Backlund: From All-American Boy to Professional Wrestling's World Champion

by Bob Backlund

  It would prove to be the match that made my career.

  Making Backlund

  Backlund had an excellent one-hour battle with Terry Funk for the [NWA World Heavyweight Championship] gold belt on October 8. Since Funk won the only fall within the sixty-minute time limit, Terry’s hand was raised, but Backlund was “made” as a major national player.

  After the Funk match, Sam and I were both laughing at how Bob had grabbed each of us, separately, to ask: “Was the match any good?” All I could say was, “Relax—it was great!”

  —Larry Matysik

  Good People, Good Guys

  I wrestled Backlund for the NWA World Heavyweight Championship twice—once in St. Louis and once in Miami. We had a near sellout in St. Louis, and a sellout in Miami, and memorably great payoffs both times. It was such a pleasure for me to step into the ring with Bobby—someone who was an old friend that I had helped to train who, by that time, had already established himself as a credit to our business, and someone that you were proud as hell to be in there with. That’s how I felt about Bobby. You wanted good people and good guys to do well in this business—and I’ll tell you something—the sixty-minute match that Bobby and I had in St. Louis was one of the very best broadways I ever had as NWA champion—and that’s high praise for Bobby, because believe me, I had a lot of them.

  —Terry Funk

  At the next Kiel card on October 22, 1976, Dory and Harley tangled in the main event, and I was paired with Jack Brisco against Moose Cholak and Buddy Wolfe in a two out of three falls tag-team match. Pairing Jack and me seemed like Sam was angling toward the creation of a “Dream Team” of two former NCAA National champions—but in fact, he was preparing to swerve the fans once again. With the fans expecting us to crush Cholak and Wolfe, we took the first fall easily when I hit the atomic drop on Wolfe for the pin. But Sam was preparing to spring his trap—as he had directed Jack and me to get heat with each other in the second fall.

  At the designated time, with all four men in the ring, I “mistakenly” threw Cholak into Brisco, leading to Brisco getting pinned. Brisco popped up and started jawing at me, and bingo—we had heat! Jack then took the third fall by himself without letting me into the match, and I jawed back at him for not “forgiving” my “mistake.” The setup for my match with Jack had now evolved from a pure babyface match, to something with some real additional intrigue! Of course, the unspoken history we had stemming from the Thunderbird incident in Atlanta added some real-life intrigue to this matchup as well.

  Once again, just terrific booking by Sam Muchnick.

  On November 26, 1976—the seeds of dissension that Sam had sewn a month earlier came home to roost, as Jack Brisco challenged me for the Missouri Championship in a one-fall match. Although billed as a “scientific” encounter, Jack played the tweener brilliantly—skating perilously close to the heel line on several occasions. The end came when I attempted a big splash on a springboard over the ropes from the apron, and Jack lifted his knees and then rolled me over for the pin—bringing an end to my seven-month reign as the Missouri State titleholder.

  The main event on that card had Terry defending the NWA World Heavyweight Championship against Harley Race—with Terry going over Harley in what I would later discover was yet another showcase match for the championship committee.

  I had my rematch with Jack on December 10, 1976, in the main event at the Kiel. The match was scheduled for the best two out of three falls. Sam’s booking called for Jack to retain the belt, but Sam wanted to leave the shine on me—so he had me “injure” my knee in the first fall, allowing Jack to catch me in the figure-four leglock and get the submission. I rose for the second fall and gamely tried to continue the match, but with my knee too badly injured, the ref waived it off about a minute into the second fall and awarded the bout to Jack on an injury stoppage. It was a good way to end my run—making Jack look good, while at the same time, allowing me to get out with my reputation intact. Jack and I worked together very well, and we had no personal differences with each other notwithstanding what had happened in Atlanta. Business was business—and we were both professionals about it.

  Backlund as NWA World Champion?

