Backlund

“Teamwork is a never-ending process, and even though it depends on everyone involved, the responsibility for it lies with you.”

The morning of Tuesday, February 21, 1978, was a morning like no other in the Backlund house. The WWWF championship belt was now safely stored in the night table drawer next to our bed, and suddenly, I had a whole lot more responsibility on my shoulders. After getting a few hours of restless sleep, I awoke with a start, thinking that I had overslept for a flight to a match. From here on, I would be in the main events every night. Showing up late or missing a date was not an option.

The whole episode seemed like a dream. I had to go back and check the drawer to make sure that the title belt was actually there. I pulled the belt out and sat there at our little kitchen table running my fingers over the gold plating, recalling the way that the Garden crowd had exploded when the referee’s hand hit the mat for the third time.

I could do this. I could be the people’s champion. I would find a way to earn their respect, and their admiration, and make them want to come out and cheer me on.

The day after the Garden show, we went to Pennsylvania for the television tapings. We’d get there at around eleven in the morning and the ring would already be set up there in the empty fieldhouse and the guys would have lunch and sit around playing cards or reading or goofing around with each other while we shot promos for the local house shows all afternoon. Since this was my first TV with the belt, I was now in all the main events, and for the first time since I had come to the territory, I was involved in most of the promos.

It was my first real exposure to talking a lot on camera, and it just wasn’t my strength. I was a pretty shy, and I certainly never professed to have the ability like Graham or Dusty to talk people into the seats. So figuring out what to say, and how to say it convincingly without seeming totally awkward, was a challenge. I decided to handle these promos as if I was talking about preparing for one of my amateur matches—and to just carry that straightforward, plain-talking style through. It was a choice made from a combination of fear and necessity, but I actually think it worked out okay and gave my matches an additional air of authenticity.

Vince Jr. ran these tapings for his father. He had a long list of all of the house shows we were taping promos for, and the matches on those cards for which we would be cutting promos. For each of those matches, to give us some context, Vince Jr. would tell us where the promo was for, who our opponent was going to be, and what had happened there last time. Once the interviews were done, they would incorporate these promos into the tape and then send the tape off to the television station(s) that covered the area where that particular house show was going to occur.

Some of the guys were very good at it and enjoyed cutting these promos. Others had managers like the Captain or Blassie or the Grand Wizard to do most of their talking for them. But that was the basic setup every three weeks—with everyone sitting out there waiting their turn, reading, hanging out, and talking or whatever. The office would bring in sandwiches to give everyone a little break.

There was a real fellowship at these tapings. Everyone on the roster was present. For new blood coming in, the tapings were usually the first place they appeared. The tapings were also the place where most of the hot new angles began, and the place where Vince Sr. handed out the booking assignments for the following three weeks. So taping days were a bit like a company staff meeting.

Initially, I was very uncomfortable at these tapings. I still felt very much like an outsider who was being judged on his every move. But with time and experience, and as I came to be accepted more by the boys as the champion, I actually grew to enjoy them.

After the tapings, we all set off in different directions. I headed down to Jacksonville, Florida, for a WWWF World Title versus NWA World Title match with my old friend Harley Race, and for promoter Eddie Graham in the Florida Championship Wrestling territory.

As I’ve mentioned before, Vince Sr. and Eddie were good friends and trusted colleagues in the wrestling business. Harley and Billy Graham had just wrestled a Broadway (sixty-minute time-limit draw) in Florida that had drawn a nice gate—and a rematch had already been scheduled. Of course, at the time the rematch was scheduled, both Vince Sr. and Eddie knew that the rematch with Race would be with me and not with Billy—but both Eddie and Harley were fine with that. The real draw for the match was the possibility, in the eyes of the fans, of a unification of the NWA and WWWF World Titles.

I was very enthusiastic to return to the Florida territory for Eddie as the newly crowned WWWF champion and also to have that match with Harley. Eddie and Vince booked us to do another Broadway—which made sense given that the fans had seen Harley go an hour with Billy, but not with me.

Harley was a master of the art of developing a match and telling a complete story in the ring. He understood, in the fullest sense of the word, that the entire purpose of a wrestling match was to entertain the people in the arenas, and Harley entertained them to the fullest. He never put himself, or his ego, or his reputation ahead of whatever would be best for the match, and he would give the people in any particular arena on any given night the very best bang for their buck. That willingness to entertain the people and to put the match above himself made Harley a very special performer.

Harley and I, of course, had been in some wars together feuding over the Missouri title in St. Louis. This match, however, was a special one to both of us because we had both ascended to the very pinnacle of our profession and were now representing our respective organizations as world champions. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was also our first meeting in the ring since Vince Sr. broke the deadlock in the NWA championship committee by voting for Harley to become the NWA kingpin and taking me to New York to become his champion. Since Eddie Graham had recommended me to Vince Sr. originally, getting this “Superbowl” match in his territory was also a little bit of a “thank-you” from Vince Sr. to Eddie—as it would virtually ensure a huge gate.

The Ultimate Babyface

Everyone in the NWA watched what happened up in New York because the New York area got ten times more nationwide press coverage than anywhere that we wrestled. So everybody knew that Backlund had gone over Graham at the Garden to become Vince’s new babyface WWWF Champion. I obviously can’t speak for everyone, but from what I heard, saw, and observed, everyone in the NWA locker rooms that I was in was happy for Bobby.

I wrestled Bobby down in Florida right after he won the belt from Graham. That match was initially booked as me against Graham, but when Bobby beat Graham for the belt in New York, they switched it so that we could keep it title versus title. And that worked out fine because Bobby had just recently worked down in Florida, was very over with the fans there and was well known, so it was kind of like a homecoming of sorts for him. Meanwhile, Bobby’s in-ring persona was food for a guy like me. I mean, who the hell wouldn’t want to see a guy that looks and acts like Bobby kick the shit out of a cocky asshole that looks and acts like me? So it was a perfect setup for us. I’ve known Bobby a long, long time now, and I’ve shared the card with him in an awful lot of places and let me tell you, Bobby Backlund was over with the people. He was a great athlete, a great wrestler, and a person that the people just loved to love. He was the ultimate fucking babyface.

—Harley Race

The match with Harley in Florida went beautifully and drew another very nice house for Eddie, and, of course, a nice payday for us. It was great to see Harley again, and to be in the dressing room with a bunch of the guys from Florida who I hadn’t seen in a while. Eddie Graham gave me a huge hug, wished me well in my new role, and assured me that I had the chops to be Vince Sr.’s champion for a long time. The boys on the card were also very nice and congratulated me heartily on becoming the WWWF champion. I felt more welcomed and comfortable in the dressing room in Jacksonville that night than had I had felt anywhere in the WWWF.

