by Bob Backlund
I didn’t attend the first set of TV tapings on November 8 and 9 because our daughter Carrie was about to be born. I talked to Vince several times on November 8 from Minnesota and he insisted that I just stay put there and be with Corki at the hospital. That was the kind of man Vince Sr. was. He was a serious businessman who was not to be trifled with, but he also understood the importance of family and family harmony in his wrestlers’ lives. I’m happy I made that decision, because Carrie was born later that day, and I was there to see it. To anyone who is a dad—you know that there is no greater moment in this world than being present for the birth of your child.
Eleven days after Carrie was born, we packed up our things into a U-Haul and moved our family to Hamden, Connecticut, outside of New Haven, to a rental unit at the Howard Johnson’s on the Merritt Parkway. On the phone, Vince Sr. had told me that my time appearing only on TV was at an end, and that the final push leading up to my win over “Superstar” Billy Graham for the belt was about to start in earnest out on the house show circuit.
13
Carrie Me Away
“… make your prayers an expression of gratitude and thanksgiving for the blessings you already have.”
—Napoleon Hill, “Use Applied Faith”
As my life was changing inside the business, it was also changing a lot outside the ring. On November 8, 1977, our daughter, and our only child, Carrie, was born. It was a miracle and—as you might expect—one of the greatest moments of my life. There is nothing quite like bringing a child into the world to remind you of your responsibilities!
Corki and I are very private people, and from the very beginning, I have always insisted that our family stay outside the business. I had been given some very good advice by Dick Murdoch during my time in Amarillo that if I wanted to work in the wrestling business and keep my family together, the best way to do that would be to keep the two totally separate. The fans and the groupies who tend to hang around the wrestlers were destabilizing factors for a marriage. So from the very beginning, that is what we did.
Fortunately for me, Corki is a very independent woman, with her own life as a teacher and a gymnastics coach, and while I was on the road she did those things and was a great mom to Carrie. Shortly after Carrie was born and Corki was out of the hospital, we moved out of the Howard Johnson’s and east into a little apartment in West Haven, Connecticut, on Greta Street right off of I-95, but near the West Haven beaches on the Long Island Sound where Corki and Carrie spent their days while I wasn’t around.
Vince Sr. had told me that I would be keeping the championship long enough to justify buying a house in the territory, so Corki spent a lot of time scoping out towns in and around central Connecticut to try and figure out where we might want to live. I was flying out of Kennedy and LaGuardia and Newark airports a lot for any trip longer than driving distance, and for anyone who familiar with driving in the New York area, you know that traffic is an issue—so doing anything to make those commutes easier was definitely a priority.
Corki spent much of her time in those early days traveling up and down the highways of central Connecticut looking at houses with a realtor. She looked at over two hundred homes between New Haven and Greenwich, until eventually, because there was so much traffic and congestion in that area, we gave up on that idea and started looking north of New Haven into the bedroom communities around Hartford.
Eventually, Corki found a house that we loved in South Windsor, which would have allowed me pretty easy access to Bradley International Airport, which had either direct or connecting flights to any of the major national and international cities where I wrestled. That spot also allowed me pretty easy access to the northern part of the WWWF territory, because it was far enough north in Connecticut to avoid most of the New York–area traffic when trying to get to Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine. The house also had an indoor pool, which would have been great for Corki and Carrie because it would have allowed them to swim year round. We signed papers and put a down payment on it, but as we approached the closing date, the seller not only changed his mind and refused to sell the house to us, he also refused to return our deposit.
To a couple of young and naïve Midwesterners, that was a pretty unkind introduction to doing business in the New York area. We were forced to retain a lawyer, went to court, and although we got our deposit back, we never did get the house.
The story, however, gets a lot stranger from there.
The guy selling the house in South Windsor was a public relations and advertising executive named Richard Shenkman, who later became infamous in the area for kidnapping his then-estranged wife from a Hartford parking garage, forcing her to drive him to the house we tried to buy from him, handcuffing her to him, and threatening to kill her. She eventually escaped, but Shenkman ended up blowing up the house and burning it to the ground. He was ultimately found guilty of first-degree kidnapping, first-degree arson, third-degree assault, possession of an unregistered firearm, and attempted assault on a police officer and sentenced to seventy years in prison.
Maybe it was a good thing that we didn’t actually get the house.
After that experience, Corki kept looking until we finally found a three-bedroom house, with a good-size yard and a backyard stream on Slater Road in Glastonbury, a bedroom community just south of Hartford that featured great schools, good athletic programs, a good parks and rec program, and easy access to Bradley Airport.
We knew we had finally found our home.
When we first moved in, the neighbors obviously didn’t know us, and they had no idea who I was or what I did. They were definitely a little suspicious that I was always arriving home in the middle of the night, and they certainly couldn’t figure out why Carrie and I were always up playing at 2 in the morning, sliding in the snow, or throwing a ball outside. The truth is, on many days, given my travel and workout schedules, that was the only time I could be home and playing with her, and I didn’t want her to miss out on time with her dad—nor did I want to miss out on my time with her.
