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

by Bob Backlund

  It was good booking for me, because I was going toe-to-toe with this devastating new heel who had destroyed all his previous competition on television, and who, in his pre-match promos, had promised not just to beat me, but to break my leg and put me out of wrestling for good. It was good for Greg, obviously, because he was taking the young WWF champion further than any challenger had ever taken him—and appeared to be someone who had the stamina and physical toughness to go toe-to-toe with me.

  At the appointed time, just before the time limit expired, and after I had blocked the application of the hold all match long, Greg finally caught me in the figure-four leglock in the center of the ring. I was struggling to escape the hold when the referee called for the bell. The crowd was aghast—many of them thinking that, like everyone else before me, I had been forced to concede to the devastating finishing hold. The bell continued to ring, but Greg refused to release the hold—trying to make good on his promise to break my leg. Finally, Arnold Skaaland jumped into the ring and smashed Greg in the head with the championship belt, causing him to unlock our legs.

  I sold the hold to the moon, struggling to get to my feet after the hold was broken and holding onto the turnbuckles and then to Arnold as Howard Finkel announced to the exhausted Garden crowd that I had, in fact, not submitted, but that the match had gone to the one-hour time limit, and was a draw. It was a great swerve that worked perfectly. With Greg seemingly injuring my leg at the end of the match, we had left a great new foundation at for the next match to be built upon, and we were all set up for the following month.

  Around the rest of the territory, I finished up feuds in some cities with Ivan Koloff, including a couple of memorable cage matches with him, and in other cities and towns with Peter Maivia. I also wrestled in some tag-team matches with Chief Jay Strongbow and with “Polish Power” Ivan Putski against the WWF Tag-Team Champions the Valiant Brothers, managed, of course, as all heel tag-team champions were, by the “Guiding Light” Captain Lou Albano.

  Vince Sr. was again testing out booking ideas by putting me into these tag-team matches—a strategy he had used in past years either to set up feuds for Bruno Sammartino, or to establish the credibility of new challengers when Bruno was champion. Vince Sr. would put Bruno into a tag-team match with a couple of monster heels—and have one of those heels either pin Bruno in the tag-team match, giving that heel the “credibility” to beat Bruno one-on-one, and immediately propelling that heel into the “number-one contender” position out on the house show circuit. Alternatively, he would have one of the heels do something to Bruno during the tag-team match that would start an angle that would lead to a championship match between the two.

  Unlike Bruno, I didn’t love working in tag-team matches. Although I had done a fair amount of tag-team wrestling for Eddie Graham down in Florida when I worked with Steve Keirn, it wasn’t my favorite. That was especially true with a partner like Ivan Putski.

  Although the people loved Putski, and he was popular and reliable enough to main-event some of the smaller buildings in the territory, I just didn’t enjoy working with Putski. Like Mascaras, any match involving Ivan Putski could not be a tag-team match, or a match to highlight one or both of the heels. A tag-team match involving Ivan Putski always had to be about Ivan Putski. He just wouldn’t have it any other way.

  Ivan was a legitimate Polish strongman, and a very stubborn guy with intense national pride. In the ring, he wanted to be the dominant guy and wasn’t interested in sharing the spotlight with anyone else. There was no cooperation or storytelling in any match that involved him. When I tried to talk to him about that, he would kind of give me the “yah yah” as if he were listening, but then he would do what he wanted to do in the ring, and not do a lot of selling for the opposition, which did nothing to build drama. You can’t have drama without tension, and he provided no tension because he never wanted to appear vulnerable.

  Vince Sr. saw that and he killed the tag-team idea pretty quickly.

  Of course, the same scenario played out with the rest of Putski’s matches, whether he was on the undercard or being used to main-event a small building on the house show circuit. If you were a heel in a match with Putski, you were either going to end up in a war with him over him taking too much of the match, or you would end up getting chewed up because he wouldn’t sell for you.

