by Bob Backlund
Fortunately, I had learned from Harley and Jack and Terry how much offense I should take in a match and how much I should give to my opponents. During my days wrestling in the NWA territories, that was never really a problem, as it seemed that most of the guys I worked with were on the same page about that and willing to give and take based on what the crowd was reacting to. When I got to the WWWF, though, things were different. I became very grateful for my amateur background, because there were times that I needed to rely on it. There were definitely people there in the early days that tested me and tried to take advantage of my good nature by taking more of our matches than they should have.
The reality is, in the wrestling business, you never really know what people are thinking, so you always have to be on your guard—especially when you’re the guy on top, or on the way to the top, and needing to protect yourself or the belt. All it takes is one quick unexpected move—intentional or not—or one failure to permit an escape while the referee is counting, and the referee will count you out. Even though the outcomes were predetermined, there was an unwritten rule in the wrestling business that the referee needed to make things look legitimate. If you failed to get your shoulders up when you were supposed to, the referees were always directed make the three count, even if it was against booking, or against the wrong man, because failing to do so would expose the business.
In the late summer of 1977, Vince Sr. called me and invited me to do a spot house show out on the Boardwalk in Wildwood, New Jersey, against Ken Patera. Up to that point, Vince’s plan had been to build me up to the WWWF audience slowly on television, but not to overexpose me out on the house show circuit, since there was still so much time before I would be taking over as champion, and only a few legitimate heels in the territory to wrestle. This match with Patera was to be my first real test in the WWWF, out on the house show circuit in a main event where my opponent and I were being relied on to draw the house. Vince wanted to see how well his experiment in getting me over with the WWWF crowds strictly on television was working. He also wanted to try me out in an arena setting and see how the crowd would react to me and how the match would go.
In Wildwood, the arena was right off the Boardwalk—I think it held something like 1,000 people—and most of the people who would come to the matches were down at the shore on vacation. Wildwood didn’t get a steady diet of professional wrestling, so when the WWWF held a spot show there in the summer, it was something of a happening. Gorilla Monsoon, who was in charge of most of the New Jersey spot shows on behalf of Capitol Wrestling, would set up a table out on the Boardwalk and sell tickets, and the wrestlers would typically all be out on the beach working on their tans during the afternoon before the matches.
I remember it being stiflingly hot and humid in Wildwood that night. The people were packed into that place and were very enthusiastic. I was excited to be out on the road, and to be working with a guy like Ken Patera, who was the biggest monster heel in the WWWF at the time, and who was also someone who could really work a terrific match. I knew there was a lot that we could do. Vince didn’t want to hurt Patera, for whom he had some big plans, so the match was booked with a DQ finish, but the people were roaring, and I think the experiment was a pretty big success. Arnold Skaaland and Gorilla Monsoon both had nice things to say to me after the match.
Debuting in Wildwood
Other than one or two Garden shows, that match in Wildwood was Bobby’s first house show match out on the WWWF circuit after about six months of just being on TV. I’ll tell you, he was so fucking wound up and nervous for that match he couldn’t sit still. They had just opened up the new building there on the Boardwalk, and the place was packed. I remember it was in the 90s that day and there was not a cloud in the sky, so there were thousands and thousands of people out on the beach and in town. The matches were advertised on posters out on the Boardwalk, and apparently, the ticket office just kept selling more and more tickets until they didn’t have any place left to put people.
They didn’t have any grandstands or anything—it was just a big empty building with rows and rows of folding chairs around the ring, so at the last minute, about two hours before the show, someone had the bright idea to go down to the playing fields in town with a pickup truck and a trailer and haul back all of the portable seating that they could find in the whole fucking town. Without that, they could only have put about 600 or 700 people in the place, but with those portable bleachers, they jammed about 1,000 people in by selling general admission tickets. So there we were—the building had just fucking baked in the heat all day long, and there was no air conditioning. Bobby had just done all of this promotional TV with the WWWF but had not yet appeared live anywhere, so the fans were just completely insane to see him in person.
The promoter, old man McMahon, had talked to me at the TV taping immediately before this happened and said “Kenny, I want you to take Bobby down there and have a really good match with him to get him off on the right foot with the fans.” I knew Bobby’s background, knew he had been the Missouri Heavyweight Champion, and knew him a little bit from TV, so when McMahon asked me to break him in, I said, “Sure—I’d love to.” So Bobby and I went down there and we had a hell of a match. My body still remembers that match to this day, though, I’ll tell you. Bobby got me into the rowboat and he almost tore my arm off he was so excited. Then he got me in a headscissors and brought one leg down across my face and smashed my nose, then about ten minutes later, he potatoed me and gave me a fat lip, and he squeezed his headlock so tight that both of my ears were burning.
We had some kind of a screwjob finish where I got frustrated and hit him with something or hit the referee or whatever, and the fans just fell in love with Bobby. After the match, though, I was joking with him in the locker room and I told him, “Hey—I’ve had easier street fights than this—you need to learn to settle down and remember that this is for show!”
