Backlund

1979 began with my second cage match ever at Madison Square Garden. This one, of course, was the culmination of my bitter “feud” with Peter Maivia, now the most hated man in the federation. Peter and I had drawn strong houses at the Garden and all over the territory in each of the first two months, so Vince Sr. saw reason to go with a cage match blowoff to this feud.

Booking wrestling is an interesting art—part storytelling, part psychology, and part business. The people are different in each city, and even sometimes from month to month in the same city. They want to be entertained, so you have to give them a steady diet of something different. Taking a look at my history as champion at the Garden up to this point will illustrate this point.

In New York, the people had seen me win the belt from Graham in February, lose to him on a blood stoppage in March, and win the cage match blowoff in April. They then watched me score three solid pinfall victories in a row, over Ken Patera in May, Spiros Arion in June, and George “The Animal” Steele in July. By August, it was time to give the fans something different, so we did a long match with former champion Ivan Koloff and gave him a blood stoppage victory. We then came back with the rematch in September, which I won with a surprise pinfall when everyone in the building was expecting something different. As the promoter, it is always critical to zig when the fans expect you to zag. In professional wrestling, predictability was a business-killer.

Next, I scored another surprise pinfall victory over Ernie Ladd in our first contest in October, and then battled Peter Maivia to a countout loss in November, and a countout victory in December—both of which ended in brawls that settled nothing between us. The Garden crowd hadn’t seen a specialty match since my cage match with Graham in April—so after eight months, in Vince Sr.’s mind, enough time had passed to do that again.

Though I much preferred to work the psychology of a crowd using chain wrestling and a series of high spots and near falls, when I wrestled in a cage match, I knew that I had to work with the cage, bring it into the match, and give the people what they came for—vindication and catharsis. When you were in a cage match, the cage had to be the third man in the ring that you were telling the story with, and at the end of a cage match, there had to be a definite winner and a definite loser. Because we were selling hope, no matter how bleak things might have looked up to that point, the winner of the cage match had to be the man wearing the white hat.

Sometimes to mix things up the blowoff match was a Texas Death Match or a lumberjack match. Which match was chosen for the blowoff had a lot to do with who the people were in the match, what had been done recently, and what would sell the story best. But the steel cage match was definitely the biggest draw in the minds of the fans. Just seeing the cage getting erected around the ring in the middle of the Garden was enough to get the crowd buzzing with anticipation—so by the time you made your entrance from the dressing room and started “testing” the cage and looking it over, the people’s energy was already high, and growing by the moment.

Peter got over incredibly well as a heel, which made wrestling him very easy. He was seasoned, set a very easy pace to work with, and had been in the business for a long time. We also had a story to tell that people had seen multiple times on television. The cage match with Peter was pretty long—going twenty minutes in the cage was pretty unusual—but we had some great heat going in this series, and we both enjoyed working together so much that we decided to get the crowd totally lathered up that night. We teased a few false finishes until the crowd was emotionally at their exhaustion point, and then finally gave the people their catharsis.

I remember the ending of that match well—Peter and I were fighting on the top turnbuckle at the corner of the cage, when I eventually got the upper hand and threw a haymaker that knocked Peter down and got his leg caught in the turnbuckle. The people were screaming and waving at me to climb out over the top. Their energy was sky high. So I gave them what they wanted and climbed out over the top and dropped down to the arena floor, rather than going out the door, with Peter still hanging there from the turnbuckle on the inside.

I don’t think that had ever been done at the Garden before. The people went home happy that night.

That night was the second time, I signed autographs by the back door of the Garden until the sun came up.

In February, 1979, I had my first match at the Garden with Greg Valentine, managed by the Grand Wizard. Valentine was a new type of heel challenger for the WWF (The World Wide Wrestling Federation was renamed The World Wrestling Federation right around this time, so for purposes of the book, from here on, I refer to the federation as the “WWF” and the title as the WWF title), a slimmer, meaner, cocky heel, with long, golden hair, who wore beautiful floor-length sequined robes, and who could also chain wrestle. Greg came into the territory featuring a potentially crippling finisher known as the figure-four leglock, which he resulted in a number of his television opponents being stretchered out of the ring. Greg also had a perpetual scowl on his face that just made him look mean, and he played that up, frequently telling people in his interviews that he had sympathy for no one.

The fans legitimately feared him, and the son of the legendary Johnny Valentine became an instant and credible threat to my championship.

I knew Greg from my time down in the Florida and Georgia territories, and I had been in the ring with him enough to know that he was someone that I could really work with. Greg was highly skilled in the ring, and had good stamina. I was also pretty confident that, after I had done so many Broadways with Dory and Terry and Harley and Jack Brisco back in the NWA, that I could go an hour in the ring with Greg. Of all the guys I had wrestled in the WWF up to this point, Greg was the guy who could tell the story with me that I wanted to tell.

It would be the first time, to my knowledge, that a Garden crowd had ever seen a title match go Broadway—so it would be something new for them, and something I very much wanted to introduce to them. So in a rare moment where I actually got involved in the booking, I asked Vince Sr. to let me go Broadway with Greg in our first at the Garden. Seeing the same potential that I saw, Vince Sr. immediately agreed to the idea.

Greg and I did a lot of chain wrestling, mixed in some high spots, worked in and out of the ring, and took the crowd on exhausting emotional rollercoaster ride. We were both drenched and exhausted, but as the minutes ticked on, the crowd realized that they were seeing something epic that they had never seen before. The fans were on the edges of their seats, exhausted themselves, waiting and wondering what was going to happen.

