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

by Bob Backlund

  There were smoky backroom machinations that led to McMahon finding Backlund, and inside politics that nearly derailed McMahon’s carefully scripted plan. There were colorful opponents that Backlund faced as he criss-crossed the globe in defense of his world championship belt looking to deviate from the promoters’ booking strategies and “go into business for themselves.” There were unsavory promoters that Backlund was forced to deal with in all corners of the world, road stories from the infamous pro wrestling fraternity, temptations visited upon him, and a remarkable degree of worldwide fame and recognition that made it nearly impossible for him to go anywhere without being mobbed by fans. All of these stories are a huge part of Backlund’s life story. But of equal importance were the positive messages of personal courage, confidence, and hope that Bob Backlund was delivering, by his own example, to me and to hundreds of thousands of young kids my age across the country and around the world.

  I managed to coax my father to take me to a couple of the seasonal wrestling cards held locally every six weeks during the summer at the John F. Kennedy Memorial Coliseum in my home town of Manchester, New Hampshire. The decrepit 2,500-seat half-moon community hockey rink served as the venue. There, we sat ringside, cheering my hero Bob Backlund on to victory and successful title defenses against the likes of George “The Animal” Steele, “Golden Boy” Adrian Adonis, and “The Russian Bear” Ivan Koloff.

  As we grew older, my friends and I anxiously awaited the turn of the season and the announcement of the spring’s first wrestling card, which would inevitably turn into a bicycle-driven pilgrimage to Fred’s Tackle Shop on the Saturday morning when tickets went on sale. Fred had fewer teeth than he had fingers (and he was missing several of both), but his odd-smelling Army-Navy surplus supply shop, crammed to the gills with survival supplies, was the exclusive presale location for wrestling tickets in those days. Fred was always waiting with a jagged smile for us to fork over the twelve dollars that each of us had carefully saved up from our paper routes or allowances in order to secure a cherished ringside seat to the matches.

  Eventually, though, as it does for all sports heroes, Bob Backlund’s championship reign and his time in the spotlight came to an end. On the day after Christmas in 1983, back in Madison Square Garden where it had all begun, the “All-American Boy” entered the Garden ring with a “neck injury” suffered in a just-televised attack at the hands of his hated archrival, The Iron Sheik of Tehran. Backlund’s injury had just been broadcast to the millions of viewers of the WWF’s television programming that very morning. The Sheik had challenged Backlund to attempt to swing his Persian clubs over his head—a feat which, the Sheik claimed, no American was tough enough to pull off. Backlund, of course, answered the call in defense of his country to the delight of the fans who chanted “USA! USA!” in unison and urged Backlund to put the Sheik in his place. Backlund succeeded in swinging the clubs, only to have the Sheik attack him while he was performing the exercise, causing one of the legitimately 50-pound wooden clubs to (not legitimately) fall on the back of Backlund’s neck.

  With that as the setup, the badly “injured” Backlund valiantly battled the Sheik in the main event that night at the Garden, but was eventually trapped in the Sheik’s dreaded “camel clutch”—an unbreakable submission hold wherein the Sheik sat on Backlund’s back and pulled upward on his chin, bending his neck and back nearly into a right angle. Backlund refused to submit and relinquish the title, and instead hung there limply, on the edge of consciousness, with the TV announcers screaming into their microphones that Backlund had to submit or risk permanent injury.

  Then, suddenly and without warning, a white towel came flying into the ring—thrown reluctantly by Backlund’s longtime manager, “Golden Boy” Arnold Skaaland, signaling Backlund’s submission and relinquishment of the championship to The Iron Sheik. “I had to save Bobby’s career,” Skaaland later maintained in the televised post-match interviews. “He would never have given up. Sheik woulda had to kill him.”

  Bob Backlund’s reign as champion was over. After nearly six years, the “All-American Boy” had lost the world championship to an Iranian madman on the night after Christmas. The wrestling world and, indeed, “all of America” was left in a state of shock and turmoil.