  There was no doubt that Ivan was a reliably good draw in some of the towns though—and consequently, he was a good guy to have on a card, particularly in places where his Polish heritage was a draw. The office knew the towns where Putski drew well, and they deployed him there in main events or semi-final matches against heels that I had finished with and who were on their way out of the territory anyway—and fed those heels to Ivan.

  And Ivan inevitably chewed them up.

  Of course, the name of the game was not necessarily great wrestling, great storytelling, or unselfish sharing of the spotlight. The name of the game was putting people in seats. And in a lot of places, Ivan Putski could put people in the seats, so Ivan Putski remained an important player in the WWF both in this run, and when he returned as a slimmer version of himself in 1982.

  On March 25, 1979, I traveled up to Toronto for my first WWF title vs. AWA title world championship unification match with AWA World Champion Nick Bockwinkel. Nick was the son of Warren Bockwinkel, who was a heck of a wrestler in his own right. When I was growing up, I once saw a match between Warren and Wilbur Snyder where the biggest offensive move in the match was a forearm smash—which tells you that Warren was all about storytelling through wrestling. Nick definitely learned his craft very well from his dad.

  Frank Tunney, the promoter in Toronto, was a close friend of both Vince Sr. and Verne Gagne, and wanted to bring Bockwinkel and me together because he thought that the two of us could put on a great wrestling match. Of course, with Gagne successfully running the AWA and Vince Sr. successfully running the WWF, there was no chance of ever actually unifying the world titles by having one of us go over the other cleanly, but the fans didn’t know that—and these inter-federation unification matches were always historic and virtually guaranteed sellouts wherever they occurred. Even though the card in Toronto was totally stacked with talent that night, Frank Tunney gave Bockwinkel and me no time duration for our match. Given the historic nature of the match, his instructions to us were to simply “let the fans decide.”

  The fact that we took the main event to the thirty-nine-minute mark on a card with that much talent tells you a lot about how the crowd was responding to what we were doing, and what a great worker Nick Bockwinkel was.

  Nick had a great head for the game, a wonderful sense of ring psychology, and an uncanny ability to use his intelligence and cockiness to get under the people’s skin. He was a terrific representative for the AWA and was the key player in the success of the AWA for a long time. I didn’t know Nick very well outside the ring, and we only crossed paths a couple of times during our careers, but I had grown up watching him on television, and I had always wanted to work with him. He was a very intelligent, well-spoken, and cocky heel, and his in-ring skills were right up there with the very best in the business.

  I always wished I had gotten the chance to do a unification match with Bockwinkel at the Garden. Given the chance to do a few interviews and a couple of television tapings, I think that match could have been as hot with the people as any series I had in New York.

  The following night, Greg Valentine and I returned to the Garden for the return match after our Broadway. The rematch was billed as something of a specialty match in that it would have “no time limit”—meaning that Greg and I could wrestle all night if that is what it took to declare a winner. We would also play off of the leg “injury” that I had sustained at the end of the last match, with Greg immediately testing the stability of that leg, and me trying to keep him away from it. In the end, though, it did not make sense for this match to go to a specialty third match, because the strength of the Backlund-Valentine serie
s was in the wrestling, not the brawling.

  Consequently, I went over Greg by pinfall after about thirty minutes of excellent wrestling, putting an end to the Grand Wizard’s threat. Valentine did a wonderful job in that series with me both at the Garden and all around the territory, and quickly became one of my favorite opponents. Vince Sr. liked him too, and gave him a subsequent series with Chief Jay Strongbow where Greg “broke” Strongbow’s leg using the figure-four leglock and then, after Chief returned, battled him all over the territory in one of the most memorable feuds of the era.

  After Valentine, we had a bit of a soft spot in the schedule while Vince Sr. was readying the next big angle—so I ended up wrestling a couple of one-off matches at the Garden. The first of those matches was against an aging veteran named Dick “The Bulldog” Brower. Brower was one of the hardest guys I ever had to work with in the ring, and probably the least favorite man I ever had to wrestle for the WWF title. Brower’s nickname was the “One Man Riot Squad”—and on this trip through the territory, he was paired with Captain Louis Albano—so the idea was to portray him as a crazy and completely unpredictable wild man who was capable of doing absolutely anything inside or outside of the ring.

