by Bob Backlund
But I can’t think of anyone who tested him twice.
—Harley Race
I could not have been happier to share the stage with Harley at the Garden and to show the fans in my home arena what a truly great wrestling match looks like. As expected, the match came off brilliantly, the fans loved it, and when it was over (I went over by disqualification when Harley hit the referee), our respective reputations had been enhanced that much more—as each of us had pushed the other to the very brink of defeat.
On October 20, 1980, I was back in the Garden facing the challenge of a new heel who had burst upon the scene in the WWWF. Managed by the Grand Wizard of Wrestling, Sergeant Slaughter had the perfect look. Standing nearly six and a half feet tall and weighing in at just shy of 300 pounds, clad in his wide brimmed hat, sunglasses, a whistle, and carrying a riding crop, Slaughter had the jaw and the nose and the look of a drill sergeant. He was the first wrestler in the WWF to come to the ring with entrance music—playing the Marine Hymn “The Halls of Montezuma” every time he would come forth from the dressing room. He also featured a hold called the “Cobra Clutch”—a form of a sleeperhold that he had been using to decimate his opponents on television. He and the Grand Wizard were also using a gimmick known as the “$5,000 Cobra Clutch Challenge” where a wrestler would sit in a chair in the ring and allow Slaughter to apply the hold, with Slaughter promising to “pay” any wrestler $5,000 if he could escape the hold.
Of course many tried but no one succeeded, the hold became one of the most feared finishers in the sport, and Slaughter quickly rose to the number-one-contender status in the federation. The fans had grown to hate Slaughter so intensely that they had taken to chanting “Gomer” at him (a reference to the bumbling marine portrayed by Jim Neighbors on the television show Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.) and carrying “Gomer” and “Sgt. Pyle” signs into the television tapings and into the arenas where Slaughter wrestled. This, of course, was manna from Heaven for Slaughter, who fed the fans’ fury by putting his hands over his ears, gesturing wildly at the fans, and demanding in his interviews that they stop calling him “Gomer,” which, of course, just made the fans yell it louder and with more commitment than ever. There were some arenas that we wrestled in where the chant of “Go-mer” was deafening when Slaughter came to the ring. Slaughter was absolutely the most interactive heel, in terms of his relationship with the fans, which I had wrestled to date.
Slaughter was so hot, and the Cobra Clutch was so over as a threat to my championship, that the setup for this first match didn’t take very long. With Slaughter getting the title match at the top of the card, the Garden had sold out long before the night of the event, so we knew we would be coming back for a second match the following month. I think even Vince Sr., who was rarely caught flatfooted, was a little surprised at just how much heat Slaughter was getting with the fans. Vince thought highly of Sarge, and really wanted to go places with him. When he brought Sarge and me together for the pre-match discussion in the dressing room, Vince asked me to put the hold over cleanly.
“Bobby, Sarge is going to ram you into the post outside the ring and then take a shot at Arnold. He’ll then throw you back into the ring and get you in the Cobra Clutch. It’s going to look like the end, but he’s going to get a little too close to the apron of the ring, and when he does, Skaaland is going to hit Sarge over the head with a chair, get you disqualified, and save your belt.”
It was kind of a heelish finish for me, but justified enough by Slaughter’s swipe at Skaaland to make it passable without it causing me to get heat with the fans. The match went only sixteen minutes, a very short time for a title match at the Garden, because we had the crowd in a frenzy that night. The people told us that at sixteen minutes, they were as emotionally invested in the match as they were going to get—and once you have them at that peak, there is no sense in going any further. You want to go home just at the point where you believe you have the fans’ emotional reaction to the match as high as it can get.
Naturally, this finish gave Slaughter the ability to go back on television for the pre-match interviews for the following month and claim that he had been “robbed” and that I was “protected” by Skaaland, and that he would be the champion were it not for Skaaland. In fact, his comments were pretty accurate—and all of this served to draw an even larger crowd to the New Jersey Meadowlands arena for our eventual Texas Death rematch.
