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

by Bob Backlund

  The middle of 1983 was a time of transition in the office, and it definitely showed in some of the bookings around the territory. Things began to feel less planned and less organized as Vince Sr. started to loosen his grip. Whereas bookings around the territory used to follow a clearly set schedule and matches and challengers followed a more predictable order, now we were traveling to places that we had never been before and running two or sometimes even three cards a day, and as a consequence, the overall quality of the cards started to diminish.

  I faced a strange array of challengers to the title in the summer of 1983, from the expected matches against Muraco, Koloff, and Slaughter in the larger arenas, to other, less plausible matches against Afa, Mr. Fuji, and Iron Mike Sharpe in some of the smaller towns. I think the theory was that simply getting the world champion and a world title match would be enough to draw a house—but as I have always said, it takes two to tango, and it didn’t make a whole lot of sense to the fans to see Mr. Fuji getting a title match against me when he had lost a mid-card match in the town a month or two before. That is not to take anything away from Mr. Fuji’s ability to put on a great match—it’s simply a commentary on the fact that the match wouldn’t necessarily be a great box office draw in advance of the card.

  Around that time same time, a twenty-two year-old kid by the name of Eddie Gilbert, another second-generation wrestler, had just arrived in the territory. Vince Sr. approached me at the television taping where Eddie debuted and asked me if I would mentor him a little bit by taking him under my wing, train with him, and keep my eye on him out on the road. Naturally, because Vince Sr. was asking, I agreed, and set about to show Eddie the right way to live his life and do the things a young wrestler needed to do to work his way up the ladder. I didn’t know at the time why Vince Sr. was asking, but as I would soon find out, Eddie had already taken some shortcuts.

  I made time for Eddie, worked out with him, and showed him how to diet to keep his body in top form. Then, one night in Salisbury, Maryland, he was scheduled to wrestle in a singles bout and he was so goofed out on drugs that his opponent had to carry him through the entire match. A few minutes in, I went down to the ring, threw Eddie over my shoulder, and carried him back to the dressing room because he was such an embarrassment. I was furious with him—and when I confronted him about it, he wouldn’t look me in the eye, and he wouldn’t even admit that he was doing drugs.

  That’s what the wrestling business can do to you—it can eat you alive if you let it.

  I didn’t enjoy working with Gilbert not only because was he not doing things the right way, but because he didn’t even want to acknowledge he had a problem. I think Vince was hoping that my example would rub off on him, but Gilbert was already caught up in the rat race as young as he was in 1983. Once that happened, and once I realized that he wasn’t willing to even acknowledge that he had a problem, I didn’t care to be around him anymore.

  I didn’t even have to tell Vince about what had happened—he had already heard about it from Phil Zacko—the promoter that night. Someone from the front office was in charge of every building where we appeared, and would report in to Vince Sr. either at the end of the night or the next morning. Even though Vince Sr. wasn’t out on the road other than at the Garden, he knew everything that went on at the matches, from how big the gate was, to who no-showed, to what matches got the best crowd reaction, from the agent on duty. Anything out of the ordinary would be reported.

  Shortly after that, Eddie was involved in a horrific car accident after a television taping in May in Allentown, during which he suffered serious neck and chest injuries. That also happened to be the same night that Jimmy Snuka’s girlfriend was found dead at the motel where the boys were staying. Needless to say, that was a long and tragic night for a lot of people, and the weeks that followed were a pretty tough time for the business. After the car accident, Eddie had to recuperate for nearly four months, and didn’t return to the circuit until the fall.

  We made our second collective trip out to California, again for matches in Los Angeles and San Diego on July 2 and 3. We flew commercial—everybody just flew to LAX from wherever they were on the circuit at the time. Since I had wrestled in upstate New York the day before—I had driven home that night and flew out from Hartford the next day and then rented a car to use in California.

  Once again, the cards were a mix of people who had wrestled in the promotions out on the West Coast, and our guys. I main-evented the buildings on both nights, against Sarge in Los Angeles, and against Koloff in San Diego. We drew much better crowds this second time around, and it was exciting to be bringing our brand of wrestling to a new audience. When you’re wrestling in an unfamiliar place, you don’t really do anything any differently—you just develop the storylines the same way and draw the people in.

  Back in those days, we didn’t need scriptwriters or long televised vignettes. We could get people to love us or hate us just by being a good worker in the ring, and doing things we knew would draw the fans into the match. Given enough time in the ring on a given night, a gifted worker could get the people whether or not the person had any television exposure beforehand. The people would tell you what your next move should be, and the direction you should take the match. You can’t script or choreograph the next thing you should do in a wrestling match–because you can’t plan how the crowd is going to react to a certain move. You have to be able to listen to what the people are telling you, react, and then reflect that back at them without them knowing you are doing it. That’s the art of professional wrestling—and I’m afraid that art is passing into history with my generation of wrestlers—the last group of guys who actually know how to do this and are capable of teaching it to the next generation.