  The problem was that Brower was looking very tired, old, and out of shape at the time he came into the territory. He wasn’t the hardest-working guy in the ring to begin with, so many of his televised matches leading up to his title match with me at the Garden had been sloppy and unconvincing. Our title match at the Garden wasn’t drawing well, so the front office had to do a rescue job for Brower on television to manufacture some heat for him.

  First, they ran an angle where he snuck up from behind me and waffled me with a folding chair while I was standing in front of the empty ring taping a promotional interview. That was the first time that had ever been done, so that accomplished the goal of getting him over a little bit better as a totally unpredictable madman. It also served to create a little bit of personal “animosity” between the two of us.

  The second thing that the front office did was give Brower an unheard-of pinfall win over Ivan Putski on television—which served three different purposes. First, it gave Brower a marquee match on television that enabled him to better establish himself as a wild heel that was capable of beating anyone at any time. As I recall, Brower, knowing that he was on thin ice, showed up to play in that match, and displayed some of the skills and mayhem that had made him a big star in the ’60s and ’70s. He was all over the arena scattering the people, battering Putski with a chair, upending the doctor at ringside, lifting up the entire set of ring steps and breaking them apart, and chasing Putski around the ring with a broken board from those steps.

  Second, by beating Putski by pinfall on television, it gave him instant credibility, since Ivan Putski never took a pinfall anywhere—even in the larger arenas on the undercards. Pinning Putski on television was a big deal. If he could pin Ivan Putski—Brower was capable of pinning anybody. Or so the story went.

  Third, the angle forced Putski to be a team player by requiring him to put someone else who needed a push over on television, which was something Ivan did not ever want to do. He was very upset about being asked to do this—particularly for a guy like Brower, who wasn’t fond of foreigners, and wasn’t very popular with the boys. I’m sure the message from Vince Sr. to Ivan was intentional—a reminder of who was boss, and who was ultimately in control of all our characters, and all of our storylines. It was a reminder to Ivan to play nicely with others.

  Brower was not an up-and-down, tell-a-story kind of opponent, so we were clearly going to be one and done at the Garden. There was only one story to tell with him: me trying to avoid getting killed or seriously injured by the crazy man, but still needing to get close enough to him for long enough to pin him and then get out of there as quickly as possible. My match with Brower fell into the same kind of booking scenario as my matches with George “The Animal” Steele—except that Steele was much more intelligent and a much nicer guy who actually cared a lot about telling a good story in the ring.

  Brower and I played cat and mouse for a while until I got too close and Brower pounded away on me with punches and kicks and threw me out of the ring. He then used some items on the arena floor to further enrage the fans. When it looked like Brower had me in peril, I made a quick comeback, pinned him, and got the heck out of there before he injured me, either as part of the storyline, or in real life.

  The match with Brower was one of my shortest and least favorite title matches at the Garden.

  As a study in contrasts, my next opponent at the Garden was one of my favorites of all time, but at the time the card was announced, no one knew who it was going to be.

  For the June 1979 Garden card, Howard Finkel announced that the winner of a twenty-man over the top rope battle royal would win a match with me for the WWF title later that evening. It was a pretty interesting concept—because in the minds of the fans, anyone was capable of winning the battle royal and getting the title match with me. Gorilla Monsoon and Ivan Putski were both in the match, so what if one of them won it? The WWF never really had babyface title matches, so that alone was cause for significant fan intrigue.

