Backlund

“You are where you are, and what you are, because of your established habits.”

On the appointed day, I flew commercial from Atlanta to Philadelphia for my first TV taping with the WWWF. Vince Sr. paid for the ticket. Once I got to the Philadelphia airport, I rented a car and began to hunt around Center City Philadelphia for the Philadelphia Arena. This was 1977, long before anyone had ever heard of GPS, or cell phones or the Internet—so I had to stop in at a couple of gas stations, and got lost in some of the seedier parts of South and West Philadelphia, but I eventually found my way there.

I got to the arena at about 6:30 p.m. or so that first night, met the people who were putting up the ring, and they pointed me to the dressing rooms. As soon as I walked in, I saw an older man in a three-piece suit with silvering hair sitting at a table and I knew immediately that it was Vince McMahon Sr.

Vince Sr. got up from the table enthusiastically, and with a big toothy grin, came over and shook my hand. It was definitely the warmest reception I had ever received from a wrestling promoter, and I remember wondering at the time if it meant something. Vince Sr. and I talked for a while, and he explained to me how their TV tapings worked, and what I should expect once the people were let into the building.

Basically, back in those early days at the Philadelphia Arena, the boys got there at around eleven in the morning with Vince McMahon Jr. to start taping three weeks of house show interviews. They typically spent the whole day laying those down, because each card would require three different sets of interviews (one for each week of TV) for at least two and sometimes three of the feature matches. Nothing was scripted, so it often took a few takes to get the interviews right and to make them sound different enough so the fans wouldn’t catch on that they were all recorded on the same day. Add in the hijinx and the ribbing and the guys standing just off camera goofing around and trying to make Vince Jr. or each other laugh while they were recording, and you had a recipe for a pretty long day.

That night, I met most of the wrestlers on the WWWF roster, all the managers, and a bunch of the office guys. Captain Lou Albano, Arnold Skaaland, Freddie Blassie, and Ernie Roth (the Grand Wizard of Wrestling) were all sitting there talking with Vince Sr. when I walked in. I also met Domienic DeNucci, Mikel Scicluna, Johnny Rodz, and Gorilla Monsoon. A bunch of them were playing cards. Scicluna was smoking a long, curled pipe and really had the look of a Maltese Nobleman. It was a strange new world—as I had never set eyes on any of these guys before in any of the other territories where I had previously wrestled.

I went over and found a corner, put my bag down, and started changing into my wrestling gear to get ready to have a match. The Captain (Lou Albano) was the first guy to come over and engage me.

“I’m from Princeton, Minnesota, sir,” I said quietly. “But we’re living down in Georgia right now.”

“Speak up, mumbles! You sound like you gotta mouthful of mashed potatoes. You need to enunciate. You got that?! E-nun-ci-ate! E-nun-ci-ate! Bwa-ha-ha-ha!”

The Captain was pretty well lubricated with alcohol by that time of the day, and he was yelling and laughing and carrying on with his big belly hanging out of his shirt, which was all the way unbuttoned. He was loud and I certainly wasn’t used to that kind of brashness. I hadn’t met anyone like him before that, and it caught me off guard. There were people in that dressing room, like Albano and DeNucci and Scicluna and Chief (Jay Strongbow) who had all been in the territory for a long time and knew each other well. I was an outsider—but I think everyone sensed, even on that first day, that I was there for a reason. I don’t know whether Vince Sr. had discussed it with anyone before I got there, or told some of the people that I was coming in, or what—but there was definitely a kind of stand-offish curiosity among the boys about who I was and what I was about.

There was a definite clique in that dressing room, comprised of Bruno, DeNucci, Rodz, Garea, Chief, and Scicluna. They were a strong and tight-knit group. Fortunately for me, Vince McMahon Sr. went out of his way to make me feel welcomed and at home.

At the time, the Capitol Wrestling Group ran the WWWF, and that group was comprised of Vince Sr., Phil Zacko, Arnold Skaaland, and Gorilla Monsoon. I think Angelo Savoldi also had a small piece of the action also. He helped on the administrative side and it seemed like he was always around. Vince Sr. had the book, and was very definitely the man in charge. As I would learn later, that group used to gather in their little New York City office across from the Garden on the Monday afternoon before the Garden show and brainstorm about booking ideas—who to bring in, what had been hot on the house show circuit, and what feuds or angles might be started to kick-start some new box office interest. Sometimes, the same group would gather at the TV tapings as well—and you’d see them sitting at a table talking, smoking cigars, and playing gin rummy.