With the exception of the nights I was wrestling in southern New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and DC, or up in northern Maine or Vermont, I almost always drove back home to Glastonbury after the matches rather than staying in a motel out on the road. There were several reasons for that. First, over time, it saved us a substantial amount of money to not have to pay for all of those motel rooms. More importantly, though, I wanted to get home to be with Corki and Carrie. Some of the boys in the business teased me for being such a “straight arrow”—but I made no apology for wanting to be a good husband and a good father. It was hard to be away from home as much as I already was—so whenever it was possible to reach home after the matches, I made the drive.
Heading home after the matches also made it easy to resist the many temptations that go along with life on the road as a celebrity. Suffice it to say that the roads of the wrestling territories were littered with the shattered remains of broken marriages, wrestlers’ kids who became addicted to drugs and alcohol or made other bad choices, and wrestlers themselves who kept looking for happiness in places other than at home with their families.
I had no use for any of that. I had found the woman I loved, and I married her, and I was in the process of raising my daughter with her, so the choice to drive home whenever I could, rather than to seek fleeting companionship out on the road, was an easy one for me.
Corki had started teaching gymnastics in the parks and rec program in 1979—when Carrie was eighteen months old. The little gymnasts in her program knew her as “Corki” and not as “Mrs. Backlund” (which we did on purpose to keep people off the trail of who she was). She also taught school in nearby Bolton, and over there, she was known as Mrs. Backlund, which did give rise to at least one funny story.
One day, as I was about to go overseas, I had to go into Corki’s classroom during the school day to get something from her. The next day, a young student in her class who
had been giving her some problems all year approached Corki all excited and said to her, “Do you know who that was that was in here yesterday?” For the life of her, my wife couldn’t figure out what the boy was talking about, so she thought and thought and eventually gave up. The boy, all wide-eyed said to her, “Bob Backlund—the world wrestling champion! Bob Backlund was here yesterday! Can you believe that? In our school!”
My wife smiled at him and paused for a moment before looking down and saying to him, “Billy, what’s my name?”
He thought for a minute and said, “Mrs. Backlund”—and suddenly his eyes bugged out as he put two and two together.
She never had another problem with him after that.
I’m happy to say that in all my years in the wrestling business, I was able to keep my family sheltered from all of the fuss and commotion of the life on the road. I don’t think Corki saw me wrestle more than a handful of times in my entire career, and I don’t think she regrets that one bit.
Corki and I are still married—and just celebrated our fortieth wedding anniversary. It hasn’t always been easy, of course. We have suffered from the same troubles, and disagreements, and ups and downs that any couple that has tried to coexist for forty years together will have. That said, we made ourselves a promise a long time ago that we would stick it out, for better or for worse and through thick and through thin—and so here we are. Our secret to success has been to give each other the space to be ourselves, to have our own lives and our own friends and our own dreams, but to support each other and give each other the foundation of a solid family to operate from.
The wrestling business provided us with a good life—and because we were smart with our money—didn’t spend what we didn’t have, invested wisely, and saved our pennies—unlike a great many of my colleagues, we are in a good place today. But wrestling was only one part of our lives—the business part. The rest of our life was the part we lived privately, within the four walls of our home, with our daughter.
Forty years later, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
A Daughter’s Perspective
When they first met, my mom was the lifeguard at the pool and my dad was the football player. He thought his legs were too skinny so he would always wrap a towel around himself until he got to the steps of the pool because he didn’t want her to see his chicken legs. She always thought that was funny—that this big, hunky muscular guy was ashamed of his body. Well they hit it off, and were pretty much inseparable after that. My mom helped with a lot of Dad’s schoolwork in college because he was always busy with football and wrestling. He was a star athlete—so that was his focus. She was more of the student. Theirs really was the kind of All-American love affair that you see in the movies.
After Dad won the NCAAs in college and then decided to become a professional wrestler, Mom followed him, but she was careful to make her own dreams along the way too. She is a very strong and independent woman. I know that she hated all of the travel in the early days, but she developed her little method of dealing with my dad’s lifestyle—she had twenty crates that everything they owned would fit in, and she would just pack them and then unpack them again and again as they moved from territory to territory.
Mom and Dad made a promise to each other a long time ago to respect each other’s worlds, but to keep those worlds separate. And that’s how it has always been with the two of them for as long as I can remember. It’s a different kind of relationship, borne in some part out of necessity, but it works. They do things on their own without one getting mad at the other. They are not joined at the hip, and do not need to get permission from each other to do things. They each do what they want to do. That is how it has always been. A lot of people put a front up for people—they don’t—they just do their own things. It never bothered me—that is just how it always was.
