by Bob Backlund
Unlike some other professional football players-turned professional wrestlers who I wrestled during my time as champion, Ladd was in total control of his body and a complete and total gentleman in the ring. Ernie used his huge size and tremendous athleticism to beat on me for the better part of fifteen minutes, with me trying to stay away from him and tire him out.
Eventually, at the end of my comeback, when the time came for the finish, I hoisted Ernie and his 350-pound frame high up in the air, walked him around the ring, backed into a corner, and then ran him out into the middle. Ernie was so big, he could have either made me work really hard to execute that move well, or could have shown bitterness about asking to do the honors in his first match at the Garden by making the move look pretty bad simply by letting his legs hang limp. But Ernie Ladd was a true professional, and was about making the match look good—so he held his legs up straight up in the air to make it look good, and sold the atomic drop like a million bucks.
When we got back to the dressing room, Ladd told me that he would never have believed I could carry him around for all that time unless he had seen it himself. Ernie was not a guy who had been picked up off his feet very much in his life, and he was legitimately impressed with my strength, conditioning, and physical appearance. Vince Sr. liked Ernie Ladd a lot, respected him for what he accomplished in his football career and for the legitimacy that he brought to the WWF by being part of the federation. I liked him too.
On October 29, I made another trip to Florida for Eddie Graham for the return NWA-WWWF title match with the still-reigning NWA World Champion Harley Race at the Orlando Sports Arena. We did another Broadway, continuing the mystique of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object theme that had characterized our matches. The allure of the double title showdown helped to bring in another good house for Eddie—and continued the back and forth talent exchange between Vince and Eddie that would persist for the next few years.
On November 4, 1978, the experiment that Vince had tested up in Bangor got off the drawing board and onto television as Peter Maivia and I were paired in a main-event tag-team match on television against Freddie Blassie’s combination of Spiros Arion and Victor Rivera. Arnold Skaaland was, of course, in our corner.
Peter and I started teasing dissention in our ranks almost immediately by having a little disagreement about who would start the match—with Skaaland eventually settling the “dispute” by deciding that Peter should start first. Later in the match, as I was getting double-teamed in the heel corner, Peter did not come into the ring to help out. Arion then started getting the best of me and Maivia was wandering away from the corner not paying attention, or giving me the short-arm from the corner and refusing to tag into the match.
The fans started chirping, and Skaaland starting getting on Peter. Then suddenly, out of nowhere, Peter attacked Skaaland, ripped Skaaland’s shirt off, and pounded away on him while Arion and Rivera double-teamed me.
The angle was on.
People were screaming at Maivia in disbelief as he left ringside with Freddie Blassie and Arion and Rivera, his shocking heel turn revealed. On cue, Skaaland was carried back to the dressing room by Tony Garea, Larry Zbyszko, Dino Bravo, and others, which left me to come out of the ring to cut my first truly “incensed” promo of my tenure as champion in the WWWF. These spots, which were not scripted ahead of time, were not easy for me.
“What happened?!” I screamed into the microphone, doing my best to seem truly shocked and enraged.
“Why did that happen?! Is the whole world against me?!”
Vince McMahon Jr. just stared at me blankly, feeding me nothing to work off of, but the fans were buying it, so I just looked around at them and then said the next thing that came to mind.
“I’m going to kill that son of a bitch!”
Oops.
Some of you probably know that Peter Maivia was movie star The Rock’s (Rocky Maivia/Dwayne Johnson’s) grandfather, and Rocky Johnson’s father. He was also a good friend, and one of the truly toughest men in the wrestling business. He was legitimately a Samoan High Chief, and the ceremonial tattoos that he displayed around his waist and upper legs were a sign of his status. Apparently, they were painfully applied with bone and shell over a period of weeks. No one in the wrestling business ever had anything bad to say about Peter Maivia. He was a good man with a huge heart and was a truly nice person who I loved working with.
The heel turn we did on TV with him attacking Arnold, however, was an early indication of just how powerful television could be—and how critical television exposure was for territorial wrestling. Just that one short ten-minute segment was enough to get the people to hate Peter, and these were fans that had loved him and had cheered him when he tried to get the championship away from Billy Graham only a year earlier. Peter soaked up their hatred and played it up like the pro he was.
Peter and I drew some nice crowds together all around the territory after his turn. To give you some idea of how much heat Peter got from that angle, one night in Springfield right after the angle aired on television, I was scheduled to appear in the main-event title match at the Civic Center with “Superstar” Billy Graham. Billy didn’t show up for the match, and the promoters were scrambling to figure out what to do. After talking with the office, they decided to sub Peter into the main event for Graham. Ordinarily, the crowd would have gone nuts to have lost a Backlund-Graham main event, and the office would have been flooded with demands for refunds. When the ring announcer told the crowd that Billy was unable to appear, as expected, they booed and started throwing things at him. But then he announced that a replacement challenger had been found, and that that person was “none other than the Samoan High Chief, Peter Maivia!” The thunderous boos turned on a dime.
