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

by Bob Backlund

  So I told Bob before the cage match began—when I go for the door, or I go for the top, I’m going to dive for it and it’s going to be like a shoot Bob—so you better grab my fucking leg, or I’m going over. And Bob was like damn, Pat, are you crazy? And I said no that’s what I’m going to do to make the match. But I had a blast with him—because when I’d hit him, he’d go down, but he wouldn’t stay down, because while he was down I’d be jumping up over the top trying to get out and he had to pop up and chase me to keep me from going out. We were up on the ropes and I was trying to get over the top and I’d hit him and told him to go down, and he wouldn’t fucking go down, and I’d be like, “Go down.” So he went down, and as soon as he did, I went right over the fucking cage as quickly as I could and he popped up there and snatched me. Or another time, the door was open, and I was like, “Let go of my leg, let go of my leg,” and as soon as he did, I would dive out the door and he’d catch me at the very last second, oh, it was awesome. I was having such a blast—he was like one of the fans—I think he thought I was really going to go out!

  Everybody knew that Vince wanted Backlund to be a star. And every once in a while, the word would come back—you know, he’s still a little green, but that didn’t matter. It takes time to develop that. And that was part of the effort of everyone else who was there—that was the job to be done. Bob had no ego—he was wide open, listened, and I think he had some of the best matches of his career with me, without a doubt. He had some big matches, but exciting matches with good wrestling, where you really felt it … ours were hard to beat.

  Bob was always a bit of a loner—he traveled by himself and he didn’t mix with the boys that much. I think I saw him in the bar once or twice while I was there having a couple of drinks with the boys. When he did, he would come in, and buy a few rounds for the boys, and then he’d be gone. And I couldn’t believe how much this guy was training—he would sit in the hotel rooms out on the road during the week and crank the heat on and work out in his room until he was drenched with sweat. He became an animal—he just loved to train and push himself. But you know, I kept thinking to myself, “This guy is missing the boat. He should be relaxing a little bit more and mixing with the boys.” But he was doing what he liked …

  Arnold Skaaland and Backlund would have a few drinks here and there also. Skaaland told me one time that he was convinced that the kid would make it. Arnold always protected Backlund—he was Vince Sr.’s right hand man, and he always made sure that Bob was taken care of and was kept happy. If you think about it, the WWF was the only place you’d ever see a babyface have a manager. And I think Bruno and Bob were the only two babyfaces I can ever think of that had a manager. But again, it worked out for them, because Arnold kept Bob happy—and managing Bob gave Skaaland a job and a steady paycheck long after his wrestling career was over. Vince Sr. was a good man—he was liked by everybody, and he took care of a lot of people.

  In watching Bob, as I did over the years, he was really trying hard to get the people to like him. He was friendly and happy and looked like an athlete—but I asked him one time, because I had heard that when he arrived at the Garden, he’d often go through the front door. Typically, when we go into the Garden, we’d go through the back door and go up the elevator but Bob was going through the front door and would shake hands with all the fans. I think Bob enjoyed that so much, because he knew that the people really liked him, and I think that he wanted to thank them personally and wanted to be with them. But when you are going to a big match, my view is you should let them see you first when you are going to the ring. So I said to him one time, Bob I can’t believe you’re doing that. And he said to me, “Pat, they’re my fans.” I said Bob, if I’m waiting in line in Las Vegas for half an hour to go see Frank Sinatra, and then all of a sudden Frank Sinatra walks by all of us and shakes our hands in the line—well then I’ve already seen him before he ever gets onstage. And you know, you lose the mystique. But when I told him that, he just looked at me and said, “You know, Pat, I’m no Frank Sinatra.”

  —Pat Patterson

  I spent most of the rest of 1979 wrestling Patterson to capacity crowds around the horn, where we did various iterations of the double knockout finish that had so wowed the crowd at the Garden, and eventually, blowoff matches that had me going over Pat by pinfall. But there were a couple of other notable matches that I had during this time that are also worthy of mention.