After returning from Florida, I settled into the routine of the WWWF house show schedule. Basically, everything was keyed off of the Garden show. With few exceptions, we were in New York at the Garden every fourth Monday night. Television in Allentown and Hamburg was every third Tuesday and Wednesday—with the days consumed with taping the promo interviews, and the nights filled with taping the three hours of squash matches that would comprise the episodes of Championship Wrestling and All-Star Wrestling that people would watch on the weekends. Allentown and Hamburg also each got one competitive “dark” match, not broadcast on television, which was used to draw the crowds.

Every third Tuesday and Wednesday, we would head up to Maine for shows in Portland and Bangor, with an occasional spot show in Waterville or Augusta. Every third Thursday was Poughkeepsie, New York, at the Mid-Hudson Civic Center, or in Worcester, Massachusetts, at the Memorial Auditorium, while Fridays were at the Civic Arena in Pittsburgh (monthly), Jack Witschis (weekly), Harrisburg at the Jaffa Mosque, or in Albany, New York, at the Washington Avenue Armory. Saturdays were at the Baltimore Civic Center, the Boston Garden, the Capitol Centre in Landover, Maryland, the Spectrum in Philadelphia, the Civic Center in Providence, Rhode Island, or the Civic Center in Springfield, Massachusetts. Sundays were at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in New Haven, Connecticut, the Hartford Civic Center, the Nassau County Coliseum in Uniondale, New York, the JFK Coliseum in Manchester, New Hampshire, a spot show elsewhere, or an off day. There were other buildings we frequented also, and this schedule varied somewhat over the years depending on building availability and the schedules of the professional sports teams that were their primary tenants, but this was generally the way things went.

After I won the title, the first order of business was to have rematches with Billy in just about every building in the territory. In all those many rematches (and there were many of them), I never once got the sense that Billy was just going through the motions. Although I know that he was suffering inside from the loss of the limelight, Billy was always professional and gave his all to every match we had.

I now more fully understand, from watching his YouTube videos and seeing some of the interviews that he has given over the years, that Billy took the title change hard. I understand that completely, because I went through the very same range of emotions and the same enduring sadness after I was asked to drop the title. I actually enjoy watching Billy’s interviews and hearing him, more than thirty-five years later, still expressing outrage about me and how I handled myself with the championship. He’s gotten a lot of extra mileage for himself from that. I don’t know if that is Billy still working or if that is how he truly feels. I’m not even sure that Billy knows the answer to that given how many different ways he has expressed himself on that issue. Whatever the truth, I prefer to just thank and respect Billy for the professional work he did in the ring with me the night the title changed, and in the many times we wrestled after that.

In the first couple of weeks out on the road after I won the title—it was announced at the various venues where I would appear that I had won the championship from Graham at Madison Square Garden, and that my match on the card that night against whomever I was wresting would now be a world title match. People were initially very surprised to discover that I had won the title from Graham. Once they learned the news, though, fans were very supportive and enthusiastic when I would meet them and sign autographs outside the arenas after my matches. Doing that was always an honor for me—because I knew it was the people who had put me there. If the people weren’t buying tickets to come see me wrestle, I wouldn’t have been the champion for very long.

While we are on the subject of the “business end” of the business—payoffs worked differently in the WWWF than they did in the other territories. In the WWWF, in the smaller towns, you could either “bank” the payout and get a draw or get paid in cash that night just by signing for it. You’d get your payoff from the bigger arenas by check every three weeks at the TV tapings. At the Garden and in some of the other larger arenas, for example, we would be paid on a percentage of the gate, which had to be figured out after the fact. A certain percentage of the gate went to overhead like the arena rental fee, police and security, and the like, a certain percentage went to the talent, and the rest went to the owners. Where you wrestled on the card determined your percentage. The main event always made the biggest percentage, and as the world champion, I was always in the main event, and my challengers in the main events would share in that benefit.

Given this setup, as champ, I was primarily relied on, along with my challenger, to “draw the house,” which made sense since we got the biggest percentage among the wrestlers. As the main eventers, we had the biggest incentive to do the promotional work necessary to put butts in the seats, and then to put on a great show so we could draw an even better crowd for the second or third match of our series (if we were going more than one month). Beyond that basic understanding of how things worked, though, I didn’t really get involved in the office part of the business. In all the years I was champ, I never checked the gate numbers, didn’t keep track of monthly attendance figures to see how we were doing, or how certain challengers were doing with me, or anything like that. Those were business concerns for the office to worry about, and I trusted that if there were issues or concerns to be addressed, someone would come to me to discuss them.

The truth is, Vince Sr. and I didn’t have a lot of substantive conversations about the business, and I think he liked it that way. Whenever I saw him, he always asked after my family, and he often checked on my health or any injury I might have incurred in the ring, but other than that, our conversations were always light and brief. We had complete trust in one another. I trusted him with the bookings and the payoffs and everything on the business end, and he trusted me with the wrestling side. It sounds naïve, but it worked, because Vince Sr.’s word was his bond, and in all the years we worked together, he never gave me any reason to doubt him.

For his part, Vince Sr. could rely on the fact that, as his champion and the person being most heavily relied on in the main events every night, I would always be at the appointed building an hour before the card began—so he never needed to worry about having to reshuffle a card, or refund money in a big building because his main event failed to go off. Vince Sr. also knew that I would always worked my hardest to stay in top shape, gave the fans my all every night, and represented his company with dignity and honor behind the scenes. In return, his consistent promise to me was that he would supply me with the very best workers in the business, and that it would be up to him to worry about the angles, the promotion, and the crowds. Generally, I would check in with him once every three weeks at the TV tapings to make sure he was pleased with the way things were going. Without exception, he would tell me that “things were going well,” and that he was very happy with my work as his champion.

Vince Sr. never expressed any dissatisfaction to me about the gates we were drawing in any city. To the contrary, he paid me religiously, without fail, and with a smile at every TV taping. In fact, Vince Sr. never told me to do anything differently in the five years and ten months I carried the championship for him.

It was a much different feel coming into the Garden with the belt in March 1978. Just walking down 7th Avenue in New York on my way to the Garden with my gym bag slung over my shoulder, I suddenly had a throng of happy and supportive people walking with me, asking questions, and wondering how it felt for me to be coming into the Garden with the title. New Yorkers, at the time, took their wrestling very seriously and completely bought in to the business as authentic.

In the promos for Billy’s rematch with me at the Garden in March 1978, Billy continued to argue that his foot had been on the bottom rope at the time of the pin, that he had been robbed, and that my title victory over him had been a fluke. On the strength of that storyline, we filled up both the Garden and the Felt Forum for the first rematch.

When Billy and I met in the bathroom at the Garden that night to get our instructions, Vince Sr. called for an enraged Billy to beat me within an inch of my life, for me to “get color” (gig myself with the tip of a razorblade to start the flow of blood from my forehead), but to stand there toe-to-toe and take all the punishment Billy could dish out until I was beat up so badly and bleeding so profusely that the doctor at ringside intervened to stop the match due to my blood loss. Although Billy would win the rematch, I would keep the title (because the title did not change on a blood stoppage), and the fans would get to see a new side of me—not the pure technical wrestling side—but the side of me that could survive and thrive in a straight-out, pier-six brawl.

