Backlund

“Infect others with your enthusiasm, and teamwork will be the inevitable result.”

As we turned the calendar to 1982, I was still battling Greg Valentine around the territory in return matches in many of the major cities—but the storyline on television was the arrival of “The East-West Connection,” Adrian Adonis and Jesse “The Body” Ventura from Verne Gagne’s AWA. Neither Adonis nor Ventura had ever appeared in WWF rings before, and both were colorful heels who were larger than life in their own way. Adonis, who hailed from New York City (the “East” half of the tandem), was a leather-clad, fast-talking hipster and the master of “Goodnight Irene”—a deadly sleeperhold that had allegedly been banned in many cities because it would render Adonis’ opponents unconscious. Ventura, on the other hand, was a tall, deeply tanned muscle man from San Diego (the “West” half of the team), who wore tassels in his bleached blonde hair and dangling earrings, and came to the ring clad in colorful robes. He was the master of the “Body Breaker”—an over-the-shoulder backbreaker that brought a quick submission from everyone caught in its clutches. Both were managed by “The Hollywood Fashion Plate,” Classy Freddie Blassie.

Although the “East-West Connection” had been a very successful tag-team combination in the AWA, as the storyline went, Blassie had decided to break them up to run them against me in succession. That way, Blassie explained on television, one could soften me up for the other, and on any given night somewhere in the territory, one of the two would be ready to claim the WWF title for Blassie’s army. These battles began at the All-Star wrestling TV taping in Hamburg at the very beginning of 1982, at which Pedro Morales and I wrestled the dark match against Adonis and Ventura just to give the four of us a chance to get our timing down with each other. Pedro was going to be defending the Intercontinental Championship belt against both Adonis and Ventura, and given that none of us had spent much, if any, time in the ring with each other, the four of us wrestled to a pretty entertaining countout in Hamburg to give each of us a chance to get some sequences down.

Around the territory at the beginning of 1982, Adonis and Ventura got staggered title matches, with Ventura getting the first shot in places like the Meadowlands, Baltimore, and Boston, while Adonis got the first crack in places like New York City, Hartford, and Landover. All the while, Blassie explained his strategic brilliance on the televised interviews that were being “bicycled” all over the territory, and the tandem of Adonis and Ventura drew great business with me nearly everywhere we went.

Adonis got the first shot at the Garden on January 18, 1982. Although Adrian and I had not spent any time in the ring together before, something just clicked with the two of us. Adrian was a very skilled worker who could get up and down really well back then. He was flexible and acrobatic, with a good knowledge of chain wrestling, and he was a bump machine. He was also a nice contrast to the parade of monsters I had faced for much of 1981, and consequently, he was a good opponent for me stylistically. Our work flowed well, and we were able to have some nice long matches that kept the fans on the edges of their seats.

Adonis was deceiving and had a great repertoire of moves. He was strong and very quick, and kept a good pace in the ring. Although he had a little extra weight on him, it did not slow him down. The fans had not yet seen a heel challenger to my title employ the sleeperhold as a finisher, so that was another “first” that helped Adonis gain some real traction as a challenger.

Vince Sr. knew right away that he had something in Adonis, and when he brought us together for our pre-match discussion, he had a sold out house waiting for the match. Accordingly, Vince Sr. called for a blood stoppage—and asked me to put over the sleeper as convincingly as possible to sell the possibility that Adonis could take the title in the rematch.

Our first match at the Garden went over thirty minutes, which means the match was paced pretty well, and that the people hadn’t yet reached their energy climax by the twenty- or twenty-five-minute mark, where most of my matches usually ended. It took us thirty minutes to get to the blood stoppage—but we were listening to the people, not watching the clock. The fans were riveted by the back-and-forth nature of that match, so we decided to just let them tell us when it was time to bring it home. Adonis had not appeared in the Garden before, but he was being hyped pretty strongly on television—so we also wanted to take the time to develop his character a little more in the match to make his challenge for the belt look strong and convincing.

Unfortunately, the consequence of that match running longer than expected that night was that Putski and Killer Khan ran out of time in their final bout of the evening. Sometimes, the card would run long, either because guys weren’t staying close enough to the time allotted to their matches, because my match or one of the other main-event caliber matches would run longer than expected, or because guys were taking too long to down to the ring or back to the dressing rooms. When that happened, the guys at the end of the card would get pinched for time. Sometimes, when that happened, the final match would go to the curfew time limit and the “referee’s decision” was used to get the booked finish. That’s what happened with Putski and Khan that night, with Putski getting awarded the victory over the departing Khan. On other nights, when they knew they were running way behind and had no chance of finishing the card the way they intended to, the 11 p.m. curfew was lifted. When that happened, it would end up costing the WWE a lot of money in mandatory overtime for the Garden employees, so lifting the curfew was a rare occurrence, and usually a pretty good indication that something in the card had not gone off as expected.