  On July 15, 1979, I went back up to Toronto for Frank Tunney and faced the NWA’s United States Heavyweight Champion, “Nature Boy” Ric Flair, at the Maple Leaf Garden. This was my first time getting into the ring with Ric, with whom I would have an even more memorable night at the Omni later in my career. I enjoyed wrestling Ric. He was very skilled, worked hard in the ring, was flamboyant, and really knew how to work the people. Ric and I had a great, pretty long matchup there that night that really seemed to capture the people. Toronto was also getting to be a good town for me, as the people had seen me often enough to really be in my corner.

  Because Ric was the US Champion and I was the WWF World Champion, even though the match that night was only for my belt, there was no way that the NWA promoters would allow Flair to be pinned by the WWF’s world champion. Because of that, there was only one way to go, and that was with some kind of an inconclusive ending, like a draw, or a disqualification or a countout. Tunney opted for a countout.

  On August 25, 1979, I traveled to Cobo Hall in Detroit to defend the WWF title against the Sheik, who was the wrestler-promoter for the territory. The Sheik, of course, was, by this point, legendary for creating mayhem wherever he went. He had actually been legitimately banned in several cities because he was so convincing that he had sparked riots in the crowds. Anyway, the Sheik (Eddie Farhat) called Vince Sr. and asked me to come up there and do a match with him.

  When you wrestled the Sheik, you knew what he was going to call for—the booking plan was always the same. He was going to try to murder you, and as the babyface, you were just in there trying to survive, get a three count on him, and get out of there with your life. The Sheik’s big gimmick was “conjuring up” and then throwing a “fireball” into the face of his opponents behind the referee’s back—and so we played off that. When he tried to do it to me, I ducked it, and then we battled outside the ring to a countout ending where I snuck back into the ring to beat the referee’s count.

  These “babyface-in-peril” bookings weren’t my favorites, because they didn’t really offer me the opportunity to build fan interest during the course of the match through actual wrestling. Like my matches with George “The Animal” Steele, Abdullah the Butcher, or Bulldog Brower, these matches were just mayhem from the opening bell, with me getting beat up and hanging on, waiting for an opportunity to sneak in a quick finish and get out of there without getting “hurt.” But I know that the people loved the variety of seeing a match like this once in a while, so that’s why we sprinkled a few of them in from time to time to mix things up.

  My last real series of 1979 was against “Cowboy” Bob Duncam. To get things started, we ran a little angle on television where he had been running roughshod over the guys he was wrestling on television week after week—refusing to pin them, and toying with them and trying to “injure” them. So during one of those matches, after I ran out there and tried to “save” one of the young guys he was beating up, and he attacked me and Arnold, and we had instant heat.

  Bobby had played professional football and worked very, very hard in his matches. He was a rough-looking and very convincing heel, but he had only one speed—sixth gear—so it was practically impossible to get him to pace himself out there. When you worked a match with Duncam, he would go all out for twelve to fifteen minutes and then blow up. You’d often see Bobby in the dressing room after his matches lying flat on his back on the floor in the dressing room trying to get air.

  At the time we had our series, Bobby’s wife was very sick with cancer and she was getting treatment in Bosto
n at Massachusetts General Hospital. Bobby cared very deeply about her and no matter where he was wrestling, he would drive back after the matches to sit by her bedside. Obviously, that put a lot of stress on him, forced him to do a lot of night driving and to eat a lot of fast food, so he got pretty heavy. But what’s not to love about a man who loves his wife like that?

  Duncam worked very hard with me, and knowing his personal circumstances made me want to work extra hard with him and for him. Bobby also remembered the days back in the AWA when I was putting him over, so he was anxious to be able to have some good matches and return the favor for me.

  On November 19, 1979, we met at the Garden and, premised on what the fans had just seen on television, we had a wild brawl that ended in a double blood stoppage. I attacked Duncam right away and we just went after each other to play off of the TV angle. Bobby was at his limit at eighteen minutes. You couldn’t take him much deeper into a match than that and have things continue to look good. But Duncam would give you an absolutely awesome 100 percent work rate for every one of those eighteen minutes, so we just played off of that and gave the people at the Garden a great pull-apart brawl that had the building really rocking.