There were locker rooms in the Philadelphia Arena, but the building was a dump and its owners were charging Vince Sr. a lot of money for rent. It wasn’t long after I came in for the first tapings that the WWWF moved its television tapings out of the Philadelphia Arena and up the road a bit to the little arena at the Allentown Fairgrounds, and the next day at the Hamburg Fieldhouse. In addition to saving money and getting us out of that decrepit building, I think ownership also wanted the fans from inner-city Philadelphia to come out to the larger and more lucrative Spectrum cards instead.

The Allentown arena was just a large, open agricultural hall with no dressing rooms or showers. One corner was cordoned off with a big blue curtain, and all of the wrestlers, both babyfaces and heels, were just sitting around in folding chairs behind that blue curtain or hanging around outside in the parking lot. Both buildings were very small steel and aluminum structures that actually reverberated with fan noise, and the people there were always very animated, so they worked out well for TV.

We would tape three one-hour shows sequentially, one after the next, with many of the guys wrestling two or three times each night against enhancement talent who would make them look good. There would also be one “dark match” main event at the end of the night, not broadcast on television, which was used to draw the crowd.

Because each of those arenas held only about 750 people, it was basically the same people who were there all the time. There were two different TV shows, Championship Wrestling, which was generally regarded as the “A” show (meaning that if a market got only one show, it was usually this one) and All-Star Wrestling, which was the “B” show (and was often broadcast on another channel serving the same market). Joe McHugh was the ring announcer for Championship Wrestling and Gary Capetta was the ring announcer for All-Star Wrestling. Vince McMahon Jr. and Antonino Rocca were the television announcers who called the action. Rocca was later replaced by Bruno Sammartino after Rocca died. When Sammartino retired, Pat Patterson took over for Bruno.

Those hour-long televised wrestling shows were basically just ads for WWWF wrestling. In any given hour, there might be fifteen to twenty minutes of actual wrestling, nearly all of which would be “squash” matches pitting a popular babyface hero against an enhancement guy to make him look invincible, or the new vicious heel against an enhancement guy to make the heel look like a complete madman or a killer. Of course, the purpose of those TV tapings was to get the people interested in seeing either the invincible babyfaces or the vicious heels battle each other, and of course, those matches weren’t shown on television. You’d have to pay to see those matches in your local arena.

Each media market would get the appropriate promotional interviews I spoke of earlier, which would be spliced into each market’s copies of Championship Wrestling or All-Star Wrestling, and shown after each squash match to whet the people’s appetites to come out to the arenas and see the “real” matches.

Although I can’t remember exactly, I’m pretty sure I wrestled Johnny Rodz first. Rodz was an excellent hand—and more than anyone else on the roster, Rodz was the guy that Vince Sr. put in the ring with new incoming talent to figure out how good they were. Vince would watch those matches pretty closely, but when the match was over, Vince Sr. would go over and talk to Rodz, and see what Rodz thought of the match—that’s how much he thought of Johnny. It is no accident that when he retired, Johnny opened a successful wrestling school. His timing and in-ring skills were just terrific.

I also wrestled a guy named Prettyboy Larry Sharpe, another of Vince McMahon Sr.’s trusted guys whose talents and opinion he respected. Sharpe was in the waning days of his wrestling career at that time, and, at the time, often wrestled in a pretty entertaining tag team with a guy named Dynamite Jack Evans. Sharpe’s primary role in the company at the time, though, was to test out the new guys, work on their timing, and see how well they could sell his offense. To a lesser degree, Larry would also work with guys in the local house shows around his home in Paulsboro, New Jersey. When Larry hung up the boots, he, too, opened a very successful wrestling school.

