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

by Bob Backlund

  That was a truly amazing sight to behold.

  Sometimes I would team with Andre in a tag-team match because a particular promoter decided it would be interesting to try. At other times, they would put us together to set up something for the next town on the tour, or for the next time over there. My match with Andre against Inoki and Sakaguchi on that tour was a perfect example of that. That tag-team match was used as a platform to build some intensity between Inoki and me for my title match the next night, on the last night of the tour, when Antonio beat me by countout at the Budokan Hall in Tokyo, the largest sumo wrestling arena in Tokyo, which held about 22,000 people for wrestling.

  Wrestling Inoki was always easy—it was almost like working with someone in America. He didn’t speak much English back then, but he was so fluid and smooth in the ring that we didn’t really need to talk. We could anticipate each other’s moves, and just flow off of each other. Antonio was New Japan’s featured performer, and we knew that we’d be working together pretty much every time I was over there, so we needed to leave the fans with something that would bring them back next time. Having me get counted out of the ring was the choice for this first tour, which would allow him to win, but me to keep the title, and leave the resolution for next time.

  Back stateside, I rode the circuit for the next couple of months finishing the feud with Billy in the secondary and tertiary towns in the territory. Vince Sr.’s booking in 1978 ensured that everybody in the territory had a chance to see me with the championship, and allowed me to start building face-to-face relationships with the fans in all the regular tour towns. Billy continued to be a true gentleman in all of these matches. Even though he knew that his time in the territory was growing short, and even though he was still getting great crowd reaction everywhere he went—he never let that disappointment detract from his performance in the ring.

  At the end of July, I went back over to Japan to Budokan Hall for the rematch with Inoki. That was an unusual trip in that I went over just for this one match with Inoki, and the trip was memorable as one of the biggest travel nightmares of my reign as champion. I arrived at the international airport in Tokyo and had to clear customs, and then, even though Inoki had sent a driver for me, it took two and a half hours to fight through the incredible traffic in downtown Tokyo to get to the venue.

  The match was scheduled for the best two out of three falls, and the plan this time was for us to go Broadway, with each of us taking a fall on the other during the sixty minutes, to show the fans that either of us could beat the other. The Japanese fans were not used to seeing either one of us lose cleanly—so the thought was that seeing that would be a big deal and raise interest for future bouts.

  We decided to give Antonio the first fall, to perpetuate the illusion for as long as possible during the match that he might actually win the WWWF championship. As I recall, Inoki used something he called the “octopus hold,” which was one of the new finishers he was trying out, to win the first fall. It was basically a version of a standing crucifix where he was up on my back twisting my head one way and my arm another using both his arms and his legs. It was a visually dramatic move, and the fans were stunned when I sold it for him and submitted to give him the first fall. It was one of the very few times in my career that I lost a fall by submission.

  We battled hard in the second fall, until eventually, I was able to foil a suplex attempt and get behind Antonio, hoist him up, and apply the atomic kneedrop, which allowed me to pin him cleanly in the middle of the ring to win the second fall and tie up the match. The fans were equally stunned to see Inoki pinned cleanly in the middle of the Budokan Hall ring—something that almost never happened. The time limit then expired before either of us could win the third and deciding fall, so the match was declared a draw. At the end of the bout, the fans were already calling for another rematch. We had done our jobs well.

  At the time, the NWA was doing a lot of things with Baba and All-Japan, including scheduling the NWA World Champion for full tours of Japan. As a result, Inoki—as the head of the New Japan promotion was trying to compete with Baba—wanted to do more with me.

  I showered in the locker room at Budokan Hall, and then it took us another two hours fighting traffic to get back to the Tokyo airport, where I then flew straight to Los Angeles to wrestle Roddy Piper in the Olympic Theater. That was the match that Roddy describes in the Foreword to this book.

