by Bob Backlund
Five days after that—on April 25, newly crowned WWF Intercontinental Champion Ken Patera and I traveled out to St. Louis for Sam Muchnick. There, Patera defeated Kevin Von Erich to become the Missouri State Heavyweight Champion on the undercard of the Harley Race—Ric Flair NWA World Title match. On that same card in St. Louis, I defended the WWF title over Bulldog Bob Brown in a match that got me a little bit of revenge over the man who had beaten me in my first-ever appearance there.
So now, with Patera in place as the new Intercontinental Champion in the WWF (and the NWA’s Missouri Champion at the same time, although that fact was never mentioned in the WWF), our rematch at the Garden would take on added importance. The match would be again be a clash of the federation’s two top singles champions—the first time that had happened since I defeated Pat Patterson in the steel cage at the Garden back in September 1979. The match was booked as a Texas Death Match three months in the making because we had already done two inconclusive finishes at the Garden in January and February.
Kenny and I went at it full force that night, and together, we had the Garden rocking. As it was with a steel cage match, in a Texas Death Match, where there were no countouts, no disqualifications, no blood stoppages, and no holds barred, you had to give the fans what they came to see. That meant that you had to be out of the ring, punching and kicking and brawling and ramming each other into the barriers and ringposts and steps, and hitting each other with chairs. At one point, Kenny grabbed the title belt from Arnold Skaaland and hit me with it and I went down and bladed pretty deep and got a lot of color. Later in the match, after we played off a couple of near falls that had the fans screaming, I mounted a comeback and threw Kenny over the top rope, banged his head into the steel barrier, and rammed him into the ringpost. He went down and bladed also—causing his bleached blonde hair to go crimson red with his blood and sweat. That was what a Texas Death Match was about—it was a battle until one man could not continue, and it brought out the sadistic side of the wrestling fans and really got them going.
I don’t know if that match is available on the WWE channel, but if it is, watch it and see how loud the Garden crowd got that night. That was the sign of the culmination of a really hot feud. When you can get the fans that high just through the story you are telling in the ring, well, it just doesn’t get any better than that!
When we had built the crowd up to a total frenzy, Patera called for the finish. He climbed to the top turnbuckle, but I caught him up there and threw him off the top turnbuckle and down to the mat. We then went outside the ring, where we fought over a chair. One of us threw the chair into the ring. Once back in the ring, we fought over the chair, each of us getting an exhausted swing at the other with it, as we teased the fans and tantalizingly drew out the finish for another minute.
Up to that point in my career, I don’t think I had ever heard the fans that into a match before. The people that night were climbing the walls, and reacting to our every move. I finally got the chair away from Patera and waffled him with it. Patera’s knees buckled and he crumpled to the mat and I fell on him and the referee counted to two and a half before Patera slipped the shoulder out the back door teasing the fans one last time. Kenny had put on an absolutely masterful performance, and it was only fitting that a great wrestler and a great champion like Patera should be allowed to keep his heat that way. Even a direct shot to the head with a chair couldn’t stop him.
But now it was time to go home.
I climbed up to the top rope as Patera staggered around the ring, and with the fans jumping out of their seats, jumping up and down, and gesturing wildly at me, I hit him with a bodyblock off the top rope and came down hard on top of him. The referee and about 22,000 fans all counted “one, two, three” in unison as I pinned him in the middle of the ring for the three count, and then the place just erupted.
I had given Kenny a lot of that match. He had me bleeding from the head and the nose, beat me from pillar to post, and, in the eyes of the fans at the Garden that night, took me to within an inch of winning the belt. It had been the greatest war that the fans at the Garden had seen me in, and there was no question that Patera left the ring that night, not just with his Intercontinental title, but with his heat still fully intact.
Patera and I took that feud around the horn, and the promoters and the fans just ate that series up. Kenny was one of my all-time favorite guys to wrestle, and we drew some great houses all over the territory. He is also a very funny guy and one of the few guys in the business who I still keep in touch with and talk to from time to time.