  During the summer of 1983, as soon as school let out, we had another of the regular biannual visits from George “The Animal” Steele. Just as he had done so many times previously, Steele took about one television taping to get his wild-man gimmick “over” with the fans. At the June Garden card where Sarge had beaten me by countout, Steele had mauled Chief Jay Strongbow to a bloody pulp, to the point where the match had to be stopped. That was all it took to set up the inevitable main event with me for the following month.

  As Gorilla Monsoon used to love to say in response to watching the wrestling fans, “people are basically sadistic,” and although many of them were legitimately frightened of “The Animal,” they couldn’t wait to buy tickets to the July Garden card where the same guy who had just mauled the Chief would get his chance to become the world champion. And wouldn’t you know it, we sold out both the Garden and the Felt Forum that night—and turned several hundred people away from the Garden. The match had sold through so well that even though we hadn’t really been planning for it, Vince Sr. couldn’t help but call for an inconclusive finish. Steele was just so over with the fans that all it took was for him to come running out into the ring, pull off his shirt to expose the jungle of back hair that he had, eat a turnbuckle, and jam me with the tape-wrapped can-opener that he kept hidden in his boot or his tights or his mouth, or wherever the referee wasn’t looking for it.

  The fans just ate it up. It was a novelty act, and you couldn’t go to it too often, but the “fight for your life” gimmick was box office gold all around the territory, and, if you think about it, all around the world. People came out in droves all over the NWA territory and in Japan, the Caribbean, Mexico, and Australia to see Abdullah the Butcher carve people up with a fork night after night, or to see the Sheik conjure up and throw a fireball at someone. In the WWF, no one had mastered the gimmick like George Steele had—and the people just kept coming out to watch the mayhem.

  Our first match at the Garden was booked to end in a disqualification after the referee saw me hit Steele with the object after I finally got it away from him. It was a passion play intended to make the fans empathize with me for having to get into the ring and wrestle this guy at all, and then to get them to hate the referee for being
so stupid. And what red-blooded American guy doesn’t love to rain hatred down on umpires or referees? The matches with Steele were almost all booked this way, because they were a guaranteed hit.

  We came back the following month in the rematch, which was booked as a no-holds-barred Texas Death Match in some places, and just as a “return bout” in others—but the plan in nearly all of those rematches was for Steele to not let me into the ring, and for the referee to have no ability to control him to get him to let me into the ring—and to play off of the predicament for five or seven minutes while the fans became increasingly emotional just watching the simple act of me trying to climb into the ring. Finally, I would just take off my ring jacket outside the ring, hand the belt to Arnold, sneak into the ring, make one move, trick George, pin him, and escape further danger before anyone knew what had happened.

  It was a booking plan that George and I had worked out together, and it got the fans night after night after night around the territory in 1983. As I have said before, it wasn’t my favorite series, because I preferred the old-school method of actually getting to wrestle with someone and develop the storyline—but there was no doubting the effectiveness of this series in putting butts in the seats around the territory.

  Doing the Honors

  In 1983 we had two matches again, and after the first match ended inconclusively, Mr. McMahon asked me, again, for the same finish: to put Bobby over in a very short period of time. He looked at me, as if he suddenly remembered what had happened the last time he asked me that, but I just looked at him and said, “Sure.” I think that shocked the hell out of him, because he looked at me and said, “Jim, why is it that you are agreeing this time when you refused last time?” And I explained to him that I agreed with the finish this time because I thought Bobby, who by that time had been the champion for almost six years, was ready for that, and I was at the point in my career where it was the right thing to do. And the fans loved it.

  After I did the honors for Bobby at the Garden in 1983, Mr. McMahon Sr. called me into his office and he had tears in his eyes, and he said, “Jim, you’ve been really good to us for a lot of years, and I don’t want you to just become another one of the hang-arounds in the name of a few extra bucks. I think it is time for your career to end right here in the WWF. I think Mr. McMahon might have sensed that his time was short, because he was very emotional. We put our arms around each other, we hugged, and that was the end of my career … I thought.

  —George “The Animal” Steele

  During the summer of 1983, Vince Sr. was also experimenting with a lot of eight-man and ten-man tag-team matches in main events or sub-main events around the territory. These matches would allow you to tell more of a story than you could in a battle royal, but the point of these matches was to give the people a different visual, and to see whether matches of this size would attract people’s interest at the box office. It was also a way of recycling people who had already had big matches with me back into the ring and to mix up the matchups and just generate interest. Generally, these matches were not elimination matches like the Survivor Series matches are now. They were usually scheduled for the best three out of five falls with a two-hour time limit, which allowed for some internal storytelling and generation of some new storylines.

  I was in a number of these matches, usually paired with Andre and some combination of the territory’s other main babyfaces (Snuka, Morales, Atlas, Johnson, Putski) against the Samoans and two or three heels who were playing out their string in the territory. It was certainly a good photo-op, and an interesting visual to see five men on a side during the introductions to these matches, and then to see four men on each side hanging on to the ropes on the apron of the ring while two guys did battle in the ring. These matches, of course, were more like a night off, since everyone needed to get some things in, and even if the match went thirty or forty minutes, that left only five to eight minutes of actual in-ring time to any one guy.