  Mike LeBelle was the promoter in Los Angeles at the time, and he thought the world of Roddy and wanted to showcase him in a long match with a world champion. Mike, however, knew that I had just flown in from Japan after doing a Broadway with Inoki, so he was very reluctant to ask me for that kind of a favor. I hadn’t wrestled Roddy before that day, but I had heard a lot of good things about him, and remembering the lessons from those who had taught me—I knew that, as the champion, I had a responsibility to come into the territory and give Roddy as much as I could. We decided that I would go over with a quick pin late—but that in the meantime, we would showcase Roddy.

  Roddy was a young but brash tweener at the time. He had torn up a picture of me on television and talked some trash to get people interested in the match, but we were still able to have a pretty nice babyface match. We did the double bridge, we did the short-arm scissor, and we did a lot of amateur stuff and fast-paced mat wrestling and switching, and Roddy, who was still very young back then, stayed right with me for the whole match.

  I liked wrestling in the Olympic Theater, because the ring was in the middle and the building was round, so the people were in close and you could feel the intensity of their emotion and enthusiasm. The crowd that night loved what we were doing, so we went virtually to a Broadway—59 minutes—and had the people on the edges of their seats in a pretty good frenzy before I finally caught Roddy in an inside cradle and got the pin just before the time limit was set to expire.

  It was a great match—and I knew right then that if Roddy could put on a little more size, he would go places in this business because the man could flat out work. His mic skills, of course, for which he is perhaps best known, were already among the very best in the business.

  Back in the dressing room after the match, both Roddy and Mike LeBelle thanked me profusely for the near-Broadway. The honor, though, was mine. I then hopped on a plane and crossed the country to Pittsburgh where I would finally catch some sleep before facing “Superstar” Billy Graham at the Civic Arena in the main event the next night.

  No rest for the weary—but to be honest, I would have given anything for that life to go on forever. I was loving life as the champion, traveling around the world, and wrestling the very best and most talented guys that each territory had to offer. It was a totally exhilarating experience.

  In the wrestling business, wintertime was the boom time, and although it may seem counterintuitive, summer tended to be our slower time. In the northeast, particularly in the big cities where we drew some of our biggest houses, people took their vacations in July and August—to the shore, to the lakes or the mountains or the state parks—to escape the heat of the large urban centers. As they did, they fell out of touch with the wrestling storylines, and also missed the house shows. Overall, the WWWF houses were typically down in the summertime, and so we tended to run smaller and cheaper shows to compensate for that. Vince would also slow down the storylines, playing off the feuds that were already established and taking those feuds to the secondary and tertiary towns, while the Garden frequently got a couple of one-off challengers who weren’t part of a big program. He would then ramp up the new angles in the fall, when people were reliably back in front of their television sets on the weekends.

  If you look at my schedule in the high summer of 1978, you will see examples of this booking strategy. I faced Graham in cage-match blowoffs in the bigger cities, concluding an angle that had started in December 1977, and otherwise found myself facing Arion, or in one-offs with guys like Steele or Luke Graham.

  On August 28, 1978, though, we
started ramping up for the fall season, and I ended up in the ring at the Garden for the first time with the returning former WWWF champion Ivan Koloff. Koloff, of course, was the man who only a few years earlier had shocked the world by pinning the previously unbeatable Bruno Sammartino, putting an end to his seven-year title reign and stripping him of the world title in this very same ring. This was the quintessential Vince McMahon Sr. match—with the upstart young All-American Boy champion facing the challenge of the chain-swinging, Russian flag-bearing former WWWF champion. Koloff, who was nicknamed “The Russian Bear,” had become white-hot with the fans for berating everything American, and “crippling” a number of young American wrestlers. He was, once again, a seemingly insurmountable monster heel. He also had Captain Lou Albano as his manager, which of course, only helped to increase the frenzied vitriol that the fans showered on them both.

