by Bob Backlund
The next night, May 2, 1981, most of the guys were in Rochester, New York. This was the famous day when Andre the Giant rolled his ankle getting out of bed at the motel and ended up breaking it. Since he was scheduled to wrestle Killer Khan that night anyway, Vince Sr. just worked it into the kayfabe storyline that Khan had landed his kneedrop off the top rope and crushed Andre’s ankle—knowing full well that when Andre recovered from the broken ankle, it would make for a ready-made feud and a box office bonanza.
In reality, Andre was transported from upstate New York to Boston for his operation at Beth Israel Hospital. The only problem was that the doctors couldn’t figure out how to sedate Andre before the operation. Because they had never dealt with a man of Andre’s size, the anesthesiologists couldn’t figure out how much sedative to give him. Fearing they might kill him by giving him too much, they erred by giving him too little, and couldn’t get him to pass out. Eventually, Andre just told the doctors to get him two bottles of Crown Royal. The bottles were produced, Andre signed a consent form, drank them down, and then told the doctors to just go ahead and perform the surgery on his ankle.
Former WWF referee Mario Savoldi told me that when Andre was released from Beth Israel Hospital, he asked that his girlfriend, a six-foot-five-inch flight attendant from Minneapolis, be flown out for the occasion. The arrangements were made, she arrived in Boston, and Mario drove them both from the hospital to a hotel where they got separate rooms. Andre went to sleep, but when he woke up to use the bathroom, he heard a woman in the next room making noises as if she were having sex with someone. Thinking that there was another man in the room with his girlfriend, Andre flew into a rage, broke through the sheetrock wall separating his room from the adjoining room, and came through that wall with his hair flying all around bellowing for his girlfriend. Well wouldn’t you know it, Andre had gotten mixed up as to which side of his room his girlfriend’s room was on, and had broken into the room of a totally different couple in the room next door. That couple were so frightened by what happened, they apparently ran out of the room and to the lobby and never came back. Andre was so upset by the incident, and was so intent on calming the couple down that he ran through the door of the adjoining room without even opening it and knocked it flat off the hinges.
On May 4, 1981, we went to Madison Square Garden for a card that was notable for a couple of reasons. First, Inoki was supposed to travel to New York to take part in a tag-team match alongside Yoshiaki Yatsu on that card, but Inoki no-showed the Garden. While this may have seemed like a big deal, it was not high on Vince Sr.’s list of concerns. The fact was, Inoki just wasn’t over in New York because he wasn’t willing to take the time to come to the TV tapings, appear on television, do interviews, and get himself over as a babyface with the WWF fans.
Second, this was the card featuring my first match with former Canadian football star Angelo “King Kong” Mosca. Mosca and I had just done an angle at the last television taping where he had repeatedly refused to pin one of the enhancement guys, and I rushed into the ring in my three-piece suit only to have Mosca attack me, hang me upside down from the turnbuckles, and stomp and spit on me until other wrestlers came from the locker room to save me. This angle came about, in part, because some of the underneath guys had told me that Mosca was a bully who enjoyed working stiff and was having fun in the ring at other people’s expense. I figured if he was going to play that way, he might as well try it with me. The television angle had done its job, as we got a good walkup crowd at the Garden in the couple of days prior to the matches, and the house was very close to capacity at bell time. I think that television angle saved Mosca from being one and done at the Garden, as Vince Sr. asked for the match to be an all-out brawl, with Mosca winning by disqualification when he ducked a punch of mine that ended up hitting the referee.
Mosca was a convincing, menacing heel. He had had a long and decorated career in the Canadian Football League, and had then built his reputation in professional wrestling in Canada wrestling in Toronto for Frank Tunney. Where things fell apart for Mosca a little bit, I think, was that my series with him immediately followed my series with Stan Hansen—and Hansen and Mosca were somewhat similar stylistically. The Garden fans had just seen me in three successive brawls with Hansen, and now, I was in another brawl with Mosca—but Hansen had broken Bruno’s neck, and Mosca just wasn’t as convincing. I was not one to second guess Vince Sr., but this underscored why Vince Sr. only wanted Hansen to get two matches. By the time my series with Mosca was over, it would be five brawls in a row over the WWF title at the Garden, and the fans were ready for something different.