I also wrestled Pete Doherty, a true character from Dorchester, Massachusetts, who had scraggly blonde hair, mismatched gear, and was missing about every other tooth. Doherty, who was known as “The Duke of Dorchester,” looked like a longshoreman, kept himself in really good shape, had really good timing and knew how to work the crowd to get a rise out of them. Doherty kept doing this little gimmick where he would hold his hair up and show the crowd, as if to suggest that his babyface opponent had pulled his hair, which of course, he hadn’t. Doherty was especially popular up in Boston, and on the local house show circuit up in that area around Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Maine, where he was often used to jerk the curtain and warm up the crowds. He also got a push working under the hood as “The Golden Terror” around this time. Doherty was a very good hand in the ring, and a very funny guy. I liked wrestling him a lot.

That first time up in Philadelphia, people truly didn’t know me from Adam, so my job was simply to go out there, show some of my amateur moves and my speed and quickness, and try to get over with the people. The WWWF roster at the time was more of a brawling roster, so I knew that my more refined amateur style was going to be a big change for the fans and might be an acquired taste that would take some getting used to. Each wrestler had a different way of trying to get over with the fans in a new territory. I had already had enough high-profile work, so I was very confident in my in-ring work—so it really just came down to executing my moves and playing to the crowd.

There is no doubt in my mind that Vince Sr. could have recruited any wrestler from any territory anywhere in the world into the WWWF with the promise of making that person the next babyface world champion. He could have taken Dusty Rhodes or Steve Keirn out of the Florida territory. He could have had David Von Erich from World Class. He could have had Tommy Rich from Georgia. But Vince Sr. had a vision—a plan—for what he wanted that next great “character” to be, and he wanted that person to look and act like the “All-American Boy.” In choosing me, Vince Sr. obviously gave up an opportunity to put the belt on someone more senior, or someone with a longer track record of making money and putting people into seats in the business—but it seemed that he was completely convinced that his new character would work, and that I was the right person to play the role.

I know, both from chatter I overheard in the dressing rooms in those early days, and from things people have told me over the years, that there were guys in the WWWF at the time who were trying to talk Vince out of giving me the belt. There were different reasons for that—some fair, and some not. I was a complete unknown in the territory, and there were a lot of people who were better known to the WWWF crowds. There were a number of guys already on the roster who had shown that they could reliably draw money and put butts in the seats—whereas no one knew whether I would be able to do that or not. Since the dawn of the territory, the WWWF crowds had grown accustomed to their champion espousing a more brawling, take-no-prisoners style. I was coming in, not only with a more amateur, scientific style, but as the perpetual underdog to boot.

No matter what anyone else thought, though, Vince McMahon Sr. stayed true to his vision, and there is not a day that goes by in my life that I don’t think about him and the faith he took in believing in me.

At the end of that first set of tapings, Vince Sr. also put me into the ring in a six-man tag-team match with a couple of other babyfaces, Tony Garea and Larry Zbyszko. The purpose of that was to put some extra shine on me with the fans to help them define me as an upper-level babyface. Both Garea and Zbyszko were very good, so putting us together would showcase the three of us for the crowd, and for the WWWF ownership group, who could then easily compare our skills in the ring, the way we looked, and the way the crowd reacted to us.

I knew from the little bit that Jim Barnett had told me that this was an “important tryout”—and I wasn’t about to fail it.

At the end of the tapings, Vince McMahon Sr. had just a quick chat with me. He thanked me for coming, shook my hand again, told me that he thought my matches had gone “well,” and invited me to come back for the next taping in three weeks. And with that, I flew back to Georgia and continued to wrestle there for Jim Barnett.

I returned to Pennsylvania in March, and it was at the end of that second set of television tapings that Vince Sr. pulled me into the bathroom and delivered the news that he had decided to put the championship on me. I don’t think it really hit me until I was sitting on the airplane flying home from that second set of tapings exactly what that meant economically to my family, what it would mean with respect to my celebrity, and most of all, what it would mean with respect to stability. We would finally be able to settle down up there and not move around from territory to territory every few months.

Bruno on Backlund

McMahon and Junior had made me a deal when I agreed to come back for a second run with the title. They asked me to come back for one year to give them time to find somebody, and then I could retire. They promised me that I would only have to wrestle two or three times per week. They did keep their word—but it went from one year to four years until Stan Hansen bodyslammed me on my head at the Garden and broke my neck. At that point, I told Vince that I had been more than fair with him, and that he had to get someone ready. I didn’t want to have the responsibility to be featured in all the major clubs—I wanted to pick my shots, and I wanted to leave on top.