  I first met Bobby when he was just breaking into the business around the Minneapolis area in the AWA. He was always a very, very athletic kid, and always in tip-top shape. Actually, in all the years we wrestled, I can never remember seeing Bob not in great shape. I can’t remember how many times I wrestled Bob over the years—truthfully, it was quite a few—and he could do virtually anything in the ring.

  Given where I was in my career at the time, when I went in the ring, I called 90-plus percent of what was happening in my matches. When you are putting your body at risk with virtually everything that went on, you’d want to make very sure that you knew what was happening at all times. But I never had to worry about any of that with Bobby. When we got in there, we’d just go with the flow.

  Anyway, Bobby and I had been together on cards in two or three different places before Sam brought him in to the Missouri territory. At that time, I had already been the NWA World Champion and was, at that time, the Missouri Champion. St. Louis was the dominant city in wrestling for at least fifty years. The NWA was headquartered out of there and spanned from Charlotte to Portland Oregon.

  The territory was controlled by Sam Muchnick, Gus Karras, and Bill Longston. Then when Gus passed away in January 1976, Bob Geigel, Pat O’Connor, and I bought Gus’s share of the St. Louis promotion, which made the three of us equal partners with each other, and collectively partners with Sam and Bill. By the time Bobby got out here, it was Sam and O’Connor on that side of the state (St. Louis) and Sam and Geigel and me on this side of the state (Kansas City).

  I was involved in the decision to put Bobby over for the Missouri title. But we knew that for Bobby to best capitalize on becoming the Missouri Heavyweight Champion—the obvious person for him to beat for that belt would be me. Our thinking was that if he beat the founder of it, the guy that had it the most times, and the guy who was recognized all over the Midwest—that would allow him to jump right out in front of everybody. So when they brought Bobby in, we immediately had a series of matches that ended up with him beating me for the Missouri State Championship. They were great matches. Bobby was a native Midwestern boy. He had such an outstanding look about him—his body and his earnest, innocent face—he just had a look about him that made everyone want to root for him. He was a true babyface, and an underdog-type character who just brought the empathy of the fans right to him. But if you tried to fuck with him for real, believe me, he could handle it. And he got over pretty damned good with the fans out here in the middle part of the country.

  Bobby was the type of guy whose personality and work ethic and love of the business just kind of combined to make you want to go in the ring and have a great match with him. I did, anyhow, and I know the other guys in the group felt the same way.

  But Bobby’s run in Missouri almost didn’t end there. He beat me for the Missouri title on April 23, 1976, and then after some rematches, he went on a tear where he was built up for a match with Terry Funk for the NWA World Heavyweight Championship at the Kiel while he was still the Missouri Champion. Those kinds of matches didn’t just happen by accident. The person who held the Missouri Championship was widely understood to be a person who was being groomed for a possible run with the NWA World Title.

  At the time this was going on, we knew that Terry’s run with the belt was coming to an end, and that we were going to need to switch it to someone else soon. But we needed a switch of that title to somebody who both looked the part, and someone who was capable, should someone decide to go into business for themselves and attempt to double-cross him, to put a stop to it in the ring. Bobby certainly looked the part, and he had the shooting skills to protect the belt if necessary. By that point, O’Connor and I had both been in the ring with Bob, and had experienced his skills firsthand.

  At that point in 1976
, there were three people being considered to become the next NWA World Heavyweight Champion after Terry Funk: Jack Brisco, Bob Backlund, and me. Backlund was very much in that mix. Both Sam and Eddie Graham were very much behind Bobby, and Eddie, in particular, who had been working with Backlund in Florida, was pushing very hard for Bobby. Eddie had worked a lot with Bobby down in Florida, and Bobby had proven himself to be very popular and very reliable and had made Eddie a lot of money down there. Barnett was a big supporter of Bobby’s also. But there were others on the Board who were not as familiar with Bobby who wanted to see the title go to Brisco, and there were others that wanted me to get it back.

