by Bob Backlund
The final angle that was used to build up to my title match with Billy at the Garden was my appearance as a “second” in the corner of challenger Mil Mascaras during his title match with Billy Graham in January 1978. The plan was to use that match to set up my match with Billy the following month. The only problem was that Mil Mascaras was really only in it for himself—as opposed to being in it for the good of the match or the angle. Your job as a wrestler is to help get the match over, not to help get yourself over. It is supposed to be about telling a good story and entertaining the people. If everyone in the business worked the way Mascaras worked, the business wouldn’t work. It is very hard to work effectively with someone when what they’re thinking most about is what is good for them as opposed to what’s good for the match.
In Mexico, where Mascaras came from, the business was different, and people wrestled in a much different style. The promoters were less involved than they were in the United States and wrestlers there needed to be more of an in-ring advocate for their characters to protect their images and reputations. Mascaras was a legendary character down there, but I think he had trouble adapting to the way things were in the WWWF.
I remember defending the WWWF championship against Antonio Inoki in a bullfighting arena in Mexico City once. It was a disorganized affair backstage—there was much less promoter control over what the wrestlers did in the ring. I worked in a couple of smaller buildings down there on that trip too, and one night was more chaotic than the next. It seemed as if no one was in charge. I had gone down there by myself on that trip, I don’t even think I had Arnold with me, and I certainly didn’t go with a bodyguard like Ric Flair did. When Flair was the NWA Champion they always sent Harley with him when he went to Mexico just to make sure nothing ever happened to him, because Flair would likely not have been able to protect himself in the ring if the match became a shoot. It was a very roguish place where you really had to be on your guard and protect yourself in the ring at all times.
Anyway, Mascaras got his double-shot at Graham in December 1977 and January 1978, and although he was happy to take the main-event payday from Vince Sr., Mascaras wouldn’t do the honors for Graham, even though Graham was the WWWF World Champion. Because of this, Vince Sr. had to concoct a screwjob finish that would allow Graham to win and keep the belt but not actually pin Mascaras or make him submit. There is only one way to do that—and that is to have the babyface challenger lose the match either by count out or disqualification. So that is what Vince Sr. chose to do—but he also decided to build in a little extra push for me while he was at it!
Vince sat down with me and explained how the angle was going to work. In a departure from the usual routine at the Garden, the Grand Wizard would be allowed to remain at ringside with Graham for the match against Mascaras. That would prompt Mascaras to run back to the dressing room and bring me back to second him at ringside. During the match, there would be a couple of false finishes with Graham’s feet on the ropes, and it would be my job to interfere in the match by pushing Graham’s feet off the ropes to stop the illegal pins. Eventually, Graham would take a swing at me and pull me into the ring, thus getting Mascaras disqualified, and Billy and I would then have an all-out brawl to set up the match in February.
This little gimmick also had the side benefit of upstaging Mascaras in the ring during his title match, which I think Vince Sr. enjoyed doing since Mascaras, in a total break with protocol, had refused do the honors for Graham. The angle was designed, in part, to give Mascaras a little taste of his own medicine.
Mascaras understood that this was a way to get him in and out of the Garden without having to get pinned by Billy, which was acceptable to him. Graham-Mascaras was just another in a long line of examples of matches that seemed great on paper until you started thinking about what you were going to do at the end. When someone isn’t willing to do the honors to make the match, the whole idea fizzles. If Mascaras had been willing to do the honors for Graham, it could have been booked that Graham cheated to win, used a foreign object, or whatever—and the feud between them could have had much longer legs. But because Mascaras was such a prima donna, there was nowhere to go with it.
I trusted Vince Sr. completely to build me up to my title match in the way he wanted to do it. From the day in Philadelphia when he first told me I would be his next babyface champion, Vince Sr. had told me not to worry about the crowds—but just to stay in shape, show up on time, work as hard as I could, and that he would take care of everything else. Vince Sr. always said that if we didn’t have a good house, it was the fault of the bookers and the front office—not that of the wrestlers. I was very sure about my ability to make a match the way it was supposed to be, and felt that I had trained with enough great people and enough good experience that I could read a crowd and handle any situation—that was the part I didn’t doubt.
The dressing room culture, though, remained a different story.
When I was about to become champ, a couple of the guys (to this day, I still don’t know who, although I suspect Graham) in the locker room went to Vince Sr. and asked him to make me put up a deposit on the belt. It was not uncommon, either in the NWA or in the WWWF, for the champion to have to put up some cash as surety to give the front office leverage over him to enable them to get the belt back when they wanted it. I know the people who went to Vince to make that request thought that I didn’t have the money, and that I wouldn’t be able to put up any kind of deposit on the belt—and that my inability to put up the cash might keep the title change from happening.
At the TV tapings right before the February Garden show, Vince Sr. pulled me aside and asked me if I would be able to put up an $80,000 deposit on the belt. I told him I could, that it wasn’t a problem, and that I could write him a check right there if he wanted me to.
Vince Sr. just nodded and walked away without saying a word.
I actually did have the money, but he never brought it up again.
