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

by Bob Backlund

  The other thing that watching all those matches gave me was a real appreciation for the art of planning and building a card. The booker would always try to pace the evening in the same way that two wrestlers would try to pace a match. A well-planned card would start with a mellow match, maybe two babyfaces who would trade headlocks, do a reverse or two, maybe have one guy throw a dropkick or use the ropes, and have someone win with an entertaining or upbeat move to get the people in the right frame of mind. The job for the guys in the opening match was to help people who had just come from doing something else in their lives get oriented to the idea that they were watching professional wrestling. The opening match was pretty critical in that regard, so you wouldn’t want it to be a match where people are just sitting around doing boring rest holds, but also you wouldn’t want it to be a match where there is a lot of punching, kicking, or high spots, because if you did that, you’d be robbing from what the guys later in the card would do to take the people’s energy up to the next level.

  The second match on a card might be the first heel-babyface match, where the action gets upped a little bit. In the second match, you’d look to draw the crowd’s emotion in a little more, and give them the sense that they were watching someone “good” that they were supposed to like and support compete against someone “bad” that they were supposed to dislike, and who would not hesitate to break the rules or cheat to win. Then you’d go from there, depending on how many matches were on the card. On a big card, the third match would be the first serious contest between a babyface and a heel where the outcome might have been seriously in doubt.

  When I was the world champion in the WWWF, if I was going to be coming back to town the following month (like at MSG or the Philadelphia Spectrum, where I wrestled every month if I was in the United States) my match was usually scheduled as the fourth or fifth match on the card, right before intermission. Vince McMahon Sr. set up his cards that way so that the outcome of my title match would be known before intermission so that the “buzz” about the match could build, to permit them to announce my opponent in the main event on the next card before the end of the night, and to not have to wait to start hyping the next match on the following weekend’s television taping.

  Wrestling fourth or fifth on a given night may not have been the ideal spot for me, but it unquestionably helped sell a lot of tickets. If you have a captive audience of 20,000 potential ticket buyers all amped up with emotion because of something they just saw, why would you not take advantage of that? Vince Sr. had big 15,000- to 20,000-seat hockey arenas to fill on many nights in a given month, so it was incumbent on him to take full advantage of whatever marketing advantages he could key into. In many of those towns, including New York and Philadelphia, tickets for the next card were put on sale through Ticketron or Teletron (remember those?) and through the arena box office either the same night, or the morning after the card. If we did our job, the following morning, there would be a line of people waiting to get the best possible seats for the next month’s card when the box office opened. In many of the territories, however, where the buildings were smaller, the last match on the card would be the blowoff on the theory that you’d want to send the fans out on an emotional high, and simply use your television tapings to hype the next card.

  As I mentioned before, during the time I was on my second runs in Georgia and Florida, I was also wrestling for promoter Sam Muchnick in the St. Louis Wrestling Club. That is where my story goes next.

  11

  The Audition (St. Louis, 1976)

  “Forget the old saying, ‘Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.’ You have to put all your eggs in one basket and concentrate your attention on protecting that basket and getting it to market!”

  —Napoleon Hill, “Control Your Attention”

  To those fans that know me primarily or completely from my days as the WWF World Champion, the story of my days with the St. Louis Wrestling Club may come as a pretty big surprise to you. The fact is, St. Louis was the crossroads of my career—the place where my die was cast and the cosmic tumblers settled into place and directed me to New York and to my life as the World Wrestling Federation’s Heavyweight Champion. But for a single voice in the NWA board of directors, the course of wrestling history in both the NWA and the WWF might have been changed forever.

