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

by Bob Backlund

  Because we went from town to town and wrestled all sorts of different people in different kinds of matches on different nights, it was always important to check yourself and understand where you were in a given feud in a given town on a given night. The specialty blowoff matches, like the steel cage match, the Texas Death Match, or the lumberjack match, were a big part of the WWWF’s booking strategy, and I couldn’t just go into one of those matches and have my “usual” style of match inside the cage, because that’s not what the people were paying to see.

  If I found myself in the cage with a heel—it meant we had already wrestled once or twice in that building, or at least in the region, and that we had already done a scientific-style match, and likely a second match that had also ended indecisively. So if the people were buying a ticket to see you wrestle the same opponent for a third time, it was time for one or the other of us to finish the job. You needed to be meaner, use different tactics, and settle the feud in the minds of the people. It nearly always meant that one or the other (or both) of us would get color. And because, as I have mentioned before, Vince Sr. was very big on marketing hope, the man with the white hat almost always came out on top in the end.

  Neither Billy and I nor Vince Sr. and I had much of a pre-match conversation that night. We just went into the heel locker room, into the bathroom, as was Vince’s custom, and listened as Vince Sr. explained the finish. The plan was that, at the appointed time, when the fans were at their peak, Billy would fall off the inside wall of the cage and get his leg caught between the cage and the ring, allowing me to escape the cage and retain the title, but, again, allowing Billy to lose with some dignity.

  Billy nodded, and we dispersed. That was the extent of the conversation.

  The match went off as planned, and Billy hit his spot perfectly. When I walked out of the cage, the Garden crowd erupted in cheers, and it felt like I had secured them in my corner. After the match, I went over to Billy’s dressing room, shook his hand, and thanked him for a great series. He clapped an arm around me, playfully slapped me with his towel, and wished me the best. It was an emotional moment between us—a changing of the guard.

  After my thee-month feud with Graham at the Garden, Vince wanted me to get some decisive wins in quick succession in defense of the championship. This, he explained to me at the next television taping, would allow me to establish myself with the fans and prove to them that my pinfall victory over Graham had, in fact, not been a fluke. Once again, Vince Sr. first turned to Ken Patera.

  Vince Sr. thought very highly of Patera both as a wrestler and as a person, and because we had wrestled so many good matches before I won the title, Vince Sr. knew that Kenny could be counted on to provide a credible box-office threat to the title, solid pre-match hype on the microphone, and a great match in the ring. Patera was an American Olympic weightlifter and the first man on Earth to press 500 pounds over his head. You would think that someone like that would be clumsy and heavy-handed, but when you were in the ring with Patera, although you could tell that you were in the hands of a very strong guy, he was actually very gentle. He looked like a bodybuilder, though, and he was a fearsome heel and very over with the people.

  Most of our matches were structured similarly to the Graham matches—with me using speed and technical wrestling moves, Kenny fighting his way out of those, and then using a lot of strength moves and me selling those. We’d go back and forth like that, with the threat of his swinging full nelson submission hold that had “crippled” so many wrestlers up to that point always looming in the minds of the fans. The difference between my matches with Graham and Patera was that Patera was very skilled in the ring, and had a wide repertoire of moves. You could do just about anything you wanted to do in the ring with Ken.

  Patera was agile, and arrogant, and the people just loved to hate him. One night when we were battling outside the ring in a match at the Civic Center in Springfield, Massachusetts, an elderly lady rose from her seat at ringside, took a full backswing, and smashed Kenny over the head with her cane. He just seemed to inspire that kind of emotion in people.

  In May 1978, I faced Patera at the Garden. We teased his swinging full-nelson throughout the match until in the end, he got it on me, but before he could lock it in and swing me around into unconsciousness, I slipped out of it, got behind him, hoisted him up, and hit the atomic kneedrop for the finish. That move continued to have a lot of drama because it allowed me to lift my opponent up in the air, parade around the ring with him, and make sure that the fans all knew what was about to happen and were paying attention before I dropped him down over my knee in the middle of the ring and covered him for the pin.