People often ask why one of the preliminary matches wasn’t dropped instead, or on nights when we had a stacked card, why those preliminary matches were still allowed to run twelve to fifteen minutes, or even to a twenty-minute time limit. The answer goes back to my earlier discussion about building the fans’ interest in a card. To build fans’ interest, you want to start slow, and draw them into the action. That’s why the curtain-jerker is usually a slow, methodical, mat-based match with only one or two high spots. You’re giving the fans a chance to settle in and get oriented. Likewise, a preliminary match is sometimes dropped in somewhere in the middle of the card—usually right after a title match, or a big grudge match—as a chance for the fans to catch their breath, and a chance for the promoter to build them up again toward the next high spot in the card. None of this was accidental. These matches were all organized with a particular purpose in mind—so you couldn’t just “cut” something in the middle of a card without impacting the flow of the rest of the card by doing it.

Between my matches with Adonis at the Garden, I made another trip out to Hawaii to again try to help out Peter Maivia. Peter had bought the promotion in Hawaii in 1980 where he and his wife Lia had retired after he finished wrestling in the WWF, but doing so had cost Peter all the money he had saved up from his years in wrestling. The promotion out there was a member of the NWA, but given its remoteness, it was also one of the smallest territories in the Alliance, and it was faltering economically. Knowing that, many of us, including Vince Sr. and Don Muraco and I, wanted to help Peter out.

One of the main problems was that the promotion was having a hard time getting a consistent time slot—the lifeblood of a wrestling promotion—on television in Hawaii. The one-hour weekly television program was essentially a one-hour-long advertisement to support the promotion, draw fan interest in the wrestlers and matches, and alert the fans to when and where the live house shows would be occurring. Without that kind of consistent and reliable exposure on television, it was very, very difficult for any promotion to draw well.

Peter’s business had also been beat up by a lack of booking creativity that had forced repetitive angles on the fans, which led to giving the fans increasingly higher high spots to “shock” the fans into renewed interest. That just made it harder for them to come back, because it is the psychology of the storytelling, not the high spots, that keeps the fans coming back. King Curtis Iaukea had returned to Hawaii from Australia, and he was doing things in the ring night after night that were focused less on ring psychology and more on shock and mayhem. That popped the houses for a little while, but mayhem is unsustainable in the long run and eventually just made it tough to get the fans to come back when the mayhem was missing.

In an effort to help Peter, Vince Sr. sent me out there to defend the WWF title in a two-match series against Don Muraco. The first night, we wrestled at the Honolulu International Center arena—which held about 8,000 people. Because Don and I had done so many Broadways together while we were both champions, we wanted to do one more for Peter—so that’s what we did. That was our eighth and final Broadway together in the ring. Unfortunately, given Peter’s problems getting exposure on television, even with the WWF title defense at the top of the bill and Muraco and me in the main event, we didn’t draw a big crowd at all. The Blaisdell Arena, where we wrestled on the first night was maybe half full. It was really shocking to me to only see 4,000 or 5,000 people in that arena given how well Muraco and I had drawn in the large East Coast of the WWF, and how well the cards had drawn in my previous matches in Honolulu when I would stop over there on my way back from Japan. This simply underscores how critical consistent television exposure is to the survival of a wrestling promotion. Vince McMahon Jr. knew that too, which was why buying up the television rights of the small regional promotions around the country was the critical component of the WWF’s national expansion in 1983 and 1984.

The next night Muraco and I wrestled in Hilo. That night, I went over Muraco cleanly to defend the WWF title, but we again drew only a lackluster house. After seeing that two nights in a row, it was clear to us that Peter was not going to make it. Peter was a much beloved guy in the wrestling business and always treated the boys very well on our Hawaiian stopovers on the way back from Japan. Let’s face it, who wouldn’t want to be booked to wrestle in Hawaii? Access to talent wasn’t his problem—the problem was in the promotion. Peter needed money to get reliable and consistent television. Without it, his promotion was dead in the water.

Unfortunately, Peter never got the chance to use his creativity and incredible connections in the profession to turn things around. It was around this time that Peter finally sought medical attention after years of ignoring the pain and discomfort, passing it off as simply the byproduct of taking nightly bumps in the ring. The doctor told Peter that cancer had spread throughout his body and he died shortly thereafter, in June 1982. My trip to Hawaii in February was the last time I would ever Peter.

When I got back from Hawaii, Adonis was waiting for our return encounter at the Garden on February 15, 1982. I would have liked to do three matches with Adrian given how well our first match had gone, but we had a backup of heel challengers forming, so Vince Sr. scheduled this second match to be a Texas Death Match with Ivan Putski as the guest referee. We drew a bigger crowd than in our previous encounter—selling out the Garden. Once again, we played off of Adrian’s Goodnight Irene finisher—the killer sleeperhold. We had been playing around with a great possible finish where he got the hold on me, nearly put me out, and then in a final furious comeback and effort to break the hold, I would run Adrian into the turnbuckles backward and then forward, forcing him to break the hold, and then sneak behind him and roll him up backward and bridge for the pin.