  During the remainder of the summer of 1983, I wrestled Koloff, Slaughter, and Steele in the primary buildings, secondary civic centers, and finally, in many of the high school gyms or ice rinks in the smaller towns in the territory.

  The first set of August television tapings on August 2 and 3 in Allentown and Hamburg saw the first appearances of the Masked Superstar—the first masked heel to come into the territory during my tenure as WWF champion. Superstar featured a terrific-looking finishing move called the Swinging Neckbreaker, in which he would catch his opponent in a front facelock and then, holding his opponent’s other wrist in his hand, corkscrew around before slamming his opponent neck and back first into the canvas. The hold was put over from the first matches Superstar wrestled on television as one that had been “banned” in several states, and one that had crippled wrestlers across the country. The first two men he wrestled on television were stretchered out after falling to the finishing move in the ring. Vince McMahon Jr. and Pat Patterson sold the move like crazy on the television broadcast.

  Superstar was a big and agile man, and most of all, a man of mysterious origin. He was extremely articulate, and served notice, with piercing blue eyes staring through the eyeholes of his wrestling mask, that he would cripple whomever he needed to until he was granted a world title match against me. From the outset, guesses were made at his identity, as on television, announcers Vince Jr. and Pat Patterson fueled speculation that he was a famous athlete who wanted to conceal his identity.

  This was actually all a ruse. The Masked Superstar was actually a guy named Bill Eadie, who I did not get to know too well outside the ring, other than that he was a former schoolteacher who was bright, articulate, and very interested in making sure that an angle or a match was as good as he could possibly make it. Prior to coming to the WWF, he had traveled the world, and was well-experienced in telling a compelling story. Obviously, the front office loved his Swinging Neckbreaker and wanted to get that move over with the fans—and this angle accomplished that in spades!

  It was clear to anyone watching that a confrontation between us was brewing. Superstar was, without a doubt, the most interesting and awe-inspiring new heel to come to the federation in some time—and he was quickly gathering a head of steam with the fans, which did not evade the ever-present, watchful eye of Vince Sr.

  Thus, at the next set of television tapings, on September 13, 1983, Eddie Gilbert returned after recovering from his automobile accident—which had been acknowledged to the fans—and challenged the Masked Superstar to a match on television. Superstar defeated Gilbert easily after punishing him with not one but two Swinging Neckbreakers in the ring, and then threw him out of the ring and delivered the Neckbreaker to the still-recovering Gilbert out on the arena’s concrete floor. This resulted in Eddie Gilbert not just being stretchered out, but taken immediately into a waiting ambulance. The angle was a slower one—but the idea was that Superstar was going to injure my young protégé first, as a way of serving notice that I would be next.

  I always thought it was a liability to have to wear a mask in the ring because you couldn’t show your facial expressions, but Eadie was one of the most successful masked men in the wrestling business. It was an interesting gimmick, and I would put his finisher up there with Hansen’s Lariat, Slaughter’s Cobra Clutch, Snuka’s Superfly Splash, and Adonis’ Goodnight Irene as one of the three or four most “over” finishers with the people that I had seen during my tenure as champion.

  On October 8, 1983, I wrestled my first match against the Masked Superstar at the Boston Garden. The building was sold out on the strength of this match and Muraco’s cage match blowoff with Snuka over the Intercontinental title. We were coming back the following month, so I agreed to put Superstar over as strongly as possible by giving him the only other stretcher job I had done in my career. He gave me the Neckbreaker inside the ring, then threw me out of the ring where I got counted out. Arnold Skaaland was at ringside and went over to protect me, but Superstar attacked Arnold and then gave me the Neckbreak
er on the floor of the Boston Garden, and then left me laying there to get stretchered out.

  On October 23, Superstar did the same thing to me in our first match at the Madison Square Garden, but since I had already done a stretcher job there for Snuka, we didn’t want to go back to that well, so I just laid there and got counted out.

  Between those two dates, on October 12, 1983, Ernie Roth, the Grand Wizard of Wrestling, died suddenly and unexpectedly of a heart attack in Florida. Everybody loved Ernie, and the news came as quite a shock to all of us. He had been a mainstay in the WWF for a long, long time, and during his tenure, had managed most of the top guys in the business. He was just terrific on the microphone selling his heels and putting butts in the seats with his scholarly promos. He helped Vince Sr. behind the scenes with tickets and a little bit of everything before, in the later years, retreating to his home in Fort Lauderdale and making appearances only at the television tapings, the Garden, and occasionally at the Spectrum, the Boston Garden, or one or two of the other larger arenas.

  It was around this time that I decided to cut my hair short and to go back to wearing a singlet. No one told me to do it—I chose to do that myself. Around that time, the WWF was becoming a bit more focused on entertainment, and a little less focused on wrestling. I always liked wearing singlets in high school and college, so I thought that I would make that little change in my appearance as a nod to my amateur background, and as a reminder to people that notwithstanding the recent changes, the name of the game was still wrestling.