We would just enjoy ourselves and hardly talked about wrestling when we did something like go sailing together. I think Vince appreciated that I could talk about something besides business. Louie was good for me in that regard — he always kept me grounded in reality outside the wrestling world.
As I mentioned, when I came to New York in 1979, they wanted me to wrestle the champion, Bob Backlund. I challenged him for the title a record four times in a row at Madison Square Garden. It had never been done before and has never been done since. Back then, if you didn’t draw at the Garden, you wouldn’t stay in a main-event program no matter what the original storyline plan might have been. The champion would remain in place, of course, but they would move on to the next challenger. That’s how it worked. Vince Sr. liked my first match with Backlund so much we ended up having three return bouts.
The third match with Backlund along with the famous match with Slaughter I had later were my greatest moments as a wrestler. WWE has everything on tape except that third match with Backlund, and I’ve always been disappointed about that. In my humble opinion, we came up with one of the very best endings for a match ever. The old man — that’s how I sometimes refers to Vince Sr. — wanted a third match after I had won the first match by disqualification and the second by count-out. Backlund had never lost a match at that point and he had now lost two in a row. For the third match, it was decided there would be no winner.
It was my big chance — not a lot of main-event rivalries made it to a third bout in those days.
At MSG, managers would retreat to the dressing room after the introductions, because they got so much heat from the crowd and it often led to trouble, sometimes even rioting. We got special permission for our managers to be ringside that night. The Grand Wizard would be there for me and Arnold Skaaland would be in Bob’s corner. As the main-event bad guy at MSG, you exited the building hidden in an ambulance, and the driver dropped you off at your hotel. This procedure was put in place after a car was turned upside down by the crowd. On that night, we all knew that the managers’ presence at ringside was like throwing a match into a powder keg, and I truly hoped it wouldn’t explode.
Near the end of the match, I started to reach into my tights for the brass knuckles I’d hidden. Skaaland got on the apron to signal my cheating to the ref, and then the Grand Wizard jumped up as well. Of course, that distracted the referee who was busy telling both men to get down from the ring. I hit Backlund with the knucks and knocked him out cold. I went to nail Skaaland next, but he ducked and hit me with the championship he carried for Bob. So there we were, both the babyface champion and the heel contender side by side in the middle of the ring, out cold. The ref began counting us out, very slowly, hoping one of us would get to our feet before a count of ten.
The Grand Wizard was my manager and I was the first ever Intercontinental Champion.
By the time he got to six, the building was shaking. I was sure the roof was gonna come off — the fans wanted Backlund to start moving that bad. Everyone went on an emotional roller-coaster ride and the crowd was almost as tired as we were when the referee finally counted both of us out. After that, we had to have a final and fourth match, and I finally lost in a cage. But now that I think back, Bob Backlund never pinned me for a count of one-two-three . . . Isn’t that something?
In the middle of this series with Backlund, I was actually crowned the first ever Intercontinental Champion — this also meant I was the first Intercontinental Champion to challenge the World Champion. That reminds me: the Intercontinental Championship . . . I won it in Rio de Janeiro. Which surprises me, because for some reason I don’t remember ever going there. But since I am indeed the first Intercontinental Champion, and the internet says I won a tournament in Rio to be crowned the first champion, I must have been there for at least one night, right? It must have been one hell of a party with Arnold Skaaland and André the Giant if I don’t remember any of it.
After all of these trials and tribulations, Vince Sr. finally offered me the position of color commentator for televised matches and had me doing interviews ringside.
On TV, as a rib, they had me say “Rio de Janeiro” as much as possible because I never could say it quite right. Sometimes they would tease me even more and make me do a five-minute interview with a wrestler who only spoke Spanish . . . Vince Sr. would shake his head and tell me it was no good.
“Yeah, but you had me do it.”
So, I had become an announcer and I was now even a good guy. The Wizard had sold my contract to Lou Albano and we had a falling-out. It made my return to the Garden a big deal. I was already working as an agent at that point, because they wanted to keep me around without having me wrestling every week. They knew I could tell our audience the stories we needed to tell on television. And they didn’t even care about my accent, because Bruno was worse than me. And before Bruno, it was Antonino Rocca, so I was really an improvement. OK, we were all shit . . .
Let me tell you, when WWE inducted Bruno Sammartino into the Hall of Fame in 2013, I was very happy. Reconnecting with him had been a long time coming, and it was fun to sit together for two hours, reminiscing. We were both happy that all the bullshit of the past was finally behind us. Whenever we see each other now, we have a blast — I tell him all my old jokes and we laugh our asses off. When I was working with Backlund in 1979, Bruno was still hot in Boston and he requested that I work with him there, instead of Backlund. He ended up losing by count-out against me — and Bruno would never lose. I truly appreciated him doing that, and I still remember it as if it was yesterday.
When Vince and I started to work together it was not always easy.
