by Bob Backlund
Stan Stasiak, who was one of the true gentlemen in the sport, was not one of those guys. Vince Sr. had chosen Stan to be the transitional champion between Pedro Morales and Bruno’s second reign. Stasiak took the title from Morales in December 1973 in Philadelphia and lost it nine days later to Bruno at the Garden. Even though his reign was short, for the remainder of his career, which would entitle him to be announced as the “former World Wrestling Federation Heavyweight Champion,” which gave Stan some extra shine and better positioning on the cards around the territory. That transitional run was a reward from Vince Sr. to Stan for his loyalty and decency.
When Vince went to Stan and asked him to put me over across the territory, Stan accepted that role with grace. We went around the horn together and wrestled a lot. Each night, the promoter would come to us and tell me that I was “going over” in fifteen minutes or so, and then we’d figure out what we were going to do for a finish. In many of the smaller buildings we were allowed to call our own finishes, so it was up to us to either agree to it ahead of time, or simply call an audible in the ring to correspond with what the people in the building on that particular night were looking for.
At the time, the promoters were pushing two finishes for me—the atomic kneedrop, and my reverse rollup and bridge, which Vince Sr. called the “Pat O’Connor finish” (because O’Connor was the first to use and popularize it). Monsoon and Zacko and a lot of the other local promoters liked that move because it was pretty dramatic and looked very realistic, so they wanted me to use that a lot. The problem is, when you put that move on, you have to be working with someone who was flexible enough to be rolled up backwards or the whole thing would fall apart and leave you both lying in a heap in the middle of the ring looking ridiculous. To apply the move properly, I had to push my opponent face-first into the ropes fast enough to maintain speed while then pulling him back, rolling over him backward, and then keeping enough momentum to roll me back over to a standing position and then into a bridge. In the wrestling business, fast was not necessarily better. Timing was everything. You had to give the people time to react to each move that you were doing so that they could register it—and the people certainly registered a reaction to that move when I had a heel wrapped up on his shoulders and then bridged out to lock him in.
I loved traveling the circuit in the WWWF. We worked a full and varied schedule—you could be in front of 22,000 people at Madison Square Garden one night, and in a high school gym in front of 800 people in a New Jersey suburb the next. That made things really different. Each building had a slightly different vibe, and each crowd had a really different personality. It was a thrill going to these different places every night. You’d get in the ring, perform, and try to really connect with the people, whether it was in front of 2,000 people, or 20,000 people.
One of the buildings I enjoyed most on the old WWWF house show circuit was the old Worcester Memorial Auditorium, in Worcester, Massachusetts. In that arena, the people were hanging right over the top of you in a balcony that went all the way around the ring, and the acoustics were really good—so when you had the people roaring, the entire building shook. Wrestling in a building like that certainly helped keep the wrestlers’ adrenaline high. If the people were into what you were doing, they were screaming and yelling, cheering or booing, and the building was rocking, which made it hard to have a bad match there.
The acoustics were also pretty good at the Zembo Mosque in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, another monthly stop on the WWWF house show tour. The reverberations were always pretty good in there as well. I had a pretty good warm-up match with Billy Graham there on a night of a raging snowstorm on January 14, 1978. The crowd that night was small because of the storm, but they were boisterous.
Jack Witschi’s, a little club in North Attleboro, Massachusetts, was probably the smallest place that we went regularly on the house show circuit. It was a little barroom that hosted a small pro wrestling card (usually four or five matches) every Friday night. The place was a real dive—the dressing rooms were falling apart, the ring was squeezed in there, and the ceiling was so low that it was impossible to climb up to the top turnbuckle and execute anything from up there without hitting the lights. If the place was sold out, there were probably 300 people in there, but they would usually be pretty well lubricated and really into it, and of course, the more the crowd was into it the more you got into it.
I didn’t wrestle at Jack Witschi’s very often, and I don’t think I ever defended the WWWF title there, but Vince had me beat the then-tag-team champions Mr. Fuji and Professor Tanaka there in consecutive main events as I began my run to the championship. When you wrestled in some of those smaller venues, it was easier to connect with the people, because you could actually make eye contact with many of them and draw them in to your battle.
Finally, and without rival anywhere in the world, there was Madison Square Garden. The Garden was the WWWF’s showcase building, and in the monthly cards held there, everything was more closely controlled. Every match at the Garden had a purpose—whether it was to warm up the crowd, showcase a new guy, pay off a favor to another promoter by giving one of their guys a match at the Garden, build a feud, or set something up for next time. There was a lot to “accomplish” on the Garden card each month, so Vince Sr. needed the matches to run to predictable lengths to ensure that they could get everything in before the curfew at 11 p.m. Running beyond the 11 p.m. curfew meant paying the Garden staff overtime, which ate into profits—obviously something they wanted to avoid at all costs. In the Garden, the match listings would be hanging on the wall inside the dressing rooms—and there, Vince Sr. would not only tell us where in the card we were and how long the match was to go, but also the finish he wanted us to use.