It was a high-risk finish that required a lot of agility on both of our parts, and a lot of things had to go exactly right for it to work. Adrian was very flexible and a great worker, so after running it successfully a couple of times in smaller towns, we decided to use it at the Garden. This time crowd was into our battle from the outset, and it didn’t take very long to work the crowd into a frenzy—so at just after the fifteen-minute mark, Adrian captured me in Goodnight Irene. I slowly slumped to the canvas and Putski held my arm out, and I let it fall limply to the canvas.

I could see the fans gasping and the ringsiders jumping up and down trying to urge me on. Putski held my arm out again, and I again let it fall limply to the canvas.

The energy in the building went up another level. Putski again reached for my arm, but this time, with the building rocking, I started to shake and quiver and tense my arms and rally to my feet. The roar of the crowd was deafening as I backed Adrian up and slammed him into the turnbuckle.

The crowd continued to scream as I ran him back into the turnbuckle a second time, faster and harder. Adrian sold the move with a yell and an obvious grimace of pain, but still he held on.

I moved my arms to bring the fans one level higher, and then this time, ran Adrian forward, slamming his face into the buckle. He released the hold, and before anyone could see what had happened, I had slipped around him and caught him in the rolling reverse. I could feel his body relax to permit me to complete the roll and then bridge out onto my arms and my head. We had it positioned perfectly, and Putski was ready.

The crowd exploded—the bell rang, and frankly, in my opinion, we had one of the best finishes in a title match that I had ever done with a challenger. It took the fans from a frenzy of despair and concern, to the edge of their seats, and then to jubilation all in about a span of twenty seconds. That’s the kind of energy and emotion that the best professional wrestling can produce—and we did it without chairs, or tables, or fire, or foreign objects. This finish was simply about wrestling—about holds and counterholds, and knowing when to seize the moment when the crowd was at its peak to take them home.

We liked this finish so much that we repeated it in nearly every arena around the territory that got a Backlund-Adonis title match—and it had the same effect just about everywhere we tried it. Kudos to Adrian for a tremendous series. For those who only saw him in the cartoon years, you really missed something.

At the March TVs in Allentown and Hamburg, the new crop of summer heels, “Superfly” Jimmy Snuka, “Cowboy” Bob Orton, and “Blackjack” Mulligan arrived for their first television matches, which would be broadcast over the next several weeks. This was also the taping where the great new babyface tag team known as the Carolina Connection of Rick McGraw and Steve Travis was born. Rick and Steve were a good combination, and were a big hit with the ladies. They would go on to feud with the tag-team champions, Mr. Fuji and Mr. Saito around the territory in the summer of 1982, and the crowds really responded to those matches. I think they would have been great for a babyface run with the tag-team belts.

I knew Orton from Florida, where Steve Keirn and I had worked with him and his father. Orton was very good in the ring, and I was excited about his run, and about getting to work some interesting technical matches with him as a nice change of pace. Mulligan was the perfect combination of giant and cowboy heel—and, like most of the best characters, it wasn’t really a gimmick for him. What you saw on television was the real person. Jack was a legitimate tough guy who knew and loved the wrestling business, and was interested in making the best of every match.

Jack was also a really big guy, I think he was six-foot-five or so and about 350 pounds, had a great sneer, an ominous handlebar mustache, a big black hat, and a mysterious black rubber glove on his hand that he would use to administer his “brain claw” finisher—another hold that the New York fans had not yet seen during my tenure as champion. He talked well, and I think he would have presented a really good, powerful, and interesting challenge to the belt. But as I would find out later, as he had with Hogan, Vince Sr. was focused on preparing Jack for a headlining run with Andre, and that was a great thing too—because whenever Andre had someone more his size, he could work with him more, and any clash between Andre and another credible giant was gold at the box office.

I didn’t know Snuka at all, and had no real expectations about that series. I fully expected that the highlight of that group was going to be Orton. That’s why Vince Sr. did the booking and I did the wrestling!

This latest crop of heels also gives you some insight into how the business worked at the time. At that taping, I had just finished with Adonis at the Garden, but was really just getting started wrestling him around the rest of the territory. Meanwhile, I had not yet wrestled Jesse Ventura at the Garden, although I already had some matches with him in other cities around the territory. Although it was unusual for other cities (other than a one-off small town somewhere if a heel and I were unfamiliar with each other and needed to get our timing down) to get a main event before the Garden, in this case there was a real logjam of challengers forming.

Ventura was to be my next opponent. Jesse, who legitimately was a bodyguard for the Rolling Stones, was trained, like I was, at the 7th Street gym in Minneapolis by Eddie Sharkey, and was trying to emulate and expand upon the character first used by “Superstar” Billy Graham. Ventura had a very muscular body, a deep tan, and was a good talker. Ventura wasn’t as up and down on and off the mat as some of the other guys were, and he wasn’t a bump machine like Adonis was, but I hadn’t wrestled a strong man–type challenger since Ken Patera and Hulk Hogan in 1980, and it takes all types to make the story work, so this was a logical fit.