The truth is, Corki and I had lived a conservative lifestyle up to that point. We had both come from modest upbringings, and as such, we didn’t have a lot of things and toys that we spent money on. Instead, we had managed to put a lot of money away, because in the world of professional wrestling, you just didn’t know how long your run would last. You were never more than one bad injury away from being done in the profession—and there was no union, no insurance, and no worker’s compensation protection you if you got hurt. A lot of the guys drank their money, blew it up their noses, or popped pills to dull the physical pain or the loneliness of the road. I felt down on occasion too—don’t get me wrong—but when I got down, I just trained harder, and that always managed to pull me out of it.
My final match at the Garden before winning the belt was an eight-man elimination tag-team match on January 23, 1978, on the undercard of the second Graham-Mascaras match. In that match, I partnered with High Chief Peter Maivia, Tony Garea, and Larry Zbyszko against the current world tag-team champions Professor Tanaka and Mr. Fuji, along with former world champion Stan Stasiak and Baron Mikel Scicluna. At the time of that match, I was still undefeated, and this was to be the last, big push to put me in position for the title match with Graham.
The match was booked so I would be left in the ring as the sole remaining member of my team against both of the tag-team champions, Mr. Fuji and Professor Tanaka. I would go on to pin them both in succession with the atomic drop, and win the match for my team.
Later that night, Howard Finkel would announce that I was now the number one contender for the world championship, and that I would face “Superstar” Billy Graham in the main event at the next Garden card on February 20, 1978.
15
My Night at the Garden (February 20, 1978)
“There are two types of people who never amount to anything … those who never do anything except what they are told to do, and those who cannot even do what they are told to do. The people who get ahead do the things that should be done without being told. And the
y don’t stop there. They go the extra mile and do much more than is expected of them.”
—Andrew Carnegie to Napoleon Hill, “Create Personal Initiative”
My world had come full circle. Just a few years earlier, I had been directionless, lifting weights in a YMCA gymnasium in Fargo, North Dakota, when a chance meeting with a wrestler doing curls in that weight room set me on my career path. Now, that very same wrestler would be standing across the ring from me in the most revered arena in the world—the only remaining obstacle left between me and stardom.
There had been whispers in the dressing rooms that some of the boys were uneasy with the prospect of me taking over as the champion. They were worried that I was unproven as a draw, and might kill the territory. The fear was that an “underdog” champion was not a successful model to draw houses in the big cities of the Northeast. In the past, in those arenas, big, bruising ethnic champions had always told the stories of good versus evil—and reassured their hardworking fan bases by beating the living hell out of their heel opponents to the delight of the screaming masses.
It was a risk, for sure.
But Vince McMahon Sr. had taken that risk with me—and I wasn’t about to let him down. What the boys in the dressing rooms didn’t realize was how much heart, will, and intensity and desire to succeed I had.
Billy’s last big title defense in the territory was two days earlier Saturday night, February 18, 1978, in the Philadelphia Spectrum, where he faced former champion Bruno Sammartino in a steel cage match. Over the years, Billy has made no secret that he was not happy to be asked to drop the title when he was doing such good business around the territory—and that he was particularly unhappy to be dropping the belt to me, because he thought I was “boring,” and “just a kid.”
Billy has also said over the years that he and Bruno talked on the night of their steel cage match in Philadelphia about pulling a last-minute screwjob over on the promoters. According to that story, the plan was for Billy to throw Bruno against the door in the side of the steel cage where the door was, causing Bruno to “accidentally” fall out of the cage and win the match and giving the promoters no choice but to put the belt back on Bruno. Once that happened, it would be impossible for me to win the title at the Garden two nights later, since Bruno would have the belt.
Screwjob in the Works?
In the transition from Graham to Backlund, there was definitely some talk in the dressing room about a potential screwjob in the works at the Spectrum between Bruno and Graham right before the Garden show. The way I heard it, Graham was going to go into business for himself and get the belt to Bruno because he didn’t want to drop it to Bobby.
That story is a complete lie. Then again, nothing really surprises me that comes out of Billy’s mouth these days. I wanted out, to get off the road, and to be able to wrestle who I wanted, when I wanted, on my own schedule. I didn’t want to be beholden to any particular promoter, or to be the champion anymore—so why would I have conspired with Billy or anyone else to acquire something that I was trying to get away from? It is absolute nonsense.
—Ken Patera
For what it’s worth—I believe Bruno’s version of the story. I had no doubt that Graham wanted to keep the belt, or at the very least, wanted to keep the belt away from me. He may even have talked to people in the dressing room about pulling something. But I also know from talking to Bruno that Bruno didn’t want to hold the belt any longer, and was looking forward to coming off the road—so it wouldn’t make any sense for him to have been a conspirator in such a scheme. In the end, I chalk this up to Billy just having a rough time facing the end of his time in the spotlight—something I totally understand from having gone through it myself.
On the night in question, Graham did, in fact, beat Sammartino with the booked finish (Sammartino threw Graham into the side of the cage where he smashed into the door and fell out for the win), and then went to Toronto on Sunday night and beat Edouard Carpentier at Maple Leaf Gardens in his last title defense before coming to New York.