It was good booking for me, because I was going toe-to-toe with this devastating new heel who had destroyed all his previous competition on television, and who, in his pre-match promos, had promised not just to beat me, but to break my leg and put me out of wrestling for good. It was good for Greg, obviously, because he was taking the young WWF champion further than any challenger had ever taken him—and appeared to be someone who had the stamina and physical toughness to go toe-to-toe with me.

At the appointed time, just before the time limit expired, and after I had blocked the application of the hold all match long, Greg finally caught me in the figure-four leglock in the center of the ring. I was struggling to escape the hold when the referee called for the bell. The crowd was aghast—many of them thinking that, like everyone else before me, I had been forced to concede to the devastating finishing hold. The bell continued to ring, but Greg refused to release the hold—trying to make good on his promise to break my leg. Finally, Arnold Skaaland jumped into the ring and smashed Greg in the head with the championship belt, causing him to unlock our legs.

I sold the hold to the moon, struggling to get to my feet after the hold was broken and holding onto the turnbuckles and then to Arnold as Howard Finkel announced to the exhausted Garden crowd that I had, in fact, not submitted, but that the match had gone to the one-hour time limit, and was a draw. It was a great swerve that worked perfectly. With Greg seemingly injuring my leg at the end of the match, we had left a great new foundation at for the next match to be built upon, and we were all set up for the following month.

Around the rest of the territory, I finished up feuds in some cities with Ivan Koloff, including a couple of memorable cage matches with him, and in other cities and towns with Peter Maivia. I also wrestled in some tag-team matches with Chief Jay Strongbow and with “Polish Power” Ivan Putski against the WWF Tag-Team Champions the Valiant Brothers, managed, of course, as all heel tag-team champions were, by the “Guiding Light” Captain Lou Albano.

Vince Sr. was again testing out booking ideas by putting me into these tag-team matches—a strategy he had used in past years either to set up feuds for Bruno Sammartino, or to establish the credibility of new challengers when Bruno was champion. Vince Sr. would put Bruno into a tag-team match with a couple of monster heels—and have one of those heels either pin Bruno in the tag-team match, giving that heel the “credibility” to beat Bruno one-on-one, and immediately propelling that heel into the “number-one contender” position out on the house show circuit. Alternatively, he would have one of the heels do something to Bruno during the tag-team match that would start an angle that would lead to a championship match between the two.

Unlike Bruno, I didn’t love working in tag-team matches. Although I had done a fair amount of tag-team wrestling for Eddie Graham down in Florida when I worked with Steve Keirn, it wasn’t my favorite. That was especially true with a partner like Ivan Putski.

Although the people loved Putski, and he was popular and reliable enough to main-event some of the smaller buildings in the territory, I just didn’t enjoy working with Putski. Like Mascaras, any match involving Ivan Putski could not be a tag-team match, or a match to highlight one or both of the heels. A tag-team match involving Ivan Putski always had to be about Ivan Putski. He just wouldn’t have it any other way.

Ivan was a legitimate Polish strongman, and a very stubborn guy with intense national pride. In the ring, he wanted to be the dominant guy and wasn’t interested in sharing the spotlight with anyone else. There was no cooperation or storytelling in any match that involved him. When I tried to talk to him about that, he would kind of give me the “yah yah” as if he were listening, but then he would do what he wanted to do in the ring, and not do a lot of selling for the opposition, which did nothing to build drama. You can’t have drama without tension, and he provided no tension because he never wanted to appear vulnerable.

Of course, the same scenario played out with the rest of Putski’s matches, whether he was on the undercard or being used to main-event a small building on the house show circuit. If you were a heel in a match with Putski, you were either going to end up in a war with him over him taking too much of the match, or you would end up getting chewed up because he wouldn’t sell for you.

There was no doubt that Ivan was a reliably good draw in some of the towns though—and consequently, he was a good guy to have on a card, particularly in places where his Polish heritage was a draw. The office knew the towns where Putski drew well, and they deployed him there in main events or semi-final matches against heels that I had finished with and who were on their way out of the territory anyway—and fed those heels to Ivan.

Of course, the name of the game was not necessarily great wrestling, great storytelling, or unselfish sharing of the spotlight. The name of the game was putting people in seats. And in a lot of places, Ivan Putski could put people in the seats, so Ivan Putski remained an important player in the WWF both in this run, and when he returned as a slimmer version of himself in 1982.

On March 25, 1979, I traveled up to Toronto for my first WWF title vs. AWA title world championship unification match with AWA World Champion Nick Bockwinkel. Nick was the son of Warren Bockwinkel, who was a heck of a wrestler in his own right. When I was growing up, I once saw a match between Warren and Wilbur Snyder where the biggest offensive move in the match was a forearm smash—which tells you that Warren was all about storytelling through wrestling. Nick definitely learned his craft very well from his dad.

Frank Tunney, the promoter in Toronto, was a close friend of both Vince Sr. and Verne Gagne, and wanted to bring Bockwinkel and me together because he thought that the two of us could put on a great wrestling match. Of course, with Gagne successfully running the AWA and Vince Sr. successfully running the WWF, there was no chance of ever actually unifying the world titles by having one of us go over the other cleanly, but the fans didn’t know that—and these inter-federation unification matches were always historic and virtually guaranteed sellouts wherever they occurred. Even though the card in Toronto was totally stacked with talent that night, Frank Tunney gave Bockwinkel and me no time duration for our match. Given the historic nature of the match, his instructions to us were to simply “let the fans decide.”

The fact that we took the main event to the thirty-nine-minute mark on a card with that much talent tells you a lot about how the crowd was responding to what we were doing, and what a great worker Nick Bockwinkel was.