Jesse and I only did one match at the Garden because his repertoire of maneuvers in the ring wasn’t as broad as some of my other challengers, and at that point in his career in the WWF, he hadn’t gotten as “over” as some of the other heels that the people just lined up to hate. Adonis, for example, was cockier on the microphone, and as I have mentioned, his Goodnight Irene sleeperhold finisher had propelled him into the ranks of heels people really wanted to see. Ventura, at that time, was a cool, beatnik type from the West Coast that the people honestly didn’t hate that much. I’m just not sure that the people quite knew what to make of Ventura, whose persona was really part wrestler, and part rock star. I also think that the people didn’t really see him as possessing the same kind of “heel credentials” as guys like Stan Hansen or Sergeant Slaughter or Don Muraco—who I think the people really believed could win the world title from me on any given night.

I felt badly that Jesse didn’t get more of a run at the Garden because I liked him a lot as a person. He was a pleasure to be in the ring with in that he always protected us both very well. Jesse got the matinee card at the Garden on March 14, 1982. I remember the match well—he came into the ring with Freddie Blassie wearing a really colorful robe and earrings and jewelry around his arms. His entrance, frankly, was among the best of any of my heel challengers at getting the people riled up—and the entrances and Howard Finkel’s in-ring introductions were a very important part of getting the people’s energy up for the title match. I think everyone knew that Jesse would pull that part off as well as anyone because he loved to play to the crowd and he was as good at that as anyone.

After that, though, Vince Sr. knew that Ventura and I wouldn’t match up that well in terms of our in-ring repertoire because Jesse’s palette of moves was limited. Given that, Vince Sr. had set up Ivan Putski as the guest referee for the bout, which was unusual given that it was our first match, and there really wasn’t a grudge befitting a special guest referee. In reality, Vince Sr. was really looking to find something to do with Jesse. Ventura and Putski started jawing at each other right from the pre-match introductions, and given the finish that Vince Sr. called for, that was all part of the setup.

When you are the champ, and you are facing someone like Ventura in the ring, you have to consider what you can credibly do within the confines of each wrestler’s abilities, and given that, how to get the people to the right place to get to the finish. The match was mostly a street fight, with Ventura punching and kicking and choking and trying to soften up my back for his finisher, the Bodybreaker, mixed with Ventura and Putski getting into it over Putski’s manhandling him to force clean breaks, and administering a couple of very slow counts when Ventura had me in pinning combinations. The drama in this match was as much about the obvious bias and growing heat between Ventura and Putski as it was about Ventura’s quest to unseat me as the WWF champion.

I basically let Jesse beat on me for about eight minutes, during which he got a series of very slow counts from Putski, after which point he got me up in the Bodybreaker for a false finish. I managed to get to the ropes, kick off, and backdrop him into a pinning combination that we held for a two count before he kicked out. The people were buzzing pretty well at that point, and I thought that was the time to go. I didn’t want to lose that peak, because you can’t hold it for long, and if you lose it, the match can go downhill from there. Given what I knew we were able to do, and how much of it we had already done, I wasn’t sure we’d be able to get the people back to that level again.

There had been a lot of long title matches at the Garden in the preceding months, and a lot of long series with challengers, so keeping the people off balance and having some shock value was always important, and that’s what this was—something completely opposite of what the people were used to seeing. So Ventura went to put me up in the Bodybreaker again, but I slipped off his shoulder, got behind him, pushed him into the ropes, and caught him in the rolling reverse, which Ventura positioned himself perfectly on, allowing me to bridge out in one fluid motion. Putski went to the mat and delivered the fastest three count in Garden history, the people roared, and the bell rang. The finish looked so good, it was used in the intro to the Championship Wrestling television broadcast for nearly a year after that. Credit to Jesse for making that happen.

After the announcements, the pot boiled over as Ventura attacked Putski, setting up an instant feud which would main-event the high school and community college gyms and fieldhouses around the territory for much of the spring and summer.

After we finished going around the horn, Adonis went on to have a series of Intercontinental title matches with Pedro Morales while I was wrestling Ventura. Ventura then went on to wrestle Putski and then Tony Atlas in strongman matches in a number of towns. Adonis and Ventura later got back together as the “East-West Connection” tag team, and would go on to have entertaining matches around the territory with Tony Garea and Rick Martel, the Carolina Connection, and the Strongbow Brothers that all did well at the box office.

Mulligan was the next heel up. It had been about a year since the WWF crowds had last seen a heel cowboy (Stan Hansen), and Blackjack, at over six feet eight inches tall and about 330 pounds, was very different from Hansen. He was more of a cross between the “rugged cowboy” and the “giant” types. Mulligan should have been the perfect guy at the time to put some heat into, but, as they had with Hogan in 1980, they wanted to keep Mulligan fresh for Andre without having the Garden crowd see me beat him, so they never booked Jack into a main event with me at the Garden. Instead, they tested the Andre-Mulligan matchup in a few small towns in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and finding that Andre and Mulligan worked well together and that the people were responding favorably to their feud, they decided to push Jack into a feud with Andre at the Garden right away.

