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

by Bob Backlund

  I don’t think Studd even came off his feet in the match until the finish.

  It was a shocking and sudden ending to the match less than eight minutes in, but I think it made sense both to the storyline of the match, and for the overall quality of the event. In reality, John had been working hard from the opening bell beating on me and pouring on the offense—and at 364 pounds, he wasn’t someone who was going to deliver a lot of quality output fifteen minutes into a match, so we were thinking that a high-quality match with a quick and fluky finish, coupled with my quick escape back to the dressing room with the belt while he screamed at the referee, was the way to go.

  I think the fans at the Garden bought into it. Studd and I did a few more turns around the territory in Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and in a few of the towns in upstate New York—but a lot of the cities stayed away from this match, opting instead to keep Studd fresh and unscathed before putting him in the ring with Andre.

  Meanwhile, on the undercard of my match with Studd at the Garden, for the second time in three years, Don Muraco stripped Pedro Morales of the Intercontinental Heavyweight Championship. Don had done very well in his previous run with the Intercontinental title, both in the ring and at the box office, when he held the belt for six months in 1981. He still looked tremendous and had a couple of years more experience, so shortly after his return to the territory, Vince Sr. had opted to have him go over Pedro again and reclaim the number-two spot in the federation. Once Muraco had the Intercontinental title, it was a natural thing to declare him the number-one contender and to again set him up for a matchup with me.

  Muraco was, by that point, enough of a draw that he could headline smaller to midsize venues by himself against a credible contender for the Intercontinental Championship. The office was starting to do two-a-days much more often, especially in smaller venues during the week, so with Muraco holding the Intercontinental heavyweight championship, they could put Muraco in there against popular babyfaces like Snuka, Rocky Johnson, Tony Atlas, Ivan Putski, or Mil Mascaras at the top of a card in one building, and me and a top heel on the top of the card in another building, and run two successful shows on the same night. You need a reliable guy who can also draw consistently to be able to pull that off, and Muraco fit that bill perfectly.

  Many of the promoters around the territory who opted to stay away from a Backlund-Studd main event in their buildings went right to Muraco even before he had taken the Intercontinental Heavyweight Championship back from Pedro. Don and I had drawn so well everywhere we went in the territory back in 1981 that the promoters, some of whom had experienced some raggedness in their booking and softness in their gates since my series with Snuka ended, were anxious to get back to something reliable. Boston, Landover, and Pittsburgh are just three of the towns I remember that launched directly into a series with Muraco even before it had the allure of a champion versus champion encounter.

  At the Garden, however, which, of course, was the WWF’s marquee arena and where everything was done in a more “orderly” fashion, Muraco and I had our first bout in February 1983, which was champion versus champion. Vince knew that another Backlund-Muraco feud would, as it had in the past, provide box-office gold, so right out of the chutes, it was decided that I would be disqualified in that first match to set up a Texas Death rematch at the Garden for the March 1983 card.

  As always, our match generated tremendous interest and crowd reaction. Muraco was one of the most credible heel challengers I faced as WWF champion—and I think it is fair to say that after watching him pin the formerly unbeatable Pedro Morales not once but twice in the span of two years—the fans definitely believed that Muraco had the goods to strip me of the WWF World Heavyweight Championship as well. The first match ended when I had the Chickenwing Crossface on Muraco, we got tangled in the ropes, and the referee disqualified me for refusing to break the hold.

  The beginning of March brought the first really definitive signs of the coming changes. On March 5 and March 6, we made our first trip out west for full WWF cards based in San Diego and Los Angeles, California. Mike LeBell’s Los Angeles–based territory had just folded, and Vince Jr. saw an opportunity—so we flew out there and rented cars and ran a couple of test cards. I wrestled West Coast guys in the main events on each of the cards out there (Ray Stevens at the San Diego Sports Arena and Buddy Rose in Los Angeles) so fans would at least be familiar with the challengers. We also used some of the local talent from out there to fill out the cards—but even with that, and a fair amount of promotion, the buildings were each less than half full. This again pointed to the critical importance of having local television to familiarize the fans with the wrestlers and the angles.

  Elsewhere around the territory, the expansion was also underway—except that expansion meant running two or more cards almost every night of the week, and splitting the roster to fulfill those dates. That made Muraco an even more important player, because when he and I were not wrestling each other in the larger arenas, or part of the six-man, eight-man, and even ten-man tag-team matches that the promoters were experimenting with in 1983, we were nearly always split up to headline different cards on the same night. Doing that meant that each venue got a title match, either with me defending the World Heavyweight Championship, or with Muraco defending the Intercontinental Heavyweight Championship. As I have mentioned before—to be a main eventer in the WWF, you needed to be a reliable guy who could be counted on to show up on time, in shape to wrestle, and possess the skills to bring the people to the box office. Muraco could check all three of those boxes, so he was the man chosen to carry the other end of the WWF banner with me as we expanded the territory in 1983.