  One month later, Hulk Hogan substituted for an “injured” Backlund, pinned the Sheik at Madison Square Garden, and “Hulkamania” was born. This swept into being a new era of sports entertainment complete with a “rock and wrestling connection,” MTV, Cyndi Lauper, dancing girls and Wrestlemania, where TV-star Mr. T donned the tights as Hogan’s partner. Pursuant to Vince McMahon Jr.’s master plan, rasslin’ had gone mainstream.

  Amid all of this new glitz and glamour, the people just seemed to forget about their plainspoken hero, Bob Backlund. And that, of course, is when the true measure of a man is taken.

  When the lights go out and the crowds have moved on, too many heroes fall.

  But not mine.

  With Hogan catching fire nationwide, Vince Jr. offered Backlund a lucrative contract to stay with the company provided that Backlund would turn his back on the fans, dye his hair, become a “jealous heel,” and spend the rest of his days attempting to vanquish Hulkamania.

  Backlund, however, knew that the “All-American Boy” he had portrayed in the ring for so many years was less a character in the McMahons’ passion play than it was his authentic self. He also knew that the credibility and influence that he built up in the real world in the previous six years was far more important to him than money. During those six years, Bob Backlund the professional wrestling character and Bob Backlund the man had become one and the same. To “turn heel” and destroy that character, as Vince Jr. was asking him to do, would be to repudiate the very essence of the person he had become in real life. And once done, there would be no going back.

  Faced with this choice, Bob Backlund opted to walk away. Backlund returned home to Glastonbury, Connecticut, to raise his young daughter with the wife who had been his college sweetheart.

  From there, Backlund watched as professional wrestling exploded into a billion-dollar worldwide industry. But with that new cross-cultural exposure and evolution into a pop culture phenomenon, the once passable “sport” evolved into farce, and the ever-increasing physical demands on its characters led to rampant steroid and drug abuse and premature deaths too numerous to count.

  For most of the next decade, during pro wrestling’s pop culture heyday, Bob Backlund absented himself from the international stage. And in those intervening years, while Bob Backlund was home raising his family, my interest in professional wrestling likewise faded. I moved on to other things, and admittedly, I lost track of the man who had once been my childhood hero.

  Fast-forward to the spring of 1993—my junior year of college. One night, upon hearing that the WWF was in town, a group of my roommates and friends made plans to head over to the New Haven Veterans Memorial Coliseum to see the show. As I had discovered, even at a rarified place like Yale, there were professional wrestling fans among the ranks. Professors of American Studies, psychology, and sociology studied it as a cultural phenomenon. My friends, roommates, and fellow students—doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs, and political leaders-to-be—readily admitted a previous (and in some cases, ongoing) fascination with “the sport.”

  Word of our planned adventure got out, and by the time the evening rolled around, our posse was a dozen strong. I had no idea what the matches were that night, or even who was scheduled to appear, but was just happy to recapture a moment from my earlier childhood: to feel the excitement of that first glimpse of the three-roped wrestling ring standing empty in the middle of the arena, with the smell of stale popcorn and cheap beer in the air. A haze of cigarette smoke hung low over the crowd as we walked into the arena, and there was a buzz in the air as the 12,000-seat New Haven Coliseum filled to capacity.

  It was good to be back.

  Later that evening, the “Heartbreak Kid” Shawn Michaels, then the
federation’s Intercontinental Champion, came to the ring for a title defense. The challenger, who came running out of the locker room in his old red, white, and blue American Flag ring jacket, to an oddly tepid response from the crowd, was none other than my childhood hero.

  Bob Backlund was back!

  Bob and Shawn put on a true wrestling clinic for the fans—a twenty-some-minute match (rare for the “cartoon era” of wrestling) which Bob won after Shawn Michaels could not answer the ten-count and was counted out of the ring. This, of course, allowed hometown hero Backlund to win the match, but allowed Michaels to hang on to the championship—which could still only change hands via a pin or submission—just like in the old days.

