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

by Bob Backlund

  People sometimes ask why the WWF’s cage match had the stipulation that the way to win the match was to escape the cage, rather than to soundly defeat your opponent for a three count by a referee. Not having the cage match end by a pin or submission was a way to keep heat on the loser and to not have to have him lay down for a pin. Remember that many of my heels would go on to wrestle Pedro for the Intercontinental title after their series with me. If I destroyed them, their ability to draw money as a challenger to Pedro in that subsequent match would be weakened. It was a delicate dance—I had to beat them decisively to send the fans home happy, but not so decisively that there wasn’t still considerable doubt as to whether that guy could beat Pedro the following month, or at the local arena card where that match might be the headliner being relied upon to draw the house.

  So all of that is a lead up to June 28, 1982—the blowoff with Snuka at the Garden in the cage—in what may well have been the most anticipated title defense of my entire career. The match was so hot, Vince Sr. had no misgivings about going back to the Garden three weeks after our last Garden bout instead of the usual five—which, of course, gave them two weeks less time to promote the match and the card. It didn’t much matter though, because the cage match with Snuka drew the largest house of my career at the Garden. The Arena and the Felt Forum were both sold out for the event, and there were a lot of people turned away that night. I don’t know what the precise paid attendance numbers were, and I’m not sure that anyone other than Vince Sr. ever really did, but I do know that my paycheck from that match was higher than anything I had ever seen at the Garden before.

  Contrary to rumor, Vince Sr. never planned to change the belt that night. The fact that there were a lot of photographers, particularly from Japan, at ringside that night was simply an indication of how much interest there was internationally in this match. My cage match with Snuka was simply the logical end to a tremendous series of matches—as good as any that I had ever had in my career with anyone.

  That night was absolutely one of the most electrifying nights of my career. The people were on edge. It was just one of those nights when everyone coming into the building knew that they were going to see something truly special. Our match was all anyone was talking about.

  Making Magic

  What Bobby and I went on to do in New York City was to make magic, you know what I’m saying? It was just magical out there. It was a happening. And the people who were there that night will never forget it.

  —“Superfly” Jimmy Snuka

  The match had a strange extra stipulation, that the only way to win the match was to go out the door of the cage, not over the top. The changes to the normal cage match rules were actually announced in the Garden that night so everyone would be clear about the rule change. Although it was hyped that this rules change had been slipped into the “contract” for the rematch by my manager Arnold Skaaland, there were actually two real-life reasons for that change. First, the booked finish had Snuka climbing up to the top of the cage, pausing there to look around, diving off, missing me, and crashing into the mat, allowing me to escape. That finish wouldn’t have made any sense if Snuka could have simply turned around at the top and climbed out of the cage instead of trying to jump down on me. So we needed the rules change to take care of that. Second, and probably more important, we needed protection against an accident. Snuka was getting a reputation among the boys for frequently being under the influence of marijuana and, thus, sometimes being a little unstable when climbing and balancing on the top rope. Because it was known that Snuka was sometimes messed up when he wrestled, the office was concerned about whether this finish would come off cleanly, both for Jimmy and for the match.

  To be fair to Jimmy, this was hardly an easy finish for him to execute. Vince Sr. was asking Jimmy, with all of that adrenaline pumping through his body, to climb to the top rope in the middle of Madison Square Garden, then turn around and climb another three feet of wobbly chain link fence to the unstable top of two intersecting sections of that chain link fence being held together by a steel cable. He was then to perch his 250-pound frame up there while sweating profusely and bleeding from multiple cuts on his face, and time his leap fifteen feet down onto the mat to both avoid me and avoid hurting himself upon landing.

  No problem, right? Just another day at the office.

  There were just too many variables involved to run that finish without protection. Vince Sr. needed that stipulation to make sure that if Snuka slipped off the top of the cage and accidentally fell to the arena floor, Vince Sr. wouldn’t have had to put the belt on him.

  Of course, as everyone knows, the match came off perfectly. The night was a little unusual in that the challenger usually came out to the ring first, but on that night, I wanted to be out in the ring so that Snuka could play up his entrance to the fans just a little bit more. When Snuka came out, he carefully identified which corner of the cage seemed to be the most stable to use for his leap, and he kept track of that corner throughout the match. When the time came, he climbed to the top rope and then to the top of the cage without incident, perched up there for a beautiful photo op for the thousands of people who were ready with their cameras, and then, with flash bulbs sparkling all over the arena, timed his leap perfectly and landed it (missing me) without injuring either one of us.

  All that was left for me to do at that point was to crawl out the door and get to the arena floor, where Vince McMahon Jr. was waiting to do a post-match interview with the winner. It was a storybook ending to a great feud, the highest high spot (both literally and figuratively) of any finish I was ever part of, and certainly one of the two or three most memorable nights of my nearly forty-year career in this business.

  Although Snuka and I were done at the Garden before the end of June 1982, there were bouts between us scheduled all over North America until mid-September. Only the Madison Square Garden got that finish, though. Because that finish was so risky and so brutal on Jimmy’s knees, back, and elbows, we could not replicate it in all the major arenas around the territory. In many of the other arenas, we did Texas Death Matches or return matches with special guest referees. Intercontinental Champion Pedro Morales was the special referee most often called on to maintain order in those bouts.