  Behind the scenes, Ivan was actually a terrific guy, and someone that I liked very much. I had wrestled him once earlier in the year down in Florida for Eddie Graham, and we had worked out a few nice high spots during that match that we repeated in New York. Ivan was a great worker and had an impeccable sense of timing. At that time, he was around 285 pounds, and we did the short-arm scissor that night at the Garden which saw me dead-lift him to my shoulder out of the short-arm scissor, walk him over to the corner, set him on the top rope, and slap him in the face.

  The fans were immediately into the match, as you might imagine given the ready accessibility of the Cold War–inspired hatred between America and Russia at the time. Vince Sr. called for Ivan to ram me into the ring post and for me to draw color and then, despite me battling on valiantly, to have the doctor at ringside stop the match due to my cuts and award the decision to Koloff. That, of course, would set us up perfectly for the rematch in September just as the fall season was heating up.

  Blood stoppages were another common booking tool in the WWWF, particularly in the major arenas where I was scheduled to have multi-month runs with a particular heel. Whenever the promoters wanted an inconclusive end to a match to draw the next house, and the heel was generating more heat than usual, they used the “blood stoppage” to amp up fan interest in the rematch. There was an old saying in the business that “red means green”—meaning that any match that had color at the end would draw an even better house the next time. The promoters didn’t pay more for color—they just asked for it when discussing the finish with you in the dressing room before the match—and when they asked for blood, you obliged.

  Getting color was just another part of protecting the business—people needed to see blood every once in a while to keep them believing that what they were watching was real. You couldn’t bang someone’s head against the iron ring post or smash someone over the head with a chair without it causing someone to bleed—or it would begin to seem suspicious. The people wanted to believe that what we were doing to each other was real—it was just like watching a movie or a television show—people wanted to suspend reality and be drawn into the story. We had to make it possible for them to believe—and “getting color” every so often as part of the storyline was part of that process.

  I got bloody noses very easily, and used to get them all the time in amateur wrestling—so oftentimes I would just give myself a bloody nose and let that bleed all over everything and get the job done without actually having to gig myself with a blade. Other times, I would cut the very tip off a razorblade and bury the “gig” sharp side up in a piece of athletic tape on the inside of my wrist or finger. Some guys even kept the gig in their mouths, although I could never understand how anyone did that without swallowing it or gashing the inside of their mouths during a high spot.

  Anyway—at the appointed time, you would take the bump (such as, for example, a shot into the iron ring post outside the ring) and crumple to the ground where you would then gig yourself with the hidden piece of blade by dragging it quickly across your forehead. That would open a cut, and the running sweat would take care of the rest, giving you the “crimson mask” effect of streams of blood pouring down your face that the promoters were looking for.

  I didn’t like blading, and I tried to avoid it as much as possible—but you knew that it would help you make money by drawing more fan interest in the return match, so you just did it when they asked you to. It did make you ask yourself, though, if you were willing to slice open your own face for the business, just how far were you were willing to go to draw money?

  Once I drew color, the doctor in attendance at ringside, who was a real doctor, but who was also typically in on the booked finish, would jump up, examine my cuts, and determine that I was losing too much blood to safely continue the match. He would then call for the bell and waive off the match, and award the decision, but not the championship, to my opponent.

  Over the years I worked for Vince Sr., I was grateful that he didn’t ask me to gig myself too many times.

  A “full” Garden title series with an able challenger was a three-match program that would begin in New York at the very beginning of the challenger’s stay in the territory—often after the new heel had only one or two television appearances. That was why pairing the heels with Blassie, The Grand Wizard, or Albano was so important—it was a placeholder to alert the fans that this “new guy” was a heel and was someone they were supposed to hate, even if the new heel’s character hadn’t yet been fully developed on television. The challenger would get a convincing victory over me in the first encounter, either by blood stoppage or countout to show the fans that he had a legitimate chance to win the belt.

  We would then come back in the second match and increase the intensity of the action, often resulting in a disqualification, a double disqualification, or some kind of double-countout or pull-apart finish. That would set up the third and final encounter, which was usually a gimmick match like a steel cage match, a Texas Death Match, or a lumberjack match, where I would go over.