Speaking of Mosca’s penchant for taking advantage of people in the ring, on June 5, 1981, he potatoed me in the face during in our title match at the Pittsburgh Civic Arena. That shot swelled up my eye and the side of my face, but I let it go. I remember that throughout the match, all of his moves were stiffer than they needed to be. As Hansen had done, Mosca was testing me to see how much I would let him get away with. When that happens in the ring, the only person who knows it is the guy in the ring who is taking it—and when it happens to me, as it did from time to time, I’d have to do what I needed to do to put a stop to it, because if I took a real beating like that too often, my wrestling career would have been a short one.
Since that was the first time Mosca had tried anything with me, I didn’t want to overreact, so I didn’t say anything to him in the dressing room, or to anyone else after the match. I just let it go. But when I heard more from underneath guys about what Mosca was doing to them in preliminary matches, I realized that maybe his shot hadn’t been a mistake and that something should be done about it. I knew I had a number of other matches with Mosca scheduled in the territory in the coming month, so I resolved to just wait and see if he tried something with me again.
Sure enough, the very next time I was in the ring with him, in Springfield at the Civic Center, Mosca potatoed me in the face again—the same way that he had done in Pittsburgh. This time, though, I was ready for him, and retaliated by hitting him so hard across the side of the face with a forearm shiver that it lifted his 319 pounds right off the mat and into the air. Mosca crashed down onto the mat and was lying flat on his back shaking the cobwebs out, but for real. I stood over him and dispensing with all pretense of kayfabe, just said to him in a voice loud enough for anyone at ringside to hear, “If you want to fight, get up!”
Mosca stayed down.
Eventually, I pulled him up, and he tied up with me, and pushed me into the ropes, and wouldn’t you know it, his touch was suddenly light as a feather. And that was the last problem I ever had with Mosca in the ring. This is an example of what happens when someone decides to “go into business for himself,” and why, as champion, you have to have the ability to defend yourself against that in the ring. If Mosca had responded to my challenge by actually getting up, the match would have turned into a shoot, and that wouldn’t have gone well for him. Fortunately, Mosca was smart enough to get back to business.
When we got back to the dressing room that night in Springfield, I went over to Mosca’s dressing room and addressed the issue face to face. He apologized to me, and after that, we had no further issues.
I had earned his respect.
I’ve seen Mosca a number of times since then at conventions, and we talk and can even joke about that situation now—but back then, it was a pretty tense thing. Tony Garea saw the whole Springfield episode happen in real time, and the moment that I flattened Mosca with that forearm shot is still one of his favorite stories, because he, too, had been roughed up in the ring a fair bit by Mosca.
Mosca and I came back to the Garden on June 8, 1981. After the last month’s disqualification finish, though, Pat Patterson was assigned to be the special guest referee for the return bout. Patterson, who had just come off the Alley Fight blowoff to his feud with Sarge, was looking for something new to do, and had decided that a feud with Mosca would be his next adventure. So Vince Sr.
and Patterson set up a little angle at the TV taping where once again, Mosca was taking advantage of an enhancement guy—this time, a jobber named Victor Mercado—and repeatedly refusing to pin him. Referee Dick Woherlie finally decided he’d had enough and disqualified Mosca, who then flew into a rage, and threw everyone, including Woherlie, out of the ring.
Patterson, who was doing color commentary for the television broadcast at the time, went to the ring to interview Woherlie, and congratulated Woherlie for “finally” doing something to stop Mosca’s reign of terror. Mosca took exception to Patterson’s remarks and waffled him with a metal water pitcher, knocking him out, and the next great feud was on.