  Getting a clean win over Patera in the middle of the ring at the Garden definitely helped to get me over the “fluke” problem, since Kenny was the premiere heel in the federation at the time, and someone who had given Bruno Sammartino a lot of trouble in their previous feuds over the WWWF title. I was certainly grateful to Kenny for being so willing to put me over so strongly. Fortunately, I got a chance to repay that favor by having a longer series with him when he came back to the federation in 1980.

  After Patera, the next challenger at the Garden was Spiros Arion—a big, legitimately Greek heel who was not particularly wild or colorful, but was a very solid-looking guy and a very good performer in the ring. Arion, who was managed by Freddie Blassie, was hilarious on the microphone in the promos, speaking in his ominous, heavy Greek accent and trying to convince the fans that I was a flash in the pan, and that he, Arion would, in fact, break me in half.

  A couple of years earlier, on his last tour of the territory, Arion had incurred the wrath of the fans by turning from a babyface to a heel when he attacked his partner, Chief Jay Strongbow in a tag-team match. During that attack, Arion destroyed the Chief’s ceremonial headdress (which, of course, was really just a set of feathers acquired from a costume shop), and got the better of the feud that followed, so Arion had credibility and legitimacy as a challenger to the world title.

  I’d never met Arion in any of the other territories where I had wrestled because he spent most of his time wrestling in Australia and New Zealand. Because Arion had also worked with Bruno in a previous run in the WWWF a couple of years earlier, he knew the drill about how to work a main event at the Garden. Arion was actually a very nice guy, and I got along well with him because he was all about the match rather than his own ego. Arion worked hard, knew what he was doing in the ring, and was not at all limited in what he could do in the ring like Billy had been, so there was a lot we could do to entertain the fans.

  Around this time, I also made my second trip to Florida as the WWWF champion—again at the request of Eddie Graham. This time, I flew down to Tampa and wrestled former WWWF champion Ivan Koloff at the Bayfront Center in St. Petersburg on April 29, 1978. Over the years I was champion, I worked with Ivan twice—for a run in 1978, and then for another run when he came back as a smaller and more agile heel in 1983. I always liked working with Koloff. His character (“The Russian Bear”) was very strong, and was easy for me, as the “All-American Boy,” to play off of. These matches were always about Ivan, as the Russian strongman, trying to prove that Russians were superior athletes, and me trying to defend American honor. It was a ready-made feud right out of the box, and a box office success anywhere you booked it. Ivan always worked very hard, and he too could do basically anything in the ring, so our matches were always interesting.

  There was a much stronger sense emphasis on kayfabe down in Florida, so unlike in New York, where Vince would bring us both together in the bathroom to discuss the match, down there, Eddie just came in, shook hands and said hello, and gave each of us the finish, independently, and that was that. The heels and faces were not allowed to be seen together, or to be mixing with each other before a match, so it was up to us to figure it out in the ring.

  Because Vince Sr. and Eddie Graham had such a strong personal relationship, they traded talent a lot. Eddie sent Dusty up to New
York regularly to have matches at the Garden and once in a while, he’d even spend a week in the territory and wrestle in some of the other major arenas. Likewise, I made a number of trips down to Florida to defend the WWWF title around the Florida territory.

  During those first couple of months elsewhere in the territory, I faced several different heels that were fed to me in one-and-done matches to establish my credibility as the champion. “Crazy Luke” Graham was one of those guys—although I only faced him in a few of the smaller buildings in the secondary towns. Graham was a brawler, and he was getting up there in years, so we were somewhat limited in what we could do. He acted like he was insane, and that was the pitch of those matches—finding a way to beat the unpredictable “crazy guy.” Crazy Luke was a good guy to help me introduce myself as champion to the crowds in some of the secondary towns, though, because we could have a quick, fast-paced, high-intensity match that impressed the people and left them happy.