Nick had a great head for the game, a wonderful sense of ring psychology, and an uncanny ability to use his intelligence and cockiness to get under the people’s skin. He was a terrific representative for the AWA and was the key player in the success of the AWA for a long time. I didn’t know Nick very well outside the ring, and we only crossed paths a couple of times during our careers, but I had grown up watching him on television, and I had always wanted to work with him. He was a very intelligent, well-spoken, and cocky heel, and his in-ring skills were right up there with the very best in the business.

I always wished I had gotten the chance to do a unification match with Bockwinkel at the Garden. Given the chance to do a few interviews and a couple of television tapings, I think that match could have been as hot with the people as any series I had in New York.

The following night, Greg Valentine and I returned to the Garden for the return match after our Broadway. The rematch was billed as something of a specialty match in that it would have “no time limit”—meaning that Greg and I could wrestle all night if that is what it took to declare a winner. We would also play off of the leg “injury” that I had sustained at the end of the last match, with Greg immediately testing the stability of that leg, and me trying to keep him away from it. In the end, though, it did not make sense for this match to go to a specialty third match, because the strength of the Backlund-Valentine series was in the wrestling, not the brawling.

Consequently, I went over Greg by pinfall after about thirty minutes of excellent wrestling, putting an end to the Grand Wizard’s threat. Valentine did a wonderful job in that series with me both at the Garden and all around the territory, and quickly became one of my favorite opponents. Vince Sr. liked him too, and gave him a subsequent series with Chief Jay Strongbow where Greg “broke” Strongbow’s leg using the figure-four leglock and then, after Chief returned, battled him all over the territory in one of the most memorable feuds of the era.

After Valentine, we had a bit of a soft spot in the schedule while Vince Sr. was readying the next big angle—so I ended up wrestling a couple of one-off matches at the Garden. The first of those matches was against an aging veteran named Dick “The Bulldog” Brower. Brower was one of the hardest guys I ever had to work with in the ring, and probably the least favorite man I ever had to wrestle for the WWF title. Brower’s nickname was the “One Man Riot Squad”—and on this trip through the territory, he was paired with Captain Louis Albano—so the idea was to portray him as a crazy and completely unpredictable wild man who was capable of doing absolutely anything inside or outside of the ring.

The problem was that Brower was looking very tired, old, and out of shape at the time he came into the territory. He wasn’t the hardest-working guy in the ring to begin with, so many of his televised matches leading up to his title match with me at the Garden had been sloppy and unconvincing. Our title match at the Garden wasn’t drawing well, so the front office had to do a rescue job for Brower on television to manufacture some heat for him.

First, they ran an angle where he snuck up from behind me and waffled me with a folding chair while I was standing in front of the empty ring taping a promotional interview. That was the first time that had ever been done, so that accomplished the goal of getting him over a little bit better as a totally unpredictable madman. It also served to create a little bit of personal “animosity” between the two of us.

The second thing that the front office did was give Brower an unheard-of pinfall win over Ivan Putski on television—which served three different purposes. First, it gave Brower a marquee match on television that enabled him to better establish himself as a wild heel that was capable of beating anyone at any time. As I recall, Brower, knowing that he was on thin ice, showed up to play in that match, and displayed some of the skills and mayhem that had made him a big star in the ’60s and ’70s. He was all over the arena scattering the people, battering Putski with a chair, upending the doctor at ringside, lifting up the entire set of ring steps and breaking them apart, and chasing Putski around the ring with a broken board from those steps.

Second, by beating Putski by pinfall on television, it gave him instant credibility, since Ivan Putski never took a pinfall anywhere—even in the larger arenas on the undercards. Pinning Putski on television was a big deal. If he could pin Ivan Putski—Brower was capable of pinning anybody. Or so the story went.

Third, the angle forced Putski to be a team player by requiring him to put someone else who needed a push over on television, which was something Ivan did not ever want to do. He was very upset about being asked to do this—particularly for a guy like Brower, who wasn’t fond of foreigners, and wasn’t very popular with the boys. I’m sure the message from Vince Sr. to Ivan was intentional—a reminder of who was boss, and who was ultimately in control of all our characters, and all of our storylines. It was a reminder to Ivan to play nicely with others.

Brower was not an up-and-down, tell-a-story kind of opponent, so we were clearly going to be one and done at the Garden. There was only one story to tell with him: me trying to avoid getting killed or seriously injured by the crazy man, but still needing to get close enough to him for long enough to pin him and then get out of there as quickly as possible. My match with Brower fell into the same kind of booking scenario as my matches with George “The Animal” Steele—except that Steele was much more intelligent and a much nicer guy who actually cared a lot about telling a good story in the ring.

Brower and I played cat and mouse for a while until I got too close and Brower pounded away on me with punches and kicks and threw me out of the ring. He then used some items on the arena floor to further enrage the fans. When it looked like Brower had me in peril, I made a quick comeback, pinned him, and got the heck out of there before he injured me, either as part of the storyline, or in real life.

The match with Brower was one of my shortest and least favorite title matches at the Garden.

As a study in contrasts, my next opponent at the Garden was one of my favorites of all time, but at the time the card was announced, no one knew who it was going to be.

For the June 1979 Garden card, Howard Finkel announced that the winner of a twenty-man over the top rope battle royal would win a match with me for the WWF title later that evening. It was a pretty interesting concept—because in the minds of the fans, anyone was capable of winning the battle royal and getting the title match with me. Gorilla Monsoon and Ivan Putski were both in the match, so what if one of them won it? The WWF never really had babyface title matches, so that alone was cause for significant fan intrigue.