I only wrestled Mulligan in a couple of towns. We did a double disqualification in our first match at the Baltimore Civic Center on April 10, 1982, then followed that a week later on April 17 at the Spectrum in Philadelphia, in a match that almost didn’t happen. During that week, while driving from Maryland to Connecticut, then back out to Long Island, and then out to Pittsburgh, I developed a blood clot in my leg. While I was home, I went to see my doctor in East Haven, Connecticut—who was the same doctor who would check the wrestlers for the Connecticut State Athletic Commission when we would wrestle at the New Haven Coliseum. My doctor told me that if the clot came loose and moved out of my leg, I could die. He called Vince Sr. and told him what was up, but with near-sellout crowds waiting in two of the largest arenas on the circuit, no-showing the main events was simply not an option. I gingerly limped my way through the next two nights’ main events against Adonis in Pittsburgh and then Mulligan in Philadelphia, where I was limping so badly that I was barely cleared to wrestle by the Pennsylvania State Athletic Commission. I wrestled one of the shortest title matches of my career that night because I was in legitimate pain and had real concerns for my health and well-being. Being the true professional that he is, Jack took especially good care of me in the ring that night to make sure that my condition wouldn’t worsen further. I was grateful for that. Vince then gave me a week off to get healthy and ready for my first match with Snuka at the Garden.

I was not privy to the communications Vince Sr. had with Jim and David Crockett of the Mid-Atlantic territory bringing Jimmy Snuka into the WWF, or how much the Crocketts had told Vince Sr. about Snuka or how he was drawing down there in the Carolinas, but I don’t think anyone had any inkling of just how over Snuka was going to get with the WWF fans. At the outset, Vince Sr. had set things up so I would end up doing a longer series with “Cowboy” Bob Orton, who, like Don Muraco, was a product of Eddie Graham’s Florida Championship Wrestling, and with whom I could have had some great wrestling matches. Orton had gotten a run with the Florida Heavyweight Championship for Eddie, and I know that Vince Sr. loved Orton, both for his look and for his substantial in-ring skills. But when Snuka just erupted into a mega-heel at the box office, the office rode that horse all the way to the bank, I unexpectedly spent nearly all of the summer of 1982 wrestling him, which seriously truncated the time I had available to spend with Orton.

For those who are unfamiliar with the Snuka series—which, in terms of box office interest, and general buzz, probably represented the high-water mark of my nearly six-year title run—let me set the scene. Snuka came into the territory as a mysterious, wild jungle savage in leopard print trunks, managed by Captain Lou Albano. The man allegedly spoke not a word of English, but had a body that looked like it had been chiseled from stone. He also possessed one of the most spectacular finishing maneuvers in the history of the business to that point—a signature move where he would climb to the top turnbuckle and then swan dive halfway across the ring before crashing down onto the prone body of his opponent. That move had earned him the nickname “The Superfly,” and had also allegedly sent numerous victims to the hospital. The first time that Snuka executed that move on television, everyone watching knew that this guy was something special.

After the first couple of matches at the taping, however, it became clear just how special.

Snuka was in his late thirties when he arrived in the WWF, and had a lot of experience in the ring. In the ring, Jimmy was a terrific performer. He knew what he wanted to do at every minute, and after each move, he would pause just long enough to allow the people to respond before he went on to his next move. Jimmy had excellent timing—he was deliberate and never rushed anything—and that’s part of what made him so successful. He got the most out of every move in terms of the people’s reaction. His level of experience in professional wrestling made Snuka one of the most polished heels I ever had the pleasure to step into the ring with.

The combination of the seemingly savage and uncontrollable Snuka with the wild and unpredictable Albano also really helped to strike fear into the hearts of the fans. The two of them fit together brilliantly and they played well off each other. It was just a great combination. At the beginning, the fear in the hearts and minds of the fans was palpable. Because television from Crocketts’ Mid-Atlantic area did not reach into much of the WWF territory, few WWF fans had ever laid eyes on Snuka before. He got a heck of a response when he came out—one that just sparkled a little bit more than most other heels. And then he started stretchering the TV job guys out, one after the next, with that devastating swan dive—and the fans’ response to him become increasingly intense. I can clearly remember the reaction everybody had at that first television taping—both the people in the crowds in Allentown and Hamburg, and the office guys in the back. Vince Jr. really liked Snuka, and Vince Sr., also liking what he saw, started reshuffling the book to accommodate an unexpected box office hit in the making.

Snuka’s title match with me in the Garden on April 26, 1982, was his first arena shot in the territory. Nobody had gotten to see him in a WWF arena before, so when he emerged from behind the curtain at the Garden with Albano, it was definitely a special moment. Flashbulbs were popping and the crowd was buzzing with anticipation, and Snuka, for his part, was really playing it up—looking around quizzically at the large number of people gathered around the ringside area, and then wide-eyed as he surveyed the thousands and thousands more in the first and second decks as if to communicate the thought that he was thousands of miles from his jungle home and had no idea where he was.

Back in the dressing room area before the match, Vince Sr. had taken me into the bathroom separately, without Snuka, which was very unusual. I deduced pretty quickly that something was up.

“Bobby,” Vince Sr. said to me, “this guy is really getting over … and he could really be something. He’s going to go over tonight by disqualification. But after that, I’d like to have Snuka hit that splash, hurt you, and send you out of here on a stretcher. Would that be alright with you?”

