by Bob Backlund
Around this time, there were also a couple of memorable mishaps out on the house show circuit. The first one occurred in Poughkeepsie, New York. Several of the boys were late getting to the building because they were coming from a venue some distance away and had become snarled in traffic. There were enough people involved that we really couldn’t even start the card, so I went out into the ring, and invited a few of the kids from the crowd into the ring, lined them up, and put on a little wrestling clinic right there in the ring in front of the fans. I had the kids wrestle each other, and I had them wrestle me, and I explained the moves and escapes to the crowd on the microphone, and the people got into it and we burned an hour that way until the rest of the boys could get to the building. The people never even knew that the wrestlers were late.
You do what you have to do to let the show go on.
Another night, we were scheduled to wrestle in a high school in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and there was some sort of miscommunication between the office and the ring crew, so the ring never showed up. So there we were in the middle of this high school gym with 1,000 or 1,500 people in the building and no ring.
What do you do with that?
Well, the name on the marquee is wrestling, right?
Fortunately, the high school wrestling coach was around that night, and gave us access to some wrestling mats, so we just laid the mats out on the gym floor as they would have been in an amateur meet, and we had the pro matches right there on the gym floor on the amateur mats. I remember I was scheduled to defend the WWF title that night against Khosrow, so he and I put on a mat wrestling clinic. It was fortunate that I was scheduled to wrestle Khosrow and not someone like Brower, who would have been nearly impossible to engage in a mat wrestling match like that. We obviously couldn’t do any real high spots, but the show went on, and we found a way to entertain the people!
Many people have asked me over the years why during the early days of my title reign, I didn’t appear very often in Boston. First, the promoter for the Boston Garden was Abe Ford—and Ford was a Bruno guy. Boston was also a town with a very strong blue-collar Italian heritage, and that was Bruno’s sweet spot in terms of his drawing power. Given that, I don’t think that Ford was very happy about Vince selecting me—a collegiate-looking Midwesterner—to be the next champion, and I don’t think Ford was convinced that I could draw in Boston.
Ford had done business with Bruno for a long time, and had gotten comfortable with having Bruno at the top of the card, and for Abe at least, as long as Bruno was still around, he wanted Bruno headlining Boston. That also meant that Bruno was asking for main-event money, and Ford probably wouldn’t have wanted (or needed) to pay both of our matches main-event money. That is why if you look at a lot of the earlier Boston cards, I was used sparingly—and Bruno was often inserted into the main-event matches with the heels that I was wrestling against elsewhere in the territory.
The other reason is that there were several cities other than Boston that wanted Saturday night bookings for their big buildings, including Philadelphia (Spectrum), Baltimore (Civic Center), Landover (Capitol Centre), Uniondale (Nassau County Coliseum), and Springfield (Civic Center). So Vince was willing to allow Ford to use Bruno at the top of his cards in Boston because it freed me up to be used in whatever other Saturday-night card was being booked opposite Boston, or to book me in Japan or Toronto or other NWA territories during that week.
I spent the rest of the first half of 1979 traveling the larger buildings of the WWF territory, primarily finishing up different series with Valentine, Ladd, and Brower depending on what the local promoters were doing. All this was to prepare for the feud that would consume the rest of 1979—the WWF’s first-ever title versus title tilt between me and the soon-to-be North American Champion (and then Intercontinental Heavyweight Champion) Pat Patterson.
A new young babyface named Ted DiBiase had come into the WWF territory at the beginning of 1979. Ted had played football at West Texas State University, but had sustained an injury his senior year that effectively ended his football career. He had grown up in wrestling was trained by his adoptive father, the legendary Iron Mike DiBiase, and by Terry and Dory Funk and Dick Murdoch. DiBiase had a lot of the same training that I had, and he had become a great young babyface. After leaving Amarillo, Ted spent several years in the Mid-South territory wrestling for Bill Watts, and also briefly held the Missouri State Championship for Sam Muchnick before getting the call from Vince Sr.
When Ted came into the territory in 1979, he was brought in as the “North American Heavyweight Champion”—a title that Vince Sr. created to give DiBiase some immediate credibility, and to create some additional interest in the WWF undercards by giving the boys a secondary belt to fight over. DiBiase defended the belt in the territory for several months until he faced a new brash-talking, cocky platinum blonde heel named Pat Patterson on television in June 1979. Patterson, who was managed by the Grand Wizard, knocked DiBiase out cold with a pair of brass knuckles he had hidden in his trunks and pinned DiBiase to win the belt in front of a shocked crowd in Allentown. In a post-match interview, Patterson and the Wizard went on television and promised the world that I would be next.
On July 2, 1979, the Garden saw its first-ever match between two reigning singles champions, as I faced the challenge of the new North American Champion Patterson. Pat was truly as good as it could get in the ring—he was very smooth, very gentle, and exceptional at developing a story in the ring. By the time he arrived in the WWF, Pat had over twenty years of experience in professional wrestling, mostly in the San Francisco area, where he had wrestled for promoter Roy Shire and formed one of the most famous heel tag teams in wrestling history with Ray “The Crippler” Stevens, and also in the AWA for Verne Gagne.