All that was used to set up the fact that Patterson had been assigned as the special guest referee for my rematch with Mosca at the Garden. But there was additional intrigue about that since the astute Garden fans no doubt remembered that there was no love lost between me and Patterson either, since less than eighteen months earlier, Patterson and I had concluded our historic four-match battle at the Garden. I ended up going over Mosca with a quick pinning combination and a notoriously quick three-count from Patterson, which caused Mosca to attack Patterson in the ring after the match to perfectly lay their feud on the tee.
About a week after that match, on June 20 at the Spectrum in Philadelphia, the WWF created a new superstar. A few weeks earlier, Don “The Magnificent” Muraco had debuted on television, with the Grand Wizard as his manager. Muraco, who had a deep surfer’s tan and hailed from Sunset Beach, Hawaii, was a very different kind of heel for the WWF. He was a big man, tipping the scales around 280 pounds, but he was also a good wrestler in terms of his knowledge of amateur moves. He was very active, he could get up and down, execute and take high spots, and he was arrogant and loquacious on the microphone—really a complete package as far as a wrestler was concerned. Muraco could fit anybody’s style, and make anybody look good.
Muraco had done very well in Florida for Eddie Graham, which, as you have probably now gathered, functioned almost like a development territory for most of the top talent that eventually came to the WWF. Muraco had been on top as Florida Champion, had drawn well, and according to Eddie, was poised to take the next step. As I have explained already, Eddie and Vince Sr., who also had a house in West Palm Beach, were very close and communicated on a weekly basis about their territories, and when Muraco’s time as Florida Champion had run its course, Eddie called Vince Sr. and recommended him for a run in New York.
On that night in June in Philadelphia, Muraco, to the shock and dismay of the sellout crowd, stripped the popular former WWF Champion Pedro Morales of the Intercontinental Heavyweight Championship by knocking Pedro out with a pair of brass knuckles and pinning him in the middle of the Spectrum ring. Fans in the WWF were not accustomed to seeing Pedro Morales pinned—much less by brash “newcomer” like Muraco who was making his first appearance in the building. I was at the Spectrum that night defending the WWF title against George “The Animal” Steele, so I know the way the crowd reacted to that title change—and you could just tell that Muraco was going to be something special. The fans really disliked him, and every time he’d come out to the ring, they’d chant “beach bum! beach bum!” at him, which of course, he played up to the hilt by covering his ears and yelling at them to stop. The “beach bum!” cheers from the crowd were deafening in many places—which, as a heel, is the biggest compliment you can get.
I was very excited to have Don in the territory, particularly as a heel Intercontinental champion and the number-two guy in the federation. You couldn’t duplicate Don Muraco—he had evolved into his character from the time he entered the business, and it worked very well for him. Muraco really did live in Hawaii, and he loved surfing and spending time on the beach—and the fact is that the best in-ring character you can have is the one that is closest to something you really are so that there is no pretending. Muraco was a handsome, cocky, athletic guy with all the skills in the world, and the persona he played just came naturally to him. The WWF was also noted for big guys, and Don had shoulders as big as anyone in the business—so he really looked the part. Vince Sr. liked Muraco immediately, and after getting the seal of approval from Eddie Graham down in Florida that Don was reliable and could be trusted not to miss dates, Vince felt comfortable putting him into the federation’s second biggest spot as the Intercontinental Champion.
Since I just mentioned him in the context of that Spectrum card where Muraco took the title, I would be remiss if I didn’t give some more ink to George “The Animal” Steele, who I faced that night in Philadelphia, at the Garden in July, and all over the territory that summer. Around this time in 1981, Vince Sr. had found a Canadian enhancement guy named Rick Bolton who had a trick shoulder that he could pop in and out of its socket on demand. Since Steele’s finisher at the time was the flying hammerlock, this became a wrestling promoter’s dream. They brought Bolton in for a one-shot and paired Steele and Bolton on television and had Steele stomp and kick and bite the guy’s arm and then put him up in the flying hammerlock. On cue, Bolton dislocated his own shoulder, making it appear that Steele had ripped Bolton’s shoulder right out of its socket. It was sadistic, but incredibly realistic—and Vince Jr. and Patterson sold the heck out of it on the television broadcast as Bolton staggered around with his arm completely turned around the wrong way and his elbow facing front and the Animal continuing to chase him around and pound on it. It didn’t hurt Bolton at all, but it certainly hurt to look at—and was a totally legitimizing moment for professional wrestling. Had Steele really just wrenched this poor man’s shoulder out of its socket? And could he do it to me next?