I appeared, for the first time ever, at the Spectrum in Philadelphia on March 25, 1978, and went to a double disqualification with the latest addition to Blassie’s Army, The Iron Greek, Spiros Arion. It was interesting that I had never been booked in Philly during my run-up to winning the title, so the fans there hadn’t really warmed up to me at all other than what they saw of me on television. Philadelphia, with its large ethnic Italian population, was very much a Bruno town, and was definitely one of the places, along with Pittsburgh and Boston, where I had a harder time getting over. When I was champion, those places weren’t really mom and dad and apple pie towns. They were the home of the hard-knocks, blue-collar fans that were very skeptical of the pure, clean-cut babyface. They would cheer their own ethnic babyfaces, but they also loved the more edgy American heels.

I found it ironic that I had the hardest time winning over those fans, because, in real life, I was one of them. I shared their hard-knocks, blue-collar upbringing, but the image that Vince was building for me was that of the do-right, amateur-trained, collegiate apple pie and Chevrolet All-American Boy babyface. That didn’t play as well in Philly and Boston as it did in some of the other cities and in the suburbs. It was harder for me to win over the Philly fans than it was in almost any other place—so when we had the Spectrum banged out and roaring, as we often did in my later years as champion, it made me feel especially good.

Graham and I came back to the Garden in April for the blowoff to our feud in what would be my first-ever steel cage match. Once again, Billy had played the promo interview game perfectly, reminding the fans that he had beaten me to a bloody pulp last time, and that this time, with a steel cage around us and no referee or doctor to save me, he’d be getting his title back. This time, though, I had some fire in my interviews also, and we set up the match as the culmination of a great feud that, by that point, had been roiling in the federation for four months.

Because we went from town to town and wrestled all sorts of different people in different kinds of matches on different nights, it was always important to check yourself and understand where you were in a given feud in a given town on a given night. The specialty blowoff matches, like the steel cage match, the Texas Death Match, or the lumberjack match, were a big part of the WWWF’s booking strategy, and I couldn’t just go into one of those matches and have my “usual” style of match inside the cage, because that’s not what the people were paying to see.

If I found myself in the cage with a heel—it meant we had already wrestled once or twice in that building, or at least in the region, and that we had already done a scientific-style match, and likely a second match that had also ended indecisively. So if the people were buying a ticket to see you wrestle the same opponent for a third time, it was time for one or the other of us to finish the job. You needed to be meaner, use different tactics, and settle the feud in the minds of the people. It nearly always meant that one or the other (or both) of us would get color. And because, as I have mentioned before, Vince Sr. was very big on marketing hope, the man with the white hat almost always came out on top in the end.

Neither Billy and I nor Vince Sr. and I had much of a pre-match conversation that night. We just went into the heel locker room, into the bathroom, as was Vince’s custom, and listened as Vince Sr. explained the finish. The plan was that, at the appointed time, when the fans were at their peak, Billy would fall off the inside wall of the cage and get his leg caught between the cage and the ring, allowing me to escape the cage and retain the title, but, again, allowing Billy to lose with some dignity.

The match went off as planned, and Billy hit his spot perfectly. When I walked out of the cage, the Garden crowd erupted in cheers, and it felt like I had secured them in my corner. After the match, I went over to Billy’s dressing room, shook his hand, and thanked him for a great series. He clapped an arm around me, playfully slapped me with his towel, and wished me the best. It was an emotional moment between us—a changing of the guard.

After my thee-month feud with Graham at the Garden, Vince wanted me to get some decisive wins in quick succession in defense of the championship. This, he explained to me at the next television taping, would allow me to establish myself with the fans and prove to them that my pinfall victory over Graham had, in fact, not been a fluke. Once again, Vince Sr. first turned to Ken Patera.

Vince Sr. thought very highly of Patera both as a wrestler and as a person, and because we had wrestled so many good matches before I won the title, Vince Sr. knew that Kenny could be counted on to provide a credible box-office threat to the title, solid pre-match hype on the microphone, and a great match in the ring. Patera was an American Olympic weightlifter and the first man on Earth to press 500 pounds over his head. You would think that someone like that would be clumsy and heavy-handed, but when you were in the ring with Patera, although you could tell that you were in the hands of a very strong guy, he was actually very gentle. He looked like a bodybuilder, though, and he was a fearsome heel and very over with the people.

Most of our matches were structured similarly to the Graham matches—with me using speed and technical wrestling moves, Kenny fighting his way out of those, and then using a lot of strength moves and me selling those. We’d go back and forth like that, with the threat of his swinging full nelson submission hold that had “crippled” so many wrestlers up to that point always looming in the minds of the fans. The difference between my matches with Graham and Patera was that Patera was very skilled in the ring, and had a wide repertoire of moves. You could do just about anything you wanted to do in the ring with Ken.

Patera was agile, and arrogant, and the people just loved to hate him. One night when we were battling outside the ring in a match at the Civic Center in Springfield, Massachusetts, an elderly lady rose from her seat at ringside, took a full backswing, and smashed Kenny over the head with her cane. He just seemed to inspire that kind of emotion in people.

In May 1978, I faced Patera at the Garden. We teased his swinging full-nelson throughout the match until in the end, he got it on me, but before he could lock it in and swing me around into unconsciousness, I slipped out of it, got behind him, hoisted him up, and hit the atomic kneedrop for the finish. That move continued to have a lot of drama because it allowed me to lift my opponent up in the air, parade around the ring with him, and make sure that the fans all knew what was about to happen and were paying attention before I dropped him down over my knee in the middle of the ring and covered him for the pin.

Getting a clean win over Patera in the middle of the ring at the Garden definitely helped to get me over the “fluke” problem, since Kenny was the premiere heel in the federation at the time, and someone who had given Bruno Sammartino a lot of trouble in their previous feuds over the WWWF title. I was certainly grateful to Kenny for being so willing to put me over so strongly. Fortunately, I got a chance to repay that favor by having a longer series with him when he came back to the federation in 1980.

After Patera, the next challenger at the Garden was Spiros Arion—a big, legitimately Greek heel who was not particularly wild or colorful, but was a very solid-looking guy and a very good performer in the ring. Arion, who was managed by Freddie Blassie, was hilarious on the microphone in the promos, speaking in his ominous, heavy Greek accent and trying to convince the fans that I was a flash in the pan, and that he, Arion would, in fact, break me in half.

A couple of years earlier, on his last tour of the territory, Arion had incurred the wrath of the fans by turning from a babyface to a heel when he attacked his partner, Chief Jay Strongbow in a tag-team match. During that attack, Arion destroyed the Chief’s ceremonial headdress (which, of course, was really just a set of feathers acquired from a costume shop), and got the better of the feud that followed, so Arion had credibility and legitimacy as a challenger to the world title.