I didn’t like battle royals, and tried to avoid participating in them whenever possible. I got injured in the first one I ever took part in when I wrestled for Leroy McGuirk in Baton Rouge. That night, I hit the ropes the wrong way on the way out and slammed my hip hard into the apron of the ring on the way down. I felt that injury for weeks afterward. There are just too many ways to legitimately get hurt in a ring with sixteen or twenty guys in it. With everyone in there moving around, flying off the turnbuckles, coming off the ropes, or trying to execute moves, it is just too easy to get a wrist or an ankle stepped on, to inadvertently bang heads, or end up with all sorts of legitimate bumps and bruises from accidental contact with another wrestler that can dog you for days afterward.

Fortunately, in the WWF, the champions typically didn’t have to wrestle in battle royals because the promoters understood that there was too much risk. I also enjoyed the science of crowd psychology, responding to the fans and how they reacted to each move as you progressed through a match, and brought the crowd to a peak. None of that was available in a battle royal.

They way that battle royals were booked, you’d simply be told who the person was that was going out before you, and who was going to be throwing you out—and so all you really had to do was keep an eye on the guy going out before you, and then work something out with the guy slated to throw you out so you knew what move he was going to use to eliminate you from the match. Only the last three or four people in the battle royal needed to work out a spots to tease an outcome and figure out how they were going to get to the end.

I know the fans liked battle royals because of the novelty of seeing sixteen or twenty wrestlers all in the ring at the same time—but if you’ve ever watched one closely, you know that there really isn’t a whole lot going on in the match. There is really just a bunch of pushing and shoving, rest holds, headlocks, and front facelocks as the guys going out later in the match bided their time and waited for the guys ahead of them to get thrown out. Next time you watch a battle royal on YouTube, notice how quickly the eliminations happen once the first few people go out. That’s because every wrestler in there wanted to get out as soon as he could to avoid getting hurt.

Anyway—to my knowledge, this was the first-ever battle royal at the Garden to determine a world title challenger, and it was “won” by my old friend Khosrow Vaziri—best known as The Iron Sheik, but at that time, known as “The Great Hussein Arab.” Of course, this had been the intent all along. Khosrow and I had wrestled a test match somewhere up in Maine just before the Garden card, and a dark match at the television tapings, both of which had gone very well, so I was looking forward to getting in the ring with him on the larger stage.

Given the diplomatic tensions between the US and Iran at the time, Vince Sr. was nervous about promoting and advertising a world title match between me and the Sheik at the Garden, or in any of the other major urban arenas, for fear of riots. I know that Khosrow found himself a little bit hamstrung, as he could not play up the politics as much as he otherwise would have, because the real-life political situation between the United States and Iran was just too hot. At the time of the match, the United States, which had supported the Shah, had just evacuated most of its people from Iran, and even though the hostage crisis would not begin for a few months, relations between our two countries were rapidly worsening. It was all over the nightly news, so I think if Sheik had played out his support of the Ayatollah (which would have been especially ironic given that he had been at one point a real-life bodyguard for the Shah’s family), and used the act he would later employ in 1983, it might have put him at serious risk. So this was the creative way that Vince Sr. opted to give Khosrow the match he deserved at the Garden without advertising it in advance and risking a riot or danger to Khosrow’s well-being.

Given that I had just had a short, wild match with Brower the month before, the match with Khosrow was a refreshing change of pace. We had a terrific thirty-minute match that was almost entirely amateur chain wrestling. Sheik was also a suplex artist, so we highlighted many of his different versions in that match. There was very little kicking and punching—and I think the fans truly enjoyed the bout. In the end, I pinned him, and sent the decidedly partisan New York City crowd home happy and without a riot.

Our paths would memorably cross again at the end of my reign in 1983. But this match with Khosrow was one of the best wrestling matches I had as the WWF champion, right up there with my matches with Harley, Valentine, Pat Patterson, and Don Muraco. I wish we could have had a two-or three-match series at the Garden, as there was certainly a lot that we could have done to entertain the fans. Had the political situation between our two countries been a little less “hot” at the time, our first match could certainly have been a Broadway. Khos was definitely one of those guys who was more than capable of going an hour and telling a compelling story.

Around this time, there were also a couple of memorable mishaps out on the house show circuit. The first one occurred in Poughkeepsie, New York. Several of the boys were late getting to the building because they were coming from a venue some distance away and had become snarled in traffic. There were enough people involved that we really couldn’t even start the card, so I went out into the ring, and invited a few of the kids from the crowd into the ring, lined them up, and put on a little wrestling clinic right there in the ring in front of the fans. I had the kids wrestle each other, and I had them wrestle me, and I explained the moves and escapes to the crowd on the microphone, and the people got into it and we burned an hour that way until the rest of the boys could get to the building. The people never even knew that the wrestlers were late.

Another night, we were scheduled to wrestle in a high school in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and there was some sort of miscommunication between the office and the ring crew, so the ring never showed up. So there we were in the middle of this high school gym with 1,000 or 1,500 people in the building and no ring.

Fortunately, the high school wrestling coach was around that night, and gave us access to some wrestling mats, so we just laid the mats out on the gym floor as they would have been in an amateur meet, and we had the pro matches right there on the gym floor on the amateur mats. I remember I was scheduled to defend the WWF title that night against Khosrow, so he and I put on a mat wrestling clinic. It was fortunate that I was scheduled to wrestle Khosrow and not someone like Brower, who would have been nearly impossible to engage in a mat wrestling match like that. We obviously couldn’t do any real high spots, but the show went on, and we found a way to entertain the people!

