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

by Bob Backlund

  You know, this is probably the craziest business in the world—and yet, the people we are talking about loved this business dearly. And let me tell you something—Vince McMahon Sr. loved this business—make no mistake about that. He cared deeply about getting the right person to carry the WWWF championship—someone who would have the right image for his fans. We talked to him a lot about that.

  Junior and I knew what the plan was for Bobby basically from the time that Vince McMahon came to St. Louis to meet with the NWA Board and broke the deadlock in the championship committee in favor of Harley. We knew what would happen as soon as we saw Bobby head for New York. And yeah, we were aware of what happened up there on that February night in 1978 in New York—everybody was. We were thrilled to death for Bobby. Junior and I both were. Bobby was destined to be the champion of the world. But why was that? Because Bobby went to school. He was a great wrestler and a great athlete, and a great student of the game. He learned the ways of this business everywhere he stopped along the way up, and learned how to draw money. And he drew a lot of money for Eddie in Florida. That was very, very important—if he hadn’t drawn money, all the other stuff wouldn’t have been enough. He wouldn’t have had the opportunity. Champions had to have all of the credentials. But really, the one guy who really loved Bob more than anyone else, and who thought the sun rose and set on Bob Backlund, was Eddie Graham, and he was the reason, other than Bobby’s own efforts, why Bob Backlund became a world champion.

  —Terry Funk

  I have to confess that when all of this discussion was going on in the St. Louis office, I had no idea about any of it. I was wrestling down in Florida for Eddie Graham, and I had no idea that I was being considered for a run with the NWA World Heavyweight Championship, and I had no idea, until Vince McMahon Sr. spoke to me in April 1977 in Allentown, Pennsylvania, that I was going to become the WWWF World Heavyweight Champion. Some people will undoubtedly think me naïve, or simple-minded for having come so close to something so important career-wise without even realizing it … and consequently, without having had any opportunity to influence the outcome. But that is the way I always lived my life in the wrestling business—and I think that turned out to be much more of a positive for me than anything else.

  In any event, that brings the story of my life to the end of the beginning, as the saying goes, and to the place where, at the age of twenty-eight, I made my first trip to New York and prepared to meet my destiny.

  I was in the Sportatorium office in Tampa, getting my next set of bookings from Jim Barnett, when Barnett told me that Vince McMahon had called and asked for some dates that I could come up there. We went into Barnett’s office and he called Vince Sr. at his home over in Palm Beach. Barnett actually reached Vince Sr. on the phone and I talked with him right then and there. Vince Sr. introduced himself, and he said that he’d like me to come up and have some TV matches for him. He told me to look at some dates and figure out what would work and that he would work it out with Jim.

  That was that.

  It was a very short, polite conversation—maybe a minute in total.

  But as it would turn out, at least as it related to my career in the wrestling business, it was the most important minute of my life.

  12

  The Six Words That Changed My Life (WWWF, 1977)

  “You are where you are, and what you are, because of your established habits.”

  —Napoleon Hill, “Use Cosmic Habitforce”

  On the appointed day, I flew commercial from Atlanta to Philadelphia for my first TV taping with the WWWF. Vince Sr. paid for the ticket. Once I got to the Philadelphia airport, I rented a car and began to hunt around Center City Philadelphia for the Philadelphia Arena. This was 1977, long before anyone had ever heard of GPS, or cell phones or the Internet—so I had to stop in at a couple of gas stations, and got lost in some of the seedier parts of South and West Philadelphia, but I eventually found my way there.

  I got to the arena at about 6:30 p.m. or so that first night, met the people who were putting up the ring, and they pointed me to the dressing rooms. As soon as I walked in, I saw an older man in a three-piece suit with silvering hair sitting at a table and I knew immediately that it was Vince McMahon Sr.

  Vince Sr. got up from the table enthusiastically, and with a big toothy grin, came over and shook my hand. It was definitely the warmest reception I had ever received from a wrestling promoter, and I remember wondering at the time if it meant something. Vince Sr. and I talked for a while, and he explained to me how their TV tapings worked, and what I should expect once the people were let into the building.