The people, of course, ate it up—and largely as a consequence of that match, we drew a crowd of over 22,000 people to the Garden for Steele’s title match with me in July 1981. Naturally, in his pre-match interviews on television, Steele stared into the camera with his green tongue lashing around and yelling “Backlund! … break! … arm!” as Vince Jr. kept reminding the fans of what Steele had done to Rick Bolton, and how, that if that happened to me, we’d have a new WWF champion.
Because we couldn’t really have a wrestling match, Steele and I worked out this little thing where he would come out to the ring first, and then not let me in, so we could play out the first five or seven minutes of the “match” with Skaaland and me on the outside figuring out how to get me into the ring without getting attacked. We did that gimmick over and over again all across the territory and the people believed in it. Once I was in the ring, all I had to do was follow his lead and let him attack me with the taped-up can opener he kept in his tights and sell it like crazy, with the referee checking him repeatedly but not finding anything. Eventually, when we had the people in enough of a frenzy, Steele would miss a high spot (often a charge into the turnbuckle or a botched hammerlock attempt) that would allow me to steal a quick pin on him and then get the heck out of there. That, too, worked like a charm all over the territory.
People loved to come and see The Animal wreak havoc, throw chairs around, and bite open the turnbuckles and rub the stuffing in people’s eyes. No one else had that kind of effect on the people or the crowds. George “The Animal” Steele was a very strong character who was completely different from anyone else in the business. He fulfilled another “type” in the business that put butts in the seats. He would come in for a couple of the spring television tapings, get over with the fans immediately, raise hell out on the house show circuit all summer, have a bunch of good paydays, and help us all put people in the seats, then head back to his teaching and coaching jobs in the fall as if nothing happened. Everyone was amused watching Steele work and wondering how he did it. Remember, this was during the territory days—so no one who actually had Jim Myers as a teacher or coach would be able to get the word out to the people at Madison Square Garden that The Animal was really just a normal guy. And who would have believed them anyway?
Before we leave Steele, I have to tell one more story about hi
m. Once, when we were in Japan together, we were walking in an alley near our hotel and suddenly he leaned over to me and said, “Watch this, Bobby” and then he slipped into his gimmick, ran ahead, pointed at a group of people, yelled “You!” and then started flapping his arms all over the place, running toward the crowd, and sending the people scattering in all directions.
George was certainly a lot of fun to be around, had a great sense of humor, and was an incredibly influential force in the wrestling business for many, many years.
Right There With Bruno
When I came back in the summer of 1981, Bobby and I had a great run. That summer, my series with Bobby was squeezed in between a bunch of his hour Broadways with Don Muraco, and I’ll tell you, I’m glad I was squeezed in between those and that nobody asked me to go an hour with Bob, because that would have killed me. Bobby had become a superb wrestler and much more comfortable in the role of champion, and he was in tremendous physical shape. Bob was a very unique champion for the WWWF because of his amateur background and his style, but he was one of the very best champions the WWF had ever had. I would put Bruno first, but you know, I would put Bobby right there with him, and then after them, there was Hogan. They might not give Bobby that much credit, but I was in the ring with all three of them and Morales too, so I will, and I mean it. The funny thing about Bobby though, the fans never accepted him as much as they should have. In some cities, the fans would chant “Howdy Doody” at him and if they were taping, the producers let that get on television, and as you know, in this business, television dictated everything. I thought the office should have continued to push Bobby in a more respectful way than they did.