Pat could get the crowd riled up as quickly and as well as anyone I ever wrestled. He just had a knack for knowing exactly what to do at exactly the right time to infuriate the people, and his gimmick of hiding a pair of brass knuckles in his tights had gotten over like crazy with the WWF crowds. For our first match at the Garden, Vince Sr. brought us together and told us that we’d be coming back the following month—because Pat had become a white-hot heel after waffling DiBiase with the brass knuckles on television, and the fans had come out in force to see the first title-versus-title showdown at the Garden. So Vince Sr. asked for me to get color in this match in to give Pat the victory with a blood stoppage.
Stay Down, Bob!
Vince Sr. called me. I had been working for Verne Gagne in Minneapolis teaming with Ray Stevens when Mike LeBell, the promoter in Los Angeles, called me and told me that Vince Sr. really wanted me in New York, but he didn’t want to create any heat with Verne. So I waited about a month and then I called Vince and asked him to give me a date—and that’s how I ended up in New York.
When I first met Vince Sr., I told him how much I appreciated the opportunity, and that I hoped I would make him happy and he said, “Pat, all I want you to do is help Bob Backlund.” Bob had been a terrific amateur wrestler and Vince wanted to make him a star—but Bob hadn’t necessarily had the right guys to work with yet. He worked with some of these guys that were big monsters—but they couldn’t always move like you’d want them to, so sometimes, these matches were not as exciting as they might have been. A lot of those guys looked really good—so that the fans would say, “Oh, my God, Bob Backlund is never going to be able to beat this guy,” and then he’d go into the ring and beat them, but up to that point, I don’t think he had really had the chance to work at the Garden with an old pro who could really move.
So Vince put me with the Wizard, told me I was going to work with Backlund, and started to build me up toward a match with Backlund at the Garden. So I had to think of something to get heat, you know, and I came up with the idea of brass knuckles. It started when I became the North American Champion by knocking out Ted DiBiase on television with a pair of brass knuckles that I pulled out of my trunks. Once I did that, now I had a belt, and it was
the first time that Bob Backlund would be wrestling another champion at the Garden. On television, I was destroying all of my opponents, so they were building it up that Bob Backlund was going to have to wrestle another champion. And the people hated me, and the brass knuckles were now part of my heat, so that was the story. I wanted it to be in the minds of the fans that when I got in the ring with Bob Backlund, that was something for the fans to be worried about—so that every time I’d go to my tights, the fans would go crazy because they thought I was going for something.
In the early days, you know, Bob was still a little green, and still had some of that amateur in him, so when you’d start beating the shit out of him, he didn’t sell as long or as much as he could have. He’d want to pop right up and start making a comeback—but you can’t make a comeback without heat, you know? So I’d say to him, “Stay down, Bob!” I used to yell at him in the ring and say, “Don’t move! Stay down!” but after every match we’d have, he’d come into the locker room and hug me and say, “Thank you, Pat. That was good, wasn’t it?” And I would say, “Yeah, that was good!”
—Pat Patterson
Pat and I came back in the Garden on July 30, 1979. Pat’s experience had made him very creative in putting together matches and coming up with angles and finishes. I didn’t know it at the time, but he was the one who came up with the idea for the next finish at the Garden. Pat had more than enough ability to work for heat, but the brass knuckles gimmick had gotten over so well with the people, that they just let him run with it. That second match at the Garden was unquestionably one of the best of my career. Pat and I built that match so masterfully and worked it for almost thirty minutes that night that when the finish came, it was one of the most memorable endings Madison Square Garden had ever seen.
The Double Kayo
Vince Sr. would not allow the heel managers to stay at ringside at the Garden. As soon as the bell rang, the manager had to be escorted back to the dressing rooms. Well that night, I begged him to leave the Wizard at ringside, and to just trust me, and that it would all work out beautifully. Well to his credit, the old man agreed—and at the right moment at the end of the match, when we had the crowd just right, the Wizard stood up and the referee turned around and was distracted just long enough for me to go into my tights and boom!—I hit Bob with the brass knuckles and down he went. Well when Bob went down like that, Skaaland jumped up on the apron, and I took a swing at him and missed and he hit me in the head with the championship belt. Pow! and now I’m down. And now Backlund and I are both laying there … and the referee starts to count. One … two … and Bob did not move one finger. He was laying there dead, just like I told him to be. Six … seven … and the building was shaking, I swear it was so loud in there I thought the roof was going to come off the place. Eight … nine … and I was almost to a sitting position, and then I fell back down. Ten. And nobody won. It was magnificent. My God, the Garden, that building was going insane. I’m telling you—that’s the fun you can have when you really get the people involved. And boy, did we have them that night.
I remember when we came backstage the old man hugged me and he just looked at me and said, “Ho-ly shit!” And the Garden had gotten so loud that everyone else was watching the match in the back, so that when we came through the curtain, they were all congratulating us on what a great match it was. Well when that happened, you knew you had done something—and we did. I’ll never forget that. I’d love to see that match again!