Perhaps the most famous match I had in WWE, however, was against Sgt. Slaughter. When it happened, I was a full-time commentator and he was doing his $5,000 Cobra Clutch Challenge. The story of his challenge went like this: he would invite a wrestler into the ring and promise that if he could escape his sleeper hold, he’d earn the five grand. Of course, no one could break the hold. Sarge was managed by my former manager, the Grand Wizard, and he was the biggest bully in the business. Anyway, I was doing an interview with both of them after an opponent had just fled in fear. One thing led to another and then Slaughter slapped me, calling me “yellow.” (I had refused the challenge for weeks because I considered myself retired — even though Sarge was offering me $10,000, twice as much as a regular challenger. I figured I had nothing to prove.) Naturally, I got mad at being disrespected like that, so I challenged him to go right then and there. I took off my jacket, shirt, and tie, and I let him put the Cobra Clutch on me — and the crowd whipped itself into a frenzy. I fought like crazy, with maneuvers people had never seen, to get out of that sleeper. Knowing I was finally about to break his dreaded hold, he released it and then proceeded to hit me with a chair. People were freaking out. He picked up my bloodied body and put on the Cobra Clutch once again. I went completely out. He refused to release the hold even when others climbed into the ring to try to make him stop. It was quite an eventful evening and the WWE Universe clamored for revenge. (By the way, technically, Sarge never paid me for breaking the hold. With interest, I think I’m owed quite a bit of money today.)
We had the inevitable confrontation after that on April 6, 1981, at the Garden and then we toured our rivalry around the territory . . . No rulebook could keep us in check and we were both disqualified.
Our big night at MSG came on May 4, 1981. It was booked as an Alley Fight, and there was no referee in the ring with us. I won after repeatedly hitting a bloodied Slaughter with my cowboy boot, and the Wizard finally threw in the towel on Slaughter’s behalf. We won a bunch of awards that year for best match, and it also captured the imagination of the WWE universe for years to come. There is not a lot about the matches of that era that I remember, but these few are really special to me. Stories about what happened outside of the arenas — well, that’s what I look back on most fondly. There�
�s plenty of them, and they all still make me laugh.
I hurt my knee while working in New York, doing the same backflip over the turnbuckle I’d done a thousand times before. I needed surgery — I was getting older and my body was letting me know it. Luckily, I didn’t miss a lot of time, only about two weeks, because the procedure was arthroscopic.
Anyway, two days after I left the hospital, I got a call.
“Hello, sir, it’s Dr. Lewis.”
I could not remember if this was the doctor who had operated on me, because I had seen two. He said he had worked on my leg.
“I have to tell you something; we need you to come back to the hospital.”
“Why?”
“You see, sir, we left something in your knee during the surgery. It will take only twenty minutes and everything will be fine.”
I was really pissed.
“How could this happen, doc? What time should I be there tomorrow?”
“About ten should be fine.”
“But I can’t believe you screwed up like this, doc . . .”
The doctor burst out laughing — it was actually a friend of mine pulling a joke on me. I was relieved. If he hadn’t blown his cover, I would have gone to the hospital the next day for sure. “Dr. Lewis” was, in fact, WWE Hall of Famer Arnold Skaaland. That didn’t happen to me too often; I usually was the one pulling the pranks.
We were working a show in Portland, Maine, on a Sunday afternoon. Most of us were going straight back to Boston, I was driving the van and André was in the back near the big sliding door. I told him there was another car with some wrestlers just in front of us and when we passed them, we’d moon them. André was always in for a good laugh.
“OK, boss.”
So he opened the door, turned his ass toward the outside, unzipped his pants, and asked me to let him know when we were ready.
As André exposed his giant ass for the whole world to see, I blew the car’s horn. But, of course, it wasn’t a car full of wrestlers. It was an elderly couple in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was fucking mad. I’m still laughing about this one. Sorry, André.
Rene Goulet was a funny guy and a fellow Quebecer. He was another Mad Dog protégé and worked with me as a producer for WWE. We had a show in Hartford once, on another Sunday afternoon, and it was still day when we got on the highway to head back home to Stamford. We hit some major traffic and we weren’t moving. That’s when Goulet said, “J’ai envie de caca.” For those of you who don’t speak French, that means that my friend needed to go . . . now. But there was nowhere for him to go. Poor Rene. “I have to go now; I can’t hold it anymore. I’m going to do it in my pants.”
I told him to take a deep breath and be patient; we were nearing an exit. He kept telling me that he wasn’t going to be able to wait that long. At some point, he grabbed some Kleenex I had in the car and ordered me to stop the car right there. I pulled over on the side of the road and he jumped out, dropped his pants, and let nature take its course. Well by now, I hope you’ve figured out what my next move was going to be. Yes, of course, I drove off and left him all by his lonesome with his pants around his ankles. Everybody was honking their horns at him. When he was done he began to run after me, faster than a speeding bullet. I think he was even madder than André. But I would never have forgiven myself if I had missed that opportunity.
At one point, Verne Gagne began running opposition to Roy Shire. Verne was putting shows on in Oakland, and Roy had limited himself to San Francisco. Verne even took over the television in the Bay Area. I was in New York, but Verne was using Bockwinkel and Stevens in an attempt to hurt Roy and take over his cities. A week before Roy’s annual battle royal, Verne announced his own battle royal in the same market. He called Vince Sr. to have me in Oakland.