You know, the first guy I wrestled in my career when I was twenty-three years old in 1959 was Gorgeous George. The match happened in Convention Hall in Philadelphia. I was excited—I was 275 pounds, I wrestled amateur but I was also a weightlifter. I was so nervous about wrestling this guy, because I was a rookie, and he was a big name, you know? He had been really big in the ’40s and part of the ’50s, but in 1959, he was no longer a star. People were catcalling him saying, “Hey, Bruno, don’t hurt the old man.” It made me feel sad for George. I made myself a promise that I would never let that happen to me—and that when it was time for me to go, I would leave on top.

They asked me who I wanted to drop the belt to the second time, and I didn’t want anything to do with that decision. I had nothing against Billy Graham personally, but I did not like the drug use. The younger people weren’t thinking long range—they just wanted to take the shortcut to be the next guy. I even spoke to him a couple of times and told him that what he was doing with the drugs could leave a very negative lasting effect on him. But Billy didn’t take my advice. They all acted like I was from the Stone Age. You know, you get results when you train hard—but by taking the chemicals, you get twice the result for half the effort, and it seemed like everyone was willing to make that tradeoff.

Vince never asked me about Bob Backlund or about making him the next champion. Shame on me, but I had never even heard of Bob Backlund before they mentioned that he was coming in for TV. When I first saw him, though, I could tell that he was not on the juice, and that he was a legitimate athlete who trained hard. I remember saying to DeNucci how happy I was that Backlund was not a chemical freak. Skaaland spoke well of Backlund too. He was of the same ethnic background as Backlund (from Sweden), and he told me that he was going to be Backlund’s manager the same as he had done for me. As I got to know Bob, it became apparent to me that we actually had a lot of things in common, one of them being that he and I were two squares who were still playing by the rules and coming by our bodies legitimately, which of course made me happy to see.

I liked the way that Bob was built—he was very athletic looking and possessed a very good knowledge of amateur wrestling. When I first saw him, I thought that he was going to be a high flyer who did dropkicks and flying head scissors, which he didn’t do that much, but I liked that he was using real technical wrestling. And he did, in fact, look like the All-American Boy. You know, the previous babyface champions had both been ethnic stars. Pedro was from Puerto Rico, and I was from Abruzzi, Italy. Backlund was a change—he was the All-American Boy from Minnesota. It was good. It was different. Backlund represented a change from the norm, and it worked out well for the organization.

The model in the WWWF had always been to have a babyface champion. You see, a heel can go on television with a manager, wreck a babyface and say, “That’s what I’m going to do to Bruno or Backlund”—and bingo, you have a draw at the box office. But it takes a babyface a lot longer to get “over” and to see if the people are willing to accept him and rally behind him. So it was a lot harder in the WWWF to have a heel champion for any sustained period of time because it took too long to develop babyface challengers. You could do it in the NWA, because the heel champion traveled from territory to territory wrestling the top babyface in each of them. But in the WWWF, there were no other territories, so the champ was a babyface, and the heels were imported from outside for short runs.

The guys in the locker room understood that McMahon needed to bring in new blood and wanted someone fresh and new and different. After Backlund won the title, I wasn’t around regularly anymore, so I can only tell you some of the things I heard. Some of the guys thought that Backlund might have lacked a little bit of charisma, and some of the heels, at least in the very beginning, felt that they had to wrestle his match, as opposed to their match, because Backlund wasn’t a natural when it came to brawling. But to be honest, there really weren’t a lot of complaints. Some of the guys in the dressing room were wondering whether Backlund could fill the Garden. But McMahon and Junior were both very much behind Backlund.

Much has been made over the years about Backlund having more support on his undercards, but I’ll tell you, someone like Andre the Giant was not the kind of attraction they made him out to be. Andre was a novelty guy—he couldn’t be in a territory for very long and couldn’t be used a lot. Andre wasn’t a hell of a lot of help to Backlund—Backlund did what he did mostly on his own. The facts are the facts, and the facts show that Backlund was able to fill the Garden. If Backlund hadn’t been able to get over, believe me, Vince would have switched horses like he did with Buddy Rogers. Buddy Rogers was killing the territory as champion, so Vince switched the title. You never really know who the people are going to buy until you see it with your own eyes. If Backlund had not drawn well, he would have been out of there, no matter what promises might have been made to him. McMahon might put someone over, but if the people don’t end up coming out to see him, his headlining days would be over quick. The name of the game was selling tickets.