  Basically, back in those early days at the Philadelphia Arena, the boys got there at around eleven in the morning with Vince McMahon Jr. to start taping three weeks of house show interviews. They typically spent the whole day laying those down, because each card would require three different sets of interviews (one for each week of TV) for at least two and sometimes three of the feature matches. Nothing was scripted, so it often took a few takes to get the interviews right and to make them sound different enough so the fans wouldn’t catch on that they were all recorded on the same day. Add in the hijinx and the ribbing and the guys standing just off camera goofing around and trying to make Vince Jr. or each other laugh while they were recording, and you had a recipe for a pretty long day.

  That night, I met most of the wrestlers on the WWWF roster, all the managers, and a bunch of the office guys. Captain Lou Albano, Arnold Skaaland, Freddie Blassie, and Ernie Roth (the Grand Wizard of Wrestling) were all sitting there talking with Vince Sr. when I walked in. I also met Domienic DeNucci, Mikel Scicluna, Johnny Rodz, and Gorilla Monsoon. A bunch of them were playing cards. Scicluna was smoking a long, curled pipe and really had the look of a Maltese Nobleman. It was a strange new world—as I had never set eyes on any of these guys before in any of the other territories where I had previously wrestled.

  I knew no one, and I definitely felt like an outsider.

  I went over and found a corner, put my bag down, and started changing into my wrestling gear to get ready to have a match. The Captain (Lou Albano) was the first guy to come over and engage me.

  “Where you from, kid?”

  I spoke to him in my normal voice, with my eyes down, looking at the floor.

  “I’m from Princeton, Minnesota, sir,” I said quietly. “But we’re living down in Georgia right now.”

  “Speak up, mumbles! You sound like you gotta mouthful of mashed potatoes. You need to enunciate. You got that?! E-nun-ci-ate! E-nun-ci-ate! Bwa-ha-ha-ha!”

  The Captain was pretty well lubricated with alcohol by that time of the day, and he was yelling and laughing and carrying on with his big belly hanging out of his shirt, which was all the way unbuttoned. He was loud and I certainly wasn’t used to that kind of brashness. I hadn’t met anyone like him before that, and it caught me off guard. There were people in that dressing room, like Albano and DeNucci and Scicluna and Chief (Jay Strongbow) who had all been in the territory for a long time and knew each other well. I was an outsider—but I think everyone sensed, even on that first day, that I was there for a reason. I don’t know whether Vince Sr. had discussed it with anyone before I got there, or told some of the people that I was coming in, or what—but there was definitely a kind of stand-offish curiosity among the boys about who I was and what I was about.

  There was a definite clique in that dressing room, comprised of Bruno, DeNucci, Rodz, Garea, Chief, and Scicluna. They were a strong and tight-knit group. Fortunately for me, Vince McMahon Sr. went out of his way to make me feel welcomed and at home.

  At the time, the Capitol Wrestling Group ran the WWWF, and that group was comprised of Vince Sr., Phil Zacko, Arnold Skaaland, and Gorilla Monsoon. I think Angelo Savoldi also had a small piece of the action also. He helped on the administrative side and it seemed like he was always around. Vince Sr. had the book, and was very definitely the man in charge. As I would learn later, that group used to gather in t
heir little New York City office across from the Garden on the Monday afternoon before the Garden show and brainstorm about booking ideas—who to bring in, what had been hot on the house show circuit, and what feuds or angles might be started to kick-start some new box office interest. Sometimes, the same group would gather at the TV tapings as well—and you’d see them sitting at a table talking, smoking cigars, and playing gin rummy.

  There were locker rooms in the Philadelphia Arena, but the building was a dump and its owners were charging Vince Sr. a lot of money for rent. It wasn’t long after I came in for the first tapings that the WWWF moved its television tapings out of the Philadelphia Arena and up the road a bit to the little arena at the Allentown Fairgrounds, and the next day at the Hamburg Fieldhouse. In addition to saving money and getting us out of that decrepit building, I think ownership also wanted the fans from inner-city Philadelphia to come out to the larger and more lucrative Spectrum cards instead.

