May 1976, I had my first dates back in Florida Championship Wrestling working for Eddie Graham. When I got back down there, Eddie didn’t really tell me anything about how long I was going to be there, or how I was going to be used, so I just settled into a routine again. We moved into an apartment on Buffalo Avenue in Tampa. I liked it there because it was very hot and humid and easy to get a good sweat going during a workout—which was something that I always loved to do. Corki liked the Florida territory too because the heat and humidity is also her kind of weather. She quickly got a job teaching gymnastics at a club down there, and settled into her own life away from the lights and the chaos of wrestling.
Most of Eddie Graham’s top guys in the Florida territory had been in the business a long time, and because Florida was one of the premiere territories in the NWA, it definitely took longer to earn your stripes down there than it did in some of the other territories. Eddie didn’t just put you into main events right away. But he kept me busy, put me on the cards every night, and gave me a variety of opponents to work with. I really couldn’t have asked for more.
By the time I returned to Florida in 1976, I’d actually only been in the professional wrestling business for two years. Many of the guys who broke into the business around the same time I did were still serving as enhancement talent or jerking the curtain in smaller regional promotions. I had been very fortunate to have been fast-tracked by the Funks in Amarillo, and because of how much influence Dory and Terry had in the business at the time, I was set on a whole different course with Eddie in Florida and Jim Barnett in Atlanta.
The Southern Heavyweight Championship was the premiere title in the Florida territory, and was defended in both the Florida and Georgia territories. “The American Dream” Dusty Rhodes was really over with the fans in Florida and by that time, had pushed his blue collar image as the “son of a plumber” to the point of becoming an almost larger-than-life character. As Dusty became increasingly loved by the fans, however, he also flexed his muscles more with the office, and Eddie lost some of his leverage as a direct consequence of Dusty’s stardom. Dusty would often suggest certain angles or finishes to his matches—which, of course, was a totally foreign concept to me. It also didn’t ingratiate Dusty much with Eddie or many of the other boys who saw him as something of a relentless self-promoter.
From what I experienced, I think most people inside and outside the wrestling business either loved Dusty or hated him. There didn’t seem to be much of a middle ground given how strong Dusty’s personality was. I was one of the people who liked him. Like mine, the character that Dusty played was one that closely resembled who he was in real life, but was also one that he evolved into—it wasn’t a character that someone just handed him off the shelf when he first broke into the business. You don’t just wake up one morning and decide that you are going to be “The American Dream” and show up to the arena that night and pull that off. “The American Dream” was another one of professional wrestling’s most successful and carefull
y evolved characters—one that Dusty built over his many years in the business.
Dusty lived his character and he was very good at what he did. He connected deeply with the Florida and Georgia fan base, and he was definitely one of the better interviews in the business (once you figured out how to understand what it was that he was saying through his heavy lisp and exaggerated Texas drawl). There were a lot of people who thought he was cocky and pushed himself on the bookers and promoters too much—but the fact is that Dusty captured the hearts and minds of the Florida fan base like nobody else ever did, and both Dusty and the promoters knew it. He was somebody who could put the butts in the seats down there better than anyone else, and because of that, he was a one-of-a kind performer.
During my two stays in Florida, and even in the years after when we saw each other in Japan and in the WWF, I always got along well with Dusty. We weren’t close friends, but we talked quite a bit about the business and we drank quite a bit of beer together. Nobody was bigger than Dusty in Florida or Georgia.
Nobody.
Jack Brisco lost the NWA World Heavyweight Championship to Terry Funk on December 10, 1975, in Miami and came off the road after two and a half years traveling as the world champion. After that exhausting schedule, Jack wanted to settle down into a territory and relax for a while. Since he was living in the Tampa area at the time, and had already successfully carried the Florida Heavyweight Championship four times, Eddie Graham wanted to put that title back on Jack. So after taking some time off, Jack won the Florida Heavyweight Championship from Pak Song on April 17, 1976, at the Bayfront Center in St. Petersburg, Florida. As the Florida Heavyweight Champion, Jack was responsible for headlining and main-eventing the cities and towns on the Florida circuit—occasionally supported by an appearance by the Southern Heavyweight Champion or the NWA World Heavyweight Champion. It made all the sense in the world for Eddie to use someone like Jack, who had just been the NWA World Champion, to carry the promotion.
Jack lost the Florida title about a month later, on May 25, 1976, in Tampa to Bob Orton Jr. Needless to say, a victory like that over someone who had just been the NWA World Champion signaled a big push—and Orton was definitely getting a big push from Eddie down there at the time. Orton, of course, would go on to fame later on in the WWF as “Cowboy” Bob Orton and then as Roddy Piper’s henchman “Ace.” He had been trained by Eddie and Hiro Matsuda and was a terrific wrestler who could really work in the ring.
The Ortons were based in the Florida Championship Wrestling promotion, and Bob Jr. had been wrestling there for almost five years when he got his push with the Florida belt. So it was definitely his time. After a couple of months running with the belt, Orton feuded with Dusty Rhodes and eventually lost the Florida title to Dusty on July 27, 1976, in Tampa. Dusty then held the Florida title until November 1976, when he was beaten by “Superstar” Billy Graham, who was being groomed to take the WWWF World Heavyweight Championship from Bruno Sammartino. Graham held the belt until vacating it in March 1977, right before beginning his run as the WWWF champion.
I mention this brief lineage of the Florida title during the time I was there to give you an idea of the kind of A-list talent that Eddie Graham had assembled at Florida Championship Wrestling. It was a great atmosphere to wrestle in, and a great time to be coming up and learning from some of these greats in the business. I wasn’t discouraged at all to be working the lower mid-card on many of those nights, because I really hadn’t paid my dues like a lot of these guys had. Frankly, I’d been fortunate that my hard work had allowed me to get to the top of the cards in Amarillo and Georgia as quickly as I did!