—Ken Patera
After that spot show in Wildwood, I came back off the road in the WWWF again for about a month until I went back to the Garden on September 26, 1977, in a match against “Prettyboy” Larry Sharpe. Larry had been an amateur high school wrestler in New Jersey, and he had blonde hair and a beautiful red robe and a cocky attitude, all of which made him a good foil for me. He was a good hand, and he was pretty good at developing a story. He was a good person for me to wrestle on my way up the ladder at that time because he was capable of having a fast-paced wrestling match, with lots of fast sequences of chain wrestling holds and counters, which was my strength and was becoming my calling card with the fans in the WWWF. Larry was another one of those guys like Johnny Rodz and Jose Estrada who could really work, and who Vince Sr. would use to test people out and see how they could work. Vince would also frequently put these guys with good workers from other territories or from New Japan if Vince wanted to make them look good at the Garden.
That night, Billy and Dusty were on top for the world championship. In retrospect, I think those two guys, individually and collectively, also helped cement Vince Sr.’s decision to put the belt on me. At the time, Dusty and Graham were at the forefront of a group of guys around the wrestling business looking to organize themselves, seize power from the promoters, and have more influence over their lives in the business.
At the time that this match occurred, Dusty had a pretty good grip on the Florida territory to the point where he could control the booking, veto the promoters’ plans, and do nearly anything he wanted to do, and there wasn’t much Eddie or Jim Barnett could do about it. Although Eddie Graham was the owner and promoter of Florida Championship Wrestling, Dusty really controlled that promotion. Dusty was “everyman”—the self-professed blue collar son-of-a-plumber who the fans could relate to. He was an artist in the ring, and he had the talk and the dance to go with it, and the people down there just went nuts for him. It was genius. People used to dream about finding a character like Dusty Rhodes and being able to do it that well. But Dusty was a one of a kin
d because it was authentic.
Dusty Rhodes and Billy Graham were very, very good friends. Dusty didn’t come up to New York very often when Bruno was champion, but he did come up a fair amount when Graham was champion and in the early years when I was champion. I think that Graham and Dusty were interested in trying to take greater control of Vince’s promotion in much the same way that Dusty had done with Eddie’s promotion down in Florida. When you get that “over,” with the people, you have a lot of control, and the promoter can’t get rid of you without damaging his own financial future.
Eddie Graham and Vince Sr., however, were also very good friends and they talked a lot, and I think Eddie warned Vince not to let Superstar become his Dusty Rhodes, or to let either or both of them take root in New York. I know that Eddie communicated a lot with Vince Sr. about what was going on in Florida, and that they discussed that often. Vince Sr. understood that my passion was in doing the work in the ring, and that I had no interest in trying to influence the bookings or to be involved in any way in any of the back-office stuff. Vince knew that I would listen to him and that I wasn’t going to try and take him over, or give him any headaches by no-showing dates or challenging him about gate receipts. We trusted each other, and I think that certainly contributed to his decision to pick me to lead the federation.
At the time this all happened, I was a young and naïve twenty-seven-year-old kid. I didn’t have an entourage of friends in the business, or a group of guys around me who I wanted to have come in to wrestle me, or to get bookings in the territory, or to get favorable treatment from Vince Sr. I never went to the booking meetings and I really didn’t care to be involved in that at all. I didn’t care about who I wrestled. I was happy to let Vince Sr. have that power.
After I defeated Larry that night at the Garden with the atomic drop, I did an interview at ringside with Vince Jr. about being undefeated in the territory and being really excited to have the support of all of the fans. That just served to further cement me as a rising babyface, and to plant the idea in people’s minds that I was an up-and-comer who might someday be worthy of challenging Billy for the championship. Right after that Garden show, Billy came down with a pretty serious staph infection and he was hospitalized for a period of time, which caused Billy to miss many of his shots around the territory in the month of October.
By the time of the October 1977 tapings, I was doing more interviews and getting ready to start my revolutions around the house show circuit. It was also around this time that I began to really develop a friendship with Andre the Giant.
I think I talked to Andre more than most of the guys. I liked him a lot, and I know he respected my amateur background, my training schedule, and my work ethic in and around the ring, which was part of why we got along so well. Andre himself had been a pretty serious athlete and had played competitive soccer in Europe before becoming a professional wrestler. Andre took the wrestling business very seriously and didn’t have much patience for guys who didn’t respect the business.
Andre was a big, big man—but for a big man, he could perform well in the ring. A lot of people only know Andre from his match with Hogan at Wrestlemania III, but the Andre who went to the ring that night in the Silverdome to pass the torch to Hogan was a man in serious pain, and a mere shadow of his former self. The Andre the Giant that I knew in the late ’70s and early ’80s could throw suplexes, and get up and down off the mat with relative ease—which made his matches that much more entertaining to watch. I think at the time I knew him, he was legitimately about seven feet tall and about 450 pounds, but he was a really down-to-earth person who just wanted people to treat him like a regular guy.