Sarge was originally from Minnesota, and was an excellent all-around athlete who played a lot of sports in high school and college, from golf to wrestling to football. He was all about the match and entertaining the people and was a truly exceptional performer in the ring. Slaughter did a lot of things well—in particular—his run into the turnbuckle, which was just tremendous. He took good care of himself physically, stayed out of trouble, and always showed up on time ready to put on a great show. For all of those things, Slaughter got rewarded with two great tenures in the WWF in 1980–81 and in 1983–84 where, both times, he had extended main-event runs with me, and then subsequent headlining feuds with others in the federation (Patterson in 1981 and The Iron Sheik in 1984).
Call Me “Gomer”
I was brought to Allentown in late 1979 to do television tapings and promos for the WWWF TV program knowing that my first match in the territory was going to be at Madison Square Garden against Bob. I was playing a tough drill instructor, a 300-pounder who could dropkick and armdrag and telling people in the promos that I meant business and was going to take the title. Mr. McMahon just loved the Sgt. Slaughter character—he told me I was one of his favorite heels of all time. When I first got there, Mr. McMahon asked me to go out and do a promo with his son, and he asked whether there was anything he could do to help put heat on me. I went to my bag and got a cassette tape out and gave it to him. He said, “What is this?” I told him it was the Marine Corps Hymn and I asked him to play it when I went out there. He said he’d never thought about someone walking out to music before, but that he was willing to give it a try—so we tried it, and the response was overwhelming. The people didn’t know me, but I walked out to that music and did the promo, and when I got back, Mr. McMahon was jingling his quarters in his hands, and said, “That was the greatest promo I have ever seen—even my son hates you!” And that’s how we started it out.
The other thing we did was during the promos, I told Bob that he should call me “Gomer” and he was like, “Gomer?” And I said, “Yeah, that’s what they call a misfit in the Marine Corps—they call him Gomer.” So he was doing a promo, and pointed into the camera and said, “You’re just a Gomer, Sgt. Slaughter, you’re a Gomer!” And then the people started chanting that, and of course, I played along, and told the people to stop calling me Gomer, and that they better not show up to the arenas with Gomer signs, and that got great heat.
The first time that Bob and I wrestled was at Madison Square Garden in the main event. I had been beating everyone on television with the Cobra Clutch, and I had promised the people that when I got it on Bob Backlund it wasn’t going to be any different. Well when we got there, we had sold out not only the Garden, but the Felt Forum also. We had the match, and I got it on him at the end, and Backlund was fighting it like crazy. I had done something to “antagonize” Arnold Skaaland just before that, so he climbed up onto the apron and hit me from behind with a chair so I won that first match by disqualification.
The one thing I noticed when I first started working with Bob was that he seemed very worried that someone would try and pull a fast one on him—but after we’d had a few matches, he came to trust me, and let me be the ring general and dictate how I was going to get my heat, and that meant a lot to me. It also made for much better and high-quality matches and storytelling.
Bob was a wrestler that was a lot like John Cena is today. Most people loved him, but there were some people who hated him. But whenever I wrestled Bob, 100 percent of the people were for him, because everyone hated Sgt. Slaughter so much. Bob enjoyed that, because it al
lowed him to be the true babyface that he always liked to be.
Bob Backlund was also one of the most physically in-shape wrestlers of all time—he took it very seriously, worked out very hard, and was one of those guys you could really go out there and tell a great story with as a villain. We drew a lot of pretty big crowds; whether it was in the Garden or a high school down the road, Bob and I packed them in and gave them their money’s worth, entertained them and had a lot of very compelling matches. If we were on before intermission, our matches were hard for others to follow. I can remember thinking to myself on of occasions when Bob and I were on before intermission—I’d never broadcast it, but I thinking to myself, “Follow that one, boys!”
—Sergeant Slaughter
Meanwhile, on November 7, 1980, I had the less-well-known rematch from the September 22, 1980 Madison Square Garden world title unification bout with Harley Race. This time, the match was held in the NWA’s home arena—the Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis. This match was arranged by Vince Sr. and Sam Muchnick and was intended to give Sam the reciprocal honor of hosting the world title unification match on the NWA’s home turf.