I’d never met Arion in any of the other territories where I had wrestled because he spent most of his time wrestling in Australia and New Zealand. Because Arion had also worked with Bruno in a previous run in the WWWF a couple of years earlier, he knew the drill about how to work a main event at the Garden. Arion was actually a very nice guy, and I got along well with him because he was all about the match rather than his own ego. Arion worked hard, knew what he was doing in the ring, and was not at all limited in what he could do in the ring like Billy had been, so there was a lot we could do to entertain the fans.

Around this time, I also made my second trip to Florida as the WWWF champion—again at the request of Eddie Graham. This time, I flew down to Tampa and wrestled former WWWF champion Ivan Koloff at the Bayfront Center in St. Petersburg on April 29, 1978. Over the years I was champion, I worked with Ivan twice—for a run in 1978, and then for another run when he came back as a smaller and more agile heel in 1983. I always liked working with Koloff. His character (“The Russian Bear”) was very strong, and was easy for me, as the “All-American Boy,” to play off of. These matches were always about Ivan, as the Russian strongman, trying to prove that Russians were superior athletes, and me trying to defend American honor. It was a ready-made feud right out of the box, and a box office success anywhere you booked it. Ivan always worked very hard, and he too could do basically anything in the ring, so our matches were always interesting.

There was a much stronger sense emphasis on kayfabe down in Florida, so unlike in New York, where Vince would bring us both together in the bathroom to discuss the match, down there, Eddie just came in, shook hands and said hello, and gave each of us the finish, independently, and that was that. The heels and faces were not allowed to be seen together, or to be mixing with each other before a match, so it was up to us to figure it out in the ring.

Because Vince Sr. and Eddie Graham had such a strong personal relationship, they traded talent a lot. Eddie sent Dusty up to New York regularly to have matches at the Garden and once in a while, he’d even spend a week in the territory and wrestle in some of the other major arenas. Likewise, I made a number of trips down to Florida to defend the WWWF title around the Florida territory.

During those first couple of months elsewhere in the territory, I faced several different heels that were fed to me in one-and-done matches to establish my credibility as the champion. “Crazy Luke” Graham was one of those guys—although I only faced him in a few of the smaller buildings in the secondary towns. Graham was a brawler, and he was getting up there in years, so we were somewhat limited in what we could do. He acted like he was insane, and that was the pitch of those matches—finding a way to beat the unpredictable “crazy guy.” Crazy Luke was a good guy to help me introduce myself as champion to the crowds in some of the secondary towns, though, because we could have a quick, fast-paced, high-intensity match that impressed the people and left them happy.

George “The Animal” Steele was another one of those guys, and I also faced him quite early in my reign as champion in 1978. Steele had an entertaining gimmick back then—which had evolved quite a bit over the years that Bruno was champion. A lot of people don’t know this, but initially, Steele played a hipster character that spoke on the microphone, called people “daddy-o,” and knew how to wrestle. By the time I got to the WWWF, though, the character had evolved into “The Animal”—a hairy guy with a green tongue who ate the turnbuckles, rubbed the stuffing in people’s faces, used a foreign object, and just stomped and punched and kicked people—then put them into the flying hammerlock to try and “break” their arms.

In real life, Steele was a high school teacher and very successful football and wrestling coach from suburban Detroit, and a heck of a nice guy. Because WWWF television did not reach Detroit, nobody out there really knew what he was up to on the weekends and in the summer months when he would come in to the WWWF to do television and a quick ten-week tour of the territory. George was actually a very smart man with a great mind for the business, but he absolutely loved playing the role of this “missing link” type creature.

Steele and I had a few matches in the summer of 1978, but we had our biggest series in 1981—when I actually wrestled him for a couple of months in a row in a lot of the bigger towns. The foreign object that he was always hiding in his wrestling pants was a bottle opener wrapped in medical tape. Before the match, he’d use green food coloring or a lozenge that would turn his tongue green and then he’d come out and wave his arms around and make these guttural noises and throw his jacket and chase the referee out of the ring, and eat the turnbuckle, and the fans were really and truly afraid of him. Heck, if I let myself believe that his gimmick was real, I would have been scared of him too.

Steele was also very big in Japan, and he loved to scare the heck out of the Japanese fans, who took their wrestling very seriously. One time when we were in Japan together, Steele went in to get his hair cut at a salon. The Japanese women, who didn’t like to show a lot of emotion, were giggling and wondering how they were supposed to give him a haircut when he had no hair on his head. Then, all of a sudden, Steele took off his shirt, pointed at his back, and said “no ladies, back here!”

Slowing the Pace Down

The first time I met Bobby we were over in Japan. This was well before he became the champion, and he gave me a picture of himself, which was one of his early, early pictures that he wanted me to give to Mr. McMahon because he wanted to come to the WWWF. The picture really did not look like he was physical enough to do the kind of things that we were doing at the time, so I never showed the picture to Mr. McMahon because I just didn’t think it would work.

I taught school and coached, so I only wrestled in the summertime. The rest of the year I was back in Michigan. Well wouldn’t you know, the following summer when I got to the TVs for the first time, Bobby comes in, and Mr. McMahon introduces me to him and tells me that this guy is going to be the next champion! Well Mr. McMahon wanted to get some heat on Bobby and make him look good. Bobby was wearing a denim suit that his wife had made by hand that they both loved, and Mr. McMahon said, “Jim, Bobby is going to be out there in the ring wearing that suit doing an interview and I want you to tear it off of him!” Well I ran out there and ripped that suit off of him, and it gave him a good start. They didn’t show that tape right away, they saved it and aired it later while I was still away teaching, but when I came back that summer, our first run in 1978 was over that incident.

In his first year as the champion, Bobby was a very excitable guy in the ring; maybe even a bit overexcited, but he was very good. He was hard to hold down because he was a very good amateur and he was trained to get right up, but in the pros early on, his timing was almost too quick. Sometimes you need to slow down and let the people digest what you just did—and Bobby had to learn to slow the pace down from what he was accustomed to doing in the amateurs.

—George “The Animal” Steele

On May 15, 1978, I made my first trip north of the border to Toronto and faced “Superstar” Billy Graham at the Maple Leaf Gardens. Frank Tunney, the promoter up there, was also very close to Vince Sr., so there were never any worries about issues with finishes or payoffs. I wrestled in Toronto a fair number of times as the WWWF champion. When we wrestled in Toronto, we used to stay at a hotel right across the street from the arena, so it was a pretty easy travel day—fly in, clear customs, workout in the city, and then go over to the arena. Frank Tunney was another one of the highly respected and trusted promoters in the NWA, like Sam Muchnick, who had the standing to put together “dream cards.” If you look over some of the results from cards in Toronto over the years, you will see appearances by all three federations’ (NWA, AWA, WWWF) world champions, and a number of unification matches. Only the most respected and trusted promoters had the kind of influence to arrange those inter-promotional matches. I always loved wrestling in Toronto because Frank Tunney was one of those guys, and you knew when you wrestled on a card for him, that you’d be surrounded by some of the best talent in the business.