Many people have asked me over the years why during the early days of my title reign, I didn’t appear very often in Boston. First, the promoter for the Boston Garden was Abe Ford—and Ford was a Bruno guy. Boston was also a town with a very strong blue-collar Italian heritage, and that was Bruno’s sweet spot in terms of his drawing power. Given that, I don’t think that Ford was very happy about Vince selecting me—a collegiate-looking Midwesterner—to be the next champion, and I don’t think Ford was convinced that I could draw in Boston.

Ford had done business with Bruno for a long time, and had gotten comfortable with having Bruno at the top of the card, and for Abe at least, as long as Bruno was still around, he wanted Bruno headlining Boston. That also meant that Bruno was asking for main-event money, and Ford probably wouldn’t have wanted (or needed) to pay both of our matches main-event money. That is why if you look at a lot of the earlier Boston cards, I was used sparingly—and Bruno was often inserted into the main-event matches with the heels that I was wrestling against elsewhere in the territory.

The other reason is that there were several cities other than Boston that wanted Saturday night bookings for their big buildings, including Philadelphia (Spectrum), Baltimore (Civic Center), Landover (Capitol Centre), Uniondale (Nassau County Coliseum), and Springfield (Civic Center). So Vince was willing to allow Ford to use Bruno at the top of his cards in Boston because it freed me up to be used in whatever other Saturday-night card was being booked opposite Boston, or to book me in Japan or Toronto or other NWA territories during that week.

I spent the rest of the first half of 1979 traveling the larger buildings of the WWF territory, primarily finishing up different series with Valentine, Ladd, and Brower depending on what the local promoters were doing. All this was to prepare for the feud that would consume the rest of 1979—the WWF’s first-ever title versus title tilt between me and the soon-to-be North American Champion (and then Intercontinental Heavyweight Champion) Pat Patterson.

A new young babyface named Ted DiBiase had come into the WWF territory at the beginning of 1979. Ted had played football at West Texas State University, but had sustained an injury his senior year that effectively ended his football career. He had grown up in wrestling was trained by his adoptive father, the legendary Iron Mike DiBiase, and by Terry and Dory Funk and Dick Murdoch. DiBiase had a lot of the same training that I had, and he had become a great young babyface. After leaving Amarillo, Ted spent several years in the Mid-South territory wrestling for Bill Watts, and also briefly held the Missouri State Championship for Sam Muchnick before getting the call from Vince Sr.

When Ted came into the territory in 1979, he was brought in as the “North American Heavyweight Champion”—a title that Vince Sr. created to give DiBiase some immediate credibility, and to create some additional interest in the WWF undercards by giving the boys a secondary belt to fight over. DiBiase defended the belt in the territory for several months until he faced a new brash-talking, cocky platinum blonde heel named Pat Patterson on television in June 1979. Patterson, who was managed by the Grand Wizard, knocked DiBiase out cold with a pair of brass knuckles he had hidden in his trunks and pinned DiBiase to win the belt in front of a shocked crowd in Allentown. In a post-match interview, Patterson and the Wizard went on television and promised the world that I would be next.

On July 2, 1979, the Garden saw its first-ever match between two reigning singles champions, as I faced the challenge of the new North American Champion Patterson. Pat was truly as good as it could get in the ring—he was very smooth, very gentle, and exceptional at developing a story in the ring. By the time he arrived in the WWF, Pat had over twenty years of experience in professional wrestling, mostly in the San Francisco area, where he had wrestled for promoter Roy Shire and formed one of the most famous heel tag teams in wrestling history with Ray “The Crippler” Stevens, and also in the AWA for Verne Gagne.

Pat could get the crowd riled up as quickly and as well as anyone I ever wrestled. He just had a knack for knowing exactly what to do at exactly the right time to infuriate the people, and his gimmick of hiding a pair of brass knuckles in his tights had gotten over like crazy with the WWF crowds. For our first match at the Garden, Vince Sr. brought us together and told us that we’d be coming back the following month—because Pat had become a white-hot heel after waffling DiBiase with the brass knuckles on television, and the fans had come out in force to see the first title-versus-title showdown at the Garden. So Vince Sr. asked for me to get color in this match in to give Pat the victory with a blood stoppage.

Stay Down, Bob!

Vince Sr. called me. I had been working for Verne Gagne in Minneapolis teaming with Ray Stevens when Mike LeBell, the promoter in Los Angeles, called me and told me that Vince Sr. really wanted me in New York, but he didn’t want to create any heat with Verne. So I waited about a month and then I called Vince and asked him to give me a date—and that’s how I ended up in New York.

When I first met Vince Sr., I told him how much I appreciated the opportunity, and that I hoped I would make him happy and he said, “Pat, all I want you to do is help Bob Backlund.” Bob had been a terrific amateur wrestler and Vince wanted to make him a star—but Bob hadn’t necessarily had the right guys to work with yet. He worked with some of these guys that were big monsters—but they couldn’t always move like you’d want them to, so sometimes, these matches were not as exciting as they might have been. A lot of those guys looked really good—so that the fans would say, “Oh, my God, Bob Backlund is never going to be able to beat this guy,” and then he’d go into the ring and beat them, but up to that point, I don’t think he had really had the chance to work at the Garden with an old pro who could really move.

So Vince put me with the Wizard, told me I was going to work with Backlund, and started to build me up toward a match with Backlund at the Garden. So I had to think of something to get heat, you know, and I came up with the idea of brass knuckles. It started when I became the North American Champion by knocking out Ted DiBiase on television with a pair of brass knuckles that I pulled out of my trunks. Once I did that, now I had a belt, and it was the first time that Bob Backlund would be wrestling another champion at the Garden. On television, I was destroying all of my opponents, so they were building it up that Bob Backlund was going to have to wrestle another champion. And the people hated me, and the brass knuckles were now part of my heat, so that was the story. I wanted it to be in the minds of the fans that when I got in the ring with Bob Backlund, that was something for the fans to be worried about—so that every time I’d go to my tights, the fans would go crazy because they thought I was going for something.

