by Bob Backlund
The first of these new heels to get his run at MSG was not really a “new” heel, but a retread from 1979 in the person of Greg Valentine. Greg and I had a great two-match series at the Garden in February and March 1979, and now, two and a half years later, Greg was back from a very successful run in Jim Crockett’s Mid-Atlantic territory and ready for another run in New York. Vince Sr. liked Greg a lot and wanted to do something new and different with him at the Garden right off the bat, so Vince asked me at the TVs to come up with an interesting finish for our October 1981 title match at the Garden that would get people to come back for the return match.
In response to Vince Sr.’s request, I came up with what has become known as “The Black Trunks Screwjob.” That night, Greg and I both came to the ring wearing identical black trunks. When we had the crowd at their high point, Greg got me up in the airplane spin and I kicked the referee in the head, knocking him down. The impact caused Greg to lose his balance. I fell on top of him and the ref counted to three, but then Greg jumped up and pretended he was the guy that was on top and put his hands up in the air. The referee, who was disoriented from being kicked in the head, raised Greg’s hand and handed him the WWF championship belt as I lay dazed and dizzy down on the mat.
No one could figure out what had just happened.
On cue, a number of WWF and New York State Athletic Commission officials rushed into the ring. The people coming into the ring was all part of the angle—it was all to sell the idea that the referee had made a huge error and had cost me the belt. The Commission guys were told what to say and how to act to make it all seem totally realistic. Greg, meanwhile, played it perfectly by hurrying out of the ring and taking the belt back to the dressing room. Arnold played his part by arguing with the referee, gesturing wildly, and pleading our case to the Commission officials.
The crowd at the Garden was stunned.
Once we got back into the dressing room area, Greg gave the belt back to me, and we all had a good laugh. Back out in the ringside area, however, it was announced that due to the referee’s error, the WWF title had been vacated and would be “held up” pending a rematch the following month. This little angle was created just for Madison Square Garden to add a little intrigue to the series. During the remainder of October and November, the rest of the WWF territory was none the wiser as I continued to hold and defend the belt everywhere else I went.
I enjoyed my matches with Greg, and had a lot of respect for him, so it was fun to do this with him and put a little bit of a rub on him. The way I originally pitched the idea, Greg was going to carry the title for a month across the territory pending our rematch at the Garden where I would get the belt back—but Vince Sr. didn’t want to do that. He wanted me to have a title run to rival Bruno’s—and he thought that my holding the title for an unbroken length of time gave me more strength—so he didn’t want to let Greg get the title, even for just a month. Still, this little angle created some additional fan interest and brought the house back stronger for the following month—so it served its purpose.
This little angle, however, brings into focus how important the referee can be in the success or failure of a match. In my era, most of the time, the referees did not know the finish of any given match ahead of time. That information was withheld from them to make their reactions in the ring more realistic—but it also meant that it was up to the wrestlers to pay attention at all times. If you had your shoulders down on the mat and the referee was counting, you had to make sure to remember to kick out so he wouldn’t count you out, since he didn’t know the outcome. That’s why, if you watch closely, a lot of the time, the referees would not only count with their hand slapping the mat, they would also yell the count so the wrestlers would be aware of what the count was.
The referees were also critical in the execution of high spots. If you executed a high spot and got a guy down into a winning combination, and the referee wasn’t right on top of the move and down on the mat to make a count, the people wouldn’t pop and the entire sequence would fall flat. The referee needed to be right there with you, in the flow of the match, anticipating what you were about to do in order to maximize the pop on each move. Referees like Dick Kroll, Dick Woherlie, Tim White, and Mario Savoldi were very good at that, and you knew they’d enhance the quality of the match. Others were not so good. Some of the referees were WWF guys, and some of them were athletic commission guys. If we drew one of the less-than-stellar commission guys on any given card, Vince Sr. would always ensure that he didn’t work the important matches.
People also often ask how it was determined which heel went with which manager. Vince Sr. would figure out which heel’s character would “fit” better with whom, and how badly a particular heel needed a talker. “Superstar” Billy Graham, for example, was one of the best talkers in the industry, so he didn’t need a talker, and that’s why they put him with the Grand Wizard both times. The Wizard was a good talker, but he was not the best of the three. Albano was loud and crazy, and as such, he generally got the crazy or wild heels that fit best with him. He was also known to be the “Guiding Light” of heel tag teams, so he generally got all of those. Freddie Blassie, on the other hand, was diabolical, and gave a great heel interview because he’d been heeling his whole life. He was also the head of “Blassie’s Army”—which was usually comprised of the strongest, most muscular heels, and most of the foreign heels, who he would always claim to have “discovered” on his most recent trip to Europe or the Orient.
Albano was a huge asset to the company because he could not only talk people into the seats, he could also still occasionally get into the ring and work. When they put Albano into the ring, it put a lot of people in the seats who wanted to see him get his comeuppance. Although Blassie had been a monster heel in his day, he really couldn’t work or take bumps anymore because his knees were shot from jumping off the ropes his whole career while having to protect the down guy. The Grand Wizard (Ernie Roth) was really more of a behind-the-scenes guy who helped the office with booking ideas. Ernie weighed 125 pounds soaking wet, so we weren’t about to put any bumps on him.