St. Louis had been a key territory in my training, so I felt at home there, especially with Sam Muchnick promoting and being in the ring with Harley.
The match at the Kiel was, like many NWA World Title matches on their turf, scheduled for the best two out of three falls with a one-hour time limit. Structuring a world title match with those stipulations definitely gave the bookers more flexibility. Since the champion would have to be pinned or submit twice within the one-hour time limit to lose his belt, it was possible for Harley and me to trade falls during the hour, which allowed the fans to see one or both champions get pinned or submit, and greatly increased the dramatic tension for the fans.
We decided to sell each other’s finishers. Harley pinned me with his vertical suplex in the first fall—which really got the people going thinking they might be watching the unification of the world championship. Harley had the background and the skills to shoot or hook if he wanted to—so this kind of match obviously required a level of trust to pull off. Because I trusted Harley and Sam completely, however, it never even entered my mind that either of them would try to put anything over on me or Vince—so allowing Harley to get the first fall on me was not a problem. With a different champion than Harley, or in a different venue with a promoter other than Sam, we might not have agreed to do that—because losing the first fall cleanly does put you at the mercy of the promoter the referee, or both, in the subsequent falls, and makes it much easier for a screwjob to actually happen.
Harley sold my finisher in the second fall with no problem, and the fans at the Kiel that night were delirious having watched two world champs pin each other on the same night. Obviously, we weren’t going to unify the titles, so we needed to come up with an ending that left the people happy—so my inadvertently backdropping Harley over the top rope provided the answer, giving him the win by disqualification. It gave Harley the win on his turf, squared us up after Harley had given me the win on my turf, and allowed us both to keep our belts and our reputations intact.
After St. Louis, I did another trip to Japan—and my participation in the tour over there was important enough to Vince Sr. to cause him to permit me to miss a Garden show for the first time since I had become the world champion. They were trying to make Inoki and me bond and to be seen as friends in the eyes of the Japanese fans, so on this tour, Antonio and I did a lot of tag-team matches together. December 3, 1980, was a memorable night on that tour, as it was the only night in my career that I can remember being in the ring against Andre the Giant, as Antonio and I took on Andre and Stan Hansen.
I remember that Andre put me in a headlock in the match that night, and I felt very small, even though Andre’s touch on me was light as a feather. Andre was very good in the ring—he took care of you and worked harder on that than most wrestlers because he was so big that he was worried about inadvertently hurting people. But Andre was a gentle giant who had a very delicate touch in the ring unless he was trying to make a point. I wasn’t in there with him for very long that night, as Antonio caught most of Andre’s in-ring time. Stan and I started the match, but with Andre, Stan Hansen, Inoki, and me in there, you had four of the biggest stars in the New Japan promotion in the ring, so everybody needed to get a little and sell a little and we needed to settle the issue of who was going to make the comeback. Andre and Stan both played borderline heels in Japan, so that made the match interesting, but with that much to protect in the ring at the same time—a double countout and full-out brawl where everyone looked strong was about the best that we could do.
Inoki and I went on to win the MSG Tag League tournament in the Prefectural Gym in Osaka on December 10, 1980, defeating Stan Hansen and Hulk Hogan in the tournament final when Inoki caught Hogan in a beautiful backslide and pinned him for the three count. Again, this tour was designed to make Inoki and I seem like we were good friends, which, in turn, served to bind our two promotions more closely together. After that win, we took some pictures with the trophy that were widely published in wrestling magazines across the world.
As mentioned, I missed the first December Garden show because I was in Japan—and that was the night that John Lennon got shot in New York City just a few blocks away from the Garden. Pedro Morales went over Ken Patera to win the Intercontinental title that night, and Bruno, who was covering for me in the main event while I was away, wrestled Sgt. Slaughter and beat him by countout in a wild brawl that left Slaughter with his heat for our rematch a couple of weeks later at the Meadowlands. Pedro still had the standing in the WWF to carry the Intercontinental Heavyweight Championship, and was over big with the Puerto Rican community, who came out strongly to support him on the cards in the major cities. With Patera getting ready to leave, Pedro was the obvious choice to carry that belt.