  The Allentown arena was just a large, open agricultural hall with no dressing rooms or showers. One corner was cordoned off with a big blue curtain, and all of the wrestlers, both babyfaces and heels, were just sitting around in folding chairs behind that blue curtain or hanging around outside in the parking lot. Both buildings were very small steel and aluminum structures that actually reverberated with fan noise, and the people there were always very animated, so they worked out well for TV.

  We would tape three one-hour shows sequentially, one after the next, with many of the guys wrestling two or three times each night against enhancement talent who would make them look good. There would also be one “dark match” main event at the end of the night, not broadcast on television, which was used to draw the crowd.

  Because each of those arenas held only about 750 people, it was basically the same people who were there all the time. There were two different TV shows, Championship Wrestling, which was generally regarded as the “A” show (meaning that if a market got only one show, it was usually this one) and All-Star Wrestling, which was the “B” show (and was often broadcast on another channel serving the same market). Joe McHugh was the ring announcer for Championship Wrestling and Gary Capetta was the ring announcer for All-Star Wrestling. Vince McMahon Jr. and Antonino Rocca were the television announcers who called the action. Rocca was later replaced by Bruno Sammartino after Rocca died. When Sammartino retired, Pat Patterson took over for Bruno.

  Those hour-long televised wrestling shows were basically just ads for WWWF wrestling. In any given hour, there might be fifteen to twenty minutes of actual wrestling, nearly all of which would be “squash” matches pitting a popular babyface hero against an enhancement guy to make him look invincible, or the new vicious heel against an enhancement guy to make the heel look like a complete madman or a killer. Of course, the purpose of those TV tapings was to get the people interested in seeing either the invincible babyfaces or the vicious heels battle each other, and of course, those matches weren’t shown on television. You’d have to pay to see those matches in your local arena.

  Each media market would get the appropriate promotional interviews I spoke of earlier, which would be spliced into each market’s copies of Championship Wrestling or All-Star Wrestling, and shown after each squash match to whet the people’s appetites to come out to the arenas and see the “real” matches.

  Although I can’t remember exactly, I’m pretty sure I wrestled Johnny Rodz first. Rodz was an excellent hand—and more than anyone else on the roster, Rodz was the guy that Vince Sr. put in the ring with new incoming talent to figure out how good they were. Vince would watch those matches pretty closely, but when the match was over, Vince Sr. would go over and talk to Rodz, and see what Rodz thought of the match—that’s how much he thought of Johnny. It is no accident that when he retired, Johnny opened a successful wrestling school. His timing and in-ring skills were just terrific.

  I also wrestled a guy named Prettyboy Larry Sharpe, another of Vince McMahon Sr.’s trusted guys whose talents and opinion he respected. Sharpe was in the waning days of his wrestling career at that time, and, at the time, often wrestled in a pretty entertaining tag team with a guy named Dynamite Jack Evans. Sharpe’s primary role in the company at the time, though, was to test out the new guys, work on their timing, and see how well they could sell his offense. To a lesser degree, Larry would also work with guys in the local house shows around his home in Paulsboro, New Jersey. When Larry hung up the boots, he, too, opened a very successful wrestling school.

  I also wrestled Pete Doherty, a true character from Dorchester, Massachusetts, who had scraggly blonde hair, mismatched gear, and was missing about every other tooth. Doherty, who was known as “The Duke of Dorchester,” looked like a longshoreman, kept himself in really good shape, had really good timing and knew how to work the crowd to get a rise out of them. Doherty kept doing this little gimmick where he would hold his hair up and show the crowd, as if to suggest that his babyface opponent had pulled his hair, which of course, he hadn’t. Doherty was especially popular up in Boston, and on the local house show circuit up in that area around Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Maine, where he was often used to jerk the curtain and warm up the crowds. He also got a push working under the hood as “The Golden Terror” around this time. Doherty was a very good hand in the ring, and a very funny guy. I liked wrestling him a lot.