It’s Howdy Doody Time
McMahon Sr. and the other office guys created a new belt—which they called the Intercontinental Heavyweight Championship. They gave it to Patterson to start off with. He was the North American Champion, but somehow, that name just didn’t have the same ring to it—so they got him a beautiful new belt and renamed it the Intercontinental Championship, and claimed that he had won it in some tournament in Rio De Janeiro or some such thing. Well Patterson had just come off his long series with Bobby, split with the Grand Wizard, and had become a pretty hot babyface as a result. And I, of course, was managed by the Grand Wizard, so that added an element of revenge to the whole thing. The plan was never to have Patterson hold that belt for long—they created that new belt for me to appease me and to give me the title run that I had been promised back when Sammartino was still champion. I left after they put the belt on Billy Graham and then switched it to Bobby and screwed me over. So I went down to work for Crockett in the Carolinas for a while, and then one day, Vince Sr. called me with this plan to put a new belt on me, and promised me a good run with Bobby, so I came back. So as I said, I had the Wizard as my manager, and the whole thing had a nice setup, and I was booked to destroy Patterson at the Garden and take the Intercontinental Championship belt from him, and then to be booked to seem unstoppable to set up my series of matches with Bobby.
Bobby had had the belt for a couple of years by that point, and you know what? He had really gotten himself over with the fans. I know that some of the boys in the locker room liked to try and say that Bobby wasn’t over with the fans, and he wasn’t a draw, and all that sort of stuff, but I can tell you, Bobby was over. People were just jealous. You know how it is? Let’s say there are three or four guys in the running to become the CEO of a large company. Only one of them is going to get it. So the other two or three are either going to immediately start to try to undermine him, or they’re going to leave the company and go elsewhere. That’s just the way it is. It’s human nature. And it’s the same thing in the wrestling business. I never got involved in that stuff, because that’s a dead end road—if you start to go behind people’s backs and start knocking them in a serious way—not in a kidding way like we did with the whole Howdy Doody thing—but in a serious way, you wind up being the loser. So I never got involved in that shit.
I’ll tell you what, if Bobby wasn’t over, he wouldn’t have been selling out all of the big buildings in the territory—and we were selling out everywhere. I was in a lot of those buildings with him, and you know, when Bobby would come out, he had that habit of jumping around in the ring and stuff, and the crowds would really pop for him. Meanwhile, back in the dressing room, every time Bobby would go out, there were a couple of people who would start singing, “It’s Howdy Doody time, it’s Howdy Doody time.” And I just couldn’t keep a straight face because it was funny. The Wizard was the one who started that—and that’s all he had to say to get people going. But where the stories tend to go off the rails a little is that it wasn’t a malicious sort of thing against Bobby—it was more just the boys ribbing Bobby a little bit because of his squeaky clean golly gee aw shucks Midwestern image. But believe me, everyone was grateful for the business we were doing.
I remember at our first show at the Civic Center in Baltimore in 1980, Larry and Bruno had main-evented the building in their first match down there and hadn’t sold out the building. Then Bobby and
I were scheduled to main-event the building the next month. So Zbyszko was running his mouth to me in the locker room somewhere talking about the next show in Baltimore and he guaranteed me that Bobby and I wouldn’t come close to selling that place out. I reminded him that he and Bruno hadn’t sold it out either. Well wouldn’t you know, when Bobby and I went in there, Phil Zacko told me there were something like 35 tickets left in the entire building. I asked him how many had been left the month before with Bruno and Larry’s first match, and he told me it was 600 anyway. And it was that way all over the place. Bruno and Zbyszko would go in and do their routine, and they would draw well, don’t get me wrong, but when Bobby and I would go in the month after and start our series, we outdrew them every time.