  I didn’t like battle royals, and tried to avoid participating in them whenever possible. I got injured in the first one I ever took part in when I wrestled for Leroy McGuirk in Baton Rouge. That night, I hit the ropes the wrong way on the way out and slammed my hip hard into the apron of the ring on the way down. I felt that injury for weeks afterward. There are just too many ways to legitimately get hurt in a ring with sixteen or twenty guys in it. With everyone in there moving around, flying off the turnbuckles, coming off the ropes, or trying to execute moves, it is just too easy to get a wrist or an ankle stepped on, to inadvertently bang heads, or end up with all sorts of legitimate bumps and bruises from accidental contact with another wrestler that can dog you for days afterward.

  Fortunately, in the WWF, the champions typically didn’t have to wrestle in battle royals because the promoters understood that there was too much risk. I also enjoyed the science of crowd psychology, responding to the fans and how they reacted to each move as you progressed through a match, and brought the crowd to a peak. None of that was available in a battle royal.

  They way that battle royals were booked, you’d simply be told who the person was that was going out before you, and who was going to be throwing you out—and so all you really had to do was keep an eye on the guy going out before you, and then work something out with the guy slated to throw you out so you knew what move he was going to use to eliminate you from the match. Only the last three or four people in the battle royal needed to work out a spots to tease an outcome and figure out how they were going to get to the end.

  I know the fans liked battle royals because of the novelty of seeing sixteen or twenty wrestlers all in the ring at the same time—but if you’ve ever watched one closely, you know that there really isn’t a whole lot going on in the match. There is really just a bunch of pushing and shoving, rest holds, headlocks, and front facelocks as the guys going out later in the match bided their time and waited for the guys ahead of them to get thrown out. Next time you watch a battle royal on YouTube, notice how quickly the eliminations happen once the first few people go out. That’s because every wrestler in there wanted to get out as soon as he could to avoid getting hurt.

  Anyway—to my knowledge, this was the first-ever battle royal at the Garden to determine a world title challenger, and it was “won” by my old friend Khosrow Vaziri—best known as The Iron Sheik, but at that time, known as “The Great Hussein Arab.” Of course, this had been the intent all along. Khosrow and I had wrestled a test match somewhere up in Maine just before the Garden card, and a dark match at the television tapings, both of which had gone very well, so I was looking forward to getting in the ring with him on the larger stage.

  Given the diplomatic tensions between the US and Iran at the time, Vince Sr. was nervous about prom
oting and advertising a world title match between me and the Sheik at the Garden, or in any of the other major urban arenas, for fear of riots. I know that Khosrow found himself a little bit hamstrung, as he could not play up the politics as much as he otherwise would have, because the real-life political situation between the United States and Iran was just too hot. At the time of the match, the United States, which had supported the Shah, had just evacuated most of its people from Iran, and even though the hostage crisis would not begin for a few months, relations between our two countries were rapidly worsening. It was all over the nightly news, so I think if Sheik had played out his support of the Ayatollah (which would have been especially ironic given that he had been at one point a real-life bodyguard for the Shah’s family), and used the act he would later employ in 1983, it might have put him at serious risk. So this was the creative way that Vince Sr. opted to give Khosrow the match he deserved at the Garden without advertising it in advance and risking a riot or danger to Khosrow’s well-being.

  Given that I had just had a short, wild match with Brower the month before, the match with Khosrow was a refreshing change of pace. We had a terrific thirty-minute match that was almost entirely amateur chain wrestling. Sheik was also a suplex artist, so we highlighted many of his different versions in that match. There was very little kicking and punching—and I think the fans truly enjoyed the bout. In the end, I pinned him, and sent the decidedly partisan New York City crowd home happy and without a riot.

  Our paths would memorably cross again at the end of my reign in 1983. But this match with Khosrow was one of the best wrestling matches I had as the WWF champion, right up there with my matches with Harley, Valentine, Pat Patterson, and Don Muraco. I wish we could have had a two-or three-match series at the Garden, as there was certainly a lot that we could have done to entertain the fans. Had the political situation between our two countries been a little less “hot” at the time, our first match could certainly have been a Broadway. Khos was definitely one of those guys who was more than capable of going an hour and telling a compelling story.