The people hated Peter so much, they didn’t even miss Billy. And that is really saying something.
There were a couple of other interesting stops on my itinerary in November, 1978. First, Vince Sr. had gotten a call from old friend Ken Patera, who by this point, frustrated that he was not going to get a chance to carry the belt, had made good on his promise to leave the WWWF and return home to North Carolina. Patera was wrestling down in Charlotte for Jim Crockett in the NWA, and had already won Crockett’s big regional belt, the Mid-Atlantic Heavyweight Championship. Crockett was hoping we could do a champion versus champion match down in their signature building—the Greensboro Coliseum. Vince asked me if I’d be willing to do that, and of course, I was happy to help out Kenny, given how strongly he had put me over in our matches in the WWWF both before and after I won the belt.
So I drove back to my home from Boston on Saturday night after wrestling Koloff in the Boston Garden, and then hopped on a plane the next morning and headed down to Greensboro for what would be my one and only appearance with the belt in Jim Crockett’s mid-Atlantic territory. Patera and I had worked so much by this point that wrestling him was like a night off—we could practically anticipate each other’s moves before they happened. We had a good match down there, I went over by DQ, they drew a nice house, and everyone was happy.
The other interesting guy I wrestled a few times during that month was Crusher Blackwell. Jerry was a really thick, massive guy—he was legitimately well over 400 pounds—but he could move around better than just about any other man of that size in professional wrestling. He could get up and down, climb the ropes, and even throw a decent-looking dropkick, but he wore a pretty bad-looking full body suit in the ring, and had a lot more blubber on him than most of the men I would wrestle.
Jerry had made good money for Verne Gagne up in Minneapolis and was involved in a number of angles up there, so Vince Sr. brought him in for a short stint in the WWWF. He didn’t hang around long, but I did work with him a few times. I wrestled him once at the Spectrum, and after wearing him out for ten or twelve minutes, got him up in the atomic kneedrop, and carried his 400-pound body around the ring before dropping him on my knee and covering him for the pin.
; Even the tough Spectrum crowd popped for that one.
On November 20, 1978, I climbed into the ring at Madison Square Garden for my first head-to-head matchup with Peter Maivia after his televised heel turn. This was also the first time I had someone in the ring with me at the Garden who had done something to me on television—so there was an extra element of psychological drama associated with the match. Before the match, when we met with Vince in the dressing room, Vince told us that given how much heat our feud was drawing, we would definitely be coming back the next month—so Peter and I knew that Vince was looking for this match to just set that up.
I don’t remember much about the actual match that night other than the fact that the crowd was so hot that it took us less than ten minutes to get the people to their emotional high point. Despite the brevity of that first match, the fans were so all over Peter that I was convinced that he couldn’t get them any higher than the where we were at the nine-minute mark—where we spilled out of the ring and finished it with Peter jumping into the ring just before the ten count and going over by countout.
Maivia and I had our first rematch at the Garden on December 18, 1978. We had again drawn a strong house, and the heat between us was still so strong that when Vince brought us together, he informed us that we’d be going three matches, culminating in a steel cage blowoff the following month. Consequently, he wanted this one to end with me chasing Peter all over the building, and for the match to end with Peter getting counted out.
It is worthy of mention here that the December holiday cards at the Garden were always special, because Vince Sr. would always bring in extra talent to give the people who had supported his promotion throughout the year a little something extra. This time was no different, as Vince had Harley in to defend the NWA World Title against Tony Garea.
The NWA promoters always wanted Harley to look good at the Garden, and Vince put him in there with Garea because he knew that Tony was a good hand who would give Harley a solid match, but would ultimately make Harley look good and put Harley over well. Antonio Inoki was here for that card as well, and was being billed as the “Martial Arts Champion,” as the front office was trying to figure out what to do with him to make him a draw in America, where he was still virtually unknown.
Antonio wanted to be more involved in the WWWF, but he never got over with the New York fans because he didn’t really have an identity or a personality when he appeared in New York. Antonio couldn’t speak much English, so he had no real opportunity to connect with the American fans as a babyface. Because he was the head of the New Japan promotion and wanted his matches in New York to be seen in Japan, he didn’t want to adopt the usual formula and become a “foreign heel” managed by Blassie, the Wizard, or Albano.
This was a struggle that the WWWF and New Japan would continue to have as we turned the calendar to 1979.
17
Taking Flight (1979)
“A positive mental attitude attracts success.”
—Napoleon Hill, “Learn from Adversity and Defeat”
1979 began with my second cage match ever at Madison Square Garden. This one, of course, was the culmination of my bitter “feud” with Peter Maivia, now the most hated man in the federation. Peter and I had drawn strong houses at the Garden and all over the territory in each of the first two months, so Vince Sr. saw reason to go with a cage match blowoff to this feud.
Booking wrestling is an interesting art—part storytelling, part psychology, and part business. The people are different in each city, and even sometimes from month to month in the same city. They want to be entertained, so you have to give them a steady diet of something different. Taking a look at my history as champion at the Garden up to this point will illustrate this point.