—Pat Patterson
By the time our third match rolled around on August 27, 1979, Patterson was now the new “Intercontinental Heavyweight Champion.” The office didn’t think that the name “North American Champion” had quite the pizzazz that they were looking for, so they went on television on August 22, 1979, with a storyline that Patterson had just returned from a trip to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where he had won a tournament and become the South American Heavyweight Champion, and the WWF had now unified the North American and South American Heavyweight Championships into a new “Intercontinental” Heavyweight Championship. Of course, all of this was just part of the storyline—but it added some additional interest in Pat’s continuing title run at the Garden. As the story went, he was on an incredible roll. He had beaten DiBiase for the North American title, “won” the tournament in Rio to become the Intercontinental Heavyweight Champion, and now, once again, was coming after my WWF World Heavyweight Championship.
When Vince Sr. brought Patterson and me together in the Garden bathroom before the match, it was the first time since I won the title that anything Vince Sr. said in one of those pre-match meetings actually surprised me. We were going to have a third consecutive match without a decisive victor. Pat was going to hit me with the knuckles again, and this time, I was going to fall out of the ring and get counted out—which would set up a no-holds barred encounter in a steel cage the following month. In that match, there would be no referee and no rules, and Patterson could legally use the brass knuckles if he wanted to, and there would have to be a winner.
A New Backlund
Vince was the promoter. Yes, he had Monsoon and Phil Zacko back then, but Vince would ultimately make the decisions. When you are the promoter, you have a feeling for it, and you can do whatever you want. It’s your choice of what you want to do. I never thought that I would have four matches in a row with Backlund at the Garden. But it was working. Just imagine that you are Vince Sr., and you are the guy responsible to create the bookings and the kind of fan interest that will put 20,000 asses in the seats at the Garden every month. He had very good relationships with the promoters all over the country, and had access to a lot of talent. But you know there were territories, and then there were territories. Minneapolis was a territory, San Francisco was a territory, Texas was a territory, but the Big Apple—that was where the money was. The northeast was THE territory. It was a big responsibility, and you had to draw money big time, and he did.
I think the thing that really helped me was that right from the first match that I had with Backlund—we saw a whole new Bob Backlund. Our matches were completely different from what had come before. I was lucky. Before me, he had wrestled all of these big guys who really couldn’t move all that well. Now I’m in the main event with Bob at the Garden, and I said to him, we’re going to have some real fucking action! And we took bumps and had high spots all over the place. So the old man looks at the first match and says, yeah, that was pretty good, and I have to draw a house next month, so I think I’ll work a return match with Bob and Pat. And then the return match with the double knockout works and almost takes the building down, and the old man says to himself, “Hey, I’d like to have one more match with no winner, can we do that?” And we said, “hell yeah, we can do that!”
Look, the truth is, if you are wrestling with the champion and you build up a story and the story that you built doesn’t sell tickets—forget it, you’re not going to be in the main event next month no matter what they might have had planned. You’re going to be one and done. That happened sometimes. But this match was selling tickets, and so the old man wanted to stretch it one more time. This time, the referee was going to get knocked down, and I was going to hit Backlund with the brass knuckles, and he was going to fall out of the ring and get counted out.
—Pat Patterson
When we took to the ring that night at the Garden, the fans heard Patterson introduced as the new Intercontinental Champion. And that definitely gave the match some added importance in the minds of the fans. And so there we were, for a third month in a row, slugging it out, and for a third month in a row, Patterson pulled out the brass knuckles and connected with them, and left me laying outside the ring to get counted out. This outcome set the blowoff up perfectly—as Pat would go on television for most of the next month telling the fans that inside the cage, he could knock me out with the brass knuckles and it would be legal and then all he’d have to do is walk out the door, and he’d be crowned the new world champion.
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nbsp; Pat Patterson was the only man in the nearly six years that I held the WWF World Championship to get four consecutive world title match main events with me at Madison Square Garden. That speaks volumes about the kind of business we were doing. And that cage match on September 24, 1979, at the Garden, featuring the federation’s two champions going at it for a fourth straight month with no holds barred and no referee brought in so many fans they had to turn people away in droves. There wouldn’t have been a building in New York large enough to hold all of the people who wanted to see that match.
Pat and I battled in the cage at Madison Square Garden for nearly twenty minutes in what was certainly one of the two or three best cage matches I had in my career. We both got color, teased finishes all over the place, and “battled to the death.” The end came when we were both perched at the top of the cage pounding away on each other when I connected with a wild haymaker knocking Pat down, where he got caught up in the corner. I fell to the canvas and crawled toward the door to get position on Patterson, and then kicked him off of me repeatedly until I fell out the door backwards onto the arena floor.
I’m No Frank Sinatra
You should have seen Bob in that cage match. He was so afraid he was going to be double-crossed. He was trained to keep an eye on that, because you never know. It only takes one move, one accident, one thing that your opponent does that he’s not supposed to do, and he’s the champion. Some guys might have the balls to do that, you know, and then try and explain it after the fact by saying I’m sorry, I slipped or I fell down, and I’m sorry, but then you have a new champ.