by Bob Backlund
My match against Salvatore Bellomo at the Philadelphia Spectrum on August 4, 1984, would be my last match in the WWF for nearly eight years. After I pinned him, I grabbed the microphone and reminded the fans that I was ready to be their champion again anytime, and ironically, because Philly had never been my best town, the fans cheered for me one last time.
Some people over the years have asked me whether I would have rather been wrestling after 1984 because of all the money and the exposure and pay per view and all of that. My consistent answer is “no,” because I got to work for one of the most honorable men I had ever met—and someone who was like a father to me. I wouldn’t have traded that time for all the money in the world.
It Was All About Hogan
I wasn’t around at the time of the transition in 1983, but I know a lot about it. At the time, a lot of us were very loyal to Mr. McMahon and to the business, maybe to a fault. Because after the switch from Bobby to the Sheik and then to Hogan, a lot of our loyalties, including Bobby’s, were swept under the table. Once Hogan had the belt, it was Hogan’s show and screw everybody else. Junior had a vision for where he wanted the thing to go, and it was all about Hogan. So our old-school wrestling business blossomed into a totally different business—what I call the “cartoon era.” But to be honest, the way the business was, with kayfabe and untelevised finishes and all of that, would not have been able to continue the way it was in the world of social media and the Internet. The finishes and the prerecorded television saved for three weeks wouldn’t have worked, they would have been instantly all over the place. The old-school way of doing business would have eventually become impossible, so the change probably saved the business from Vince McMahon Jr.’s point of view.
I never expected Junior to call and invite me back after that. In hindsight, doing the cartoon character that I ended up doing was very good for my retirement, but not real good for the lasting image of my character or for wrestling, but after Bobby’s run, once Hogan took over, wrestling became a cartoon business selling lunch boxes. Unfortunately, I think doing that tainted everything that I had done before with Bruno and Pedro and Bobby that had been so real and good and strong. But it fit in great with Hulk.
Bobby was a real gentleman and I’m really glad that he had the run that he had, because he was very deserving and he was a great champion. We had a lot of fun together over the years, particularly over in Japan, and it was a pleasure to work with him.
–George “The Animal” Steele
It Became About Show Business
Late 1983 and 1984 was a time of transition. It was a time where the promoters wanted more show business—and they didn’t realize that the marquee said wrestling. So it became a time that the great pure wrestlers were starting to get pushed aside for people who were more flamboyant. Because all of a sudden there was Hollywood, and there was MTV, and they were going all over the world. With professional wrestling, one reason that it was so popular all over the world is that you didn’t need to know anything about it—you didn’t need to speak the language—you just needed to turn the TV on and if the psychology was being handled right, you could tell what was going on. It was universal.
When Hogan came along—he was a completely different piece of work than Bobby Backlund. Vinnie was pushing entertainment—from more of a high-paced, show business, entertainment, Liberace and the Rockettes kind of place. And he was surrounding the wrestling talent with that kind of entertainment to help it appeal to a larger audience outside of wrestling. Vinnie was trying to take wrestling into the entertainment mainstream. So the great technical wrestlers kind of got poo-poo’ed. They wanted Hogan, who was a movie star having just completed Rocky III with Stallone, to take his vitamins and say his prayers. They would rather set things up for Hogan to hulk up and flex his muscles—and in the blink of an eye, relatively speaking, the business changed, and the great technicians, the guys who knew how to use psychology to get the people and who were formerly the cornerstones of the business became dinosaurs.
The shame of that is that the business now is suffering because no one realized how great the art that those men had mastered was, and what they brought to the table in terms of the art of telling a story in the ring through psychology. Now, the psychology is not known. As I was coming in, Bobby was on his way out, because the promotion had decided to go with entertainment instead of wrestling.
There was a lot of talk about trying to turn Bobby heel after they took the belt off him. I was around for those discussions. They didn’t want anybody around on the babyface side that could go in there and show up Hogan. They wanted to cotton ball Hogan. Hell, I’d do an interview with Hogan where he’d say something about my kilt and I’d say something about his bald head, and they’d yell, “Cut, cut! You can’t say that about Hulk—he’s on the Wheaties box!” This was pro wrestling we’re talking about—but even there, the definition was changing. They had started to redefine everything. It had just become a gigantic marketing machine with a little wrestling on the side, and they wouldn’t let anyone get close to dinging up Hogan in any way.
So Vinnie put a great technical wrestler like Bobby in mothballs in favor of what he thought was a more entertaining kind of match, animated by characters that they created and could market. But now, we look back on it and see that the wrestlers of this new generation don’t have the training in the psychology of how to tell a story in the ring like Bobby Backlund did—so they have to do all kinds of song and dance to try to keep the thing going instead of just having one man who knew the art, like Bobby Backlund did, come into an arena cold and draw tons of money simply because of his ability to tell a story in the ring, and leave with everybody looking great. That’s what a real champion does—and that’s a guy who can stay over with the people all by himself, just by his own storytelling in the ring with one other man—as opposed to putting someone in a fucking clown outfit and hoping he can sell you a few T-shirts and ice cream bars.
