by Bob Backlund
Although football went well my senior year (we went a combined 16–2–1 in the two years I played at NDSU), and despite the fact that I was now an NCAA national wrestling champion, I still hadn’t connected in any way with Coach Erhardt, even after I was named a Division II All-American. When football season ended, I was once again near the 230-pound mark for football, and I just couldn’t bear the thought of having to go through the turmoil to drop weight back to 190 again. I was carrying twenty-four credits, trying to finish school, and I was worried that I wasn’t going to be able to do all of it well.
I met with Bucky, and we decided that I would come with the team on its Christmas tour of Pennsylvania, but that instead of dropping weight, I would wrestle as a heavyweight. I won all four matches on the tour, but I just wasn’t in the same kind of physical shape at 230 that I had been in when I wrestled at 190. I knew that when I had to compete against a top heavyweight, I would be in trouble.
During my senior year, I went 8–3 in dual meets, finished third in the conference tournament, and fifth in the NCAA tournament in the heavyweight division.
A Legends at NDSU
During his senior year, Bob decided not to try to cut to 190, because he was convinced that he was going to get a tryout in the NFL following his being named an All-American. I could understand that.
During his senior year, Backlund had become a legend in the NDSU athletic department. On their way to football practice, Erhardt had every player stop at this crude isometric bar that had been cemented into the ground and perform a series of isometric lifts. The thing was two four-by-four posts with an iron bar crossing about two feet off the ground. Most of the players approached the bar, just grunted, got red in the face and went on their way. Bob, who never faked a grunt, went up to the thing, grabbed hold of it, and pulled the entire apparatus right out of the ground! Needless to say, the team had a new hero after that.
Backlund and the isometric posts is a story that comes up whenever people around here talk about feats of strength. This just added to the Backlund Legend at NDSU. The bearhug collapsing his opponent at the National Championships, the running in place to lose 40 pounds in eight days to make weight, and the story of the isometric posts are all still told whenever the old wrestlers get together. Bob has been inducted into the NDSU Athletic Hall of Fame, and we have pictures of Bob both in my office and in the ticket office wearing the WWWF Championship belt. He is always a big topic of conversation whenever he comes to town. When Bob comes to Fargo, we usually get together and go to the Elks Club where a lot of the Bison boosters and fans like to hang out. He is always the talk of the club, and spends most of the night signing photos.
—Bucky Maughan
As you will see as you read on, there have been a number of seemingly unexplainable coincidences that have happened in my life—most of them for the good. The first of those coincidences happened in the spring of 1972 at the YMCA in Fargo. I used to work out there sometimes—it was an old YMCA with a weight room in the middle and a balcony circling around the weight room with a running track on it. On that particular day, I was doing bench presses and I noticed that there was a professional wrestler in the weight room with me doing curls.
That man was none other than “Superstar” Billy Graham.
I had grown up watching the American Wrestling Association’s (AWA) brand of professional wrestling on television in Princeton, and I had seen Billy Graham before. I recognized him immediately. As anyone who knows Billy will tell you—his huge physique and long bleached blonde hair made him pretty much instantly recognizable!
The AWA was holding a card that night at the Fargo Civic Center, and Billy had come to the YMCA to get a workout in. I shook his hand, and told him that I was wrestling and playing football at North Dakota State and that I had grown up watching the AWA. He asked me if I had considered becoming a pro wrestler when I graduated from college. I told him that I hadn’t considered it because at that time, I was hoping to end up in the NFL. He looked at my physique and told me that I should consider it. We talked for a few more minutes about the business, and then shook hands again and went our separate ways to finish our respective workouts.
It was a brief, chance meeting. Most would call it a fluke. But the truth is, as ironic as it is, it was “Superstar” Billy Graham who put the first real thought of becoming a professional wrestler into my head.
And as most of you probably know, the fates would have it that Billy and I would meet again.
4
Breaking In
“Find out what you want most in life, and go after it.”
—Napoleon Hill, “Build a Positive Mental Attitude”
I spent the spring quarter of my senior year student-teaching in North Dakota at Fargo South High School, under Jerry Larson, the high school wrestling coach. I was still hoping to get drafted to play pro football in the NFL.
That spring, however, I learned that Coach Erhardt had been telling the pro scouts that I “wasn’t interested” in playing professional football. I have no earthly idea why he would have been telling people that, because playing professional football in the NFL had been my goal the entire time I was at NDSU. By the time I found out what Erhardt was telling the scouts, however, it was too late to do anything about it.
It is hard for me to have any respect for that man. I know that Erhardt ended up as a head coach with the New England Patriots and offensive coordinator with the New York Jets, but I just didn’t have any respect for the way he conducted himself, the way he treated his players at NDSU, or the way he unilaterally downplayed my NFL prospects. To this day, I don’t know for sure what our issue was, but I suspect that it might have had something to with the fact that I was recruited to NDSU by Coach Maughan, and not by him. I always worked hard for Coach Erhardt, but it is very clear that he and I were just not on the same page. It’s funny how life tends to work these things out, though. Who knows what would have happened if Erhardt had pushed me to the pro scouts, and I had caught on with an NFL team?