We wanted to get Jimmy’s amazing finisher over with the people as strongly as we possibly could, and what better way to do that than for me to get carried out of the Garden on a stretcher for the first time ever? I was very pleased, however, that Vince Sr. thought enough of me as his champion to pull me aside, and ask me for this booking rather than simply telling us to do it. Of course, I had so much respect for Vince Sr. that I would have done just about anything for him, and frankly, I agreed with him that it made a lot of sense to do that finish. The people had seen Snuka stretcher a number of people out on television, and that splash was the kind of maneuver that, in reality, could break ribs or collapse a lung—the kind of damage that, if it were real, really would cause you to be taken from the ring on a stretcher. The idea was to put in the minds of the fans that this guy had the potential not just to beat me for the world title, but to actually injure me so severely that I wouldn’t be able to wrestle again for a long time.

That first match definitely had its desired effect, as Jimmy and I brawled all over the Garden for about twelve or fourteen minutes. The purpose of that first match was to deliver the impression that I was not in a wrestling match with this guy—but was actually in a fight for my life against a savage who was seemingly impervious to pain. That was why my choking Snuka out and not heeding the referee’s warning until he disqualified me made sense as a finish. If you were in a fight for your life, you would use whatever means were at your disposal to try and protect yourself, wouldn’t you? That was exactly the feeling that I was going for in that first match.

Everything in that first match worked according to plan. After the bell rang and the referee broke the choke, Snuka rallied, and suplexed me down onto the mat and then climbed to the top rope with the flash bulbs sparkling all over the arena and crashed down right over me. It was an eerie feeling laying down there on the mat waiting for a 250-pound man to dive on you, and knowing that even the smallest, adrenaline-fueled miscalculation could lead to a legitimate and catastrophic injury to one or both of us. As it was, Snuka barely touched me, but he made it look great. The fans were shocked as I lay motionless inside the ring getting checked out by Arnold and the doctors, and then eventually got loaded onto the stretcher and carried out of the Garden.

A Beautiful Thing

You know, for Bobby to do that for me—to put me over like—was a really beautiful thing, brother. You know, he didn’t have to do that.

But Bobby was a wonderful person and a great athlete and a great champion, and he knew that we could really do something together, you know?

—“Superfly” Jimmy Snuka

What Jimmy did to me in the Garden that night triggered fan interest in our feud the likes of which had not been seen in the federation since Stan Hansen broke Bruno’s neck in 1976. The magazines covered it, and the stretcher job in the Garden even got some coverage in the mainstream New York City media. Everywhere I went after that, people expressed concerns for my safety and well-being, and were genuinely worried about how, and whether I was going to be able to find a way not to beat Snuka, but perhaps just to survive Snuka.

Meanwhile, this firestorm of interest in the Snuka series relegated both Orton and Mulligan to the back burner. On May 1, 1982, I pinned Orton in our first match at the Capital Center, and I did the same in Boston a few nights later. It was very disappointing for Orton to not get the opportunity to really prove himself after working his way up the ladder for so many years down in Florida with Eddie Graham, and the fact is, Orton and I could have done a lot more with that series than we did.

In fact, the gimmick we used with Orton, who was managed by the Grand Wizard, was that I had ducked wrestling Orton in the amateurs, that he had been chasing me ever since, and, he claimed, he was the one wrestler in the world that I knew I couldn’t beat.

It was a pretty interesting booking premise that hadn’t been used before, but with all the buzz that summer being about Snuka, only Phil Zacko, who promoted the Philadelphia Spectrum, saw the merit of giving Orton two main-event title matches with me. Everybody else was lining up for multiple months of Backlund-Snuka.

Meanwhile, it must have been especially disappointing for Mulligan, who was, at that time, a fifteen-year veteran of the business, to come into the territory, be here for two weeks, and end up wrestling a mid-card guy in the Garden while Snuka got the main event and stretchered the champion out. Because all three of those guys had come into the territory at roughly the same time, and with the same expected four-month stay, both Orton and Mulligan had to know where all the buzz about Snuka was going to leave them. They knew where the focus was going to go. And, in fact, only a couple of nights after the first Garden card with Snuka, Mulligan was one-and-done, doing the honors for me in Hartford and Boston.

Meanwhile, there were already some telltale signs developing around Snuka after the fans around the territory got to see him a couple of times. Snuka was the hottest heel the territory had seen during my reign as the champion. The fans were frightened by him, intrigued by him, and just wanted to get close enough to get a good look at him. On May 22, 1982, at the Philadelphia Spectrum, on the card where I had my first main event with Orton (where he beat me by countout), Snuka was in the ring with Morales for the Intercontinental Heavyweight Championship and drew a fair number of cheers from the fans, while Morales, normally a favorite in Philly, was booed. Philadelphia had always been something of a heel town, so it wasn’t that surprising to hear Snuka get cheered there, but it was an interesting development that did not pass unnoticed, either in the dressing room, or among the front office guys.