—“Rowdy” Roddy Piper
25
Killing Mr. Kirkley (1985–1992)
“Sunflowers don’t grow from turnip seeds.”
—Napeolon Hill, “Use Cosmic Habitforce”
After I left the WWF, I dabbled around for a little while in a few different promotions. The Pro Wrestling USA promotion, which was comprised of an unstable alliance between the NWA and the AWA, had offered me steady work, but there was too much infighting between the promoters to allow it to be successful. Although some jointly promoted cards did get off the ground, the problem was that the promotion was comprised of two different competing groups (the NWA and the AWA), and neither one was going to permit its champion to be overshadowed by the other’s. There was no clear leadership in the group—and as a consequence, although the promotion showed promise, and could have been successful if an effective leadership team had been established, that never happened. I don’t think anyone realized at the time that their collective future depended on it.
I also spent some time wrestling in the AWA, but there, Verne Gagne had already invested in Rick Martel, another scientific babyface champion. I also did some independent tours of Japan, wrestled a little bit for the Savoldis in the IWCCW territory up in Maine, and even did a little bit of independent promoting of my own in the Springfield, Massachusetts, area. I know I could have continued in the business had I wanted to, by just soldiering on in any one of those promotions and helping make any one of them succeed—but my heart really wasn’t in it. I missed Vince Sr., and I missed my role as the world champion. I missed the fans, the arenas, and the routine.
It just wasn’t the same anymore.
Meanwhile, Vince Jr.’s national expansion was in full swing, and his gamble on Hulk Hogan, and the rock and wrestling connection, and Wrestlemania, had paid huge dividends. Vince Jr. was parlaying those victories by buying up television slots across the territories, cutting off blood supply to the NWA’s regional promotions, and eventually acquiring their top talent until the entire NWA terri
tory system had become unstable. Even though the NWA had an existing board of directors, and a leadership team that could have and should have been able to stave off Vince Jr.’s challenge, the local promoters were more concerned about their own survival and self-interest than they were about the survival of the alliance as a whole, even though they knew, in their heart of hearts, that the survival of the alliance was the only way they would be able to survive individually. The NWA’s inability to come together was ultimately what permitted Vince to win the war for the airwaves and territorial supremacy.
So after these few forays in 1984 and 1985, I retreated from the spotlight, and returned to Glastonbury to help raise Carrie and be with my family and my community. Eventually, even though Corki was working full time as a teacher and gymnastics instructor, I needed to find something to do, so I worked construction, spent some time as a bail bondsman, ran for Congress, and coached amateur wrestling at the high school level at a couple of places in Connecticut.
I also became very depressed, and experienced some of the darkest days of my life during these days away from the business. It is hard to explain the impact on your life when the lights go out, the people go home, and you are forced, once again, to become an ordinary person with an ordinary life. That was something I struggled mightily with during the second half of the 1980s and the beginning of the ’90s until the lure of the spotlight finally called me home.
The People Let Him Do It
The territories all had their own TV stations, and some of them were quite large. But the WWF was located in the right vicinity—right in the heart of the country’s media centers. The three biggest ones were Los Angeles, Atlanta, and New York. So when the war began, those were the three territories that should have been the survivors because they were the ones that controlled the media—and the local media centers are what fueled wrestling in the territories. But it was a fruitless war—and I realized that at a very early stage in the Amarillo area because no matter what we did and what our TV did, we just couldn’t keep up.
The best way to understand what happened to the wrestling business is to compare it to something else that happened around the same time. We used to have a five and dime store in Canyon, Texas. And that five and dime store was run by a guy named Mr. Kirkley. And by golly, when you went into that store, Mr. Kirkley would call out a greeting to you by name as soon as you walked in there. And Mr. Kirkley would ask you about your children and your parents, and anything that might be going on in your life and your job, and then, once you had picked out the things you wanted or needed and paid for them at the register, Mr. Kirkley would help you carry your bags out to your car. Everyone just loved Mr. Kirkley, and going into his store and buying what you needed just made you feel good, you know?
But then along came Wal-Mart, with its bright lights and easy parking, and lower prices, and more variety and what not—and people just up and forgot about Mr. Kirkley even though they loved him. And that’s the way it was in the wrestling business. When Vince Jr. decided to go national, he just started buying up the local television rights and cutting off the oxygen to all of the territories. And the people let him do it, because even though they used to love the local product, they were the ones who lined up to buy the tickets. They were the ones who made it possible to kill Mr. Kirkley.
—Terry Funk
26
Being Bad by Being Good: The Birth of “Mr. Backlund” (1993–94)
“If your life isn’t already what you want it to be, it is because you have drifted into your present circumstances…. You can change that!”
—Napoleon Hill, “Use Cosmic Habitforce”
George Foreman had just staged an incredible comeback in the world of boxing, and had become the world champion again at an advanced age. As it so often does, wrestling imitates life. I was about as old as George was, so in 1992, with business in the WWF worse than I had ever seen it, and in the wake of the steroid scandals that had rocked the company, I was invited to make a comeback nine years after I lost the title.