—Ken Patera
Asses in the Seats
There were a lot of guys in the business who if you had a top position—they wanted it. Bob was young, and some of the old timers didn’t love the idea of Bob coming in and getting a big push and getting the belt and making a lot of money. Some of the guys thought they should have gotten that run simply because they had been around longer. Bob also never partied with the boys, he never took drugs, he was always reliable and didn’t cause any trouble, and they resented all of that, and the inner strength that he had. What they didn’t realize was that the promoters didn’t base your position on the card by your age—they based it on how many asses you could put in the seats. You can be the greatest athlete in the world, but if you can’t put asses in the seats, the promoter had no use for you.
When I was in the WWF, Bob was the champion because he sold out buildings. That’s why he was champion. If nobody was paying to see Bob Backlund, he would never have gotten the belt—and if people didn’t keep paying to see Bob Backlund wrestle, he would never have kept the belt. The reason why Bob Backlund was champion for six years was because he was consistently and reliably putting asses in the seats.
—“Mr. USA” Tony Atlas
After that match with Patera, I took off for a two-week tour of Japan. This was the one and only trip I took to Japan where Corki joined me—something she regretted almost immediately. That was the tour that featured one of the craziest and most interesting matches of my wrestling career—the night that I defended the WWF title against “The American Dream” Dusty Rhodes. It would also be the last time that Corki ever attended one of my matches.
Hisashi Shinma (the booker for Antonio Inoki’s New Japan promotion) decided to put Dusty and me together in a main event for the WWF championship in Osaka on May 27, 1980. New Japan’s bookers could always be counted on to pair two American “Gaijin” (outsiders) together, either in a tag team against two Japanese wrestlers, or against each other, regardless of whether that matchup would make any booking sense in the United States. This was the one and only time Dusty Rhodes and I ever wrestled each other. We were also on neutral ground, which made what happened that night especially fascinating.
Dusty and I didn’t get together to talk things over before the match that night, but we’d watched each other a lot both in our days in Florida and Georgia and on previous Japanese tours, so we both knew what we wanted to do. The Japanese fans had always appreciated my scientific, amateur style in the ring, and had supported me wholeheartedly. Dusty, likewise, was hugely over as a babyface in Japan. So that night, we resolved to listen to the crowd in Osaka and let them determine what they wanted to have happen.
Japan was a funny place. You just didn’t know what to expect. We were both anxious to see what the fans would do with us.
When our match was called, Dusty came charging through the crowd into the ring in his beautiful black and white robe, and he had the fans all over him, patting him on the back and reaching out to touch him. He got a big, roaring ovation. There was no doubt that the fans viewed Dusty as a babyface at the beginning of the match. I came out to the ring second, displaying the WWF title belt around my waist, and got a similar reception from the crowd.
We came together in the center of the ring, and our hosts played the Star-Spangled Banner and presented us both with huge bouquets of flowers, as was the Japanese tradition prior to the main event of the evening. During the pre-match announcements, it was very hard to tell who got the bigger ovation from the crowd, Dusty or me. We shook hands enthusiastically in the middle of the ring, the crowd cheered in appreciation, and we were off.
For the first couple of minutes of the match, we did a nice sequence of amateur moves, with go-behinds and switches, with both of us returning to our feet in the ready position. From the very beginning of the match, though, you could sense a strange sort of tension in the building. I don’t think the fans were entirely happy to see two of their biggest heroes facing off against each other. As we went on, working off a series of armholds, I got the upper hand, and Dusty feigned frustration. There was a point, still early in the match, where Dusty pushed me into the ropes and instead of giving me an immediate clean break, as the fans might have expected him to, Dusty held me there for an extra beat and I threw my guard up. It was a tease, and just for a second, but with that very subtle little extra beat of time, we dramatically increased the tension in the crowd. You could almost hear the fans draw and hold a breath. When Dusty then broke clean, the relieved fans exhaled, applauded in appreciation, and the match continued. Shortly thereafter, I pushed Dusty into the ropes and likewise broke cleanly.