  Our series at the Garden culminated in a Texas Death Match in our second bout of the series in a rare Sunday matinee on March 20, 1983. I was a little surprised that Vince Sr. chose to end that series after two bouts, rather than stretching it to the full three match series this time. When we wrestled at the Garden in August and September 1981, the August match was our first sixty-minute Broadway, and the September match was a Texas Death Match—and we then wrestled a whole series of matches all over the territory, from Broadways to cage matches, to Texas Death Matches, banging out buildings for almost the entire time that Don was in the territory. So I was looking forward to the chance to go three with Muraco at the Garden, but it was not to be.

  The other thing was that when we got together in the ring, as we had proved in 1981, Don and I actually liked to wrestle. We didn’t really need the gimmick of the Texas Death Match to get the match over with the fans—we could do it just by virtue of the fact that we were wrestling in a title versus title match and by building the drama of the match through chain wrestling. On top of that, Dick Kroll (the referee that night), normally the fed’s top guy, had an off night and forgot that the match was a Texas Death Match. He broke chokes and counted when we were out of the ring—to the point that we had to actually remind him about halfway through the match that it was actually a Texas Death Match and to stop counting.

  But the match was billed as a Texas Death Match, so we had to give the fans something that qualified—so near the end of the match, I threw Don into the ringpost and he bladed a gusher and bled all over the place, and sold the blood loss for the rest of the match as having weakened him severely. From there, we went into a series of false finishes, with me catching him in an over the shoulder backbreaker, Don backflipping out of it and backdropping me into a pinning combination in the middle of the ring, me bridging out of it and putting him in the Chickenwing Crossface, Don kicking off the ropes, and me giving Don a German suplex into a bridge for the pin. That little sequence was something that we had worked on. We had wanted to make it like the end of a fireworks show—emptying the bag with everything we had to throw at each other—where ultimately, Don’s blood loss weakened him enough for me to get the three count on a suplex and bridge.

  It was a great finish to a great match that I think the fans really enjoyed. I wish we c
ould have gone three at the Garden—especially given the way the rest of that summer’s bookings went. We sold out the Garden and the Felt Forum for the Texas Death Match that Sunday afternoon, and I remember hearing in the dressing room that there were hundreds of people milling around outside who wanted to buy a ticket but couldn’t get in! I think that pretty clearly demonstrated that Muraco and I had again struck a chord with the fans in New York, and could easily have filled that building for a third time.

  Tremendous Humility

  In 1983, when I came back and carried the Intercontinental Championship again, we often had two crews running different shows on the same night, and Bob had one crew and I had the other. I had a lot of heat on me at the time, so I just tried to read the newspapers and watch TV and try to keep current with pop culture so I could keep my interviews sharp, but the WWF was already expanding then, and there was a lot of talent, so it wasn’t really so much just me and him anymore, there were a lot of people we could rely on to draw.

  I think the main thing to say about Bob was just how professional he was in everything he did inside the ring and outside, and the way he represented our profession. He always wore a suit and tie when he traveled, he always traveled alone, watched his diet, and he always did the right things. You know, back in those days we were always heavy kayfabe, so we never really had the chance to get real close. He seldom came out after the matches—most of the time, he drove home to be with his family. I got to know Bob best over in Japan. We went on a tour together over there, and so I got to know him better from being in the dressing rooms and on the busses with him, and running around working out and having a few beers with him after the matches over there when he could let his hair down a little bit more.

  For the era we were in, Bob was different from everybody else. What you saw was what you got. He was an honest, hardworking, simple guy who had tremendous humility, a big heart, and who always just worked his ass off. I was proud to have had the chance to work with him, and to have had the matches we did. I was proud of the way he represented the business for me, because I wasn’t exactly what you would call a role model for others. He was the consummate pro. I just have the utmost respect for the man.

  —Don Muraco

  I remember that day at the Garden well—because I showered after the match and drove back to Glastonbury—but not to my home. I was doing double-duty that day. After the matinee at the Garden, I was main-eventing a benefit card in my home town at Glastonbury High School that night against Ray “The Crippler” Stevens—marking the first time that I had wrestled in front of my hometown crowd since Mad Dog Vachon back in Princeton at the beginning of my career.

  The April 1983 television tapings saw the return of another one of my favorite opponents—Sergeant Slaughter. Knowing that Slaughter would be one of my primary opponents in the territory throughout the summer, we wanted to do something that would generate some real heat between us right away. I came up with the idea of attempting to do the Harvard Step Test—a challenge of strength and endurance where you step up and down on a step—on television for an hour, and having Sarge come out somewhere late in the hour, criticize my performance, and then attack me and whip me with his riding crop while I was in a weakened physical state.

  Given that Sarge had actually been a drill instructor in the United States Marines Corps, he was the perfect person to do this with. Sarge did a lot of great things in his career, but whipping me like a dog on television was definitely one of those memorable moments that everyone still remembers thirty years later—and was one of those high points that propelled him to superstardom as a heel. Of course, Sarge was straight out of central casting—he looked more like a drill sergeant than an actual drill sergeant did—but more than that, he was a fantastic performer in the ring.