Now that I am an adult looking back, I am happy it was that way, because divorce terrifies me, and I feel like if my mom had been forced to try and coexist in the world my dad worked in, they never would have made it. Professional wrestling’s circus atmosphere and lifestyle is about as opposite of what my mom is as there can be. I think that is why she always took such pains to avoid being drawn into that world in any way.
Dad kept his life very separate from us—I knew he was gone all the time, and I didn’t really understand what he was doing when I was young, I just thought that every other dad was gone too. It wasn’t until I got a little older that I fully understood what was going on. My dad really sheltered me and my mom from his world because of the way that world was. Keeping us away from the business was very, very important to him. I’m very happy that he did that because, in retrospect, I would not have wanted to be in the spotlight as the “daughter of the world wrestling champion,” or anything like that. I wanted my privacy and to be able to grow up a normal kid and live my own life. Despite my dad’s celebrity, he was still able to give that to us, and both Mom and I were very grateful for it. I still never willingly tell people know who my dad is—because I want people to like me for me not because of who my dad is.
My mom loves to read, loves to knit, she kayaks all the time, and she loves to be outside. She will be outside in the yard doing yard work or tending to the garden until it is too dark to see anything. She is always active. She leaves for work at 6:30 in the morning, goes to school, then goes to gymnastics, then does her swim workout for ninety minutes every night, and then she gets home at 9:30 or 10:00 at night. Other than for Thanksgiving, I don’t know that we’ve ever sat down as a family and eaten a meal together, because Dad was gone nearly every night. Thanksgiving, though, was the time we were always together. We would get a condo and go skiing in Vermont. That was a tradition for us—and something we have done for twenty-five years. I think that is what I missed most about our family—that we never had more of that kind of together time.
My mom is set in her ways. I love her to death and we have a great relationship but we don’t have the kind of relationship that a lot of other moms and daughters have. We would talk every Thursday night and Sunday night. We both hate talking on the phone, so to this day, we can go months without talking on the phone. She doesn’t have a cell phone—so it’s hard to catch up to her sometimes.
Mom was my gymnastics coach forever, which really brought us close because my dad wasn’t there. She is still coaching gymnastics for girls all the way from infants to high school. She has always been the balance beam coach—and all the kids just love her. She of course, doesn’t need to be a gymnastics coach—I am long gone, and she doesn’t have a child on the team, but I think they see her as a mother figure. They all just crowd around her. She is very supportive of them and positive and encouraging—where a lot of the parents are critical of their kids these days. In some ways, I think some of those kids are closer to her than I am.
Mom and I also always traveled together. We have been to France and Spain and Aruba. We would always travel somewhere for Christmas. Dad, on the other hand, traveled every day for most of his life, so on the rare occasions when he was home, he wanted to be home, and if he could drive somewhere, he preferred to drive. On my twenty-fifth birthday, for example, he drove all the way from Connecticut to the Florida Keys to take me out to dinner, stayed overnight with me, I cooked him breakfast, and then he drove all the way back home. He was never able to be around for my birthday parties when I was a kid, so he told me that now that he had the chance, he wanted to be with me. That meant a lot to me. People might read this and think that driving to Florida from Connecticut is crazy but Dad would rather drive anywhere and be in control of what’s going on than have to sit on a plane next to someone who would talk his ear off for the entire flight.
People are always curious about my dad’s level of physical fitness, given that he is now in his mid-sixties, but looks a lot younger, and is still incredibly fit. For as far back as I can remember, Dad always juiced fruits and vegetables and was constantly drinking the juice he made—and he always worke
d out at least twice a day in our home gym. He would work out first thing in the morning and then he would drink juice. He was always very healthy and very in shape and interested in physical fitness. I remember when he had Lyme Disease a few years ago, my mom didn’t want me to see him because he had lost so much weight. His clothes just hung on him. We live in the middle of the woods—and from what I can remember, my dad doesn’t really go to doctor’s and he thought he was just getting older—after all the years of being in the ring, his joints were creaky and it was just getting more painful. Eventually, though, things got bad enough that he had to go to the doctor and they told him he had Lyme Disease. It really affected his knee and his leg and he walked with a limp for a while and it really debilitated him. But he fought his way back from that, and really focused on his diet and exercise, and seems to have made almost a full recovery.
To be honest, I don’t have a lot of childhood memories of my father because he was always gone. I know that back in the very early years of my childhood, when dad had just come to the WWWF and Vince McMahon Jr. was the television announcer, we all lived in the same area, and I used to play with Stephanie and Shane McMahon a lot. I met them again at the Hall of Fame induction last year and it was fun—we took a picture together and had a lot of laughs recalling those early days. Our lives have certainly changed a lot since then!
When Dad was home, it was always at two or three o’clock in the morning, but whenever he would get home after being away on the road, he would always wake me up and we would turn on the lights in the yard and go outside and play no matter what time it was. I would always try to impress him with what I was doing on the trampoline. I know that he felt really conflicted about being away from home so much—which is why he would drive through the night so often just to be able to wake up home in our house instead of in a motel somewhere out on the road.