I also did a lot of tag-team wrestling in Florida, teaming up with guys like Mike Graham (Eddie’s son), Gerry Brisco, and Steve Keirn. We wrestled guys like the Ortons (Bob Sr. and Bob Jr.) who were the Florida Tag-Team Champions, the Assassin and the Missouri Mauler, Orton Sr. and Bob Roop, and the Hollywood Blondes.
Obviously, when you wrestled as a tag team, it was important to like your tag-team partner and to be compatible with him outside the ring, because once you were involved in a tag team, it meant that you and your partner were traveling together, and working together almost every night. Fortunately for me, I liked Mike and Gerry and Steve a lot, and we had a lot of fun working together.
Tag-team wrestling was another common booking trick used to keep somebody busy without hurting them. There is a big difference between wrestling in a singles match, and wrestling in a tag team or a six-man tag-team match. In a singles match, you have only one other person to communicate with and work with in order to tell a compelling story in the ring. In a tag-team match, though, that communication triples—as you have to communicate well with your partner, and with both of the guys you are wrestling against.
The goal of tag-team wrestling is to create a match people are going to enjoy—one that will be favorable to everyone in the ring. Done well, a tag-team match can be very entertaining. There is a lot of action, and a well-orchestrated tag-team match can be very interesting and very popular with the fans. The key to a good tag-team match, though, is to keep the focus on what is going on in the ring unless it is everyone’s intention to have something that is going on outside the ring help the development of the match inside. For example, it would be totally proper and appropriate for a babyface partner standing on the ring apron to rally the crowd to help inspire his partner in the ring taking punishment to come make the tag. On the heel side, it was totally appropriate for the heels to interact with their manager outside the ring, to get or hide foreign objects from their manager, or to interfere from the outside in the match while the referee’s back was turned.
It is a major no-no, however, for the person outside the ring to be jawing with the fans, “grandstanding,” or doing things to draw attention away from the guys inside the ring. Grandstanding by doing any of these things to draw attention to yourself rather that to keep the attention on the storyline of the match was a fast way to irritate both your partner and your opponents. For a successful tag-team match, everyone had to be working together toward a common story and the betterment of the match as a whole. When individual egos got the best of people and individual wrestlers were in it for themselves or their own character, though, the match suffered.
It was Eddie Graham’s idea to put Steve Keirn and me together for a run with the Florida tag-team titles, because Steve and I both liked to work the quick, amateur style, and Eddie thought that would be exciting for the fans to see. We won the Florida Tag-Team Titles from Bob Roop and Bob Orton Sr. at the Sportatorium in Tampa on June 29, 1976, and defended the belts around the Florida territory against a host of challengers that summer including the Ortons, the Briscos, and the Assassin and the Missouri Mauler. It was a pleasure to be in the ring with all of those guys because they all knew how to wrestle and how to entertain people—which gave us a lot of options in our matches.
We dropped the titles at the end of the summer on September 7, 1976, to the Hollywood Blondes, Buddy Roberts and Jerry Brown. Roberts, of course, would go on from there to work as Fabulous Freebird Buddy Roberts (along with Terry Gordy and Michael Hayes) for Fritz Von Erich in World Class Championship Wrestling.
During this time in Florida, I worked most intensely on my ability to listen to a crowd and understand what they were asking you for. Every night, in every city or town, the crowd would be different in mood and makeup. The art of “reading the fans” is something that takes a while to acquire, but once you can do it, no matter where you are or what a crowd is like, you can always let them take the match where they want it to go. Giving the fans what they want to see, within reason, is the name of the game. It is what keeps them coming back to the box office to buy tickets.
By way of example, if I was wrestling in a lower-midcard babyface match in Orlando, and the fans that night were not interested in seeing mat wrestling or chain wrestling and were letting us know it, then my opponent and I would have to switch it up and adjust. Maybe we would mix
in more speed work, like moves off the ropes, hip tosses, arm drags, dropkicks and head-scissors, or more high flying moves to get the people going. If that didn’t work, maybe one of us would take offense to someone throwing a forearm, or not breaking cleanly out of the ropes, and have the match devolve into fisticuffs. It usually didn’t take much to get the fans going and to find something that they liked. But you have to be listening to know what the people want.
It was also very important to know what happened in the matches before you so you didn’t repeat things that the fans have already seen. The bookers tried to take care of this, at least to some degree, by making sure that all of the booked finishes on a given night were differently paced, that all of the matches on a particular card ended with a different finisher, and that they didn’t have three disqualification finishes on the same card. Everything from the beginning of the match to the finish was ad-libbed by the guys in the ring, so it was incumbent on the wrestlers to make sure that they weren’t duplicating high spots that had already been done earlier in the card—or robbing a later match of its high spots or its booked finish. If the main event was slated to end with a piledriver that resulted in a pin, you didn’t want to show one to the fans earlier in the evening that ended with someone kicking out.
Every building had a place where you could go to watch the matches where people wouldn’t see you, and I always made a habit of doing this. Taking this approach gave me insight into what a particular crowd was like and what it was looking to see that night, provided me with examples of how other wrestlers, especially the top ones, paced their matches, pulled off angles, and handled particular finishes, which I could use in my future matches. It also helped me know what the fans had already seen so I could give them something different. A lot of guys just played cards or socialized in the dressing rooms before and after their matches. I was really serious about the business and about improving my craft—so I took full advantage of the opportunity to learn every night from some of the top guys in the business who were working in Florida at the time. I learned a lot from doing that, and seeing how guys responded to different situations—which gave me a wealth of ideas to pull from when I found myself in the same situation on another night.