  The St. Louis Wrestling Club was the most influential territory in the National Wrestling Alliance. St. Louis’s place at the pinnacle of the NWA’s loose confederation of territories was secured because of the reputation and influence of its promoter, Sam Muchnick. Muchnick, along with Tony Stecher and Wally Karbo of the Minneapolis Boxing and Wrestling Club (which would later go on to break away and become the AWA), Orville Brown of Kansas City, Pinky George of Des Moines, and Max Clayton of Omaha, had founded the National Wrestling Alliance in 1948. By the time I got to St. Louis in late 1975, the Alliance, of course, had grown much larger, and Muchnick, who had served as its president for nearly a quarter-century, was the only remaining original member of the Alliance who was still promoting.

  Because of his incredible history in founding the National Wrestling Alliance and in holding the Alliance together through legal battles and power struggles between and among its individual promoters, Muchnick had greater stature in the Alliance than any other promoter in the United States except, perhaps, for Vince McMahon Sr. Muchnick enjoyed the trust and respect of his peers around the country—a rare thing in a profession that was often characterized by precisely the opposite.

  St. Louis was also a territory unlike any other in the Alliance in that it did not have a traveling circuit. The territory fed off of its famed television program, Wrestling at the Chase, which was taped at the studios of KPLR-TV in St. Louis on Saturdays, and its twice-monthly live cards at the Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis on alternate Friday nights. This setup permitted Muchnick four things not shared by any other promoter in the Alliance.

  First, other than the person he chose to hold the Missouri State title, Sam had no static stable of wrestlers. Consequently, every two weeks, he was able to pick and choose which wrestlers from around the Alliance he wanted to bring in and feature both on television in one of the country’s major media markets, and at the Kiel.

  Second, because he booked only one card every two weeks, Sam was free to concentrate his creative energy on developing storylines that were simply directed at filling the Kiel every two weeks by showcasing talent from across the Alliance. Sam always had someone coming up the ladder and getting on a roll, either on the babyface or heel side—usually both. Almost all of the wrestlers on the card were either masters of their art, or the best of the up and coming young talent in the Alliance.

  Any wrestler invited to wrestle in the St. Louis Wrestling Club knew he was being looked at by the most influential eyes in the Alliance. It also meant that he would be paid well, so when working for Sam, everyone would turn up his work-rate a notch and make sure everything was crisp. There were very few preliminary matches on a Kiel card—most Kiel cards were like an All-Star Game in professional wrestling.

  Third, in many parts of the rest of the country, even back then, professional wrestling was viewed with a sort of bemusement and was not regarded as a sport. Because of the strong relationship Sam maintained in the business community and sports media outlets in the St. Louis area, however, in St. Louis, the activities and events of the St. Louis Wrestling Club were given equal billing to the NFL and Major League Baseball. The St. Louis papers covered wrestling religiously and treated it like any other sport. The Friday St. Louis papers almost always carried a teaser about that night’s card at the Kiel, and the Sunday edition would often feature a detailed article about the matches and the results.

  Finally, because of Sam’s sterling reputation in the business and his relationships with promoters from “rival” organizations like Verne Gagne’s and Vince McMahon Sr., Muchnick was able to secure talent and champions from these other federations and put together dream matches and dre
am cards that no other promoter in the NWA could attract. There was really no other territory anywhere in the Alliance where all three world champions (NWA, AWA, and WWWF) would appear and defend their titles against talent from other wrestling organizations. Only Sam Muchnick had the esteem and trust of his fellow promoters necessary to pull that off.

  What all of that meant was that when you wrestled in St. Louis, you were wrestling the very best talent in the world at that time. It also meant that the person Sam chose to be the Missouri Champion held a special stature in the NWA—and was generally regarded as the number-two man in the Alliance behind whoever held the NWA World Championship at the time. Being given a run with the Missouri Championship was widely regarded as the industry’s biggest tryout—since that title was frequently a stepping stone to a run with the NWA World Heavyweight Championship.

  The fans in St. Louis responded to all of this by turning out in droves. Several thousand fans bought a “season ticket” to the matches for an entire year, which, of course, gave Muchnick the working capital he needed to keep the promotion running and to secure the talent he needed to keep the houses full. On many nights, the Kiel, which held about 10,000 people for wrestling, was filled to capacity.