We were testing the fans to see which way they wanted us to go.
They hadn’t decided yet.
We then took it to the mat for several minutes, with Dusty taking control with a series of leg holds, elbowdrops to my legs, and leg scissors, with me trying to escape. It was a pretty good display of mat wrestling that had the fans watching intently, so we kept that going. Eventually, I escaped the leghold and reversed things, and took command with a series of legholds of my own. Dusty, however, couldn’t break out of these holds by using counters as I had done, and again showed his “frustration.” Since he couldn’t escape using a counter, he poked me in the eyes instead, which made me break, and then we rose to our feet.
The fans saw that Dusty had cut a corner, and a few of them began to jeer. He showed them a couple of bionic elbows, which made them cheer temporarily, since they had seen him use that move so many times as a hero. He followed with a series of punches, and we went back to the mat with Dusty in control using a chinlock to wear me down. I rallied, shaking my arms to see if I could get the crowd behind me, and suddenly, the crowd was cheering and chanting, “Bob-by! Bob-by!” as I rose to my feet. Dusty played off it perfectly, jerking his head from side to side, looking at the crowd with a look of complete betrayal on his face, as if he could not understand how or why the fans would be cheering for someone to make a comeback on him.
The crowd in Osaka had made its decision.
We clinched closely, head-to-head and called a high spot. Dusty threw me into the turnbuckle, I came out, and he caught me in a bodyslam, but I kicked my feet furiously and fell on him for a count of two and a near fall. The crowd cheered, confirming what we thought was going on.
They wanted Dusty to play the heel.
I got to my feet before Dusty, who was pretty gassed by that point, and got behind him and picked him up for my finisher—the atomic kneedrop. Dusty, who was around three hundred pounds at that point, sold it perfectly, waving his arms around as I hoisted him up and carried him around the ring before smashing him into my knee. He dropped next to the ropes and clung to them like a baby would cling to a blanket, preventing me from going for the pin.
The crowd was roaring.
I got up and hit a piledriver on Dusty in the middle of the ring. He slipped out at the count of two and a half. We criss-crossed into the ropes and slammed into each other. I fell backward and Dusty wobbled before crashing down himself, but managed to drape an arm across my shoulders as the referee counted. Another near fall, as I kicked out at two.
Three more false finishes followed in quick succession. First, Dusty tried for
a vertical suplex, which I spun out of. Next, I got behind Dusty and pushed him into the ropes for the rolling reverse with the bridge—which I had used to pin many opponents in Japan—but Dusty hung on the ropes causing me to crash backward onto my head. Then Dusty went for his figure-four leglock, and I kicked him off at the last second—and he ran right into the referee and knocked him down.
Had Dusty struck the referee on purpose? Had I kicked him off into the referee by accident? The spot had come off perfectly, so it was nearly impossible for the fans to tell.
I rose, dropkicked Dusty out of the ring, and went over to “check” on the referee. As I did, Dusty pulled me out of the ring by the leg, and declared himself a full convert to the heel side (at least for that night) by slamming me into the ring steps, and then smashing my head into the iron ringpost that held the ropes and turnbuckles together. The fans watched in stunned silence as I collapsed to the arena floor, my head hidden in my hands so I could “get color.” Dusty showed the blood to the fans by holding my head back and dropping an elbow right on the cut and helping the blood to mix with my sweat to give me a better “crimson mask.”
Dusty threw me back into the ring and the crowd cheered, relieved that the match wasn’t going to end on a countout. Dusty threw his hand in the air and the crowd cheered momentarily—but he then swerved them and played another heel card, scooping me up, trapping me upside down in the cornerbuckles, and kicking and stomping away. The crowd jeered. The referee stepped in to break it up, and Dusty threw him aside and down to the canvas. The ref signaled for the bell and called for the disqualification.