Out on the house show circuit, I didn’t hide after my matches or try to just rush out to my car. I signed autographs for people at the arena door, out in the parking lot, or basically wherever they found me—which was something that a lot of wrestlers, most notably Pat Patterson, later warned me not to do. The thinking at the time was that big celebrities should not be accessible, so that when you were actually seen coming into the ring in the arena, you had more of a mystique, which created a bigger burst of excitement.
“Don’t let the people get close to you,” everyone always said, “or they’ll realize that you’re really just another person like they are …”
I rejected that advice and went completely in the opposite direction. I understand the argument that someone with the persona of an Andre the Giant or a Dusty Rhodes might want to do that, because those guys were larger-than-life characters. But I was different. I wasn’t Dusty Rhodes or Andre the Giant. I came from the people. I was the underdog who represented their hopes and dreams, and I was someone for them to identify with and cheer for. So it wouldn’t have made any sense for me to be aloof and unavailable to them. At least that’s the way I saw it.
When I was champion, there were a lot of times when I stood outside the side door of Madison Square Garden late into the night and didn’t leave until everyone who wanted my autograph got it. I appreciated the fans, and I wanted them to know it. In my own mind, I wasn’t a celebrity—I never thought of myself as a star. I thought of myself as Bob Backlund, the “All-American Boy” from Princeton, Minnesota, the person I had always been.
In the WWWF territory, northern Maine was the “experimental” area where Vince Sr. liked to try things out before he brought them to New York or put them on television. If you look at old arena results from Portland and Bangor and Waterville and other little towns up that way, you will often find little gems and surprises that were a clue as to what Vince was thinking about for booking ideas. Vince could try things up there because, in those days, the news didn’t really travel from there to the territory’s big cities.
As we headed toward the title change at the Garden in February, we all recognized that, before we took the big stage, Billy and I would need a couple of “warm up” matches to get our tim
ing down, figure out what we could and couldn’t do together in the ring, and then figure out what we wanted to do at the Garden. We needed to get used to each other. We had wrestled just that one time in St. Louis right after Billy won the title, but that was already many months in the past. So it was no surprise that Vince chose December 6, 1977 in Portland, Maine, for our first title match in the territory.
I know a lot has been said by people, including by Billy himself, about whether he liked the idea of me as the champion, or whether he wanted to give the championship to me or not. Billy has suffered a lot in his older years, both physically and psychologically, and I understand it. Psychologically, at least, I went through a lot of the same things that Billy did after I lost the title and was forced to leave the WWF. Having said that, I never got the sense in any of my matches with Billy that he was holding anything back.
The Exposition Building in Portland wasn’t a big venue, but the people up there were passionate about wrestling and because of that, that place was usually a good bellwether for how fans elsewhere in the territory would react to certain booking ideas and finishes. This was a warm-up to help us figure out what kind of a match to plot out to maximize the drama for the title change. The idea we settled on was for me to try to keep away from his strength, outmaneuver him at the beginning of the match, wrestle in and out of his bearhug which he would use to try and wear me down, and have that be the focal point for most of the match. We would paint the picture that he was the “stronger” man and I was the quicker man—and to make the match about which of those attributes would prevail. In reality, although Billy had the body of a Greek god back then—I was actually both quicker and stronger than he was.
In a typical heel versus babyface house show match, the heel would “call” most of the match (direct the in-ring action and call the high spots and the finish), because he knew best how he wanted to build heat with the fans. As the babyface, I would typically just follow along, interjecting on occasion if I noticed something about what the crowd was reacting to, or if I felt like the heel was trying to take too much of the offensive side of the match. If we needed to communicate with each other during the match, we’d either discreetly whisper to each other while in a front facelock or some other hold, or speak Carny. On the occasions where I felt like I wasn’t getting enough spots, or if I thought the match was lagging or we were losing the people, I’d step in and call a few things. I generally didn’t have much trouble with that—most of the guys I wrestled had the best interests of the match in mind and didn’t try to pull anything.
Bruno mentioned to me one night in the dressing room at the Garden, just before I won the championship, that as a babyface in the WWWF, I needed to try to work to the style of my opponent and adapt more to him, rather than trying to make him adapt to me. That was because in the WWWF, the babyfaces—particularly the world champion—would be in the territory a long time, and the heels would cycle in and out—so working to the different heels’ styles would keep things fresh. Before I became the champion, I had been resistant to doing that because I wanted to try and dictate the style and pace of my matches. Once I became the champion, though, it became clear to me that Bruno’s advice was right on point.
Bruno and I didn’t talk much initially. When I came into the territory after having worked in Florida, Georgia, Amarillo, and St. Louis in the NWA, he didn’t really know me. I think Bruno was initially standoffish with me because he wanted to take a long look at me, and see how I conducted myself in and out of the ring before he would really accept me. I understood that—the man had essentially built the company over the previous twelve years and had given everything of himself to it. If I had been in the same situation, I would have done the same thing.