  On November 4, 1979, I went back to Toronto where I was supposed to be wrestling Pat Patterson, but Pat had gone over to Japan to drop the no-longer-existing North American title to Seiji Sakaguchi as a favor to Inoki, so Frank Tunney brought in Baron von Raschke from the AWA to sub for Patterson. Von Raschke and I had also wrestled previously when I was in the AWA, and we worked that match around his “notorious” iron claw submission hold, which was an easy gimmick to play up for the fans.

  Von Raschke was fun. He was another wrestler who was playing up the German Nazi gimmick, but in reality, von Raschke had been a great amateur wrestler at Nebraska. He got the crowd lathered up, and we battled to a double countout. The match surprised Tunney in that it drew enough heat that Tunney forgot all about Patterson and brought von Raschke back the next month in a no-disqualification match where I beat him cleanly with the atomic drop.

  18

  A Favor for Antonio (Japan, 1979)

  “Show an alert interest, tolerance and respect for others, and they will instinctively do the same for you.”

  —Napoelon Hill, “Assemble an Attractive Personality”

  In the late 1970s, Japan was a hotbed for professional wrestling, and tours there drew huge crowds and were very lucrative for the boys. It was not unusual to make more money on a ten-day or two-week tour of Japan than you could make in a month or more wrestling in one of the territories in the United States.

  Shohei “Giant” Baba was the head of All-Japan Pro Wrestling and Baba and his All-Japan promotion were closely allied with the NWA. Baba had a good relationship with the Funks in particular and All-Japan was gaining momentum at the time. Baba had already had his first run with the NWA World Heavyweight Championship—a local switch of the title during a Japanese tour that had been privately arranged between Baba and NWA World Champion Jack Brisco and brokered by the Funks without the knowledge of the NWA Board of Directors. Brisco just dropped the NWA World Title to Baba at the beginning of the tour, and Baba dropped it back to Brisco at the end of the tour before Jack returned to the United States. This, of course, served to put a lot of shine on Baba in the eyes of the Japanese fans, and drew more fans to All-Japan.

  Meanwhile, while this was going on, Antonio Inoki, the head of New Japan Pro Wrestling, had built an alliance with Vince McMahon Sr. and the World Wrestling Federation. Inoki was losing face in Japan because Baba had been a world champion, and Inoki had not.

  Vince Sr. and Inoki wanted to enlarge their relationship. They had already worked out a deal to bring WWF talent to Japan regularly, which would be great exposure for the WWF and financially advantageous for the boys. The “payback” for this deal, though, was to give Inoki and his promotion a “rub” that would help keep him on par with Baba. The first of these overtures was for Pat Patterson to go to Japan and “lose” the North American title (which Patterson was no longer defending since Vince Sr. had renamed it the Intercontinental Heavyweight Championship) to Seiji Sakaguchi—one of Inoki’s best hands.

  But there was more to come.

  Vince Sr. approached me at the Hamburg television taping on November 14, 1979, and told me I would drop the belt to Inoki on my next tour of Japan, that I would get it back at the end of the tour, and that it would be a quiet little thing he was doing to help Inoki and further the WWF’s business relationship with New Japan. I didn’t have any problem with Vince’s request–Antonio and I had already had several matches in Japan, and there wasn’t a whole lot more we could do if we didn’t do a title change to keep things interesting. Vince Sr. didn’t tell me anything about how I was going to lose the belt, or how I was going to get it back—he simply told me that it would all be worked out when I got over there—that Arnold Skaaland would be coming with me and handling the business end of things, and that I could trust the New Japan promoters to handle things properly.