  As the crew dismantled the ring after the matches, I recognized Tony Garea, a babyface from the past now serving as a road agent for the company, standing by the exit. I walked over and struck up a conversation, and mentioned to Tony how Bob’s match with Shawn had been a wonderful reminder of the old days—and wondered aloud whether Bob would be able to “get over” with the people and recapture that old magic again.

  “The fans don’t appreciate the same things anymore,” Garea lamented.

  Turns out, he was right. In 1993’s postmodern, dawn of the Internet world, Bob Backlund’s wholesome, play by the rules, All-American hero persona wasn’t selling anymore. In many cases, the crowds were now cheering for the immoral heels to beat the good guys. Vince McMahon Sr. was gone, and so too his reliable old model of good always triumphing over evil in the end. In fact, in the WWF of 1993, good and evil were, in many cases, no longer even distinguishable.

  That night, however, I began what was to become an eighteen-year odyssey to recapture the magic of my childhood. Seeing Bob Backlund again made me want to relive the matches and interviews that had so entranced me when I was young. To hear the dramatic ring announcements from the old carny Joe McHugh, young upstart Gary Michael Cappetta, or Madison Square Garden’s Howard Finkel. To listen again to Vince McMahon Jr. and Gorilla Monsoon’s compelling play-by-play on the live wrestling cards then-broadcast through the miracle of early cable television on HBO, Madison Square Garden Cablevision, the PRISM Network in Philadelphia, and, later, on the USA Network.

  In the years since then, and with the help of many others, I reached back across time and pieced together one of the most complete videotaped collections of Bob Backlund’s matches. Watching those live wrestling cards and their supporting TV shows again, it is remarkable how well the stories stand up, both the “angles” drawn up by the “bookers,” and the stories told by Bob and his opponents in the ring.

  I followed Bob’s return to wrestling with renewed interest, but noted with sadness as Tony Garea’s comment that night in New Haven proved correct. Try though he did, my then-forty-two-year-old hero couldn’t sell his story of hard work, clean living, and perseverance to the kids growing up in Generation X. Instead, this generation of wrestling fans cheered a group of “heels” like Michaels that broke the rules, defied authority, objectified women, and referred to themselves, appropriately, as “Degeneration X.” Backlund’s George Foreman–like resurgence upon the wrestling scene he had once captivated for more than six years was, in this new era, sadly failing to catch fire.

  By then, however, Backlund’s daughter Carrie and his legions of young fans had grown up into adulthood, and Backlund had been privately pondering how he could get his message across to this new generation of wrestling fans. One night, on cable television’s leading show, the WWF’s Monday Night RAW television program, it all came together. I watched in amazement as Backlund “snapped,” locked his deadly Chickenwing Crossface submission hold on his towel-throwing former manager Arnold Skaaland, and began to rant and rave about the moral depravity of the modern wrestling fan. I watched with a smile of appreciation in subsequent weeks as my old childhood hero “got heat” with this new generation of fans by becoming an “out-of-touch,” eccentric, and highly volatile force, donning a red bow tie and suspenders reminiscent of your former high school principal, and lecturing everyone about their vices and failings.

  As Bob put it, “I just decided to be bad by being good.”

  I must admit that I was never a fan either of Hulkamania, or of the crazed, bow-tie-wearing, lunatic heel “Mr. Backlund” character that Bob invented and assumed in the 1990s. For me, as a fan, the magic spell that pro wrestling had cast on me was broken that night in December 1983 when Arnold Skaaland threw the towel ending Bob’s reign as the champion.

  My childhood hero was, and always will be, the soft-talking, clean cut, sportsmanlike Bob Backlund—the underdog World Champion entering the ring with his loyal manager Arnold Skaaland and vanquishing challenger after challenger. That is the Bob Backlund that I will always choose to remember. And in Bob’s heart, that is the authentic Bob Backlund that he hopes we will never forget.

  But to his peers on the inside of the business, the “Mr. Backlund” character that Bob created is revered to this day as one of the most remarkable strokes of creative genius the industry has ever seen. It was, of course, at its essence, a social commentary on the changed and blurry mores of the fans and society at the time.