  George “The Animal” Steele was another one of those guys, and I also faced him quite early in my reign as champion in 1978. Steele had an entertaining gimmick back then—which had evolved quite a bit over the years that Bruno was champion. A lot of people don’t know this, but initially, Steele played a hipster character that spoke on the microphone, called people “daddy-o,” and knew how to wrestle. By the time I got to the WWWF, though, the character had evolved into “The Animal”—a hairy guy with a green tongue who ate the turnbuckles, rubbed the stuffing in people’s faces, used a foreign object, and just stomped and punched and kicked people—then put them into the flying hammerlock to try and “break” their arms.

  In real life, Steele was a high school teacher and very successful football and wrestling coach from suburban Detroit, and a heck of a nice guy. Because WWWF television did not reach Detroit, nobody out there really knew what he was up to on the weekends and in the summer months when he would come in to the WWWF to do television and a quick ten-week tour of the territory. George was actually a very smart man with a great mind for the business, but he absolutely loved playing the role of this “missing link” type creature.

  Steele and I had a few matches in the summer of 1978, but we had our biggest series in 1981—when I actually wrestled him for a couple of months in a row in a lot of the bigger towns. The foreign object that he was always hiding in his wrestling pants was a bottle opener wrapped in medical tape. Before the match, he’d use green food coloring or a lozenge that would turn his tongue green and then he’d come out and wave his arms around and make these guttural noises and throw his jacket and chase the referee out of the ring, and eat the turnbuckle, and the fans were really and truly afraid of him. Heck, if I let myself believe that his gimmick was real, I would have been scared of him too.

  Steele was also very big in Japan, and he loved to scare the heck out of the Japanese fans, who took their wrestling very seriously. One time when we were in Japan together, Steele went in to get his hair cut at a salon. The Japanese women, who didn’t like to show a lot of emotion, were giggling and wondering how they were supposed to give him a haircut when he had no hair on his head. Then, all of a sudden, Steele took off his shirt, pointed at his back, and said “no ladies, back here!”

  Slowing the Pace Down

  The first time I met Bobby we were over in Japan. This was well before he became the champion, and he gave me a picture of himself, which was one of his early, early pictures that he wanted me to give to Mr. McMahon because he wanted to come to the WWWF. The picture really did not look like he was physical enough to do the kind of things that we were doing at the time, so I never showed the picture to Mr. McMahon because I just didn’t think it would work.

  I taught school and coached, so I only wrestled in the summertime. The rest of the year I was back in Michigan. Well wouldn’t you know, the following summer when I got to the TVs for the first time, Bobby comes in, and Mr. McMahon introduces me to him and tells me that this guy is going to be the next champion! Well Mr. McMahon wanted to get some heat on Bobby and make him look good. Bobby was wearing a denim suit that his wife had made by hand that they both loved, and Mr. McMahon said, “Jim, Bobby is going to be out there in the ring wearing that suit doing an interview and I want you to tear it off of him!” Well I ran out there and ripped that suit off of him, and it gave him a good start. They didn’t show that tape right away, they saved it and aired it later while I was still away teaching, but when I came back that summer, our first run in 1978 was over that incident.

  In his first year as the champion, Bobby was a very excitable guy in the ring; maybe even a bit overexcited, but he was very good. He was hard to hold down because he was a very good amateur and he was trained to get right up, but in the pros early on, his timing was almost too quick. Sometimes you need to slow down and let the people digest what you just did—and Bobby had to learn to slow the pace down from what he was accustomed to doing in the amateurs.