After college, I ended up in Mundelein, Illinois, playing semi-pro football at the Chicago Bears training camp. I made so little money playing for that team that I had to hand out brochures for a company door-to-door just to make enough money to live. I was paid per piece for doing that, so I just incorporated it into my workout routine and ran my entire delivery route, so I made it work for me. I made enough money to cover rent, to have a place to work out, and to buy enough food to get by. I was living in a boarding house with ten other guys doing the same thing I was doing, so I had a three-foot by ten-foot space on the wood floor just big enough to roll out a sleeping bag, and that was about it.
It was a pretty depressing scene and it would have been very easy to get demoralized and just give up.
But I didn’t.
In the face of that totally discouraging situation, I stayed positive and worked out harder and harder every day to keep myself in absolutely peak physical condition while I waited for my chance to come. I knew that I didn’t have control of when that chance would come—but I did have control of what kind of shape I would be in if and when it did.
Deep down, though, I knew that I didn’t have much chance of getting into the NFL from a semi-pro team, because the NFL was getting a steady stream of talent from the college ranks every year, and anyone they plucked from a semi-pro team never seemed to stick. Those were the guys who always seemed to be in the first round of cuts during training camp and ended up getting stuck on the practice squads. The writing was on the wall for me. I recognized that my chances of actually making it to the NFL were pretty slim.
There were players on that team that had been there ten years waiting for their chance to make the pros. I decided I wasn’t going to wait around for a chance at my dream—I was going to go after it! Little did I know that one of life’s little coincidences was about to strike again.
When the season was over, I went back to NDSU and finished the credits I needed to graduate, and in the s
pring, I moved to Anoka, Minnesota, outside Minneapolis and lived with a guy named Elroy Carpenter, who had been a friend of mine in high school. I was taping sheetrock during the day, and working out every day at the 7th Street gym in Minneapolis when my chance finally did come.
There was a man at the 7th Street gym who would always watch me work out. I knew he was somehow involved with professional wrestling because he was working in the gym with a lot of the guys, like Mad Dog Vachon, Billy Red Lyons, and Red Bastien, who I had grown up watching in the AWA. The man turned out to be pro wrestling trainer Eddie Sharkey.
One day, Sharkey just came up to me during my workout and introduced himself. As Graham had before, Sharkey asked me if I had ever considered getting into professional wrestling. He knew that I had excelled in high school and college wrestling, and mentioned that, with that background and my build, I should give it a try.
It seemed like the fates were steering me toward an outcome. Twice in one year, I was being invited to join the pro wrestling fraternity. This time, I wasn’t going to let the chance pass me by. So I said “yes” to Eddie Sharkey.
And that’s how it all began for me.
I became a student of Eddie’s, who charged me a flat fee of $500 to train me. He had a professional-style ring in the 7th Street gym, which was just lying on 2x6s on the floor—it was not on a platform—so we couldn’t learn how to get thrown out of the ring. We trained for three days a week in the evenings after work, learning holds and maneuvers, how to hit the ropes, and how to “chain wrestle”—putting together the strings of moves that you would use in a professional wrestling match.
Obviously, there were major differences between wrestling in the amateur ranks and professional wrestling. In the amateurs, the goal is to pin your opponent’s shoulders to the mat for one second, or to win the match on points by dominating your opponent on the mat, taking him down, and controlling the action. Joint locks and any other kinds of submission moves were forbidden. Of course, amateur wrestling is also a legitimate athletic competition. In professional wrestling, the goal is to pin your opponent’s shoulders to the mat for a three-count, or to make him concede the match by submission. You could also win the match if your opponent was counted out of the ring, or disqualified, or if the match was stopped because your opponent was bleeding too severely to continue. Professional wrestling, while certainly still very athletic, was entertainment. While a working knowledge of amateur wrestling certainly helped in professional wrestling by providing you with a catalogue of moves you could call upon to tell a story in the ring, or to protect yourself if you needed to, it was also important to remember that professional wrestling required a give and take in the ring that necessitated allowing your opponent to get the upper hand on you in a match. To me, that was one of the hardest adjustments!
Eddie trained me for about seven months. We worked on “ring presence,” submission holds, and professional pinning combinations that had more visual flourishes than the amateur ones did. He taught me how to throw a dropkick. Most importantly, though, he taught me how to execute high spots without hurting my opponent, and how take “bumps” without getting hurt myself.
Taking a bump, whether it is a hiptoss, a bodyslam, a suplex, or a piledriver, is all about making sure that your body and your opponent’s body are in the right position to land at the end of the move. As the person taking the bump, it is about learning to land as flat as you can, and dispersing the impact over as large an area of your body as possible. Think of it like going across thin ice on skis. You can make it across a sheet of thin ice on skis, where you would fall through on foot, because you are dispersing your weight over a larger area. It is the same principle in wrestling. If you take a bump with your entire body, rather than landing on, say, a shoulder or your hip, you can properly disperse the impact and avoid injury. You want everything to hit the mat at the same time—and your opponent is supposed to protect you by executing any move so that your body is in the proper position to make that happen.