I met with Vince McMahon at his office in Stamford, and we sketched out a plan for how this was going to work. By that time, Carrie was a teenager, and I wanted to be back in the business. So I broke out my old “All-American Boy” ring jacket and set about to prove I could make it back to the top of the business.
We tested it out a little bit in a few arenas near home in the summer of 1992, and things felt good, so the WWF put some money into a series of promotional videos to be aired on the WWF broadcasts touting my return to the ring after a nine-year absence from the sport. Those videos ran in the early fall of 1992, and I went out on the road again on a full-time basis in October of 1992.
It didn’t take too long to realize, however, that professional wrestling, and the expectations of the wrestling fans had changed a lot in the nine years I had been away. My clean-cut, return to the All-American Boy gimmick wasn’t really getting over with the majority of the fans, because by that point, even the babyfaces in the business were lying and cheating and swearing. The lines between babyfaces and heels, and between good and evil, had become so blurred that there was no way that a pure babyface like me, especially an older one, was going to get over in that environment. Being a pure babyface made me an anachronism—a strange and goofy throwback to an earlier era that nobody seemed to understand anymore.
To their credit, Vince Jr. and the guys in the office did everything they could do to help to make the angle work. They had all kinds of people put me over in an effort to make the people love me again in the way that they once had, but the sad truth was that it just wasn’t catching fire the way we had all hoped it would.
Then, one night, I was riding down the road flipping around the radio, and I came upon the Rush Limbaugh show. Rush was listening with an increasing level of impatience to a caller who was complaining about how bad her life was. Finally, when he couldn’t take it anymore, Rush started yelling at her for the long series of bad choices she had made in her life that she was refusing to take responsibility for.
There, in that moment, it all crystallized for me.
I realized that there were now a lot of people out there who didn’t want to hear about working hard, and being responsible, and having goals and making the right choices. There were too many people looking for the quick and easy path, or needing immediate gratification. In the years I had been gone, we had become much more of a “me” culture, where people were putting themselves first, not thinking about other people, and not caring about our country or our world. I realized that the fan base that had once cheered the “All-American Boy” was gone.
And then it hit me.
I couldn’t get Vince on the phone fast enough. I asked him for a meeting at the next possible opportunity.
When we got together, I looked Vince in the eye and I told him that I wanted to turn heel. He looked shocked, given that this had been the issue that had caused the major rift between us nine years before, when he wanted me to turn heel and chase Hogan for the title. Understandably, Vince asked me why I wanted to turn heel now, after all this time, and I explained to him that my “All-American Boy” routine had become an anachronism, but that reality had presented me with the very real opportunity to be bad by being good.
A moment passed as Vince Jr. thought that through, and then he started nodding.
In that moment, “Mr. Backlund” was born.
Turning heel gave me an incredible burst of energy, because it allowed me to pour out all of my own anger and frustration at what the business had become, at what so many of the fans had become, and at how much our society had weakened since the days when I grew up. I was, in reality, disgusted at what I was seeing, and found myself longing for the days when people still had morals and values, and when people still raised their children the right way. I meant every word of what was coming out of Mr. Backlund’s mouth. It was coming straight from the heart.
So Mr. Backlund became the moral echo—the unspoken and forgotte
n conscience of our society in the ’90s. I know Vince McMahon was snickering inside, because I don’t think he thought I’d be able to pull it off. He was probably thinking, “Bob Backlund can’t shoot a promo to save his life, so how in the world is he going to come back and pull this off?” In fact, I think he was nearly certain that I would fall on my face and make a fool out of myself.
We decided to launch the new character at a Monday Night Raw where the old Bob Backlund faced the current WWF World Champion Bret Hart for the belt. This was to have been the culmination of all of the work we had done with the old character—where, if Bob Backlund had gotten over, he would have won the title at forty-two years old and overcome those incredible odds. But we had all agreed that the babyface Bob Backlund wasn’t over enough with the people to have a successful reign as the WWF champion. The people didn’t want to see it, and so we needed to respond in kind.
I proposed to Vince that we have forty-two-year-old babyface Bob Backlund character lose to Bret Hart in that match after he thought he won, and then, when that reality hit him, to have Bob Backlund “snap” on television, turn heel, and become Mr. Backlund.
So that’s the way the match was booked.
Bret Hart, who was the son of legendary wrestler and wrestling trainer Stu Hart, was a terrific babyface wrestler—which enabled Bret and me to have a great babyface match for about twenty minutes on Monday Night Raw. We traded holds and counterholds, and the fans, who were no longer accustomed to longer, wrestling-based matches, liked it a lot. It was an old-school match all the way to the end when I got him in a cradle and I thought I heard the ref slap the mat three times, released the hold, and threw my hands in the air and began to celebrate. In reality, the ref had only counted to two, and pushed my hands down. I turned around, and Bret surprised me with his own small package and the referee counted to three and the match went to Bret—ending my winning streak, and the dream of a being a champion once again.