  Back in those days, before his operation splintered off from the NWA to become the World Wide Wrestling Federation, Vince McMahon Sr. was on some of the NWA Boards of Directors. Vince Sr. wasn’t on the NWA championship selection committee at the time, but he had a lot of very good friends among the promoters in the NWA that made up that committee, and believe me when I tell you that Vince Sr. wasn’t afraid of using his influence to lobby people when he felt strongly about something. Because he controlled some of the largest venues in some of the largest cities in the United States, he had a lot of influence. There were nine members of the championship committee, so you needed a vote of five of the nine to become champion—and that committee didn’t have a majority. The group was split three ways between Backlund, Brisco, and me.

  Some of the dispute in the office about who was going to get it next was that if the title was going to go back to Jack, it would be a babyface taking it from a babyface, which would run the risk of pushing either Terry or Jack over into the heel role. That would also have been the case with Bobby, but with Bobby, there was the additional concern that he was just too much of a pure babyface. Getting a run with the NWA World Title meant that you had to travel the territories and wrestle the top guy in each territory, whether that person was a babyface or a heel. If you were a babyface champion, in some territories, that meant you’d be wrestling as a babyface against a top heel, while in other territories, you might be wrestling as a babyface against other babyfaces. Sometimes, you could have a straight scientific babyface match, but that wasn’t always the most interesting thing for the fans to see, so the booking in those matches often required that, as the champion, you had to cut a corner, or exhibit some more heelish behavior—and that really wasn’t in Bobby’s nature to do. Bobby Backlund didn’t cut corners. That just didn’t match up with who he was.

  In many of the places I went as the World Champion, I had to play the worst asshole on the face of the earth, and to be honest with you, that came easy to me. Of the people on the championship committee that weren’t in favor of putting the NWA World Title on Bobby, that was the knock on him: a perceived inability on his part to play the asshole. Bobby’s look and his personality really didn’t fit that role. Had Bobby been more of a verbal guy who could talk about himself in arrogant or cocky terms, or if he could have expressed himself more forcefully on the microphone, that might have been enough to overcome those concerns … but to be honest with you, that was the one thing about Bobby that was holding some of the members of the committee back from endorsing him for an NWA World Title run.

  If you think about the three people in the running for the belt at that time, I was a total asshole and had played one as the champion. I’d beat the hell out of anyone and cheat when necessary whether I was wrestling a face or a heel in any territory in the world, it didn’t matter a bit. So I could wrestle anyone without having to radically change my style. Brisco was a babyface, but he was more arrogant and cocky than Backlund—he was better equipped to come on your TV and jump out at you on an interview, and he had just enough swagger to make him better able to walk the line between babyface and heel. Backlund was kind of the opposite of that. He had always been a very humble guy who could cut a convincing straightforward interview and make you love him for being the pure babyface or the underdog—but it was hard to see Bobby playing heel to any babyface in the Alliance at the time. Shit, when he wrestled Dusty Rhodes in Japan for the WWWF title several years later, the fans turned Dusty into the heel. Let’s face it—in the world as it was back in the mid-70s, who the hell wouldn’t want to see a guy that looked and acted like Bobby Backlund kick the shit out of a cocky asshole like me? Bobby Backlund was the ultimate fucking babyface.

  The other concern that a couple of the guys in the office had was that if they put the NWA belt on Bobby, and then he didn’t want to lose it when they told him to, who the hell were they going to put in there to take it away from him? If Bobby didn’t want to lose, trust me, there were very, very few people in the wrestling business at the time who could have taken it from him in a shoot. That was part of the thinking that went into asking him to lose to Brown in his debut match in St. Louis. It was a test to see whether Bobby would cooperate—and he did, without the slightest hesitation. I don’t think that anyone was really worried that he wouldn’t cooperate, but that was always something that the committee thought about in those days before they put the big belt on somebody, so why not test him?

  Anyway, that’s where things were in November 1976—with Terry looking to come off the road and give up the title, and the NWA championship committee undecided as to who should get it next. And that’s when, if you can believe it, Vince McMahon Sr. showed up looking for an “All-American Boy” to be his next babyface champion up in New York.