The year ended with a second card at the Garden on December 29, 1980, with me facing the newest member of Freddie Blassie’s army. With both Mr. Fuji and Professor Tanaka gone from the territory, it was time for the federation to add a new Asian heel in its cast of characters, so Blassie introduced his newest “find”—a “terror” from the Orient named Killer Khan who had not been seen in the WWF before.
Khan’s gimmick was that of a wild man from Mongolia who was vicious and loved to torture American wrestlers and hurt people. He would contort his face into a fearsome scowl, and he screamed a lot in the ring when delivering chops and kicks and punches. All of this, coupled with the fact that Khan was about six foot four and around 300 pounds, got him very over with the people as a monster heel. Khan had been a legitimate sumo wrestler in Japan, but he was also very flexible. Because of that, I was able to work a very realistic looking leg stretcher move on him that night in the Garden that would have ripped a normal person’s groin apart. The move looked brutal, the people loved it, and Khan sold it like a champ, but because he was so flexible, it didn’t actually hurt him at all. All of this, of course, was designed to make it appear that I was working over Khan’s legs to try and take away his finishing maneuver from him. Khan’s finisher—a flying kneedrop off the top rope—had already caused a number of guys on television to be “stretchered” out of the ring. Our “plan” was that if he couldn’t stand up and balance on the top rope, he couldn’t hit the move on me. This was just one of the ways that in-ring psychology could be used to make a match seem more strategic and realistic.
In reality, when performing that move, Khan caught most of his weight on his hands and his other leg, and that finish was much harder on him. Landing on your hands and knees after a five-foot leap from the ringpost night after night, you would develop knee and wrist problems from having to work so hard and so carefully to protect your opponent. That flying kneedrop was also a very dangerous finisher for the guy laying on the mat, because if Khan missed with that move, even by a little, the underneath guy would have caught the full force of Khan’s knee on whatever part
of his body he happened to hit—and that would almost certainly have ended in something getting broken or crushed.
My match with Khan set up as the typical “babyface in peril” match. I liked Khan, so I sold a lot of his offense and even took his “weakened” finisher from him in the near corner of the ring, but managed to get a foot on the ropes at the very last moment to break up the count. For the finish, because Khan was so flexible, I was able to gut wrench him into a German suplex with a bridge and use his own weight as leverage to get a quick pin on him and get out of there before he could “hurt” me further. It was the kind of quick move, following his giving me a brutal beating for most of the match, that would leave Khan with most of his heat, but would also look great for the fans, and give me a clear and decisive win. By surprising the 300-pound Khan and pinning him in the center of the ring in Madison Square Garden, I was able to send the fans home happy and punctuate the end of what had been a very successful year, both personally and for the federation.
20
Monsters and Broadways (1981)
“Let your manner always be friendly, no matter what the outcome, and people will be glad to have worked with you.”
—Napoleon Hill, “Assemble an Attractive Personality”
The beginning of 1981 saw the rise of another new member of Freddie Blassie’s army—Stan “The Lariat” Hansen. Stan and I had been in the Amarillo territory together, and we had always had a bit of an uneasy real-life rivalry with one another because the Funks had pushed me ahead of him. The Funks had trained Stan, who was from Texas, and I think Stan had thought of himself as their “favorite son.” Yet, when I arrived from Tri-States, Terry Funk immediately put me over by taking me to the ten-minute time limit on television, and then put me over in the six-man tag-team elimination match where I was partnered with Stan but was booked to be the last man standing. I think all of that affected Stan a little bit, because he was a pretty competitive guy by nature. I suspect that the Funks were just testing Stan’s humility—which might have needed a bit of adjusting—in the same way that Sam Muchnick later tested mine by asking me to put over Bulldog Bob Brown in my first match in St. Louis. In any event, our shared history had placed Stan and me a bit at odds as we came together for this series over the WWF title.