Snuka and I came back to the Garden on June 5, 1982, which had sold out well in advance. People showing up to buy tickets were being told that the only way they could see the match was to buy a ticket for the closed-circuit broadcast in the Felt Forum, and eventually, that too approached capacity. When Vince Sr. brought us together for the pre-match instructions that night, Jimmy and I both knew that we were going three. There was no way that they couldn’t have booked it that way given the way that the feud was selling around the territory. Everywhere Jimmy and I wrestled, the people were turning out in droves. Even up in Portland, Maine, our title match drew the largest wrestling crowd in the history of the Cumberland County Civic Center. All the promoters wanted a piece of this match.

“Bobby, Jimmy is going over by count-out tonight,” Vince Sr. explained to us. You’re both going to get color, and Bobby, you’re going to be frustrated that you can’t seem to find a way to beat Jimmy, and you’re going to chase him out of the ring. And Jimmy, you’re going to catch Bobby out there and work him over, and then jump back into the ring for the win. We’re coming back next month in the cage, so that’s what you’re setting up.”

The point of the second match, of course, was to continue to give Snuka the air of invincibility—for me to become more and more frustrated that I couldn’t beat him—and for the fans to begin to wonder even more whether it was possible to pin Jimmy Snuka for the three count. In the ring, it felt like the match came off really well, and we had the fans at their peak at about the twenty-minute mark of the match. Meanwhile, on the undercard, Andre faced the unblemished Mulligan and the two battled all over the building to an indecisive finish. As Vince Sr. expected, in the eyes of the fans, Mulligan presented a legitimate threat to Andre’s career undefeated streak.

In a really hot three-match series, the third match was always some kind of gimmick match—be it a lumberjack match, a chain match, a Texas Death Match, a Bunkhouse match, or, of course, the steel cage match. Which gimmick was chosen for the blowoff was usually a factor of what the fans in that city had seen or not seen recently coupled with what the wrestlers were capable of. The Texas Death Match was a Funk invention—it was basically a free-for-all match with no countouts or disqualifications, no holds barred, and no stoppages by the doctor for excess blood loss. It usually spilled out into the ringside area and involved the use of foreign objects or whatever might have been around and available at ringside. It also usually involved one or both participants getting color. The Texas Death Match (or its ethnic alternatives, like the Greek Death Match, the Caribbean Death Match) was just an alternative to make sure that the promoter did not have to overdose on cage matches every time a blowoff match was needed. In the WWF, typically, we’d choose a Texas Death Match with a guy like Patera, Muraco, Valentine, or Slaughter, who had enough of a repertoire to not need a cage to sell the blowoff. With a roughhouser or a guy with a limited repertoire, you could use the cage to add a new level of story to the match, because in a cage match, the cage, and the attempt to escape it, becomes the story.

On a card that features a steel cage match, the cage is generally what the people have come to see, and as such, the people expect certain things from you. They’re going to be looking for color—so you have to give them that. They are going expect both wrestlers to use the cage as part of their offense and defense—so you can’t go into a cage match and start throwing hiptosses, because that doesn’t fit the storyline. If the storyline was developed properly, the fans would have already seen those things in one or both of the first two matches. The steel cage was the modern-day equivalent of the Roman Coliseum—so there needed to be a furious pace, some real damage inflicted on someone, and a clear winner and a clear loser. In Vince McMahon Sr.’s WWF, the man with the white hat had to win the war decisively to send the people home happy. There were only a couple of examples in all the years I wrestled where that didn’t happen.

People sometimes ask why the WWF’s cage match had the stipulation that the way to win the match was to escape the cage, rather than to soundly defeat your opponent for a three count by a referee. Not having the cage match end by a pin or submission was a way to keep heat on the loser and to not have to have him lay down for a pin. Remember that many of my heels would go on to wrestle Pedro for the Intercontinental title after their series with me. If I destroyed them, their ability to draw money as a challenger to Pedro in that subsequent match would be weakened. It was a delicate dance—I had to beat them decisively to send the fans home happy, but not so decisively that there wasn’t still considerable doubt as to whether that guy could beat Pedro the following month, or at the local arena card where that match might be the headliner being relied upon to draw the house.

So all of that is a lead up to June 28, 1982—the blowoff with Snuka at the Garden in the cage—in what may well have been the most anticipated title defense of my entire career. The match was so hot, Vince Sr. had no misgivings about going back to the Garden three weeks after our last Garden bout instead of the usual five—which, of course, gave them two weeks less time to promote the match and the card. It didn’t much matter though, because the cage match with Snuka drew the largest house of my career at the Garden. The Arena and the Felt Forum were both sold out for the event, and there were a lot of people turned away that night. I don’t know what the precise paid attendance numbers were, and I’m not sure that anyone other than Vince Sr. ever really did, but I do know that my paycheck from that match was higher than anything I had ever seen at the Garden before.

Contrary to rumor, Vince Sr. never planned to change the belt that night. The fact that there were a lot of photographers, particularly from Japan, at ringside that night was simply an indication of how much interest there was internationally in this match. My cage match with Snuka was simply the logical end to a tremendous series of matches—as good as any that I had ever had in my career with anyone.