—Bruno Sammartino

They Had Plans for Backlund

I was around at the time that the transition away from Bruno began. Bruno was tired of the grind and had wanted to come off the road for some time, and he really wanted me to have the belt. There was a big, big fight with the old man about it because the old man wanted Superstar to get the run, and Bruno wanted me to have it. He put the belt on Billy mainly because Eddie Graham wanted him to do that and the old man and Eddie were very close. Right after he did that, the old man said to me, “Well, we’ll figure out who the real heel is between you and Superstar,” and he booked a couple of test matches in some small towns mostly up in Maine, away from the big cities just to see what would happen. The one match of those that I distinctly remember was up in Portland, Maine, in the old expo center up there. Billy and I had a hell of a matchup there, I think we went about twenty or twenty-five minutes and we wound up out on the floor in some sort of a double countout with blood all over the place, but three minutes into the match, I had turned Superstar stone cold babyface. The crowd was cheering Billy like crazy, and I don’t think the old man liked that at all. Anyway—the experiment proved to the old man that I was the bigger heel.

I remember I was up in Portland and Bangor, Maine, on the northern swing with the kid—Junior–Vinnie—we used to call him Vinnie or Junior—I’m talking about Vince McMahon Jr. now. We were riding back from the show in Bangor down to New Haven, Connecticut, and he was telling me that they had big plans for Bobby Backlund. Vinnie told me that they were going to have Superstar drop the belt to him at the Garden, and that the plan was to run with Backlund for at least five years. And I looked at Vinnie and said, “Five years?! What about me?” The old man had more or less been promising me for some time that I would get a run with the belt at some point. I mean, he never really came out and promised me that in so many words, but it was pretty much the plan for about a year and a half, that I was going to be the one to take it off of Bruno when the time came—and that’s what everybody thought.

So Vinnie looks at me and says, “Well, you know Kenny, things change, and this is the direction we’re going in.” I talked to his dad a day or two later at the Garden and asked him about it, and he said, “Well Kenny, you know, I talked to Eddie Graham, who is a good friend of mine, and Eddie wanted me to put the belt on Superstar.” Superstar had been doing a lot of wrestling down in Florida for Eddie Graham and had been the Florida Heavyweight Champion, so I guess Eddie thought it would be good for business to have Superstar get the WWWF title for awhile. And I guess it turned out that way, because after he won it, he went down to Florida with it and defended it down there, and people knew him, so he drew some pretty nice houses.

Anyway, I reminded the old man that the expectation had been that I would be the guy to take the belt off of Bruno, and now that wasn’t going to be the case, and on top of that, I’m hearing that Bobby Backlund is going to have the belt for five years, so where does that leave me? You know? So I asked him, can you give me some idea of what my future looks like here? Do I need to go somewhere else? So the old man looked me in the eye and told me straight up, Kenny, you don’t need a belt to draw—but I told him I thought that was a line, because everyone knows the champion gets the main events and gets the big checks, and I told him that I thought I had proven myself.

Anyway, the old man wanted me to stay two more years, but I told him I wasn’t going to stay two more years if I wasn’t going to get a chance to carry a belt. I was living down in North Carolina at the time, and so I told him I was going to take off and head down there and work for Jimmy Crockett and Crockett promotions. Well I’ll tell you, he was pissed. He really got pissed about that. The old man also suggested that during the next two years, he would set me up to go over and work for Inoki in Japan because the old man was trying to work out a reliable relationship with Inoki and New Japan. Well, I stayed for a little while longer, but after that, I did go down and work for Jim Crockett down in Mid-Atlantic, and while I was there, I went over and worked for Baba in All-Japan—which was Inoki’s big rival. Well that really pissed off the old man, let me tell you. He was really big time pissed. But what the hell? He fucked me out of the goddamned belt!

—Ken Patera

Corki became pregnant with Carrie in February 1977 and shortly after that, we headed back to Minnesota because we wanted our daughter to be born there. I called Verne, told him that my wife was going to have a baby and that after that, we were going to be moving to the New York area to work for the WWWF. I asked him if he wanted to book me while I was in the area, and he said that he would see what he could do.