  So with all of this as a backdrop to establish just how important the territory was, and what it meant to be invited to wrestle there—I had a tryout on the undercard of the December 5, 1975, Kiel Auditorium show where I was booked in a ten-minute time-limit match against Bulldog Bob Brown. Brown had been in the Kansas City/St. Louis territory for almost his whole life—he wasn’t a really big guy, he was maybe five-eleven and 220 pounds, but he was a good hand. The whole card that night was made up of people who were at the top of their game at the time: Terry Funk was less than a week away from winning the NWA World Championship from Jack Brisco. Stan Stasiak had been the WWF World Champion a couple of years earlier. Nick Bockwinkel was the newly crowned AWA World Heavyweight Champion—having just defeated Verne Gagne a month earlier. Dick the Bruiser was an AWA legend. That snapshot just gives you a little flavor of what the St. Louis territory was like.

  The Kiel Auditorium was a terrific venue for wrestling because it was a round arena that allowed everyone to be seated close to the ring. The crowds there were always into the action, making the atmosphere there as good as it was in any place I ever wrestled in except, perhaps, for Madison Square Garden.

  When I got to the Kiel for my tryout that night, however, I was surprised to learn that Muchnick was asking me to lie down and take a clean pin from Brown. Sam gave me the finish and told me we’d be going just shy of the ten-minute time limit. I knew from talking to Jim Barnett that Sam was pretty high on me—so I definitely wondered whether there had been a mistake or miscommunication somewhere, or whether I had already done something to sour my relationship with Sam. I definitely thought it odd to be asked to job in my debut.

  Nevertheless, as I had always done, I said nothing, listened to what I was being asked to do, went out and had the best match I could with Bulldog, and delivered what Sam was looking for.

  As it turned out, that choice became a defining moment in my career.

  Sometime later, I learned that because I was a shooter, Sam and his group wanted to make sure, before they made any kind of commitment to working with me, that I wasn’t someone whose ego would get in the way of doing business. They wanted to be sure that, if I was asked to “do the honors” for someone, that I would do what was asked of me without complaint. Being asked to do the honors to Brown was a test.

  I passed.

  The match with Brown went off well, and shortly after the tryout, I got the message through Jim Barnett that Sam wanted me back for a string of dates in St. Louis, beginning on March 26, 1976, at the Kiel. My opponent that night was to be none other than the current Missouri Champion, Harley Race. Because I was still an unproven commodity in the territory, the match was scheduled to be a “non-title” event.

  Harley, who remembered me from our match in Omaha, was part of the St. Louis office at the time and wanted to work with me again. He had a lot to do with my being booked into that match with him. We took the crowd on a ride for about fifteen minutes that night, and eventually, I went over Harley by DQ when, per the prearranged storyline, Harley had all he could handle of me and threw me out over the top rope.

  The St. Louis fans really liked the match, and particularly liked the finish. Harley drew huge heat for getting himself disqualified and preventing me from scoring the upset. Just by doing that, Harley got the near-capacity crowd that night solidly behind me. The booking of that match was designed to re-establish my standing with the fans after my debut loss to Brown three months earlier, and to get me started on the right foot.

  It worked.

  On the next Kiel card two weeks later, Sam matched me up with Gene Kiniski, which was another huge honor for me. Kiniski was someone I had heard about for years and years and who was a legend in the business. Kiniski had defeated Lou Thesz for the NWA World Heavyweight Championship in the Kiel ring a decade earlier and then held the belt for three years. He was tall (six foot three or four) and a great athlete, and a very well-respected guy. He was also very tough. Before becoming the NWA World Champion, he had spent most of his career up in Canada.