Bruno had the appearance of a rugged Italian brute who looked like the toughest guy on the street. I was the complete opposite of that—the guy people thought they could beat up, but then found out that they couldn’t. As it turned out, Bruno and I had a lot in common in terms of training and nutrition and commitment to the craft, and over time, Bruno warmed up to me. I hadn’t grown up watching Bruno, but as I got to know him, I developed the utmost respect for him, both for the way he conducted himself in and out of the business, and for his commitment to training and keeping his body fit the natural and honest way.
Over the years, people have occasionally asked me, “so why didn’t Vince Sr. use Bruno to put the shine on you during your run up to the title?” I’m not certain why Vince opted not to do that, but I have learned that Vince never even asked Bruno to help pass the torch to me. I suspect it had something to do with the fact that by choosing me, Vince was trying to create something totally new, and to move in a totally new direction, and using Bruno in any way to help put me over would have worked at cross-purposes to that idea.
What Vince did do, though, was accomplish the same end using Bruno’s longtime manager Arnold Skaaland. Vince ran a storyline on television where I came out and talked to Vince Jr. on TV and told him that I was going to choose a manager. During the course of the next couple of weeks, all of the WWWF’s managers—Blassie, the Wizard, Albano—made their pitch to work with me. Arnold Skaaland did too, and in the end, of course, I picked him. Being courted by all of the heel managers, of course, teased a potential heel turn for me, and when I ultimately chose Bruno’s manager and he agreed to manage me, it not only reinforced my standing as a babyface in the eyes of the fans, it linked me to Bruno even if that link wasn’t directly acknowledged. The optics were obvious. Bruno and I were the only two men that Skaaland managed—and I was the only person, other than Bruno, that Skaaland deemed “worthy” of his time. We were also the only two babyfaces in the federation, and, I think, in the United States at the time, to have a manager. It was an elegant and successful solution—and one that Skaaland, as a part-owner of the company at the time, was happy to participate in.
During my travels through the territory in the months leading up to winning the belt, there were a couple of other guys I wrestled a lot who are worth a mention here. The first guy was The Golden Terror, who was managed by Captain Lou Albano. The Golden Terror wore a yellow lycra body suit and a yellow mask, and could do some good things in the ring. For those that don’t know, the guy under the hood back then was “The Duke of Dorchester” Pete Doherty. I really enjoyed working with him. He moved well, was pretty flexible, was good at inciting the people, and his timing was very good.
Doherty was one of the first people I did the short-arm scissor with in the ring. I loved doing that particular maneuver because there were very few people in the world who were strong enough to do it because it is impossible to get any help. Your opponent catches your arm in a short-arm scissor with his legs and you roll him over and just deadlift him up onto your shoulder and place him up on the top turnbuckle. The short-arm scissor is a credibility move—both inside the business and with the fans. If you can perform that move in the ring, your opponents instantly understand that you are the real deal. When the fans see it, they understand that they are seeing a pretty unusual feat of strength, and always really appreciate it.
The other guy I want to mention is Mr. Fuji. My last singles match at the Garden before my title match with Billy was on December 19, 1977, against Mr. Fuji, who at the time was the co-holder of the world tag-team championship with Professor Tanaka. Fuji had been in the business a long time and had already had a very successful career—especially in the tag-team business—and was someone the fans at that time were not used to seeing get pinned. I was excited to get in the ring with another heel with that kind of experience.
Fuji held himself out to the fans as the “master” of karate and judo and nerve holds, and he was vicious about it, and as good as anybody at what he did. He also played off a gimmick where he always had a packet of salt hidden somewhere in his tights that he would throw in your eyes to blind you if he got the chance. So there was always the opportunity to play off the foreign object when you got in the ring with him. Fuji had h
is formula down, and was hated by the fans, so you didn’t have to do much to him to make the people respond. And you didn’t have to limit what you could do with him, because Fuji could do anything in the ring. He understood ring psychology, could take any bump, and was very committed to making the match—telling the story and making it work.
I got a clean pinfall victory over Fuji at the Garden in November 1977, using the atomic drop, to maintain my undefeated streak. As I recall, it was a good ten-or twelve-minute match, where we got in there, got a lot done, and got out. Getting in the ring with Fuji was like having a night off—nothing was mapped out in advance but everything always fell into place. We didn’t know what we were going to do until we met the people and found out what they wanted. He was a real pro—he’d hear things and call spots based on what people were hot for, and I would follow along. When I was in the ring with such a clear heel as Fuji was back then, that’s all I had to do: do a few speed moves at the beginning to establish my credibility, fall to the blows of his karate and judo, suffer in his nerve holds, and then get fired up, get the crowd behind me to support my comeback, and then, when we had them at their peak, take it home.
By the way, I should mention here that I refer to Mr. Fuji by his wrestling name, and not by his given name, Harry Fujiwara. In the business, wrestlers generally referred to each other by their wrestling names—not their real names. It was easier—and it both protected kayfabe and your family identity. So we called Sergeant Slaughter “Sarge,” not Bob Remus. I called Bill Eadie “Superstar,” and Khosrow Vaziri “Sheik.” Nobody called anybody by their real name unless, as I was, they were using their real name. I was “Bobby” to just about everybody.