In the early days, you know, Bob was still a little green, and still had some of that amateur in him, so when you’d start beating the shit out of him, he didn’t sell as long or as much as he could have. He’d want to pop right up and start making a comeback—but you can’t make a comeback without heat, you know? So I’d say to him, “Stay down, Bob!” I used to yell at him in the ring and say, “Don’t move! Stay down!” but after every match we’d have, he’d come into the locker room and hug me and say, “Thank you, Pat. That was good, wasn’t it?” And I would say, “Yeah, that was good!”

—Pat Patterson

Pat and I came back in the Garden on July 30, 1979. Pat’s experience had made him very creative in putting together matches and coming up with angles and finishes. I didn’t know it at the time, but he was the one who came up with the idea for the next finish at the Garden. Pat had more than enough ability to work for heat, but the brass knuckles gimmick had gotten over so well with the people, that they just let him run with it. That second match at the Garden was unquestionably one of the best of my career. Pat and I built that match so masterfully and worked it for almost thirty minutes that night that when the finish came, it was one of the most memorable endings Madison Square Garden had ever seen.

The Double Kayo

Vince Sr. would not allow the heel managers to stay at ringside at the Garden. As soon as the bell rang, the manager had to be escorted back to the dressing rooms. Well that night, I begged him to leave the Wizard at ringside, and to just trust me, and that it would all work out beautifully. Well to his credit, the old man agreed—and at the right moment at the end of the match, when we had the crowd just right, the Wizard stood up and the referee turned around and was distracted just long enough for me to go into my tights and boom!—I hit Bob with the brass knuckles and down he went. Well when Bob went down like that, Skaaland jumped up on the apron, and I took a swing at him and missed and he hit me in the head with the championship belt. Pow! and now I’m down. And now Backlund and I are both laying there … and the referee starts to count. One … two … and Bob did not move one finger. He was laying there dead, just like I told him to be. Six … seven … and the building was shaking, I swear it was so loud in there I thought the roof was going to come off the place. Eight … nine … and I was almost to a sitting position, and then I fell back down. Ten. And nobody won. It was magnificent. My God, the Garden, that building was going insane. I’m telling you—that’s the fun you can have when you really get the people involved. And boy, did we have them that night.

I remember when we came backstage the old man hugged me and he just looked at me and said, “Ho-ly shit!” And the Garden had gotten so loud that everyone else was watching the match in the back, so that when we came through the curtain, they were all congratulating us on what a great match it was. Well when that happened, you knew you had done something—and we did. I’ll never forget that. I’d love to see that match again!

—Pat Patterson

By the time our third match rolled around on August 27, 1979, Patterson was now the new “Intercontinental Heavyweight Champion.” The office didn’t think that the name “North American Champion” had quite the pizzazz that they were looking for, so they went on television on August 22, 1979, with a storyline that Patterson had just returned from a trip to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where he had won a tournament and become the South American Heavyweight Champion, and the WWF had now unified the North American and South American Heavyweight Championships into a new “Intercontinental” Heavyweight Championship. Of course, all of this was just part of the storyline—but it added some additional interest in Pat’s continuing title run at the Garden. As the story went, he was on an incredible roll. He had beaten DiBiase for the North American title, “won” the tournament in Rio to become the Intercontinental Heavyweight Champion, and now, once again, was coming after my WWF World Heavyweight Championship.

When Vince Sr. brought Patterson and me together in the Garden bathroom before the match, it was the first time since I won the title that anything Vince Sr. said in one of those pre-match meetings actually surprised me. We were going to have a third consecutive match without a decisive victor. Pat was going to hit me with the knuckles again, and this time, I was going to fall out of the ring and get counted out—which would set up a no-holds barred encounter in a steel cage the following month. In that match, there would be no referee and no rules, and Patterson could legally use the brass knuckles if he wanted to, and there would have to be a winner.

A New Backlund

Vince was the promoter. Yes, he had Monsoon and Phil Zacko back then, but Vince would ultimately make the decisions. When you are the promoter, you have a feeling for it, and you can do whatever you want. It’s your choice of what you want to do. I never thought that I would have four matches in a row with Backlund at the Garden. But it was working. Just imagine that you are Vince Sr., and you are the guy responsible to create the bookings and the kind of fan interest that will put 20,000 asses in the seats at the Garden every month. He had very good relationships with the promoters all over the country, and had access to a lot of talent. But you know there were territories, and then there were territories. Minneapolis was a territory, San Francisco was a territory, Texas was a territory, but the Big Apple—that was where the money was. The northeast was THE territory. It was a big responsibility, and you had to draw money big time, and he did.

I think the thing that really helped me was that right from the first match that I had with Backlund—we saw a whole new Bob Backlund. Our matches were completely different from what had come before. I was lucky. Before me, he had wrestled all of these big guys who really couldn’t move all that well. Now I’m in the main event with Bob at the Garden, and I said to him, we’re going to have some real fucking action! And we took bumps and had high spots all over the place. So the old man looks at the first match and says, yeah, that was pretty good, and I have to draw a house next month, so I think I’ll work a return match with Bob and Pat. And then the return match with the double knockout works and almost takes the building down, and the old man says to himself, “Hey, I’d like to have one more match with no winner, can we do that?” And we said, “hell yeah, we can do that!”