I was happy with the booking — I was going to see Ray, Nick, Greg Gagne, and Bobby Heenan, while getting paid to make a trip to California. As soon as my name was advertised, Roy Shire called Vince Sr.
“You motherfucker, you let fucking Patterson work for fucking Verne Gagne! I have my own battle royal a week after. Now I’ve got to have Patterson as well.”
Senior came to me and said, “You have to do me a big favor. You have to stay down there and work for Roy Shire in his battle royal after Verne’s show. He’s mad because I let you go.”
I said no, I’m not doing it. I was still mad about how things ended between Roy and me.
Vince Sr. then said, “You can’t do that to me. Roy’s screaming. You’ve got to go. Please?”
Reluctantly I said yes, on the condition that I would be paid in full before I even showed up. As far as I knew, Roy was still mad at me for leaving and I didn’t want him to screw with my money for revenge. I went and wrestled the battle royal in Oakland for Verne, and a week later I entered the battle royal for Roy in San Francisco. It was the last battle royal Roy ever ran.
And you won’t believe who won that match.
Yes. It was me.
I wrestled for opposing promoters in the same market one week apart.
Despite all of that shit we went through together, Roy and I, he was a smart man. Maybe he was still mad at me, but he gave the fans what they wanted to see.
* * *
Even my father had accepted who I was. Still, we had never discussed the issue between us since I’d left for Boston all those years ago. Now that I was living in New York, it meant I was just a few hours away from him again. For a good part of my life, I had been under the impression that my dad loved my brother Normand and that was it. But early in my run in New York, Louie and I had my dad over. I flew him to New Jersey and took him to Madison Square Garden. And then I arranged to sit and talk with him, one-on-one. It wasn’t an argument — I just calmly let him know how I felt when I was young. I just let it all out, in a nice way. We both cried and we held hands and hugged. And then I reached into my pocket and I gave him a nice little diamond ring. And oh my God, he cried like a baby. I had never seen my father cry . . . Damn, it felt good to let that burden go.
When I lost him on March 4, 1981, it didn’t register the way it did when I lost my mother. I saw him in the hospital, and then the family left to get something to eat and when we came back, he was gone. At the end, he was still the same: a very stern man. He was hard-headed and he always would be. I wish he were here to read this today. We ran out of the time we needed to get close, but at least we had closure.
On the business front, I was wrestling less and less. My friend Gorilla Monsoon was in charge of television and Lord Alfred Hayes worked as a commentator, so I kept working behind the scenes with my friends. On top of my duties as a commentator, Vince Sr. asked me to go on the road full-time as a producer. He needed someone to be in charge of the show, someone he could trust. I enjoyed that very much, and when George Scott quit, I moved up to working in the office . . . But that’s a story for later.
I think I had my last matches (until the Attitude Era and the stooges stuff I did with Gerald Brisco) around 1987, when I worked some of the WWE shows in Montréal. On August 31, 1987, I had a match against Brutus Beefcake with Mr. T as the referee at the Montréal Forum. It seemed like a fitting end to my active career, wrestling in the city where my dream had started almost thirty years before. And Mr. T was a big star. Not too bad for a local boy like me. (I lost some hair in that one, though.) The attendance was 14,624. Not bad either.
Vince and I started from very different backgrounds, but we became a great team and, more importantly, great friends.
I wrestled all the top wrestlers in our business, so I must have been good, right? Being gay never had anything to do with it. It just meant I had to work harder and laugh in the face of abuse. I’m proud of the fact that I always left a territory of my own accord: I was never given notice.
That young kid from Montréal who loved wrestling had been in the main event at Madison Square Garden in N
ew York City, and that still means something to me. When the old man thanked me and told me how good my matches with Backlund and Slaughter were, in my mind I knew everything had been worth it.
Sure enough, the wrestling business was not done with me. I was about to start the second part of my career, the one that is apparently never going to end. But before I get into that, I have a few more stories I want to share with you about my travels.
AROUND THE WORLD . . . AND BACK!
“I’ve lived a life that’s full”
What a way to make a living, doing what you love, while traveling all over the world, meeting people and making friends while staying in some of the most incredible hotels on the planet. There is no way I could have envisioned that when I left Montréal or even when I was lying on my bed looking up at the ceiling in my little apartment in Boston. I’ve always hated routine and I’m always up for something new, so traveling was usually fun for me.
But, strangely, tours of Japan were difficult for me. They were just too intense, too much about wrestling. You stay with wrestlers, you wrestle, you travel to a wrestling show by train, you wrestle, you take a bus to another wrestling show, where there’s . . . even more wrestling. I can’t live and talk about the business twenty-four-seven; I need a break. That was the hardest part for me. The language barrier didn’t help either. In 1968, for my first tour, it was a big culture shock. In Japan, there are regular hotels just like we have, and there are also Japanese hotels. In those, you sleep on the floor with a rice pillow and a tatami for a mattress. The toilet is standing only — there’s no time to read, let me tell you. The food was also a challenge for me. There’s a lot of fish and I didn’t like fish when I first went. I’m glad I’ve experienced it, but it wasn’t for me. I could not have worked in Japan full-time like others did.
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