  As the summer wore on, however, an interesting thing was happening. Jimmy started to get more and more cheers from the fans, and our matches started to revert to more scientific wrestling matches rather than the fierce brawls we had at the Garden. The fans were turning Jimmy Snuka into a babyface. By the time I had my last title match with Jimmy at the Spectrum in Philadelphia in September 1982, Jimmy’s unplanned face turn was nearly complete. In that “return” match, Jimmy barely played the heel, I beat him cleanly with an inside cradle in the middle of the ring, and when he popped up, he stared me in the face, and I extended a hand to him, and he shook it. The fans could not believe what they were watching, but they were cheering madly for it. It had been a wild and crazy six-month run, which took Jimmy Snuka from one of the most feared and hated rulebreakers the federation had ever seen to an unplanned babyface turn that more or less evolved naturally before the fans’ eyes.

  Toward the end of our series of matches, as things were winding down, Vince Sr. pulled me aside at a television taping and talked to me about Snuka. He asked me, straight out, whether I thought Jimmy could be the world champion. I told Vince Sr. that Snuka’s timing in the ring was as good as anybody’s I had ever worked with in the WWF, and that Jimmy had the look and the ability necessary to be a great champion in the ring. I talked to Vince Sr. about Jimmy’s versatility in the ring, and how he had the repertoire of moves to work with people of different styles, from amateur-oriented guys like me, to full-out brawlers like Pedro. But then, as it always did with Jimmy, our conversation turned to the extracurricular activities that he was involved in—most particularly his propensity to get stoned, and whether, given that reality, Jimmy could be relied upon to hold down the top spot on the card. T
he question in Vince Sr.’s mind was whether Jimmy could be relied upon to show up every night, and to show up prepared and ready to wrestle in the main event in every building he appeared in.

  I know that after the fans had turned Snuka into a babyface, Vince Sr. was thinking about making Snuka the next champion. We talked about it. Ultimately, however, Vince Sr. decided not to give him a run with either the world title or the Intercontinental belt because the front office guys concluded that there were just too many negatives on the personal side to entrust the business to him. It would take a man like Vince McMahon Sr. to make a decision that would value integrity over money—and that’s exactly what he did in making the decision not to put a belt on Snuka, who was unquestionably as big a draw as anyone in the federation at that time. Had it not been for his personal demons, I think Snuka would have ended up with the world title sometime in 1982, either by taking it directly from me, or by quickly winning it from a transitional heel champion. What I respected most about that whole episode, though, is that once again, Vince McMahon Sr. came to me directly—he just came right out and asked me, “What would you think of Snuka as a champion?” To me, that indicated the level of trust and respect that I had earned from Vince Sr.—a fact that made me very happy.

  Snuka, of course, went on to turn babyface in September 1982. The office, faced with the fact that they couldn’t maintain the façade of Jimmy as heel any longer, scrambled to come up with a scenario that would make it official. Ultimately, they did it through the Buddy Rogers Corner television vignette. There, Rogers, who had been the federation’s first world champion in 1963, returned to the federation and “exposed” the fact that Captain Lou Albano had been “stealing” all of Snuka’s gate money, and that Jimmy was, in fact, broke. Jimmy then “fired” Albano, and asked Buddy Rogers to be his new manager. In reality, Buddy was hired back because he needed the money, and Vince Sr. needed someone to drive Jimmy around and make sure that he got to the arenas on time and in proper shape to wrestle.

  Jimmy got attacked and took a piledriver on the concrete floor by Ray Stevens in a memorable television angle, and Jimmy’s face turn was complete.

  From there, Snuka would go on to have a memorable feud with Ray “The Crippler” Stevens that headlined many buildings in the fall of 1982 and then a sensational feud with Don Muraco over the Intercontinental title in the summer and fall of 1983. By that point, though, Buddy Rogers had quit driving Snuka because, as it was explained to me, he didn’t want to be associated with Snuka’s continuing drug use and chemical dependence.

  Vince Sr. was running more than one show a day on many days, and was using Muraco’s Intercontinental title defense as the main event on many of the cards where I did not appear to defend the world title. Given that newfound responsibility that the Intercontinental Champion was shouldering, Jimmy’s personal demons kept him from getting a run with that belt as well. Of course, by that time, Jimmy’s personal problems extended well beyond chemical dependence after his girlfriend, Nancy Argentino, was found dead in his motel room in Allentown in May 1983 after a television taping, and Jimmy found himself at the center of a major crimes investigation. I had left for home hours before this tragedy occurred because I only recorded promo interviews and did not wrestle that night at the Allentown taping, so my work was done late in the afternoon.

  That same night, another young wrestler on the roster, Eddie Gilbert, was involved in a serious car accident.

  Needless to say, it was a tough night for the federation. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

  At the television tapings in Allentown the week before the steel cage blowoff with Snuka at the Garden, I had picked up my bookings for the upcoming three weeks and saw the following odd notation in Vince’s calendar.