  That first time up in Philadelphia, people truly didn’t know me from Adam, so my job was simply to go out there, show some of my amateur moves and my speed and quickness, and try to get over with the people. The WWWF roster at the time was more of a brawling roster, so I knew that my more refined amateur style was going to be a big change for the fans and might be an acquired taste that would take some getting used to. Each wrestler had a different way of trying to get over with the fans in a new territory. I had already had enough high-profile work, so I was very confident in my in-ring work—so it really just came down to executing my moves and playing to the crowd.

  There is no doubt in my mind that Vince Sr. could have recruited any wrestler from any territory anywhere in the world into the WWWF with the promise of making that person the next babyface world champion. He could have taken Dusty Rhodes or Steve Keirn out of the Florida territory. He could have had David Von Erich from World Class. He could have had Tommy Rich from Georgia. But Vince Sr. had a vision—a plan—for what he wanted that next great “character” to be, and he wanted that person to look and act like the “All-American Boy.” In choosing me, Vince Sr. obviously gave up an opportunity to put the belt on someone more senior, or someone with a longer track record of making money and putting people into seats in the business—but it seemed that he was completely convinced that his new character would work, and that I was the right person to play the role.

  I know, both from chatter I overheard in the dressing rooms in those early days, and from things people have told me over the years, that there were guys in the WWWF at the time who were trying to talk Vince out of giving me the belt. There were different reasons for that—some fair, and some not. I was a complete unknown in the territory, and there were a lot of people who were better known to the WWWF crowds. There were a number of guys already on the roster who had shown that they could reliably draw money and put butts in the seats—whereas no one knew whether I would be able to do that or not. Since the dawn of the territory, the WWWF crowds had grown accustomed to their champion espousing a more brawling, take-no-prisoners style. I was coming in, not only with a more amateur, scientific style, but as the perpetual underdog to boot.

  No matter what anyone else thought, though, Vince McMahon Sr. stayed true to his vision, and there is not a day that goes by in my life that I don’t think about him and the faith he took in believing in me.

  At the end of that first set of tapings, Vince Sr. also put me into the ring in a six-man tag-team match with a couple of other babyfaces, Tony Garea and Larry Zbyszko. The purpose of that was to put some extra shine on me with the fans to help them d
efine me as an upper-level babyface. Both Garea and Zbyszko were very good, so putting us together would showcase the three of us for the crowd, and for the WWWF ownership group, who could then easily compare our skills in the ring, the way we looked, and the way the crowd reacted to us.

  I knew from the little bit that Jim Barnett had told me that this was an “important tryout”—and I wasn’t about to fail it.

  At the end of the tapings, Vince McMahon Sr. had just a quick chat with me. He thanked me for coming, shook my hand again, told me that he thought my matches had gone “well,” and invited me to come back for the next taping in three weeks. And with that, I flew back to Georgia and continued to wrestle there for Jim Barnett.

  I returned to Pennsylvania in March, and it was at the end of that second set of television tapings that Vince Sr. pulled me into the bathroom and delivered the news that he had decided to put the championship on me. I don’t think it really hit me until I was sitting on the airplane flying home from that second set of tapings exactly what that meant economically to my family, what it would mean with respect to my celebrity, and most of all, what it would mean with respect to stability. We would finally be able to settle down up there and not move around from territory to territory every few months.

  Bruno on Backlund

  McMahon and Junior had made me a deal when I agreed to come back for a second run with the title. They asked me to come back for one year to give them time to find somebody, and then I could retire. They promised me that I would only have to wrestle two or three times per week. They did keep their word—but it went from one year to four years until Stan Hansen bodyslammed me on my head at the Garden and broke my neck. At that point, I told Vince that I had been more than fair with him, and that he had to get someone ready. I didn’t want to have the responsibility to be featured in all the major clubs—I wanted to pick my shots, and I wanted to leave on top.