I took my first tour of Japan as the WWWF champion at the very end of May and beginning of June 1978. By this point, I had been over there a couple of times and knew the routine and the odd bookings, which were a nice break from the norm. In Japan, because WWWF television programming was not generally shown on television, Japanese promoters were not concerned with who was a heel and who was a babyface back in America, or what angles might be going on between guys in a territory. Because of that, Japanese results often didn’t make sense when viewed against what was going on in the United States.

If a wrestler hadn’t spent a lot of time over in Japan, he wasn’t “established,” so a heel could play face, and a face could play heel, and American heels and faces could end up as tag-team partners over there against a couple of Japanese guys. The second-to-last night of that tour was the first time I recall teaming with Andre in the little town of Gifu. I remember feeling like a little baby standing next to him in the ring, and as Andre’s tag-team partner, I didn’t have to think too much about what I would do. The formula when you were Andre’s tag-team partner was always the same—get in a few moves at the beginning, take the heat from your opponents for a while, tease an inability to tag Andre in for a while longer until you had the crowd at its peak, then tag Andre in, and let him clean house and take it home.

Everything about Andre was larger than life. To give you a sense of his size, you could pass a silver dollar through the inside of his ring. In his prime, there was nobody in the world that was going to stop Andre from doing something in the ring if he didn’t want to be stopped, and when you’re that big, it didn’t make a whole lot of booking sense to have him doing crazy moves in the ring. If you think about it, there is no need for you to throw a dropkick or use aerial moves if you can just use your immense strength and size to bully and overpower your opponents. That said, when Andre was lighter and still relatively pain free as he was back then, he could throw suplexes and get up and down quite a bit.

You knew that Andre liked you and trusted you if he let you bodyslam him. Although a bodyslam was a pretty generic move for most of us, for Andre, who legitimately weighed well over 400 pounds, taking a bodyslam was a significant and legitimately painful bump. Dropping him anything other than perfectly could have seriously injured him and ended his very lucrative career. As such, over the years, there weren’t too many guys let into that club. Hogan did it to him on television in 1980 at the start of their feud, which had pretty good shock factor, since most people had not seen Andre slammed before. Andre graciously allowed that to happen to help get Hogan over with the people as a credible threat to Andre’s undefeated streak, and to help sell their feud that summer. He did it again at Shea Stadium and a few other times around the circuit—but if Andre didn’t want you to slam him, you weren’t going to get him up there without his cooperation. Harley and Ken Patera and Don Leo Jonathan, El Canek down in Mexico, and Otto Wanz over in Germany were among the handful of guys who had been allowed the privilege of bodyslamming Andre.

I liked Andre very much—and he was always very good to me. I liked to drink beer with him, and after the matches, on nights when I was too far away to drive home, there were many times that he and I would end up in a bar drinking together. He’d want to keep me up all night—and I always joked with Andre that I would stay up all night drinking with him if he would come out and train with me in the morning. Somehow, that conversation always ended with him clapping one of his huge hands across my shoulders, laughing his deep laugh, and then saying, “Okay, Bobby,” and letting me go to bed! I was in a bar with Andre one night where he drank 112 bottles of beer and remained coherent enough to line all of the empties up on the windowsills of the bar.

Sometimes I would team with Andre in a tag-team match because a particular promoter decided it would be interesting to try. At other times, they would put us together to set up something for the next town on the tour, or for the next time over there. My match with Andre against Inoki and Sakaguchi on that tour was a perfect example of that. That tag-team match was used as a platform to build some intensity between Inoki and me for my title match the next night, on the last night of the tour, when Antonio beat me by countout at the Budokan Hall in Tokyo, the largest sumo wrestling arena in Tokyo, which held about 22,000 people for wrestling.

Wrestling Inoki was always easy—it was almost like working with someone in America. He didn’t speak much English back then, but he was so fluid and smooth in the ring that we didn’t really need to talk. We could anticipate each other’s moves, and just flow off of each other. Antonio was New Japan’s featured performer, and we knew that we’d be working together pretty much every time I was over there, so we needed to leave the fans with something that would bring them back next time. Having me get counted out of the ring was the choice for this first tour, which would allow him to win, but me to keep the title, and leave the resolution for next time.

Back stateside, I rode the circuit for the next couple of months finishing the feud with Billy in the secondary and tertiary towns in the territory. Vince Sr.’s booking in 1978 ensured that everybody in the territory had a chance to see me with the championship, and allowed me to start building face-to-face relationships with the fans in all the regular tour towns. Billy continued to be a true gentleman in all of these matches. Even though he knew that his time in the territory was growing short, and even though he was still getting great crowd reaction everywhere he went—he never let that disappointment detract from his performance in the ring.

At the end of July, I went back over to Japan to Budokan Hall for the rematch with Inoki. That was an unusual trip in that I went over just for this one match with Inoki, and the trip was memorable as one of the biggest travel nightmares of my reign as champion. I arrived at the international airport in Tokyo and had to clear customs, and then, even though Inoki had sent a driver for me, it took two and a half hours to fight through the incredible traffic in downtown Tokyo to get to the venue.

The match was scheduled for the best two out of three falls, and the plan this time was for us to go Broadway, with each of us taking a fall on the other during the sixty minutes, to show the fans that either of us could beat the other. The Japanese fans were not used to seeing either one of us lose cleanly—so the thought was that seeing that would be a big deal and raise interest for future bouts.

We decided to give Antonio the first fall, to perpetuate the illusion for as long as possible during the match that he might actually win the WWWF championship. As I recall, Inoki used something he called the “octopus hold,” which was one of the new finishers he was trying out, to win the first fall. It was basically a version of a standing crucifix where he was up on my back twisting my head one way and my arm another using both his arms and his legs. It was a visually dramatic move, and the fans were stunned when I sold it for him and submitted to give him the first fall. It was one of the very few times in my career that I lost a fall by submission.

We battled hard in the second fall, until eventually, I was able to foil a suplex attempt and get behind Antonio, hoist him up, and apply the atomic kneedrop, which allowed me to pin him cleanly in the middle of the ring to win the second fall and tie up the match. The fans were equally stunned to see Inoki pinned cleanly in the middle of the Budokan Hall ring—something that almost never happened. The time limit then expired before either of us could win the third and deciding fall, so the match was declared a draw. At the end of the bout, the fans were already calling for another rematch. We had done our jobs well.

At the time, the NWA was doing a lot of things with Baba and All-Japan, including scheduling the NWA World Champion for full tours of Japan. As a result, Inoki—as the head of the New Japan promotion was trying to compete with Baba—wanted to do more with me.

I showered in the locker room at Budokan Hall, and then it took us another two hours fighting traffic to get back to the Tokyo airport, where I then flew straight to Los Angeles to wrestle Roddy Piper in the Olympic Theater. That was the match that Roddy describes in the Foreword to this book.