In New York, the people had seen me win the belt from Graham in February, lose to him on a blood stoppage in March, and win the cage match blowoff in April. They then watched me score three solid pinfall victories in a row, over Ken Patera in May, Spiros Arion in June, and George “The Animal” Steele in July. By August, it was time to give the fans something different, so we did a long match with former champion Ivan Koloff and gave him a blood stoppage victory. We then came back with the rematch in September, which I won with a surprise pinfall when everyone in the building was expecting something different. As the promoter, it is always critical to zig when the fans expect you to zag. In professional wrestling, predictability was a business-killer.
Next, I scored another surprise pinfall victory over Ernie Ladd in our first contest in October, and then battled Peter Maivia to a countout loss in November, and a countout victory in December—both of which ended in brawls that settled nothing between us. The Garden crowd hadn’t seen a specialty match since my cage match with Graham in April—so after eight months, in Vince Sr.’s mind, enough time had passed to do that again.
Though I much preferred to work the psychology of a crowd using chain wrestling and a series of high spots and near falls, when I wrestled in a cage match, I knew that I had to work with the cage, bring it into the match, and give the people what they came for—vindication and catharsis. When you were in a cage match, the cage had to be the third man in the ring that you were telling the story with, and at the end of a cage match, there had to be a definite winner and a definite loser. Because we were selling hope, no matter how bleak things might have looked up to that point, the winner of the cage match had to be the man wearing the white hat.
Sometimes to mix things up the blowoff match was a Texas Death Match or a lumberjack match. Which match was chosen for the blowoff had a lot to do with who the people were in the match, what had been done recently, and what would sell the story best. But the steel cage match was definitely the biggest draw in the minds of the fans. Just seeing the cage getting erected around the ring in the middle of the Garden was enough to get the crowd buzzing with anticipation—so by the time you made your entrance from the dressing room and started “testing” the cage and looking it over, the people’s energy was already high, and growing by the moment.
Peter got over incredibly well as a heel, which made wrestling him very easy. He was seasoned, set a very easy pace to work with, and had been in the business for a long time. We also had a story to tell that people had seen multiple times on television. The cage match with Peter was pretty long—going twenty minutes in the cage was pretty unusual—but we had some great heat going in this series, and we both enjoyed working together so much that we decided to get the crowd totally lathered up that night. We teased a few false finishes until the crowd was emotionally at their exhaustion point, and then finally gave the people their catharsis.
I remember the ending of that match well—Peter and I were fighting on the top turnbuckle at the corner of the cage, when I eventually got the upper hand and threw a haymaker that knocked Peter down and got his leg caught in the turnbuckle. The people were screaming and waving at me to climb out over the top. Their energy was sky high. So I gave them what they wanted and climbed out over the top and dropped down to the arena floor, rather than going out the door, with Peter still hanging there from the turnbuckle on the inside.
I don’t think that had ever been done at the Garden before. The people went home happy that night.
That night was the second time, I signed autographs by the back door of the Garden until the sun came up.
In February, 1979, I had my first match at the Garden with Greg Valentine, managed by the Grand Wizard. Valentine was a new type of heel challenger for the WWF (The World Wide Wrestling Federation was renamed The World Wrestling Federation right around this time, so for purposes of the book, from here on, I refer to the federation as the “WWF” and the title as the WWF title), a slimmer, meaner, cocky heel, with long, golden hair, who wore beautiful floor-length sequined robes, and who could also chain wrestle. Greg came into the territory featuring a potentially crippling finisher known as the figure-four leglock, which he resulted in a number of his television opponents being stretchered out
of the ring. Greg also had a perpetual scowl on his face that just made him look mean, and he played that up, frequently telling people in his interviews that he had sympathy for no one.
The fans legitimately feared him, and the son of the legendary Johnny Valentine became an instant and credible threat to my championship.
I knew Greg from my time down in the Florida and Georgia territories, and I had been in the ring with him enough to know that he was someone that I could really work with. Greg was highly skilled in the ring, and had good stamina. I was also pretty confident that, after I had done so many Broadways with Dory and Terry and Harley and Jack Brisco back in the NWA, that I could go an hour in the ring with Greg. Of all the guys I had wrestled in the WWF up to this point, Greg was the guy who could tell the story with me that I wanted to tell.
It would be the first time, to my knowledge, that a Garden crowd had ever seen a title match go Broadway—so it would be something new for them, and something I very much wanted to introduce to them. So in a rare moment where I actually got involved in the booking, I asked Vince Sr. to let me go Broadway with Greg in our first at the Garden. Seeing the same potential that I saw, Vince Sr. immediately agreed to the idea.
Greg and I did a lot of chain wrestling, mixed in some high spots, worked in and out of the ring, and took the crowd on exhausting emotional rollercoaster ride. We were both drenched and exhausted, but as the minutes ticked on, the crowd realized that they were seeing something epic that they had never seen before. The fans were on the edges of their seats, exhausted themselves, waiting and wondering what was going to happen.