  Saturday, July 3

  Atlanta, GAWTBS studios TV

  Sunday, July 4

  Atlanta, GAWTBS studios TV

  Sunday, July 4

  Atlanta, GAOmni

  Seeing that I was heading down to the Omni, which had become the Madison Square Garden of the NWA, for a match on July 4, I figured this was going to be something pretty big. Likewise, WTBS out of Atlanta had become one of the first national television superstations that was broadcast all over the country, which had provided the NWA with a nationwide promotional platform. I tracked Vince Sr. down and asked him who I’d be wrestling there. He told me that I would be facing the current NWA World Heavyweight Champion, Ric Flair, in a world title unification match.

  The match had been arranged between Vince Sr., Jim Barnett, who at the time was still running Georgia Championship Wrestling, and Jim Crockett, the promoter in charge of the Mid-Atlantic region and the then-president of the NWA.

  There were some pretty interesting goings-on between the NWA and the WWF at the time. In June 1982, Vince Sr. and his partners sold their interests in Capitol Wrestling Corporation (the entity that ran the WWF) to Vince’s son. Vince Jr. had until mid-1983 to make the required payments to acquire the shares. I think this whole situation created some heartburn among some of the major players in the NWA, because although those guys had enduring relationships and reverence for Vince Sr., they didn’t really like or trust Vince Jr. Vince Sr. was still in charge of the booking, however, and had made the arrangements for the match with Jim Barnett, who I knew well from my days wrestling for him in Georgia. I was actually excited to go down there and have a match like this with Flair.

  Vince hadn’t said anything to me about unifying the titles, so I knew that the booking would be either a Broadway or some sort of inconclusive finish that I would get from Barnett when I got down there. If Vince Sr. had agreed to a title change, even for a short period, I know that he would have sat me down and explained the booking to me before I left for Atlanta—as he had when we did the short switch with Inoki in Japan in 1979.

  I went down to Atlanta, wrestled a match in the ring in the WTBS studios, and then, the following day, did a face-to-face interview with Flair at ringside conducted by Gordon Solie. I had wrestled Flair once a couple of years earlier up in Toronto for Frank Tunney when Flair was the NWA’s US Champion, so I knew him to be a great performer in the ring. I had also been around Ric for a time in Florida—so we knew each other well enough. Ric had really come into his own and grown into his character since defeating Harley Race for the NWA World Heavyweight Championship, and had blossomed into an enormous box office draw all over the NWA territory. Flair was being bankrolled by the NWA to live his character, and as such, was legitimately wearing expensive suits, and Rolex watches, and alligator shoes, and being chauffeured around the territory in a limousine. His gimmick had gotten him over as a larger-than-life character with the NWA fans who were turning out in droves to see him wherever he went.

  Unlike Harley and I, however, Ric and I did not have a long history together, or a shared level of trust. Ric and I were not close.

  I knew that Flair was a good athlete and a great performer, though, so I knew we were going to have a heck of a match. I felt pretty relaxed during the interview with Gordon Solie, and just tried to look into the camera and give the NWA fans a straightforward, credible interview like any professional athlete preparing to compete for a world championship would give. Ric, who was better on the microphone than I was the day he came out of the womb, gave a somewhat toned-down and respectful, but still pretty cocky accounting of himself. That interview was broadcast across the country on Superstation WTBS, and set the stage for our confrontation. It would be a matchup of two world champions with very different styles: Ric, as the rich, flashy, entitled champion—and me, as the amateur-based, hardworking man-of-the-people. Even though the fans in Atlanta hadn’t seen me regularly for five years, they got behind me right away as someone who had the credentials to shut Flair up, take his belt, and unify the world championship. I also liked Gordon Solie a lot—he had been very polite and complimentary to me, and the other wrestlers at the studio had greeted me kindly.

  That Sunday taping concluded earl
y in the afternoon, and we went right to the Omni from there. When I got to the locker room at the Omni, I got a workout in while they were setting up the ring, but then, as I was getting ready and doing the stuff that I normally do, something didn’t feel right. I don’t know why, but I just had a sixth-sense that something was wrong.

  No one had greeted me at the arena when I arrived, and no one had come around to talk about the finish or what we were going to do. In the several other world title unification matches that I had done with Harley in New York with Vince Sr., in Miami with Eddie Graham, in St. Louis with Sam Muchnick, or in Toronto with Frank Tunney, we had always had a little meeting with the promoter in the dressing room beforehand to talk about how the match was going to go. On each of those occasions, I had spent a few minutes talking with my opponents about what things we each wanted to get into the match and how best to capture the hearts and minds of the people. That night at the Omni, however, there was no sign of either Barnett or Crockett, or Flair.

  Something just felt different—and not in a good way.

  I called Vince Sr. from a payphone in one of the Omni’s hallways, explained to him that although I couldn’t put my finger on anything specific, after being in so many different places with the belt wrestling for so many different promoters, there was something fishy going on that I didn’t like. Something didn’t feel like business as usual.

  I was worried that there might have been some sort of double-cross in the works.