by Bob Backlund
Hayes played the part of an English Nobleman and a snob, so the Midwesterners hated him intensely. He was legitimately from England and was a friend of Billy Robinson, Tony Charles, and Les Thornton—three guys whom I knew well and had trained with in Florida and Georgia. The English guys were all trained in a great wrestling school in England—one of the best in the world—and they were experts at chain wrestling. Hayes and I had a nice match that was put together pretty well—he had a lot more experience than I did, so he called most of the match, enraging the fans with his heel tactics and hiding them from the referee—building the fans up to a crescendo, where I surprised him and caught him in the small package for the pin. I think that was the first time I met Hayes in the ring—and we had a lot of fun with it.
A couple of weeks later, I caught up with my old friend Terry Funk at what would prove to be an historic Wrestling at the Chase television taping. Funk was the reigning NWA World Champion at the time, and was in the territory building up to his upcoming title defense at the Kiel against former champion Gene Kiniski. When Terry saw me in the locker room, he teased me immediately.
“Shit, Bobby. What are you doing up here? You’re supposed to be back in Amarillo!”
It was a nice moment.
Sam booked Terry and me into a tag-team match on television against Kiniski and an arrogant blonde and muscular Kansas City heel named Roger Kirby. To my knowledge, that match was the only time the NWA World Heavyweight Champion and the Missouri Champion ever joined forces in a tag-team match.
Pursuant to the booking plan, Kirby and I “had words” and got into it several times in that match, but the real key was that the match ended with Kiniski catching a pin on Terry—all of which, of course, had been cleverly arranged by Sam to generate main events for the next couple of Kiel cards. If Kiniski was capable of pinning NWA kingpin Terry Funk in a tag-team match on television, then clearly he was more than a legitimate threat to take the world championship back in a title match at the Kiel!
Meanwhile, at the next Kiel card on May 21, 1976, I defended the Missouri title against Kirby. The buildup to the Kiniski-Funk NWA title match continued, as the main-event tag-team match that night pitted Gene Kiniski and Jack Brisco against Terry Funk and Dory Funk Jr. The Funks were over as a monster heel tag team in St. Louis, and the storyline here was that the Funks were “protecting” Terry by trying to take out Kiniski before he could get a world title match with Terry. This was another fun and creative bit of booking by Sam that gives you some insight into the care that went into building these matches.
The energy in the building was amazing that night. Kirby was the master of the piledriver—which was a feared hold in St. Louis at the time—so we worked around him trying to get that hold on me. Eventually, I finished him off after about twenty minutes of back and forth action. Meanwhile, the main event went two out of three falls with the Funks trying and failing to “injure” Kiniski, who was the only guy not to get pinned in the match, and who caught the deciding fall against Junior for the win.
Kiniski had survived the Funks’ attempt to injure him. Now there was nothing standing between him and his world title match against Funk.
That match would occur on the next Kiel card. On June 4, 1976, former AWA World Champion Verne Gagne served as the special referee as Terry Funk and Gene Kiniski waged a fierce battle that went to a third fall before Kiniski threw Gagne out of the ring, Funk hit Kiniski with a chair, and the bout ended in a wild double disqualification that absolutely delighted the fans. On that card, I defended the Missouri title against the challenge of Killer Karl Krupp—the latest entry into the Nazi officer typecast. Krupp, who was actually a Dutch guy named George Momberg who hated the Germans for occupying his homeland during World War II, saw this character as a way of ridiculing the Germans, and in doing so, had taken the gimmick over the top. He was a big man with a shaved head, a thin black beard, and a monocle and whip. He came to the ring sneering and goose-stepping in a black cape and shiny black boots, and even though World War II was thirty years in the past by then, the gimmick was a heat machine.
Interestingly—that match with Krupp was the first match I can remember where my opponent no-sold my finisher and the booked finish of the match. Sam had called for me to demolish Krupp with the atomic kneedrop, but when the appointed time came and I hit the finisher, Krupp did not go down. Instead, he just staggered around the ring sneering at the fans—which I took as a sign of disrespect both to Sam and to me. I immediately went into shoot mode, slapped him into a standing front facelock, choked him out, and whispered to him that I was going to suplex him for a revised finish, and that he better stay down.
The shoot hold had its desired effect, as Krupp did not test me further. He stayed down for the three count, but I was not pleased that he had no-sold my finisher in my last match before the summer recess.
We reconvened the Wrestling at the Chase television program on July 31, 1976, with a tag-team match where I teamed up with Guy Mitchell (later “Gentleman” Jerry Valiant in the WWF) against Harley and Ox Baker. As usual, this tag-team match served a dual booking purpose. First, it set up my next Missouri title defense against Ox Baker at the Kiel. More importantly, it served to reignite my “feud” with Harley Race.
I was thrilled that Sam wanted to book me into an extended program with Harley, because I loved working with him and learning from him. Being in the ring with Harley was so easy—we were nearly always on the same page about where to take the match and how to grow the energy. Harley was always focused on making the match the best it could be, and was never concerned about his own ego. The plan that day called for a double disqualification finish, and for me to then demand a singles match with Harley on television at the next Wrestling at the Chase program.