Mike LeBelle was the promoter in Los Angeles at the time, and he thought the world of Roddy and wanted to showcase him in a long match with a world champion. Mike, however, knew that I had just flown in from Japan after doing a Broadway with Inoki, so he was very reluctant to ask me for that kind of a favor. I hadn’t wrestled Roddy before that day, but I had heard a lot of good things about him, and remembering the lessons from those who had taught me—I knew that, as the champion, I had a responsibility to come into the territory and give Roddy as much as I could. We decided that I would go over with a quick pin late—but that in the meantime, we would showcase Roddy.

Roddy was a young but brash tweener at the time. He had torn up a picture of me on television and talked some trash to get people interested in the match, but we were still able to have a pretty nice babyface match. We did the double bridge, we did the short-arm scissor, and we did a lot of amateur stuff and fast-paced mat wrestling and switching, and Roddy, who was still very young back then, stayed right with me for the whole match.

I liked wrestling in the Olympic Theater, because the ring was in the middle and the building was round, so the people were in close and you could feel the intensity of their emotion and enthusiasm. The crowd that night loved what we were doing, so we went virtually to a Broadway—59 minutes—and had the people on the edges of their seats in a pretty good frenzy before I finally caught Roddy in an inside cradle and got the pin just before the time limit was set to expire.

It was a great match—and I knew right then that if Roddy could put on a little more size, he would go places in this business because the man could flat out work. His mic skills, of course, for which he is perhaps best known, were already among the very best in the business.

Back in the dressing room after the match, both Roddy and Mike LeBelle thanked me profusely for the near-Broadway. The honor, though, was mine. I then hopped on a plane and crossed the country to Pittsburgh where I would finally catch some sleep before facing “Superstar” Billy Graham at the Civic Arena in the main event the next night.

No rest for the weary—but to be honest, I would have given anything for that life to go on forever. I was loving life as the champion, traveling around the world, and wrestling the very best and most talented guys that each territory had to offer. It was a totally exhilarating experience.

In the wrestling business, wintertime was the boom time, and although it may seem counterintuitive, summer tended to be our slower time. In the northeast, particularly in the big cities where we drew some of our biggest houses, people took their vacations in July and August—to the shore, to the lakes or the mountains or the state parks—to escape the heat of the large urban centers. As they did, they fell out of touch with the wrestling storylines, and also missed the house shows. Overall, the WWWF houses were typically down in the summertime, and so we tended to run smaller and cheaper shows to compensate for that. Vince would also slow down the storylines, playing off the feuds that were already established and taking those feuds to the secondary and tertiary towns, while the Garden frequently got a couple of one-off challengers who weren’t part of a big program. He would then ramp up the new angles in the fall, when people were reliably back in front of their television sets on the weekends.

If you look at my schedule in the high summer of 1978, you will see examples of this booking strategy. I faced Graham in cage-match blowoffs in the bigger cities, concluding an angle that had started in December 1977, and otherwise found myself facing Arion, or in one-offs with guys like Steele or Luke Graham.

On August 28, 1978, though, we started ramping up for the fall season, and I ended up in the ring at the Garden for the first time with the returning former WWWF champion Ivan Koloff. Koloff, of course, was the man who only a few years earlier had shocked the world by pinning the previously unbeatable Bruno Sammartino, putting an end to his seven-year title reign and stripping him of the world title in this very same ring. This was the quintessential Vince McMahon Sr. match—with the upstart young All-American Boy champion facing the challenge of the chain-swinging, Russian flag-bearing former WWWF champion. Koloff, who was nicknamed “The Russian Bear,” had become white-hot with the fans for berating everything American, and “crippling” a number of young American wrestlers. He was, once again, a seemingly insurmountable monster heel. He also had Captain Lou Albano as his manager, which of course, only helped to increase the frenzied vitriol that the fans showered on them both.

Behind the scenes, Ivan was actually a terrific guy, and someone that I liked very much. I had wrestled him once earlier in the year down in Florida for Eddie Graham, and we had worked out a few nice high spots during that match that we repeated in New York. Ivan was a great worker and had an impeccable sense of timing. At that time, he was around 285 pounds, and we did the short-arm scissor that night at the Garden which saw me dead-lift him to my shoulder out of the short-arm scissor, walk him over to the corner, set him on the top rope, and slap him in the face.

The fans were immediately into the match, as you might imagine given the ready accessibility of the Cold War–inspired hatred between America and Russia at the time. Vince Sr. called for Ivan to ram me into the ring post and for me to draw color and then, despite me battling on valiantly, to have the doctor at ringside stop the match due to my cuts and award the decision to Koloff. That, of course, would set us up perfectly for the rematch in September just as the fall season was heating up.

Blood stoppages were another common booking tool in the WWWF, particularly in the major arenas where I was scheduled to have multi-month runs with a particular heel. Whenever the promoters wanted an inconclusive end to a match to draw the next house, and the heel was generating more heat than usual, they used the “blood stoppage” to amp up fan interest in the rematch. There was an old saying in the business that “red means green”—meaning that any match that had color at the end would draw an even better house the next time. The promoters didn’t pay more for color—they just asked for it when discussing the finish with you in the dressing room before the match—and when they asked for blood, you obliged.

Getting color was just another part of protecting the business—people needed to see blood every once in a while to keep them believing that what they were watching was real. You couldn’t bang someone’s head against the iron ring post or smash someone over the head with a chair without it causing someone to bleed—or it would begin to seem suspicious. The people wanted to believe that what we were doing to each other was real—it was just like watching a movie or a television show—people wanted to suspend reality and be drawn into the story. We had to make it possible for them to believe—and “getting color” every so often as part of the storyline was part of that process.

I got bloody noses very easily, and used to get them all the time in amateur wrestling—so oftentimes I would just give myself a bloody nose and let that bleed all over everything and get the job done without actually having to gig myself with a blade. Other times, I would cut the very tip off a razorblade and bury the “gig” sharp side up in a piece of athletic tape on the inside of my wrist or finger. Some guys even kept the gig in their mouths, although I could never understand how anyone did that without swallowing it or gashing the inside of their mouths during a high spot.

Anyway—at the appointed time, you would take the bump (such as, for example, a shot into the iron ring post outside the ring) and crumple to the ground where you would then gig yourself with the hidden piece of blade by dragging it quickly across your forehead. That would open a cut, and the running sweat would take care of the rest, giving you the “crimson mask” effect of streams of blood pouring down your face that the promoters were looking for.

I didn’t like blading, and I tried to avoid it as much as possible—but you knew that it would help you make money by drawing more fan interest in the return match, so you just did it when they asked you to. It did make you ask yourself, though, if you were willing to slice open your own face for the business, just how far were you were willing to go to draw money?