  —George “The Animal” Steele

  On May 15, 1978, I made my first trip north of the border to Toronto and faced “Superstar” Billy Graham at the Maple Leaf Gardens. Frank Tunney, the promoter up there, was also very close to Vince Sr., so there were never any worries about issues with finishes or payoffs. I wrestled in Toronto a fair number of times as the WWWF champion. When we wrestled in Toronto, we used to stay at a hotel right across the street from the arena, so it was a pretty easy travel day—fly in, clear customs, workout in the city, and then go over to the arena. Frank Tunney was another one of the highly respected and trusted promoters in the NWA, like Sam Muchnick, who had the standing to put together “dream cards.” If you look over some of the results from cards in Toronto over the years, you will see appearances by all three federations’ (NWA, AWA, WWWF) world champions, and a number of unification matches. Only the most respected and trusted promoters had the kind of influence to arrange those inter-promotional matches. I always loved wrestling in Toronto because Frank Tunney was one of those guys, and you knew when you wrestled on a card for him, that you’d be surrounded by some of the best talent in the business.

  I took my first tour of Japan as the WWWF champion at the very end of May and beginning of June 1978. By this point, I had been over there a couple of times and knew the routine and the odd bookings, which were a nice break from the norm. In Japan, because WWWF television programming was not generally shown on television, Japanese promoters were not concerned with who was a heel and who was a babyface back in America, or what angles might be going on between guys in a territory. Because of that, Japanese results often didn’t make sense when viewed against what was going on in the United States.

  If a wrestler hadn’t spent a lot of time over in Japan, he wasn’t “established,” so a heel could play face, and a face could play heel, and American heels and faces could end up as tag-team partners over there against a couple of Japanese guys. The second-to-last night of that tour was the first time I recall teaming with Andre in the little town of Gifu. I remember feeling like a little baby standing next to him in the ring, and as Andre’s tag-team partner, I didn’t have to think too much about what I would do. The formula when you were Andre’s tag-team partner was always the same—get in a few moves at the beginning, take the heat from your opponents for a while, tease an inability to tag Andre in for a while longer until you had the crowd at its peak, then tag Andre in, and let him clean house and take it home.

  Everything about Andre was larger than life. To give you a sense of his size, you could pass a silver dollar through the inside of his ring. In his prime, there was nobody in the world that was going to stop Andre from doing something in the ring if he didn’t want to be stopped, and when you’re that big, it didn’t make a whole lot of booking sense to have him doing crazy moves in the ring. If you think about it, there is no need for you to throw a dropkick or use aerial moves if you can just use your immense strength and size to bully and overpower your opponents. That said, when Andre was lighter and still relatively pain free as he was back
then, he could throw suplexes and get up and down quite a bit.

  You knew that Andre liked you and trusted you if he let you bodyslam him. Although a bodyslam was a pretty generic move for most of us, for Andre, who legitimately weighed well over 400 pounds, taking a bodyslam was a significant and legitimately painful bump. Dropping him anything other than perfectly could have seriously injured him and ended his very lucrative career. As such, over the years, there weren’t too many guys let into that club. Hogan did it to him on television in 1980 at the start of their feud, which had pretty good shock factor, since most people had not seen Andre slammed before. Andre graciously allowed that to happen to help get Hogan over with the people as a credible threat to Andre’s undefeated streak, and to help sell their feud that summer. He did it again at Shea Stadium and a few other times around the circuit—but if Andre didn’t want you to slam him, you weren’t going to get him up there without his cooperation. Harley and Ken Patera and Don Leo Jonathan, El Canek down in Mexico, and Otto Wanz over in Germany were among the handful of guys who had been allowed the privilege of bodyslamming Andre.

  I liked Andre very much—and he was always very good to me. I liked to drink beer with him, and after the matches, on nights when I was too far away to drive home, there were many times that he and I would end up in a bar drinking together. He’d want to keep me up all night—and I always joked with Andre that I would stay up all night drinking with him if he would come out and train with me in the morning. Somehow, that conversation always ended with him clapping one of his huge hands across my shoulders, laughing his deep laugh, and then saying, “Okay, Bobby,” and letting me go to bed! I was in a bar with Andre one night where he drank 112 bottles of beer and remained coherent enough to line all of the empties up on the windowsills of the bar.