The plan went off beautifully. Harley countered that he would not “agree” to wrestle me in a singles match unless I was willing to put up the Missouri title. Of course, I immediately agreed to do so, which brought an outpouring of concern from the fans fearing some sort of double-cross. Sam, however, knew that actually delivering on that double-cross would be too predictable, so he planned another swerve to keep the storyline one step ahead of the fans.
During the televised match, Harley pinned me after illegally using the ropes for leverage and the referee counted to three and raised Harley’s hand. The fans, seeing their worst fears confirmed, were furious. But Sam, who was at ringside watching the match, went to the ring and told the referee what happened, and ordered the match to continue. In a fury, I attacked Race with a vengeance to the delight of the fans, and then, pretending to be totally out of control, threw both the referee and Race over the top rope, leading to Harley’s victory by disqualification. I kept the title, Harley was screaming about how the promoters and the referees were “protecting me,” and the intensity of our feud ticked up another notch.
Back in the dressing room, Harley and I joked about Sam’s booking genius and looked forward to our next chance to entertain the fans at the Kiel.
On August 13, 1976, Terry Funk and Gene Kiniski had their much-anticipated rematch at the Kiel for the NWA World Heavyweight Championship—which was contested, as Sam called it, in a “fence match”—St. Louis’s version of the steel cage match. Steel cage matches didn’t happen a lot back then in St. Louis, so when Sam scheduled one, it really meant something. To the fans, a cage match meant that there would be a certain winner that night one way or the other. To the workers in the match, a cage match blowoff was a testament to the fact that they had been able to work fan interest in their feud to the highest level. To the other hands on the card, it signaled that the feud between the two wrestlers in the cage match had been milked for everything it could provide, and that a big house (and consequently, a bigger payday for everyone) was in the offing.
That night, Terry turned back Kiniski’s challenge in a bloody encounter that gave the St Louis fans something very different from what they were used to. Meanwhile, working off of our previous
tag-team encounter, I defended the Missouri Championship against the giant Ox Baker in another all-out brawl.
Ox’s pre-match interviews were always good enough to talk the fans into the seats, but unfortunately, they were also almost always better than his actual in-ring performance. To those who don’t know Ox Baker—it is worth putting this book down for a moment and YouTubing him to get a sense for what the man looked like in his heyday. Ox stood about six feet six inches tall and weighed about 350 pounds. He was bald, and had a giant black muttonchop beard and wild black eyebrows that framed his face in a permanent scowl.
Ox’s interviews were pretty notorious. He would yell and scream and threaten the lives of everyone within earshot. And then he would look into the camera and tell the fans how much he liked to hurt people, all the while ominously tapping his taped left fist that he used for his lethal finisher—the heart punch—which was applied by simply raring back and punching his opponent directly in the heart. Baker enjoyed the additional infamy of having two of his opponents actually die (for real) shortly after their matches with him—and although neither wrestler’s death had anything to do with his heartpunch, Baker did not hesitate to play up that fact to the fans for maximum effect. In the world of professional wrestling—anything—even another wrestler’s death, was exploited to create heat.
Baker wasn’t the kind of guy you could easily take off his feet or put in wrestling holds. He was a wild brawler—and so we had a fast and furious eight-minute match where he just charged into the ring and beat the heck out of me and got the sympathy of the fans firmly behind me, only to have me pull out a miracle in the end by getting behind him and stunning him with the atomic kneedrop long enough to get the three count and get out of the ring before he realized what had happened. The match with Ox was pretty entertaining in terms of its buildup. He was a terrific-looking and-sounding heel—but once we were in the ring, we were pretty limited as to what we could do.
At the next set of television tapings, Harley attacked me during a televised match against Roger Kirby, again drawing the ire of the fans and setting us up for another tilt at the Kiel on August 27, 1976, for the Missouri Championship. That match was set to be a best two of three falls encounter with Pat O’Connor as the guest referee. Interestingly, there was no NWA World Title match, and no star-studded undercard with talent from Florida and Georgia and Texas supporting us. The undercard that night was filled mostly with standard Kansas City talent, so it was left to Harley and me to draw the house. As I would later find out from Harley and others, Sam was evaluating drawing power as he began to search for Terry’s successor as the NWA World Heavyweight Champion.
There was still so much heat associated with Harley’s and my feud, that Sam felt that he could milk one more match out of the series—so this one was booked to tease a decisive finish as Harley and I each traded falls, with Harley taking the first one with his finisher—the vertical suplex—and me storming back to take the second fall with mine—the atomic kneedrop. In the third fall, I threw Harley over the top rope and out to the floor, leading, once again, to a disqualification. The fans, however, had gotten enough seeing each of us pinned once, that the indecisive ending only took the energy up that one final notch. We had wrestled for about half an hour and had the people in our hands from the opening bell.
There was only one problem.
The Kiel was only half full.
I remember at the time expressing some concern to Sam that we weren’t drawing the kind of houses that St. Louis had grown accustomed to—and Sam just patted me on the shoulder and told me to just worry about putting on a good match in the ring, and not to worry about the houses. I took Sam at his word.