As it turned out, Verne kept me pretty busy. News traveled quickly in the territories back then, so many of the promoters knew what the plan was—and Verne had a very good relationship with Vince Sr., so I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the two of them had a conversation about “protecting” me while I was home in Minnesota and working in the AWA. Even though there was no crossover television between the two territories at that time, I was now a “made” man in New York, and I’m sure Vince asked Verne to respect that. Given their relationship at the time, and what ended up happening to me while I worked for Verne, I’m pretty sure that Verne did what Vince asked.

Even though I was wrestling in the AWA at the time, I had my first match at Madison Square Garden in New York City on April 25, 1977, against Masked Executioner II (Killer Kowalski) on the undercard of Bruno’s final title defense at the Garden against Baron von Raschke. The Garden almost always had at least 20,000 people in it, and it was a very strange feeling going from wrestling in a little high school gym in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere in Minnesota to wrestling in one of the largest venues in the world in the middle of New York City. It was odd just being in New York, getting recognized, having people wishing me luck, and recognizing me from the TV tapings—I could actually feel the amount of exposure I was getting from the TV time. It was rewarding but sort of scary at the same time because it became pretty evident that I was losing my anonymity and my privacy.

Wrestling Kowalski in my debut match at the Garden was quite an honor, although I wouldn’t have minded being in the ring with someone who could have moved around a little more so I could have used a few more of my moves. Kowalski was really slowing down by then, and I wasn’t able to have my best match with him. It was still great being there, though, and the energy in that building was like nothing I had ever experienced.

With Bruno Sammartino making his last ever WWWF title defense in the Garden on that card, he was a big presence in the dressing room area that night. Bruno didn’t really know me, and I didn’t know him at all, so we didn’t speak much at that card. To be completely honest, because I hadn’t grown up watching him, I didn’t idolize Bruno like many of the other young guys. He wasn’t a hero of mine—and I don’t mean that at all in a negative way, I just didn’t know a whole lot about him. I knew Bruno only by reputation—that he was a fitness fanatic who worked hard, ran hard, trained hard, and put a lot of miles on his body investing in his craft. I knew that he worked way above and beyond what the average professional wrestler did—and I definitely respected him for that, because I shared those values too.

Bruno and I shook hands in the dressing room that night. It was just a quick handshake—but in reality, it was an important moment there in the back hallway of Madison Square Garden. Both of us knew what the future held, so in effect, that moment represented something of a passing of the torch. A few nights later, Bruno would go to Baltimore and lose the title to “Superstar” Billy Graham and set into motion the events that would eventually lead to my becoming the next babyface WWWF champion.

Shortly after that first appearance at the Garden, I learned another important lesson about professional wrestling that would stay with me for the rest of my career. It was Harley Race who really accentuated the critical importance of respecting your opponent’s body in the ring. Professional wrestling might have predetermined outcomes, but it is also a very athletic pursuit, and when you are in the ring in front of thousands of people executing high spots like suplexes and piledrivers with adrenaline coursing through your veins, it is critical to remember that the high spots you are doing can cripple your opponent in an instant if you aren’t careful. When you call a spot, you are responsible for making it look good, but even more importantly, you are responsible for your opponent’s body and for making sure that your opponent makes it all the way back down to the mat safely and without getting injured.

I knew my time in the AWA was going to be short-lived and that I wasn’t going to climb the ladder there toward a shot at the AWA world title. My job was to just keep my skills sharp and stay in shape wrestling in the middle of the cards there. I was grateful to have a place to do that so close to home, and to get paid for doing it. My ticket had already been punched for New York—and this was just a stop on the way to allow Corki to be in Minnesota when our daughter was born.

While I was in the AWA, I liked working with Jim Brunzell and Billy Robinson. Robinson was one of the best shoot wrestlers in the world, and he was there because of that. If Verne was having a problem with someone, he’d book the person into a match with Billy Robinson and tell Billy to “stretch” the guy, and that would take care of the problem. These were the guys that I watched while I was growing up—so it was a real pleasure to be able to get into the ring with some of them, or even to share a spot on a card, or be in the dressing room with them.