  Arnold Skaaland always encouraged me to take more of offense and sell less in the blowoff matches in order to appear more powerful, but I always wanted my heels to leave our blowoff match at the Garden or anywhere else with as much heat as they could keep—because that’s what was good for business. For part of the time that I was champion, Pedro Morales was the Intercontinental Heavyweight champion, and he would often be booked to face the heel that I just beat on the next Garden card. Given that, I wanted to make sure that I left those heels with enough credibility in the minds of the fans to still pose a legitimate threat to Pedro, or to whomever else they might find themselves in the ring with.

  While doing that might have not made me look like an unbeatable champion, I had been taught that it was always good to have a strong heel or two that I hadn’t totally chewed up on the undercard. If it looked like any one of those heels could beat me on any given night, it was good for them and would continue to be good for the business as a whole. That became my way of doing business, and, I think, why a lot of people in the business ultimately came to respect me.

  On September 25, 1978, Koloff and I came back to the Garden for our second match. The booked finish that time was a swerve by Vince Sr. intended to continue to build my credibility with the fans. Remember that Koloff had shocked the world by pinning the seemingly unbeatable Bruno Sammartino at the Garden to win the WWWF title, and he hadn’t been pinned much at the Garden since then, so when I hit him with the atomic kneedrop and pinned him cleanly in the middle of the ring in the second match of our series, the fans were amazed. It was a really big deal to pin Ivan Koloff at the Garden, and I think that finish really shocked the fans and earned me a lot of credibility in their minds.

  After that match, I showered and, as was my custom, headed out the side door of the Garden to walk to my car. That night, however, I was mobbed by a large group of fans and ended up standing there, outside the side door of the Garden, talking with fans and signing autographs until the sun came up the next morning! I think the second Koloff match at the Garden was the tipping
point that put me over in the hearts and minds of the fans. I had now truly been accepted as their champion—and they now believed in me, and were firmly behind me.

  In October 1978 up in Maine, we tested one of the angles that Vince Sr. was thinking about running the following year—namely pairing me with the Paramount Samoan High Chief Peter Maivia and making us tag-team partners. On October 18, 1978, on the proving grounds in Bangor, where many of the WWF’s angles were tested, Peter and I took on (and lost to) the WWF tag-team champions the Yukon Lumberjacks. The fans, however, had reacted favorably to our team, and that gave Vince the information he needed to plan the federation’s primary angle for the first half of 1979.

  On October 23, 1978, though, I faced “The Big Cat” Ernie Ladd at the Garden. Ernie was managed by the Grand Wizard and had returned to the federation as a huge, “arrogant,” and well-known football personality. Standing six feet nine inches and weighing 350 pounds, Ernie had, at that point, been one of the biggest men to ever play in the NFL—where he was an All-Pro defensive tackle who played for the San Diego Chargers, the Houston Oilers, and the Kansas City Chiefs. This was another marquee matchup for the fans at the Garden, as it pitted me—their former NCAA collegiate wrestling champion All-American Boy—against a very legitimate NFL football star. This would ultimately take the form of another “big guy” match, although Ernie Ladd could move around as well as any big man I ever got into the ring with. Ernie was a great talent with a silver tongue and a fearsome appearance.

  When Ernie and Vince and I met for the pre-match discussion in the bathroom in the heel locker room at the Garden, though, Vince was riffling his quarters as he always did, looked Ernie in the eye, and explained that I would be going over Ernie by pinfall with the atomic drop. I remember Ladd towering over both Vince and me looking disappointed, but he just smiled at both of us and said, “Okay, boss.” I think Ernie was hoping for more than just one match with me—and frankly, I think we could have done more with me trying to figure out how to break down a man of Ernie’s immense size and losing the first match by countout—but Vince Sr. wanted to keep me strong.