Sam was building toward an October main event where I, as the still-reigning Missouri champion, would face the seemingly insurmountable Terry Funk for the NWA World Heavyweight Championship. To get us there, though, particularly after the fans had just seen Terry defeat the giant former champion Gene Kiniski in the cage, Sam needed to give me a decisive victory over a meaningful opponent.
Once again, Harley Race answered the call.
The match would happen at the Kiel in the territory’s first-ever lumberjack match on September 10, 1976, where the other fourteen men on the card surrounded the ring to ensure that neither Harley or I could leave the ring until a definite winner was declared. As before, Sam asked us to trade falls. Harley won the first fall with a vertical suplex, and again, I came back to win the second fall with the atomic kneedrop. In the third and deciding fall, per the booked finish, Harley got into it with Pat O’Connor, who was serving as one of the lumberjacks, and I took advantage of the moment, grabbed Harley from behind and rolled him up for the pin.
The crowd went nuts—and I had my decisive victory over Race. The problem, again, though, was that there just weren’t enough people in the seats. Once again, we had no undercard, and our blowoff match for the Missouri title had only half-filled the building. In the dressing room after the match, Harley congratulated me for what he thought was a great match, and I thanked Harley for doing the honors for me. Sam, too, appeared to be very happy with the way the match had come off. Based on what the boys were talking about in the dressing room, I think the problem with the undercard had something to do with a continuing difference of opinion between Muchnick and O’Connor about who to book.
The next Kiel card on September 24, 1976, saw the return to St. Louis of Jack Brisco, the former NWA World Heavyweight Champion. Brisco had beaten Harley for the world championship in Houston on July 20, 1973, and other than an unauthorized and very controversial double-switch with Shohei “Giant” Baba in Japan in December 1974, he had defended the title across the world for over two years until losing it to Terry Funk on December 10, 1975, in Miami Beach.
Jack’s return to St. Louis heralded change.
On September 24, 1976, Sam tested Brisco’s standing with the fans by immediately putting him into the main event against another former NWA World Champion—Pat O’Connor. He was also building Jack up toward a possible matchup with me for the Missouri Championship. As I would later learn from both Harley and Terry Funk, this was a “test” match, because the NWA Board was taking a look at the former champ knowing that Terry wanted to come off the road, and that the search for Terry’s successor was underway.
Interestingly, I was not asked to defend the Missouri title on that card, but instead, was booked on a “dream team” in a six-man tag-team match where my partners were the former WWWF World Champion Pedro Morales and US Champion Wilbur Snyder. Our opponents were a somewhat mismatched team of Baron von Raschke, Tank Patton, and Bob Geigel. Sam kept me looking strong by giving me the pinfall victory over Patton in that lengthy semi-final event. Harley did not appear on that card at all. The fans did not really respond to that booking either—as once again, the card drew a poor house of just over 3,500 fans.
On October 8, 1976, Sam rolled out the card he had been working toward since August—putting me, as the Missouri Heavyweight Champion, into the NWA World Heavyweight Championship main-event match against the world champion, Terry Funk. I was excited to get the chance be in the ring working with Terry again. In light of how much I appreciated the Funks for all that they had done for me, I was bound and determined to make that match with Terry the very best match of my career to date. Happily, we drew a good crowd to the Kiel that night—and the energy in the building was the best it had been in several months. There was definitely electricity in the air, and I think the people could sense that change might be afoot, and that something historic might be in the offing.
Back then, most of the NWA World Championship matches were scheduled for the best two out of three falls to allow for greater booking flexibility—and this match was no different. When Sam brought Terry and me together for the pre-match instructions in the dressing room, he told us that we were going to do a “Broadway” (sixty-minute time-limit draw), and that Terry would capture the only fall in the match. I was thrilled to be given th
e honor of going Broadway with the NWA World Heavyweight Champion, and shook hands with Terry and shared a few nice words with him before we parted ways prior to the match. Terry and I had worked together so much and so well back in Amarillo that we were totally comfortable being in the ring with each other, and I knew that the fans would be in for a great match that night! There was no mention of a rematch the following month or any booking plans beyond the match that night, but I do remember that Sam was pretty excited about the house we had drawn, and about Terry and me headlining the night.
I can’t say enough about how the match came off that night. Terry put over a whole series of my best moves and made me look sensational. As the booking required, Terry took the first fall with a surprise rolling sunset flip, but he waited to take that fall until nearly the entire match had elapsed and he had convinced the fans, beyond doubt, that I had the ability to beat him. Terry did not have to do that. He could have called for the first fall at the fifteen-minute mark and made himself look strong. Instead, he chose to make me look like a world champion.
In the ring with Terry that night in a match for the world championship on the NWA’s biggest stage—I realized, for the first time, that I had made it as a professional wrestler. I was totally comfortable, and having the time of my life. It also crossed my mind more than once that Terry was again demonstrating for me the lesson he and Junior had first taught me during my days in Amarillo: when you are the champion, it is your job to make sure that your opponent looks as good as you can possibly make him look. I worked hard in the ring that night—but Terry gave me a lot more of that match than he ever needed to.