Whenever I considered taking a bump, I always tried to think about Freddie Blassie, who by that point was already walking with the aid of a cane, and thought about what that bump was going to do to me ten years down the road. Take Hulk Hogan, for example. Think about how many times in his career he had to execute that running legdrop. That became his signature move, and, thus, one that he was expected to execute just about every night. That means that on around three hundred nights a year, Hulk Hogan was jumping up in the air, and dropping his 310-pound frame on his pelvis and his wrists, which he used night after night to break the fall. Any wonder why Hogan has back problems now.
There were definitely a lot of things to worry about inside the ring. Some high spots afforded you more control than others. Consider the bodyslam. If you didn’t completely trust the guy bodyslamming you, you could hang onto his trunks or put your lower hand on his quad and at least partially control what part of your body hit the canvas first, and where you ended up. Likewise, on a piledriver, you’d grab the back of the offensive guy’s knees and legs and he would then bend his knees as he fell back, and you would either get your hands on the mat, or rotate them around and push up on the guy’s knees as you fell to ensure that your head never actually hit the mat. The vertical suplex was a more dangerous move because you had less control and had to trust your opponent to start in the right spot, aim in the right direction, and then drop you onto the mat backward with enough clearance to ensure that you could get your feet to hit first, and that no part of your body would hit the ropes or the turnbuckles on the way down.
I didn’t like getting thrown over the top rope, because the drop to the floor was hard to time. Because you also never knew exactly where your opponent was going to throw you, there was always the risk that you would hit a table or a chair or something else in the ringside area on the way down. I got the worst injury I ever had
in the business during my first three months wrestling in Baton Rouge when I went over the top rope in a battle royal, and hit my hip on the steel ring apron on the way down. My whole side was black and blue down for days after that, and frankly, I felt that injury my whole career.
A lot of the submission holds, like the sleeperhold, the Cobra Clutch, the Boston crab, or the figure-four leglock would really work if your opponent applied pressure to the hold, so if you actually allowed your opponent to put one of those moves on you, you had to trust that the guy was working with you. Other moves, like the brain buster, had a big “if” factor attached: namely that if the person applying the hold was off by even a little bit or lost his grip on you because of sweat or whatever, you could get seriously injured. Fortunately, with only a couple of exceptions, the guys who made it into the ring with me in the championship matches in the WWF were generally the top performing pros in the prime of their careers.
Typically, my opponents were very careful in the ring with me and didn’t want me to get hurt because they were usually working multiple dates with me in the territory, so they needed and wanted me to be there to ensure their payday. Obviously, during the years that I was champion, I was the main event on the card, and in any given month would generally wrestle the same three or four guys all over the territory—so the guys I wrestled had a significant financial stake in making sure that we both got into and out of each match healthy and in one piece.
Although the WWF title was “held up” at Madison Square Garden, I continued to defend the belt around the rest of the territory in October and November 1981 against Muraco, and finishing up series with Khan and Mosca in some of the secondary and tertiary cities and towns. During the month, Don and I did our sixth and seventh one-hour Broadways in Binghamton and New Haven, to packed houses at the Broome County Arena and Veterans Memorial Coliseum, respectively. I think the fans in those two towns were somewhat incredulous to watch the federation’s two champions go at it to a one-hour time limit in their towns, and when those matches were over, the people knew that they had seen something special. For our part, Don and I were continuing to enjoy working together as the top two guys in the federation thrilling the fans with our epic battles.
On November 23, 1981, Greg Valentine and I were back in the Garden to decide the fate of the “vacant” WWF title. The angle worked, because the house came back stronger than it had been the month before for our first match. When Vince Sr. brought us together for the pre-match discussion, he told us that since Greg had gotten such a nice rub from getting his hand raised in the first match, he wanted the second match to be a decisive victory for me—so I would be going over by pinfall and regaining (or retaining!) the title, and then Valentine would be entering a feud with Pedro Morales over the Intercontinental title. On that same night, because Don was reaching the end of his run with the WWF and getting ready to leave the territory, Pedro was slated to get his revenge over Muraco and to win back the Intercontinental Heavyweight Championship.
They put the title back on Morales, because after taking a little break, Pedro expressed interest in getting back into a more regular role with the company. Pedro had a pretty reliable fan base of Puerto Ricans who would come out to see him in many of the larger cities and towns in the Northeast. Even though we were both babyfaces, there was no threat of redundancy in our title defenses because our styles were so different. Pedro was a brawler like Bruno was, and I was more of a collegiate-style scientific wrestler, so our matches were always very different making it easy for us to share a card.