Right before I went to the WWWF, I bought a brand new 1977 gray Buick Electra in Cambridge, Minnesota, and I was showing it off back in Princeton. We had all had a few beers, and I was going home late at night and went to make a right turn onto Silver Lane, lost control of the car in the gravel, slammed into a telephone pole, and put my head through the windshield.

There was only 58 miles on the car at the time of the accident, and frankly, I was lucky to have lived through it.

As the police approached the scene, I jumped down into the grass and pretended to be looking for the keys. I figured that the police couldn’t arrest me if they couldn’t find the keys to prove I was driving the car. They eventually locked me in the back of the cruiser, but they never found the keys. That’s because they were buried deep in my inside pocket the whole time. Things certainly might have turned out very differently for me, and for Corki, if anything about that accident had gone a different way. Given the lateness of the hour, Corki eventually came out looking for me and came upon the accident scene. She was very pregnant, and about to give birth to our daughter at the time, and she was not at all happy with me.

That was the last time I ever drank and drove an automobile or got into the car with anyone who had been drinking. I was very fortunate to learn that lesson and to be able to live to tell about it.

I went back to Philadelphia for the first set of May TV tapings for the WWWF. By that time, Billy Graham had the title, having just beaten Bruno at the Baltimore Civic Center, and they were showcasing him as the new champ. I was wrestling in individual matches but also teaming with Chief Jay and Billy Whitewolf to keep the focus on me as an up-and-coming babyface who was allied with the other, more established heroes in the territory.

At the second set of May TV tapings, I wrestled only in singles matches as Vince began the process of establishing me as a singles wrestler. At those tapings, I wrestled Buddy Wolfe on television. Buddy was a very good performer from Minnesota, and was a lot of fun to work with because he was energetic and had very good timing. Buddy also grew up about 30 miles from Princeton, so we tended to see a lot of things the same way.

On May 27, 1977, I went back to St. Louis for Sam Muchnick, and had my first WWWF title match against “Superstar” Billy Graham at the Kiel on the top of that card. St. Louis was a very safe place for Billy and me to meet in our first match to begin to get familiar with one another and to get our timing down. There was no cross-pollination of St. Louis television anywhere in the WWWF territory, so at the time, very few people outside of St. Louis knew that the match even happened.

Frankly, I was surprised to be getting a match against Billy so soon, but apparently, Sam was anxious to be the first promoter to put the two of us together in the ring. Because Sam had been right in the middle of the NWA World Title discussions a year earlier that had resulted in Vince McMahon Sr. taking me to New York, he already knew that I was the one who was eventually going to beat Billy for the belt—so he wanted to get ahead of other promoters and be the first to book us together.

The fact is, Billy Graham looked like a professional wrestling champion, and as everyone knows, he was also terrific on the microphone, but when it came down to actual execution, there was really only so much that Billy could do in the ring. That first match in St. Louis evolved into a fight in and out of a few basic wrestling holds, and Billy won and retained the title, beating me by countout. The countout ending was frequently a pretty unpopular one with the fans and almost always left everyone wanting more—which, of course, was the whole point of having that kind of a finish. Winning or losing a match by countout never really hurt anyone’s standing, but it also didn’t really do anything for anyone either. It was essentially just a way to tread water until the next card, where the inconclusive finish could help to draw the next crowd if we were coming back against each other.

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 kind 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.

I didn’t attend the first set of TV tapings on November 8 and 9 because our daughter Carrie was about to be born. I talked to Vince several times on November 8 from Minnesota and he insisted that I just stay put there and be with Corki at the hospital. That was the kind of man Vince Sr. was. He was a serious businessman who was not to be trifled with, but he also understood the importance of family and family harmony in his wrestlers’ lives. I’m happy I made that decision, because Carrie was born later that day, and I was there to see it. To anyone who is a dad—you know that there is no greater moment in this world than being present for the birth of your child.

Eleven days after Carrie was born, we packed up our things into a U-Haul and moved our family to Hamden, Connecticut, outside of New Haven, to a rental unit at the Howard Johnson’s on the Merritt Parkway. On the phone, Vince Sr. had told me that my time appearing only on TV was at an end, and that the final push leading up to my win over “Superstar” Billy Graham for the belt was about to start in earnest out on the house show circuit.