Look, the truth is, if you are wrestling with the champion and you build up a story and the story that you built doesn’t sell tickets—forget it, you’re not going to be in the main event next month no matter what they might have had planned. You’re going to be one and done. That happened sometimes. But this match was selling tickets, and so the old man wanted to stretch it one more time. This time, the referee was going to get knocked down, and I was going to hit Backlund with the brass knuckles, and he was going to fall out of the ring and get counted out.

—Pat Patterson

When we took to the ring that night at the Garden, the fans heard Patterson introduced as the new Intercontinental Champion. And that definitely gave the match some added importance in the minds of the fans. And so there we were, for a third month in a row, slugging it out, and for a third month in a row, Patterson pulled out the brass knuckles and connected with them, and left me laying outside the ring to get counted out. This outcome set the blowoff up perfectly—as Pat would go on television for most of the next month telling the fans that inside the cage, he could knock me out with the brass knuckles and it would be legal and then all he’d have to do is walk out the door, and he’d be crowned the new world champion.

Pat Patterson was the only man in the nearly six years that I held the WWF World Championship to get four consecutive world title match main events with me at Madison Square Garden. That speaks volumes about the kind of business we were doing. And that cage match on September 24, 1979, at the Garden, featuring the federation’s two champions going at it for a fourth straight month with no holds barred and no referee brought in so many fans they had to turn people away in droves. There wouldn’t have been a building in New York large enough to hold all of the people who wanted to see that match.

Pat and I battled in the cage at Madison Square Garden for nearly twenty minutes in what was certainly one of the two or three best cage matches I had in my career. We both got color, teased finishes all over the place, and “battled to the death.” The end came when we were both perched at the top of the cage pounding away on each other when I connected with a wild haymaker knocking Pat down, where he got caught up in the corner. I fell to the canvas and crawled toward the door to get position on Patterson, and then kicked him off of me repeatedly until I fell out the door backwards onto the arena floor.

I’m No Frank Sinatra

You should have seen Bob in that cage match. He was so afraid he was going to be double-crossed. He was trained to keep an eye on that, because you never know. It only takes one move, one accident, one thing that your opponent does that he’s not supposed to do, and he’s the champion. Some guys might have the balls to do that, you know, and then try and explain it after the fact by saying I’m sorry, I slipped or I fell down, and I’m sorry, but then you have a new champ.

So I told Bob before the cage match began—when I go for the door, or I go for the top, I’m going to dive for it and it’s going to be like a shoot Bob—so you better grab my fucking leg, or I’m going over. And Bob was like damn, Pat, are you crazy? And I said no that’s what I’m going to do to make the match. But I had a blast with him—because when I’d hit him, he’d go down, but he wouldn’t stay down, because while he was down I’d be jumping up over the top trying to get out and he had to pop up and chase me to keep me from going out. We were up on the ropes and I was trying to get over the top and I’d hit him and told him to go down, and he wouldn’t fucking go down, and I’d be like, “Go down.” So he went down, and as soon as he did, I went right over the fucking cage as quickly as I could and he popped up there and snatched me. Or another time, the door was open, and I was like, “Let go of my leg, let go of my leg,” and as soon as he did, I would dive out the door and he’d catch me at the very last second, oh, it was awesome. I was having such a blast—he was like one of the fans—I think he thought I was really going to go out!

Everybody knew that Vince wanted Backlund to be a star. And every once in a while, the word would come back—you know, he’s still a little green, but that didn’t matter. It takes time to develop that. And that was part of the effort of everyone else who was there—that was the job to be done. Bob had no ego—he was wide open, listened, and I think he had some of the best matches of his career with me, without a doubt. He had some big matches, but exciting matches with good wrestling, where you really felt it … ours were hard to beat.

Bob was always a bit of a loner—he traveled by himself and he didn’t mix with the boys that much. I think I saw him in the bar once or twice while I was there having a couple of drinks with the boys. When he did, he would come in, and buy a few rounds for the boys, and then he’d be gone. And I couldn’t believe how much this guy was training—he would sit in the hotel rooms out on the road during the week and crank the heat on and work out in his room until he was drenched with sweat. He became an animal—he just loved to train and push himself. But you know, I kept thinking to myself, “This guy is missing the boat. He should be relaxing a little bit more and mixing with the boys.” But he was doing what he liked …

Arnold Skaaland and Backlund would have a few drinks here and there also. Skaaland told me one time that he was convinced that the kid would make it. Arnold always protected Backlund—he was Vince Sr.’s right hand man, and he always made sure that Bob was taken care of and was kept happy. If you think about it, the WWF was the only place you’d ever see a babyface have a manager. And I think Bruno and Bob were the only two babyfaces I can ever think of that had a manager. But again, it worked out for them, because Arnold kept Bob happy—and managing Bob gave Skaaland a job and a steady paycheck long after his wrestling career was over. Vince Sr. was a good man—he was liked by everybody, and he took care of a lot of people.

In watching Bob, as I did over the years, he was really trying hard to get the people to like him. He was friendly and happy and looked like an athlete—but I asked him one time, because I had heard that when he arrived at the Garden, he’d often go through the front door. Typically, when we go into the Garden, we’d go through the back door and go up the elevator but Bob was going through the front door and would shake hands with all the fans. I think Bob enjoyed that so much, because he knew that the people really liked him, and I think that he wanted to thank them personally and wanted to be with them. But when you are going to a big match, my view is you should let them see you first when you are going to the ring. So I said to him one time, Bob I can’t believe you’re doing that. And he said to me, “Pat, they’re my fans.” I said Bob, if I’m waiting in line in Las Vegas for half an hour to go see Frank Sinatra, and then all of a sudden Frank Sinatra walks by all of us and shakes our hands in the line—well then I’ve already seen him before he ever gets onstage. And you know, you lose the mystique. But when I told him that, he just looked at me and said, “You know, Pat, I’m no Frank Sinatra.”