Interestingly, Dusty Rhodes was also back in New York on that card. It certainly seemed to me that Dusty was working Vince Sr. pretty hard to get booked and get “over” up here, but the reality was that Vince Sr. was way ahead of Dusty and because of what Eddie Graham had warned him about, he really didn’t have any desire to see that happen. On the November card, for example, Dusty was matched up against King Kong Mosca in a pretty interesting babyface-heel matchup that could have main-evented many of our secondary towns. If Vince Sr. was interested in building Dusty up to go anywhere in the WWF, he would have put Dusty over Mosca cleanly in that match. Mosca was about to leave the territory and was already doing clean jobs for Pat Patterson all over the territory. Instead, Vince Sr. booked the match to a DQ finish, which tells me that Vince saw Dusty’s appearance as nothing more than a novelty act and a favor to Eddie Graham.
At the TVs the next day in Allentown, before the tapings started, they announced to the people that Pedro had won the title from Muraco at the Garden the night before. This allowed them to immediately run the angle with Valentine challenging Pedro and suplexing him on the concrete floor to get that feud off the ground. It had its desired effect—as the people were infuriated by Valentine’s actions. It was also the first time that anyone had seen Pedro hurt like that before, so it perfectly set up Pedro and Greg to have a hot feud around the territory headlining some of the smaller buildings, and in combination with my main-event title matches in the larger buildings.
Before that, though, Muraco and I had some unfinished business to attend to over the next ten days in Landover, Boston, and Pittsburgh. I had been booked into return “title versus title” matches with Muraco, who, of course, had already lost the Intercontinental belt to Pedro. But because only the very few people who had satellite dishes at the time would have seen the Intercontinental title change at the Garden on MSG-Cablevision, Muraco came to the ring in those towns still wearing the Intercontinental Heavyweight Championship. The promoters in each of those cities wanted to see me beat Muraco before anyone learned that Morales beat him, because that would have affected the gate and taken away the champion vs. champion main-event rematch at the top of the card. So they just held back the TV taping in those three markets, kept Pedro and Muraco on the same routing to make sure that the belt was in the building on those nights, and kept the belt on Muraco in those cities to allow for these remaining matches to play out. Certainly anyone who was at the Garden to witness the title change and then happened to find themselves in the buildings in Boston, Landover, or Pittsburgh during the next couple of weeks would have been very confused—but in the days before the Internet, all of this was possible.
Boston was a rough city—they liked cage matches, and we hadn’t done one in a while up there, so they put Don and me into a cage matchup there—with me going over Muraco when he got himself caught up between the ropes and the cage, allowing me to go out the door. In Landover, we did a Texas Death Match much like the one we had done at the Garden.
I was definitely sad to see Don go so soon—as I think he had gotten over with the people even more than Vince Sr. had imagined. I would put Don right up there with Sergeant Slaughter as the two most pleasant heel surprises of my time in the WWF. History will dictate which of those battles was the more compelling one to the fans in the WWF—but I certainly enjoyed working with both of them immensely.
21
The Peak (1982)
“Infect others with your enthusiasm, and teamwork will be the inevitable result.”
—Napoleon Hill, “Inspire Teamwork”
As we turned the calendar to 1982, I was still battling Greg Valentine around the territory in return matches in many of the major cities—but the storyline on television was the arrival of “The East-West Connection,” Adrian Adonis and Jesse “The Body” Ventura from Verne Gagne’s AWA. Neither Adonis nor Ventura had ever appeared in WWF rings before, and both were colorful heels who were larger than life in their own way. Adonis, who hailed from New York City (the “East” half of the tandem), was a leather-clad, fast-talking hipster and the master of “Goodnight Irene”—a deadly sleeperhold that had allegedly been banned in many cities because it would render Adonis’ opponents unconscious. Ventura, on the other hand, was a tall, deeply tanned muscle man from San Diego (the “West” half of the team), who wore tassels in his bleached blonde hair and dangling earrings, and came to the ring clad in colorful robes. He was the master
of the “Body Breaker”—an over-the-shoulder backbreaker that brought a quick submission from everyone caught in its clutches. Both were managed by “The Hollywood Fashion Plate,” Classy Freddie Blassie.
Although the “East-West Connection” had been a very successful tag-team combination in the AWA, as the storyline went, Blassie had decided to break them up to run them against me in succession. That way, Blassie explained on television, one could soften me up for the other, and on any given night somewhere in the territory, one of the two would be ready to claim the WWF title for Blassie’s army. These battles began at the All-Star wrestling TV taping in Hamburg at the very beginning of 1982, at which Pedro Morales and I wrestled the dark match against Adonis and Ventura just to give the four of us a chance to get our timing down with each other. Pedro was going to be defending the Intercontinental Championship belt against both Adonis and Ventura, and given that none of us had spent much, if any, time in the ring with each other, the four of us wrestled to a pretty entertaining countout in Hamburg to give each of us a chance to get some sequences down.
Around the territory at the beginning of 1982, Adonis and Ventura got staggered title matches, with Ventura getting the first shot in places like the Meadowlands, Baltimore, and Boston, while Adonis got the first crack in places like New York City, Hartford, and Landover. All the while, Blassie explained his strategic brilliance on the televised interviews that were being “bicycled” all over the territory, and the tandem of Adonis and Ventura drew great business with me nearly everywhere we went.