For my part, I would be entering the ring against Graham undefeated in the WWWF, and with as much of a tailwind as the WWWF could have provided to me, given the dearth of heel talent on the roster at the time.
“Bobby, I’ve decided to put the belt on you.”
Nearly ten months had passed since Vince McMahon Sr. had first spoken those words to me, but on this, the appointed day, those nine little words were echoing in my mind as if I was hearing them for the first time. I had goose pimples all over my body as I sat in my 1977 Buick Electra, idling in the Stamford, Connecticut, rest area on the side of Route 95 bound for New York City and reflecting on the monumental changes about to happen in my life.
The morning of February 20, 1978, had dawned clear and cold in West Haven. Unable to sleep, I got up before dawn, had a bowl of oatmeal and then took Carrie, then two months old, outside for some fresh air. We had a backpack she liked to sit in, so I put her in there, strapped her onto my back, and took her out for a little walk. It was cold, but nothing compared to the frigid weather we knew from growing up in Minnesota, where it was often 20 degrees below zero at sunrise.
Although I had been appearing on WWWF television programming for about nine months, I was still by no means instantly recognized in public. It was still possible for me to go out for a jog without being recognized, or for us to have dinner in a restaurant in town without anyone knowing who we were. As I walked through the streets of West Haven that morning, though, smiling as I passed people getting into their cars on the way to work, I took a moment to appreciate the anonymity.
All that was about to change.
When Carrie and I got back, I went for my normal training session at the Olympic Gym in North Haven. At the time, I was doing primarily calisthenics and several sets of heavy free weights, training different parts of my body each day. I had a good workout, and I was able to get through it without interruption. That too, I knew, would be different starting tomorrow. The Olympic Gym was about to become known as the place where the world heavyweight wrestling champion came for his morning workout.
I went home and met Corki for lunch. We sat at the kitchen table playing with Carrie and dreaming about the many ways in which our lives were about to change. The many years of living out of boxes in temporary housing and moving every three to six months were finally over.
Given that the outcomes of the matches in professional wrestling are predetermined, when an important “angle” is scheduled—as when you win or lose a major title, or become a “heel” by turning on a babyface, or become a babyface by turning on a heel—you can actually anticipate your future before it happens. There are a lot of surreal things about professional wrestling, but being able to sit with your wife and discuss the real-life ramifications of a wrestling match in New York City that wouldn’t happen for another ten hours was very strange.
Although Vince Sr. had not told me specifically how long I would be holding the title, he did tell me that we could plan to be in the area for “quite a while,” and that it would make sense for us to start looking for a house somewhere in Connecticut—which was roughly at the geographic middle of the territory. Corki and I were about to have real financial security for the first time in our lives. Not only would this actually allow us to stay in the same place for longer than six months for the first time since we left Minnesota five years earlier, it would also allow Corki to find a permanent job, and for us to set down roots and live like normal people.
As we contemplated these changes, we promised each other that we wouldn’t let fame change us, and that we would try our best to hang on to our solid Midwestern values and the basic way in which we were both raised. We also promised each other that we would always remember and appreciate that Vince McMahon Sr. was bestowing an incredible gift upon us, and that we would strive to always be worthy of it in the hearts and minds of the fans.
I had a lot of pent-up nervous energy and excitement that my walk and my wor
kout that morning had failed to dispel, so I kissed Corki and Carrie goodbye, got in the car, and decided to set off for New York City.
And that’s when the doubts started.
As I sat there in the car in the Stamford rest area, I began to think about Vince McMahon Sr., and his vision of an “All-American Boy” underdog champion—someone who could represent the dreams and hopes of the average American. Someone who the people sitting at home watching on television could identify with, and most of all, someone that those people would want to buy a ticket and come out to the arenas to cheer for. Vince Sr. had just seen the way the world was captivated by and rallied behind the young Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci at the 1976 summer Olympics in Montreal, and his idea was that he could catch that same lightning in a bottle using an “All-American Boy” as the model for his next champion.
I thought about where I was in the business, where I had come from, and why Vince Sr. had decided to pick me. I didn’t doubt my wrestling ability—I knew that my strong amateur background combined with the five years of training I had in the professional rings with some of the best guys in the business—would serve me well. I knew how to tell a story in the ring, read the crowds, listen to their reactions to what we were doing, and make the appropriate adjustments.
It wasn’t the technical things I was worried about.
Sitting there in the car, I was thinking about “Superstar” Billy Graham—the man who had invited me into the business, and the man I had been booked to beat at the Garden in a matter of hours. I thought about his 22-inch arms and 55-inch chest, and his rippling muscles, tie-dyed outfits, and remarkable charisma. I thought about the interviews he had given during his time as the world champion that channeled Mohammed Ali and drove the crowds wild. The way the words just seemed to roll off his tongue as he claimed to be made of “T-bone steaks and barbell plates” and described himself as “the reflection of perfection and the number one selection” or “the women’s pet and the men’s regret.”