Once I drew color, the doctor in attendance at ringside, who was a real doctor, but who was also typically in on the booked finish, would jump up, examine my cuts, and determine that I was losing too much blood to safely continue the match. He would then call for the bell and waive off the match, and award the decision, but not the championship, to my opponent.

Over the years I worked for Vince Sr., I was grateful that he didn’t ask me to gig myself too many times.

A “full” Garden title series with an able challenger was a three-match program that would begin in New York at the very beginning of the challenger’s stay in the territory—often after the new heel had only one or two television appearances. That was why pairing the heels with Blassie, The Grand Wizard, or Albano was so important—it was a placeholder to alert the fans that this “new guy” was a heel and was someone they were supposed to hate, even if the new heel’s character hadn’t yet been fully developed on television. The challenger would get a convincing victory over me in the first encounter, either by blood stoppage or countout to show the fans that he had a legitimate chance to win the belt.

We would then come back in the second match and increase the intensity of the action, often resulting in a disqualification, a double disqualification, or some kind of double-countout or pull-apart finish. That would set up the third and final encounter, which was usually a gimmick match like a steel cage match, a Texas Death Match, or a lumberjack match, where I would go over.

Arnold Skaaland always encouraged me to take more of offense and sell less in the blowoff matches in order to appear more powerful, but I always wanted my heels to leave our blowoff match at the Garden or anywhere else with as much heat as they could keep—because that’s what was good for business. For part of the time that I was champion, Pedro Morales was the Intercontinental Heavyweight champion, and he would often be booked to face the heel that I just beat on the next Garden card. Given that, I wanted to make sure that I left those heels with enough credibility in the minds of the fans to still pose a legitimate threat to Pedro, or to whomever else they might find themselves in the ring with.

While doing that might have not made me look like an unbeatable champion, I had been taught that it was always good to have a strong heel or two that I hadn’t totally chewed up on the undercard. If it looked like any one of those heels could beat me on any given night, it was good for them and would continue to be good for the business as a whole. That became my way of doing business, and, I think, why a lot of people in the business ultimately came to respect me.

On September 25, 1978, Koloff and I came back to the Garden for our second match. The booked finish that time was a swerve by Vince Sr. intended to continue to build my credibility with the fans. Remember that Koloff had shocked the world by pinning the seemingly unbeatable Bruno Sammartino at the Garden to win the WWWF title, and he hadn’t been pinned much at the Garden since then, so when I hit him with the atomic kneedrop and pinned him cleanly in the middle of the ring in the second match of our series, the fans were amazed. It was a really big deal to pin Ivan Koloff at the Garden, and I think that finish really shocked the fans and earned me a lot of credibility in their minds.

After that match, I showered and, as was my custom, headed out the side door of the Garden to walk to my car. That night, however, I was mobbed by a large group of fans and ended up standing there, outside the side door of the Garden, talking with fans and signing autographs until the sun came up the next morning! I think the second Koloff match at the Garden was the tipping point that put me over in the hearts and minds of the fans. I had now truly been accepted as their champion—and they now believed in me, and were firmly behind me.

In October 1978 up in Maine, we tested one of the angles that Vince Sr. was thinking about running the following year—namely pairing me with the Paramount Samoan High Chief Peter Maivia and making us tag-team partners. On October 18, 1978, on the proving grounds in Bangor, where many of the WWF’s angles were tested, Peter and I took on (and lost to) the WWF tag-team champions the Yukon Lumberjacks. The fans, however, had reacted favorably to our team, and that gave Vince the information he needed to plan the federation’s primary angle for the first half of 1979.

On October 23, 1978, though, I faced “The Big Cat” Ernie Ladd at the Garden. Ernie was managed by the Grand Wizard and had returned to the federation as a huge, “arrogant,” and well-known football personality. Standing six feet nine inches and weighing 350 pounds, Ernie had, at that point, been one of the biggest men to ever play in the NFL—where he was an All-Pro defensive tackle who played for the San Diego Chargers, the Houston Oilers, and the Kansas City Chiefs. This was another marquee matchup for the fans at the Garden, as it pitted me—their former NCAA collegiate wrestling champion All-American Boy—against a very legitimate NFL football star. This would ultimately take the form of another “big guy” match, although Ernie Ladd could move around as well as any big man I ever got into the ring with. Ernie was a great talent with a silver tongue and a fearsome appearance.

When Ernie and Vince and I met for the pre-match discussion in the bathroom in the heel locker room at the Garden, though, Vince was riffling his quarters as he always did, looked Ernie in the eye, and explained that I would be going over Ernie by pinfall with the atomic drop. I remember Ladd towering over both Vince and me looking disappointed, but he just smiled at both of us and said, “Okay, boss.” I think Ernie was hoping for more than just one match with me—and frankly, I think we could have done more with me trying to figure out how to break down a man of Ernie’s immense size and losing the first match by countout—but Vince Sr. wanted to keep me strong.

Unlike some other professional football players-turned professional wrestlers who I wrestled during my time as champion, Ladd was in total control of his body and a complete and total gentleman in the ring. Ernie used his huge size and tremendous athleticism to beat on me for the better part of fifteen minutes, with me trying to stay away from him and tire him out.

Eventually, at the end of my comeback, when the time came for the finish, I hoisted Ernie and his 350-pound frame high up in the air, walked him around the ring, backed into a corner, and then ran him out into the middle. Ernie was so big, he could have either made me work really hard to execute that move well, or could have shown bitterness about asking to do the honors in his first match at the Garden by making the move look pretty bad simply by letting his legs hang limp. But Ernie Ladd was a true professional, and was about making the match look good—so he held his legs up straight up in the air to make it look good, and sold the atomic drop like a million bucks.

When we got back to the dressing room, Ladd told me that he would never have believed I could carry him around for all that time unless he had seen it himself. Ernie was not a guy who had been picked up off his feet very much in his life, and he was legitimately impressed with my strength, conditioning, and physical appearance. Vince Sr. liked Ernie Ladd a lot, respected him for what he accomplished in his football career and for the legitimacy that he brought to the WWF by being part of the federation. I liked him too.

On October 29, I made another trip to Florida for Eddie Graham for the return NWA-WWWF title match with the still-reigning NWA World Champion Harley Race at the Orlando Sports Arena. We did another Broadway, continuing the mystique of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object theme that had characterized our matches. The allure of the double title showdown helped to bring in another good house for Eddie—and continued the back and forth talent exchange between Vince and Eddie that would persist for the next few years.

On November 4, 1978, the experiment that Vince had tested up in Bangor got off the drawing board and onto television as Peter Maivia and I were paired in a main-event tag-team match on television against Freddie Blassie’s combination of Spiros Arion and Victor Rivera. Arnold Skaaland was, of course, in our corner.

Peter and I started teasing dissention in our ranks almost immediately by having a little disagreement about who would start the match—with Skaaland eventually settling the “dispute” by deciding that Peter should start first. Later in the match, as I was getting double-teamed in the heel corner, Peter did not come into the ring to help out. Arion then started getting the best of me and Maivia was wandering away from the corner not paying attention, or giving me the short-arm from the corner and refusing to tag into the match.