  Sarge was also a terrific guy outside of the ring, and he was actually very nervous about this angle because he wanted no part of legitimately hitting me with the whip. I that we needed to legitimize our feud in the eyes of the fans so we could set the world on fire across the territory that summer. I reassured him, repeatedly, that I wanted him to hit me as hard as he could with that whip to make sure that it raised welts on my body that the people could instantly see on television—and still see later when we took the match out on the road. Sarge absolutely hated the idea of doing that to me, so I pretty much had to tell him that if he didn’t hit me hard enough with it to make the angle work, that I would take the thing away from him and do it to him.

  Whipping the Champ

  I asked Bob if he had ever been whipped by a riding crop, and of course, he said, “No,” and I said, “Well, it’s going to hurt and leave marks on you,” but he was intent on making that attack look as realistic as he could, so he said, “We only have one shot at it, let’s make it count!” Well, he was about fifty-seven minutes into the Harvard Step Test and his skin was sweating a lot and just primed for that riding crop. I felt bad every time I hit him with it because he was up on his tiptoes and I knew that it had to hurt, but he was all about making that angle a winner.

  —Sergeant Slaughter

  As it turned out, unlike the debacle with Graham, this was a hugely successful angle on television—maybe the best one I ever did. Although I had to reassure Sarge right up to the moment that I went out to start the Harvard Step Test, he did actually hit me with the whip as hard as he could, and that thing hurt like heck when it bit into my skin again and again. Some of the strikes went deep enough into the skin to draw blood, and I had those marks on me for a couple of weeks or maybe longer. Whenever I took my shirt off in the gym or in the arena, the people could see that the marks were real—and that made the whole thing take off and lent credibility to the angle, although Corki was madder than heck that I agreed to let someone do that to me.

  Slaughter’s look and his personality, coupled with the fact that his finisher—the Cobra Clutch—had again gotten totally over with the fans, really made the whole thing work. Ours became a really hot feud, and we milked it all over the territory all summer. We needed it, too, because with Vince Jr. taking over the business from his father, the flow of new heels from the NWA territories into the WWF had slowed considerably, and there weren’t as many new guys around for me to wrestle.

  Meanwhile, at the Garden in April, I faced the challenge of another returning heel—“The Russian Bear” Ivan Koloff. Koloff was another guy with a lot of history in the business, and a lot of miles already logged in WWF rings. He, of course, was the man who beat Bruno at the Garden in 1972 to end Bruno’s first and seemingly insurmountable nine-year reign as WWF champion, which, of course, gave Koloff a lot of credibility with the fans. Because Koloff had beaten Bruno, who many thought to be invincible, the fans figured he was capable of beating me too, and that was something that put people in the seats.

  Koloff had significantly slimmed down from the 300-pound strongman he was in the 1970s to a 240-pound wrestling machine. Although we were booked as one-and-done in most places during this series in 1983, my matches with Ivan tended to be lengthier than most of my other challengers because Koloff was a master of chain wrestling, we could start slow and build and tell the story that way. Our matches were very credible, and were among the best and most satisfying of my career. They were also a nice diversion from the matches with Slaughter that were happening at the same time—because the series with Slaughter was more of a feud, and as such, featured more brawling than wrestling.

  At the Garden, I beat Koloff with the Chickenwing Crossface after about thirty minutes of really solid wrestling in what was one of the best technical matches I ever had in that building. In other arenas around the territory, Ivan and I wrestled for as long as forty-five minutes before calling for the finish. We were having a great time, and in most of the places we wrestled, we had the fans on the edges of their seats simply by featuring old-school mat and chain wrestling. It was great to see that the fans had learned to appreciate that kind of old-school, psychology-driven wrestling match.


  By contrast, my two matches with the Sarge at the Garden were total brawling affairs almost from bell to bell—which is not to say that the matches were any less compelling to the fans. He was a terrific worker with tremendous agility for a big man. He was also 100 percent about the match, all the time—which made him a real pleasure to work with. In our first match at the Garden in May 1983, I caught Sarge in the Chickenwing, and he grabbed the whip from the Grand Wizard, who was at ringside and started whipping me with it, causing the referee to declare a disqualification.

  Ordinarily, a challenger getting disqualified would be a booking tool to get him out of a championship series with me without having to get beaten cleanly. It was usually a tool used to keep someone strong for a later series—often with Andre. In this case, however, it was a finish that allowed me to demand the rematch, even though technically Sarge was no longer the number-one contender after losing the match by disqualification. On television, much was made of this point, and of the fact that I might be “losing my cool” a little bit by demanding a rematch with such a dangerous challenger—and that the fact that Sarge had gotten under my skin might prove to be my undoing.

  The booking worked great—as the Garden was again full for our rematch in June, which had all the makings of a Pier Six brawl. That match was likewise booked to end inconclusively, with me getting counted out after Slaughter clotheslined me off the ring apron with the Slaughter Cannon after I had been distracted by the referee. This time, however, the blowoff Texas Death Match between Slaughter and me was set for the Meadowlands Arena in East Rutherford, New Jersey, which provides you with the answer to the oft-asked trivia question—who was the only one of my challengers I never defeated cleanly at the Garden? Despite two series against Sarge in 1980 and 1983, he was the only heel that I faced for the championship that I never defeated. We did, however, completely sell out the Meadowlands for that Texas Death Match, where I finally got that elusive pin over the Sarge.