  Vince Jr. had wanted to turn Bob Backlund into a jealous heel back in 1984 and have him try to stop the spread of Hulkamania. Although Backlund could have made millions doing so, Backlund turned Vince Jr. down because he had a young daughter who wouldn’t have understood why her friends suddenly hated her father, and because, he believed, the legion of children who idolized him wouldn’t have been able to understand and process why their hero suddenly turned his back on them, became “evil,” and started cheating, breaking rules, and acting without principle. Cynics will say that Backlund cost himself a fortune by becoming a “mark” for his own character. Others, this author among them, would say that Backlund understood that his wrestling persona had grown to transcend the world of professional wrestling—and his place as a role model for young people became bigger and more important to him than his role in the World Wrestling Federation.

  So Backlund had waited, bided his time, and stayed in peak physical condition until his daughter was older and his young fans had grown up. Then, in his forties, Backlund re-emerged, defied all odds by returning to a wrestling world that hadn’t seen him for nearly a decade, and became the most hated heel in the sport by becoming its conscience.

  It was a story that took the wrestling world by storm and once again, “put butts in the seats” all over the world—culminating in Backlund’s world title victory over then-champion Bret “The Hitman” Hart at the 1994 Survivor Series. Backlund’s second title run would prove to be brief—but it introduced him to a whole new generation of fans, and a whole new generation of professional wrestlers who grew to admire him, for his remarkable physical conditioning, his knowledge of the business, and for his ability to read a crowd and induce passion—the three old-school hallmarks of what a professional wrestler was supposed to be.

  Fast-forward again to 2009. I am now back in New Hampshire as a partner in a prominent, old-line New England law firm where I have once again discovered unlikely wrestling cohorts—old wrestling fans who will gladly put down their pens to reminisce about seeing Bruno and Backlund and Andre and Pedro at the old Boston Garden. I am now a dad to two young boys, and married to a woman who views all of this “wrestling stuff” with a sort-of bemused fascination—wondering how her otherwise serious-minded litigator husband could possibly be drawn into this fantasy world of men in tights playing out a battle of good versus evil.

  “It is a soap opera for men,” I try to explain to her—“a microcosm of the world’s problems and ills played out in a wrestling match.” I have to smile when I realize how ridiculous this sounds when you say it out loud.

  In reality, though, it is really much more than even that.

  For me, and I suspect for a great many others out there, remembering the glory years of the “All-American Boy” Bob Backlund evokes memories of a far simpler time, bef
ore computers, and the Internet, and smartphones—and before the world got itself in such a hurry. A time before “playdates,” and before every minute of every day of a child’s life was scheduled. A time when kids would still gather in the streets and neighborhoods on lazy summer days to play stickball or kick the can, collect and trade baseball cards, play Atari in each others’ basements, and then congregate on a neighbor’s front porch to discuss how Bob Backlund was going to get past the new challenge of “King Kong” Mosca, “The Magnificent” Muraco, or whatever seemingly insurmountable new heel had been groomed on Vince Sr.’s “Storyboard” for a run at the underdog “All-American Boy” and his championship belt.

  For me, and for many others like me, Bob Backlund was, like Star Wars, Atari. and MTV, an iconic emblem of a place in time that we now look back on with more than a little nostalgia. Surely I am not the only one who drives past the dilapidated half-moon ice rink in town with my kids in tow and, looking back over my shoulder, sees myself as a still-idealistic child, chattering in a group of friends outside the arena’s back door on a muggy summer night, waiting for that first glimpse of the ring set up in the center of the building. Waiting and wondering how Bob Backlund would even survive his match this time against the 315-pound insane cowboy Stan “The Lariat” Hansen, never mind find a way to actually pin him.

  You see, for me at least, remembering Bob Backlund is like remembering our childhood—recalling old friends, and coming of age, and a simpler life that seemed much more black and white than the myriad shades of gray we now know life to be. Bob Backlund was someone to cheer for. A true to life hero. Someone who was unambiguously good, and just, and right. Always the underdog, and yet, somehow, someway, ultimately, always the winner.