  The chosen night was November 30, 1979, the first night of the tour, in Tokusimaat the City Gymnasium. The City Gym wasn’t a very big place—about the size of a small college fieldhouse. There were a few bleachers and then a lot of chairs lined up in rows on the floor. I presume the promoters chose this building because it happened to have been the first venue booked on the tour, and they wanted to give Antonio as much time and exposure with the belt as possible.

  Unlike in the United States—where the promoters would usually bring the wrestlers together to discuss the finish—over in Japan, word just got passed along to you. In this particular case, it has all been worked out between Hisashi Shinma, representing New Japan, and Arnold Skaaland, representing Vince Sr. Arnold explained to me that we were going to do a false finish where I caught Antonio in the atomic kneedrop and pinned him for what I thought was a count of three—but he would have his leg on the rope and I wouldn’t notice. I was to pop up, throw my hands in the air and let my guard down, as Antonio, who knew he had his foot on the ropes, would get up, get behind me, and deliver a vicious suplex that would catch me off guard, knock the wind out of me, and allow him to pin me for a three count. It was a very believable finish—and one that was very respectful to me, so I was enthusiastic about making it look good.

  It felt a little strange to allow myself to be pinned and to give up the WWF title, but I had lost the Western States belt, and had lost the Missouri State Championship to Jack Brisco in St. Louis, so losing a belt wasn’t a completely foreign feeling. It would be good for our business over in Japan, which, in turn, would help the WWF overall, so I was happy to do it.

  My match with Antonio that night was one of our better ones. Inoki spoke little English—but he was a great performer and was always very attuned to what was going on in the ring, so we never needed to talk about much. He was easy to work with and very loose and flexible, so I could do just about anything I wanted to do with him. We did a lot of back-and-forth and switching, and we definitely had the fans engaged in the match. I hit the atomic drop and pinned Inoki for what I “thought” was a three count. I jumped up and started celebrating—and did not notice the referee waving off the pin, or Antonio getting up. When he suddenly suplexed me hard to the mat and got the three count on me—it was completely conceivable that I would have had the wind knocked out of me, having dropped my guard.

  The crowd, of course, was totally stunned—and I worked to sell the pin as a screwjob as best I could. In the ring, I worked to give the impression something had gone wrong, pushing the refs and the other officials in the ring, and imploring Arnold to stop what was happening. In fact, after the match that night, I actually ran around the public areas of the building trying to convince people I had been robbed of the belt. I’m not a good actor, so I needed to convince myself this had actually been a screwjob, and to do what I would have done if the title had actually been stolen from me.

  Even as I left the arena to board
the bus, I was still ranting and raving about how I had been robbed because there were a lot of fans gathered there. It wouldn’t have made any sense if those fans saw me laughing with the boys or acting as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. In their eyes, I had just been jobbed out of the world heavyweight championship, so I had to appear to be very upset until there was no one left to see me. Normally, as you are leaving the ring, you continue to sell whatever happened in the ring until you are out of sight of the fans, and then you can just turn it off and resume your normal life. But that night was different, because we had something serious to sell to people. I carried on yet again once I got to the hotel where I was staying that night. I wanted everyone who came into contact with me that night to be convinced that I appeared to be upset and distraught, and to spread that word to their family and friends in Japan. I’ve even had some fun toying with people over the years at fan conventions by continuing to play up the idea that the “screwjob” over there was real just to see how far I could run with it.

  But I guess this is the time to finally put that old chestnut to rest. There was no screwjob that night in Tokusima. The switch to Inoki in Japan was very much a planned and orchestrated event to give him the same kind of “rub” that Jack Brisco had given Baba by dropping the NWA World Title to him.

  After Inoki beat me that night, he ran with the title for the full length of the tour. In his first title defense, Inoki defended the WWF title against former WWF champion Pedro Morales, who was also asked to do the honors for Inoki. Like the consummate pro that Pedro was, he graciously agreed to follow suit—which was a pretty big deal as well. You can count on one hand the number of times you saw Pedro Morales get pinned in that era—and to have the same guy pin both Backlund and Morales in the same week gives you a pretty good idea of how committed Vince Sr. was to this new Japanese partnership.