If Andre bought us a round of beer, as he often did, then I bought him a round back—and when he tried to refuse my offer, I told him that if he wouldn’t let me buy him a round back that I wouldn’t drink with him anymore. Well that stopped him cold, and after that, we had an understanding. I was one of the few people who Andre would allow to buy him a drink. Generally, Andre was uncomfortable letting other people buy things for him because of how much he consumed—so he was happy to just go around taking care of the tabs for people. I think the way he thought of it, adding other people’s tabs really didn’t add too much to what his tab looked like anyway.
Andre and I had a lot of fun together. I liked to drink beer with the boys after the matches when I wasn’t driving back home to Connecticut, and I could drink with the best of them. A lot of times, I had to tell Andre that I couldn’t stay up drinking with him all night because I had to get up and train in the morning. At a lot of the hotels and motels where we stayed, Andre had a great deal of trouble getting a comfortable night’s sleep or even taking a hot shower in the little tub/shower combos that those places had—so he preferred to just stay up most of the night drinking. On those nights, I would tease him and tell him that I’d stay up and drink with him as long as he promised to get up with me at five in the morning to train with me.
Whenever I would say that to him, he would clap me on the shoulder with one of his giant hands and just give me one of those deep, booming Andre “HOGH, HOGH, HOGH” laughs and flash that infectious ear-to-ear smile of his that you’d see when he was having a good time. We had a lot of good times together, but when it was time for me to leave him at the bar, he knew why, and he always respected me for it.
In the wrestling business, your ability to drink beer a badge of honor. Being good at it was important, and it was important to be drink with the boys to keep up relations. We had a place, in almost every town that was a regular stop on the circuit, where we could go to drink after the matches, and where the owner would either close the place to protect us, or where, given the hour, there wasn’t going to be a lot of walk-in traffic. Some of the places I remember were Cloud Nine at Bradley Airport, where we would go after Hartford or on the way back from Springfield. In New York City, it was usually the Lone Star Café or the Savoy. Up in Boston, there was a motel behind the old Boston Garden where we used to go. And there were many others—but you get the idea.
A Perfect Role Model
In those days, we’d check into a hotel and before an hour or two went by the television would be laying in the swimming pool, that chair would be out the window, that one would be broken into pieces, there would be naked girls running all around, there would cocaine sitting on that table over there. There would be someone sitting in the bathroom over there rolling joints, and the bathtub would be full of ice and beer. The promoters in the ’70s used to tell us that they didn’t care what we did on our own time—so as soon as the matches were over and we got back to the hotel, well it was party, party, party.
But Bob wouldn’t do that stuff. I can remember one night, we were wrestling in Portland, Maine, and the next night, we were going to be wrestling in Boston. Well as soon as the matches in Portland were over, we were partying it up in the hotel room all night, slept a little bit, and then drove down to Boston for the matches the next day. But not Bob—Bob drove home to Connecticut after the matches, slept at home with his wife and his daughter, and then drove back up to Boston the next night. That’s how we all should have done it. But instead, we would just set up shop in the hotel bar, or someone’s room—get set up with the local guy who was bringing the weed or whatever else we wanted that night, and the guys would stay up until three or four in the morning partying all night. Then the next morning, everyone would wake up feeling like crap and need to go the matches, and Bob would show up at the arena having had a good night’s sleep, feeling good, and be there doing his squats and pushups. He felt like an outcast because he didn’t get involved in the reckless side of pro wrestling, and some people resented him for it because they figured he thought he was too good for everyone else. But in reality, all he was doing was the right thing.
We lived a real wild life and luckily for us, there were guys like Bob in this business who didn’t choose that route. They were the example setters. Some guys would get a brand new car every year,
buy a house, get married, divorce the lady two years later, lose the house, pay child support and alimony, and then go off three or four years later and do it all over again. And some of the guys did that two or three times! Those were the guys we thought we should be following, but in reality, the guys that we needed to be following were the guys like Bob Backlund. To me, Bob was the perfect role model. He was a great athlete and a perfect gentleman.
—“Mr. USA” Tony Atlas
Unlike the way things had been in some of the other territories where I wrestled, in the WWWF, Vince Sr. wasn’t a stickler for kayfabe, so heels and faces could drink in the bar together. In a lot of the smaller territories in the NWA, doing that would have been cause for immediate dismissal from the territory. In the WWWF, though, it was permissible.
Remember that the WWWF was located in the northeastern United States. Vince Sr. was selling to the masses, so having a few people see heels and faces together wasn’t that big a deal to him. There were ten million people in the New York City metro area alone—so it was pretty easy to be anonymous once you got a few blocks away from the Garden. If three or four wrestling fans happened upon us, it wouldn’t have had any appreciable effect on the business because there was really no way for them to spread the word. This was in the days before camera phones and the Internet and Twitter and Snapchat and twenty-four-hour cable news shows, so no one could snap a picture of me having a drink with George and do anything significant with it. It wasn’t like The Times was going to publish it.