As the person calling and then executing the “high spot,” you have the responsibility to ensure that the move is understood, and that the timing is right so your opponent can react properly to what you are doing. Professional wrestling is often compared to a “dance,” and that is really pretty accurate. You are constantly responding to what your opponent is doing. Every move needs a countermove to support it. Miss even one, and someone can get badly hurt.
It doesn’t really matter that a move is predetermined if you have a 280-pound man up above your head upside down in a vertical suplex. If you move him too close to the ropes or the turnbuckles, if your timing is off, or if your move is not predictable, you might as well be doing it for real. And of course, while you are busy protecting yourself and your opponent—you need to make it look like it’s real and that you are, in fact, trying to hurt him, so that the fans’ suspension of disbelief isn’t dispelled.
It was a lot to take in. One day, though, Eddie pulled me aside and told me that I was ready to make a go of it. He told me where to go to get some professional photographs taken, and then gave me a list of names, addresses, and phone numbers of regional wrestling promoters all around the country. He told me to send a photo to each of those promoters and then follow up with a phone call about two weeks after that and to tell them that Eddie Sharkey sent me.
He wished me good luck.
And that was that.
I sent those photographs all over the country—to Stu Hart in Calgary, and Jim Barnett in Georgia, and Paul Bosch in Houston and Eddie Graham in Florida, and Fritz Von Erich in Texas and Roy Shire in San Francisco and Mike LaBell in Los Angeles. I kept working taping sheetrock for minimum wage, training at the 7th Street gym at night, and waiting for the responses that never came.
Finally, Eddie told me to just start calling the promoters. Once I started doing that, I realized how hard it was to actually get a wrestling promoter on the telephone! It seemed that they were always too busy. Or not in the office. Or at least saying that they were not in the office! That’s if they even had an office! Others said they were full, or to try back in a few months.
I remember feeding coins into a payphone waiting and waiting (and waiting!) for Stu Hart from the Calgary promotion to get on the phone. When he finally got to the phone, he talked so slowly that the phone cut out because I had run out of money. I never did call him back—and thus managed to avoid getting stretched in the infamous Hart dungeon—the basement of the Harts’ family home in Calgary which was set up wall-to-wall with wrestling mats, and where Stu Hart was famous for working over his students while teaching them the craft.
A couple of days later, when I had money in my pocket again, I called Leroy McGuirk’s office in Tulsa, Oklahoma. McGuirk was the head of the Tri-States promotion that, ironically, actually covered parts of four states: Oklahoma, Louisiana, Missouri, and Texas. McGuirk was also a former NCAA champion himself, having won the Division I title at 155 pounds wrestling out of Oklahoma A&M (now known as Oklahoma State) as a junior in 1931. At the time he won that title, he was blind in one eye, which made the feat even more amazing.
By the time I called on him, though, Leroy was totally blind, having lost the sight in his other eye in a horrific automobile accident. He obviously couldn’t see my pictures personally, but he had some office person there review my credentials with him, and he learned that I was also an NCAA champion. He liked that about me, and we talked on the phone about amateur wrestling a little bit, and after chatting for a while, he offered me a tryout. He gave me a house show date in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in two weeks’ time, and told me he would meet me there.
I was on my way.
5
From the Sheraton to the Trunk (Tri-States, 1973)
“Turn all unpleasant circumstances into opportunities for positive action. Make this an automatic habit, and your success will multiply.”
—Napoleon Hill, “Build a Positive Mental Attitude”
The Sunday after recei
ving the invitation to try out with Leroy McGuirk, I packed everything I owned into the back of my very used 1968 green Chevrolet Impala that I had bought earlier that summer for $200. In retrospect, I probably should have invested in a better car given how much driving I was about to be doing—and because that Impala would end up being much more than just a car to me in those early years.
When the car was packed, my mother stood in front of our little homestead in Princeton, gave me a big hug, told me she loved me, and told me to do my best. The naysayers, though, were out in force. People told me that I was wasting my time, and that I would never make it in pro wrestling. They said, “We’ll see you back here in a month hanging sheetrock.” Fortunately, I didn’t listen to them, and I made myself a little promise to prove them all wrong. And with that, I struck off from Princeton, Minnesota, a twenty-one-year-old, bound for Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and determined to make it as a professional wrestler.
At the time I left Minnesota, I had $20 in my pocket, and by the time I got down there, I had spent it all on gas and food. Fortunately, I was about to have my first professional wrestling match, and I knew that the match was going to be held at a pretty decent-sized arena, so I made a hotel reservation for myself at the Sheraton Baton Rouge, because I had picked up, through bits and pieces of conversation in various places, that a lot of professional athletes stayed at Sheratons.
My first match ever was against Ron Starr—who was pretty green himself back then, but who would go on to have a long career in the NWA and the WWC down in Puerto Rico. During my days training with Eddie, we were always in a ring in a gym with no fans watching—so having an arena full of people waiting as I left the locker room and went to the ring was a very different feeling.