  The match with Kiniski was another big test for me in the eyes of the promoters. At the time of that match, Kiniski was being built up for a match with new NWA World Champion Terry Funk, so Sam asked me to do the honors for him. In the pre-match discussion, however, Muchnick instructed us that he wanted the match to be a see-saw contest that came down to the wire at the end. To his credit, Kiniski honored that request, sold a number of my high spots, and made me look great in defeat. When the match was over, I remember shaking Gene’s hand in the back and thanking him for giving me so much of the match, and Gene just clapping me on the back of the head with a big paw and smiling at me. It was a nice moment that conveyed to me that he thought that I belonged.

  In St. Louis, Sam Muchnick watched almost every match. Although he was watching, what he was really interested in was feeling the people’s energy and how they were reacting to certain guys and certain booking ideas—which guided what he would go on to do in future weeks. Sam could sense that the people were solidly behind me in the Kiniski match, cheering on the edge of their seats, which was exactly the kind of see-saw affair that Sam had asked for. He was looking to see whether I could capture the hearts and minds of the people, get them in my corner, and keep them there, even if I wasn’t being booked as a winner in every match.

  I guess I passed that test too, because on the card after that, on April 23, 1976, I was booked with Harley again, this time in a title match for the Missouri Heavyweight Championship. The build-up for that match in the local Wrestling mailer and at Wrestling from the Chase was that Harley had desperately wanted a rematch after our March 26 non-title match that I had won by disqualification, but that I had held out for a title match and gotten it from the promoters. It was a fun little booking twist that increased fan interest in the rematch.

  An hour before the match that night, Sam came into the dressing room, and pulled me aside.

  “Bobby, you’re gonna go over Harley tonight for the belt. When it’s time, he’s going to try and suplex you, but you’ll flip over him and give him the O’Connor finish.”

  Had Sam Muchnick really just said that?

  I was going over Harley Race for the Missouri Heavyweight Championship!

  I had been wrestling in Georgia while all of the back-office discussions about this were going on in St. Louis, so I truly had no idea that I was even under consideration for this honor, especially considering the way I had been booked in my first three matches. The match itself wasn’t the typical long Harley Race–Bob Backlund affair that we would later be known for. We had the people at their emotional high spot at around the twelve-minute mark, so Harley called for the finish. He tried to lift me into the vertical suplex, but I slid over his shoulder and pushed h
im into the ropes into my rolling reverse cradle and held him there for the three-count. It all happened so fast that it was almost surreal—but I do remember listening to the count, and when the referee’s hand slapped the mat for the third time and the bell rang, that there was an explosive cheer from the crowd, as if a year of pent-up frustration had been suddenly released.

  In some ways, it had been. Harley had been a very effective heel in St. Louis—hated by the fans for his conniving ways, but managing to hang on the Missouri title for fourteen months—longer than anyone else in the history of the promotion. And then, he and Sam had chosen me to be the man to break that streak. I wouldn’t find out until much later how much of an influence Harley had been in getting me a run with the Missouri belt, and in many other ways.

  A Backlund High

  Bob Backlund had been earning early praise for his potential while he wrestled in Florida. Like me, Sam loved what he saw of Backlund’s personality and ability. Pat O’Connor too, was high on Backlund, and Harley simply raved about him…. Everyone was amazed at how serious Backlund was. He regularly put in sixty minutes, working out and running the steps before he even stepped into the Kiel ring. He wanted to learn, and he valued constructive criticism …

  —Larry Matysik, from Wrestling at the Chase: The Inside Story of Sam Muchnick and the Legends of Professional Wrestling

  Becoming Missouri Champion meant that I always needed to take part in the Wrestling at the Chase television tapings, so from that point on, my trips out to St. Louis from Georgia and Florida would involve both the Friday night event at the Kiel followed by the Saturday tapings. My first television appearance with the belt was against Ed Wiskoski—a large, well-built guy who was best known as Colonel DeBeers in the AWA. I went over in that match by disqualification when Lord Alfred Hayes jumped into the ring to interfere in the match—which, of course, was done to create some additional interest in my first defense of the Missouri Championship at the Kiel on May 5, 1976, against none other than Lord Alfred Hayes.