—Pat Patterson

I spent most of the rest of 1979 wrestling Patterson to capacity crowds around the horn, where we did various iterations of the double knockout finish that had so wowed the crowd at the Garden, and eventually, blowoff matches that had me going over Pat by pinfall. But there were a couple of other notable matches that I had during this time that are also worthy of mention.

On July 15, 1979, I went back up to Toronto for Frank Tunney and faced the NWA’s United States Heavyweight Champion, “Nature Boy” Ric Flair, at the Maple Leaf Garden. This was my first time getting into the ring with Ric, with whom I would have an even more memorable night at the Omni later in my career. I enjoyed wrestling Ric. He was very skilled, worked hard in the ring, was flamboyant, and really knew how to work the people. Ric and I had a great, pretty long matchup there that night that really seemed to capture the people. Toronto was also getting to be a good town for me, as the people had seen me often enough to really be in my corner.

Because Ric was the US Champion and I was the WWF World Champion, even though the match that night was only for my belt, there was no way that the NWA promoters would allow Flair to be pinned by the WWF’s world champion. Because of that, there was only one way to go, and that was with some kind of an inconclusive ending, like a draw, or a disqualification or a countout. Tunney opted for a countout.

On August 25, 1979, I traveled to Cobo Hall in Detroit to defend the WWF title against the Sheik, who was the wrestler-promoter for the territory. The Sheik, of course, was, by this point, legendary for creating mayhem wherever he went. He had actually been legitimately banned in several cities because he was so convincing that he had sparked riots in the crowds. Anyway, the Sheik (Eddie Farhat) called Vince Sr. and asked me to come up there and do a match with him.

When you wrestled the Sheik, you knew what he was going to call for—the booking plan was always the same. He was going to try to murder you, and as the babyface, you were just in there trying to survive, get a three count on him, and get out of there with your life. The Sheik’s big gimmick was “conjuring up” and then throwing a “fireball” into the face of his opponents behind the referee’s back—and so we played off that. When he tried to do it to me, I ducked it, and then we battled outside the ring to a countout ending where I snuck back into the ring to beat the referee’s count.

These “babyface-in-peril” bookings weren’t my favorites, because they didn’t really offer me the opportunity to build fan interest during the course of the match through actual wrestling. Like my matches with George “The Animal” Steele, Abdullah the Butcher, or Bulldog Brower, these matches were just mayhem from the opening bell, with me getting beat up and hanging on, waiting for an opportunity to sneak in a quick finish and get out of there without getting “hurt.” But I know that the people loved the variety of seeing a match like this once in a while, so that’s why we sprinkled a few of them in from time to time to mix things up.

My last real series of 1979 was against “Cowboy” Bob Duncam. To get things started, we ran a little angle on television where he had been running roughshod over the guys he was wrestling on television week after week—refusing to pin them, and toying with them and trying to “injure” them. So during one of those matches, after I ran out there and tried to “save” one of the young guys he was beating up, and he attacked me and Arnold, and we had instant heat.

Bobby had played professional football and worked very, very hard in his matches. He was a rough-looking and very convincing heel, but he had only one speed—sixth gear—so it was practically impossible to get him to pace himself out there. When you worked a match with Duncam, he would go all out for twelve to fifteen minutes and then blow up. You’d often see Bobby in the dressing room after his matches lying flat on his back on the floor in the dressing room trying to get air.

At the time we had our series, Bobby’s wife was very sick with cancer and she was getting treatment in Boston at Massachusetts General Hospital. Bobby cared very deeply about her and no matter where he was wrestling, he would drive back after the matches to sit by her bedside. Obviously, that put a lot of stress on him, forced him to do a lot of night driving and to eat a lot of fast food, so he got pretty heavy. But what’s not to love about a man who loves his wife like that?

Duncam worked very hard with me, and knowing his personal circumstances made me want to work extra hard with him and for him. Bobby also remembered the days back in the AWA when I was putting him over, so he was anxious to be able to have some good matches and return the favor for me.

On November 19, 1979, we met at the Garden and, premised on what the fans had just seen on television, we had a wild brawl that ended in a double blood stoppage. I attacked Duncam right away and we just went after each other to play off of the TV angle. Bobby was at his limit at eighteen minutes. You couldn’t take him much deeper into a match than that and have things continue to look good. But Duncam would give you an absolutely awesome 100 percent work rate for every one of those eighteen minutes, so we just played off of that and gave the people at the Garden a great pull-apart brawl that had the building really rocking.

On November 4, 1979, I went back to Toronto where I was supposed to be wrestling Pat Patterson, but Pat had gone over to Japan to drop the no-longer-existing North American title to Seiji Sakaguchi as a favor to Inoki, so Frank Tunney brought in Baron von Raschke from the AWA to sub for Patterson. Von Raschke and I had also wrestled previously when I was in the AWA, and we worked that match around his “notorious” iron claw submission hold, which was an easy gimmick to play up for the fans.

Von Raschke was fun. He was another wrestler who was playing up the German Nazi gimmick, but in reality, von Raschke had been a great amateur wrestler at Nebraska. He got the crowd lathered up, and we battled to a double countout. The match surprised Tunney in that it drew enough heat that Tunney forgot all about Patterson and brought von Raschke back the next month in a no-disqualification match where I beat him cleanly with the atomic drop.