The fans started chirping, and Skaaland starting getting on Peter. Then suddenly, out of nowhere, Peter attacked Skaaland, ripped Skaaland’s shirt off, and pounded away on him while Arion and Rivera double-teamed me.

People were screaming at Maivia in disbelief as he left ringside with Freddie Blassie and Arion and Rivera, his shocking heel turn revealed. On cue, Skaaland was carried back to the dressing room by Tony Garea, Larry Zbyszko, Dino Bravo, and others, which left me to come out of the ring to cut my first truly “incensed” promo of my tenure as champion in the WWWF. These spots, which were not scripted ahead of time, were not easy for me.

“What happened?!” I screamed into the microphone, doing my best to seem truly shocked and enraged.

Vince McMahon Jr. just stared at me blankly, feeding me nothing to work off of, but the fans were buying it, so I just looked around at them and then said the next thing that came to mind.

Some of you probably know that Peter Maivia was movie star The Rock’s (Rocky Maivia/Dwayne Johnson’s) grandfather, and Rocky Johnson’s father. He was also a good friend, and one of the truly toughest men in the wrestling business. He was legitimately a Samoan High Chief, and the ceremonial tattoos that he displayed around his waist and upper legs were a sign of his status. Apparently, they were painfully applied with bone and shell over a period of weeks. No one in the wrestling business ever had anything bad to say about Peter Maivia. He was a good man with a huge heart and was a truly nice person who I loved working with.

The heel turn we did on TV with him attacking Arnold, however, was an early indication of just how powerful television could be—and how critical television exposure was for territorial wrestling. Just that one short ten-minute segment was enough to get the people to hate Peter, and these were fans that had loved him and had cheered him when he tried to get the championship away from Billy Graham only a year earlier. Peter soaked up their hatred and played it up like the pro he was.

Peter and I drew some nice crowds together all around the territory after his turn. To give you some idea of how much heat Peter got from that angle, one night in Springfield right after the angle aired on television, I was scheduled to appear in the main-event title match at the Civic Center with “Superstar” Billy Graham. Billy didn’t show up for the match, and the promoters were scrambling to figure out what to do. After talking with the office, they decided to sub Peter into the main event for Graham. Ordinarily, the crowd would have gone nuts to have lost a Backlund-Graham main event, and the office would have been flooded with demands for refunds. When the ring announcer told the crowd that Billy was unable to appear, as expected, they booed and started throwing things at him. But then he announced that a replacement challenger had been found, and that that person was “none other than the Samoan High Chief, Peter Maivia!” The thunderous boos turned on a dime.

The people hated Peter so much, they didn’t even miss Billy. And that is really saying something.

There were a couple of other interesting stops on my itinerary in November, 1978. First, Vince Sr. had gotten a call from old friend Ken Patera, who by this point, frustrated that he was not going to get a chance to carry the belt, had made good on his promise to leave the WWWF and return home to North Carolina. Patera was wrestling down in Charlotte for Jim Crockett in the NWA, and had already won Crockett’s big regional belt, the Mid-Atlantic Heavyweight Championship. Crockett was hoping we could do a champion versus champion match down in their signature building—the Greensboro Coliseum. Vince asked me if I’d be willing to do that, and of course, I was happy to help out Kenny, given how strongly he had put me over in our matches in the WWWF both before and after I won the belt.

So I drove back to my home from Boston on Saturday night after wrestling Koloff in the Boston Garden, and then hopped on a plane the next morning and headed down to Greensboro for what would be my one and only appearance with the belt in Jim Crockett’s mid-Atlantic territory. Patera and I had worked so much by this point that wrestling him was like a night off—we could practically anticipate each other’s moves before they happened. We had a good match down there, I went over by DQ, they drew a nice house, and everyone was happy.

The other interesting guy I wrestled a few times during that month was Crusher Blackwell. Jerry was a really thick, massive guy—he was legitimately well over 400 pounds—but he could move around better than just about any other man of that size in professional wrestling. He could get up and down, climb the ropes, and even throw a decent-looking dropkick, but he wore a pretty bad-looking full body suit in the ring, and had a lot more blubber on him than most of the men I would wrestle.

Jerry had made good money for Verne Gagne up in Minneapolis and was involved in a number of angles up there, so Vince Sr. brought him in for a short stint in the WWWF. He didn’t hang around long, but I did work with him a few times. I wrestled him once at the Spectrum, and after wearing him out for ten or twelve minutes, got him up in the atomic kneedrop, and carried his 400-pound body around the ring before dropping him on my knee and covering him for the pin.

On November 20, 1978, I climbed into the ring at Madison Square Garden for my first head-to-head matchup with Peter Maivia after his televised heel turn. This was also the first time I had someone in the ring with me at the Garden who had done something to me on television—so there was an extra element of psychological drama associated with the match. Before the match, when we met with Vince in the dressing room, Vince told us that given how much heat our feud was drawing, we would definitely be coming back the next month—so Peter and I knew that Vince was looking for this match to just set that up.

I don’t remember much about the actual match that night other than the fact that the crowd was so hot that it took us less than ten minutes to get the people to their emotional high point. Despite the brevity of that first match, the fans were so all over Peter that I was convinced that he couldn’t get them any higher than the where we were at the nine-minute mark—where we spilled out of the ring and finished it with Peter jumping into the ring just before the ten count and going over by countout.

Maivia and I had our first rematch at the Garden on December 18, 1978. We had again drawn a strong house, and the heat between us was still so strong that when Vince brought us together, he informed us that we’d be going three matches, culminating in a steel cage blowoff the following month. Consequently, he wanted this one to end with me chasing Peter all over the building, and for the match to end with Peter getting counted out.

It is worthy of mention here that the December holiday cards at the Garden were always special, because Vince Sr. would always bring in extra talent to give the people who had supported his promotion throughout the year a little something extra. This time was no different, as Vince had Harley in to defend the NWA World Title against Tony Garea.

The NWA promoters always wanted Harley to look good at the Garden, and Vince put him in there with Garea because he knew that Tony was a good hand who would give Harley a solid match, but would ultimately make Harley look good and put Harley over well. Antonio Inoki was here for that card as well, and was being billed as the “Martial Arts Champion,” as the front office was trying to figure out what to do with him to make him a draw in America, where he was still virtually unknown.

Antonio wanted to be more involved in the WWWF, but he never got over with the New York fans because he didn’t really have an identity or a personality when he appeared in New York. Antonio couldn’t speak much English, so he had no real opportunity to connect with the American fans as a babyface. Because he was the head of the New Japan promotion and wanted his matches in New York to be seen in Japan, he didn’t want to adopt the usual formula and become a “foreign heel” managed by Blassie, the Wizard, or Albano.

This was a struggle that the WWWF and New Japan would continue to have as we turned the calendar to 1979.