  Vince Sr. came to St. Louis and talked to the committee, and explained that Bruno Sammartino was wanting to come off the road up in New York, and that he was looking for a non-ethnic, All-American Boy to be his next champion. Well Eddie Graham, Jim Barnett, and Sam all recognized at that moment that Vince’s opportunity was the perfect shot for Bob. The New York model had always been built around a babyface champion keeping the belt, and getting a cycle of heel challengers coming in from the territories to have programs with him. It had been that way since the territory was founded, and frankly, it was the perfect answer for Bobby, who wouldn’t then have to worry about wrestling babyfaces. So Vince Sr. decided to take Backlund to New York, and told the rest of the committee that he thought I should get to run with the NWA World Title based on the way things had gone during my two-month tryout with the belt when I served as the crossover champion between Dory and Jack Brisco.

  Vince Sr.’s involvement broke the three-way deadlock and led the committee to choose me to become the next NWA World Champion—and for Bobby, well, that sealed his fate too. He would become the next babyface champion up in New York. Everything pretty much fell right into place after that. I won the NWA World Title from Terry Funk up in Toronto on February 6, 1977, and Bobby went up to New York for his first set of TV tapings for Vince right around the same time.

  What happened in that meeting in St. Louis was part of the reason why Vince was always so loyal to Bobby. Vince Sr. had pulled Backlund out of contention to become the NWA World Champion in order to bring him to New York, and had promised the WWWF title to Bobby right down to the day he was going to get it. Vince Sr. was a man of his word, and one of the few people in this business that you could trust on a handshake. So he honored his promise and put the belt on Bobby when the day came regardless of how over Graham was. That’s pretty much the way it happened. Vince Sr. was the type of guy that if he really liked someone, he would do just about anything to help him. And Vince Sr. felt that way about Bobby.

  —Harley Race

  A Committee Divided

  I had held the NWA World Title for over a year, and that’s about as long as I wanted to have with it because it takes a tremendous toll on your body wrestling long matches night after night, and also on your family because you’re traveling all the time. So when I told people that I wanted to come off the road, there was a real question about who was going to carry the title next. Bobby was very much in that mix—in fact, he was the Missouri champion at that time. He had just had a great match with me for the NWA title at the Kiel, and it was between Ja
ck getting it back, Harley, and Bobby. Bobby was being groomed by Eddie Graham, and being groomed very well. Eddie and Sam Mushnick were both pushing pretty hard for Bobby, and he was definitely right in the middle of that discussion. But there was also a group of promoters that liked Jack, and a group that wanted Harley.

  The championship committee could not agree, but then we heard that the top spot in New York was about to open up and Vince McMahon was talking to Eddie Graham and looking for an All-American Boy, and Eddie told Vince that Backlund was his guy. Bobby had wrestled for a long time for Eddie down in Florida and for Barnett up in Georgia. Credentials, you see. Why did Bobby end up where he did? Because of his wrestling ability and hard work and honesty. You get up into that group of people who were being trusted to carry the world championships of these different wrestling organizations whether it was in the NWA or for Vince Sr. or for Verne Gagne, and you’re talking about people with serious credentials. Bobby was right in there in the mix for a run with the NWA World Championship because of his credentials and his honesty and his integrity.

  The committee was split—not because they didn’t like Bobby or because Bobby wasn’t drawing or anything like that—they loved his look and his ability to take care of himself and the belt, but Bobby would have had to have been purely a babyface champion. And that was their primary concern as it related to Bobby—it was a necessity for the NWA World Champion to be able to be a credible heel in some territories—and back then especially, Bobby didn’t look anything like a heel. He looked like the biggest babyface of all time. So ultimately, Eddie pushed Bobby to Vince, because Bobby was exactly what Vince Sr. was looking for—and the glove fit him perfectly in New York, because New York always had babyface champions.