That night was absolutely one of the most electrifying nights of my career. The people were on edge. It was just one of those nights when everyone coming into the building knew that they were going to see something truly special. Our match was all anyone was talking about.

Making Magic

What Bobby and I went on to do in New York City was to make magic, you know what I’m saying? It was just magical out there. It was a happening. And the people who were there that night will never forget it.

—“Superfly” Jimmy Snuka

The match had a strange extra stipulation, that the only way to win the match was to go out the door of the cage, not over the top. The changes to the normal cage match rules were actually announced in the Garden that night so everyone would be clear about the rule change. Although it was hyped that this rules change had been slipped into the “contract” for the rematch by my manager Arnold Skaaland, there were actually two real-life reasons for that change. First, the booked finish had Snuka climbing up to the top of the cage, pausing there to look around, diving off, missing me, and crashing into the mat, allowing me to escape. That finish wouldn’t have made any sense if Snuka could have simply turned around at the top and climbed out of the cage instead of trying to jump down on me. So we needed the rules change to take care of that. Second, and probably more important, we needed protection against an accident. Snuka was getting a reputation among the boys for frequently being under the influence of marijuana and, thus, sometimes being a little unstable when climbing and balancing on the top rope. Because it was known that Snuka was sometimes messed up when he wrestled, the office was concerned about whether this finish would come off cleanly, both for Jimmy and for the match.

To be fair to Jimmy, this was hardly an easy finish for him to execute. Vince Sr. was asking Jimmy, with all of that adrenaline pumping through his body, to climb to the top rope in the middle of Madison Square Garden, then turn around and climb another three feet of wobbly chain link fence to the unstable top of two intersecting sections of that chain link fence being held together by a steel cable. He was then to perch his 250-pound frame up there while sweating profusely and bleeding from multiple cuts on his face, and time his leap fifteen feet down onto the mat to both avoid me and avoid hurting himself upon landing.

There were just too many variables involved to run that finish without protection. Vince Sr. needed that stipulation to make sure that if Snuka slipped off the top of the cage and accidentally fell to the arena floor, Vince Sr. wouldn’t have had to put the belt on him.

Of course, as everyone knows, the match came off perfectly. The night was a little unusual in that the challenger usually came out to the ring first, but on that night, I wanted to be out in the ring so that Snuka could play up his entrance to the fans just a little bit more. When Snuka came out, he carefully identified which corner of the cage seemed to be the most stable to use for his leap, and he kept track of that corner throughout the match. When the time came, he climbed to the top rope and then to the top of the cage without incident, perched up there for a beautiful photo op for the thousands of people who were ready with their cameras, and then, with flash bulbs sparkling all over the arena, timed his leap perfectly and landed it (missing me) without injuring either one of us.

All that was left for me to do at that point was to crawl out the door and get to the arena floor, where Vince McMahon Jr. was waiting to do a post-match interview with the winner. It was a storybook ending to a great feud, the highest high spot (both literally and figuratively) of any finish I was ever part of, and certainly one of the two or three most memorable nights of my nearly forty-year career in this business.

Although Snuka and I were done at the Garden before the end of June 1982, there were bouts between us scheduled all over North America until mid-September. Only the Madison Square Garden got that finish, though. Because that finish was so risky and so brutal on Jimmy’s knees, back, and elbows, we could not replicate it in all the major arenas around the territory. In many of the other arenas, we did Texas Death Matches or return matches with special guest referees. Intercontinental Champion Pedro Morales was the special referee most often called on to maintain order in those bouts.

As the summer wore on, however, an interesting thing was happening. Jimmy started to get more and more cheers from the fans, and our matches started to revert to more scientific wrestling matches rather than the fierce brawls we had at the Garden. The fans were turning Jimmy Snuka into a babyface. By the time I had my last title match with Jimmy at the Spectrum in Philadelphia in September 1982, Jimmy’s unplanned face turn was nearly complete. In that “return” match, Jimmy barely played the heel, I beat him cleanly with an inside cradle in the middle of the ring, and when he popped up, he stared me in the face, and I extended a hand to him, and he shook it. The fans could not believe what they were watching, but they were cheering madly for it. It had been a wild and crazy six-month run, which took Jimmy Snuka from one of the most feared and hated rulebreakers the federation had ever seen to an unplanned babyface turn that more or less evolved naturally before the fans’ eyes.

Toward the end of our series of matches, as things were winding down, Vince Sr. pulled me aside at a television taping and talked to me about Snuka. He asked me, straight out, whether I thought Jimmy could be the world champion. I told Vince Sr. that Snuka’s timing in the ring was as good as anybody’s I had ever worked with in the WWF, and that Jimmy had the look and the ability necessary to be a great champion in the ring. I talked to Vince Sr. about Jimmy’s versatility in the ring, and how he had the repertoire of moves to work with people of different styles, from amateur-oriented guys like me, to full-out brawlers like Pedro. But then, as it always did with Jimmy, our conversation turned to the extracurricular activities that he was involved in—most particularly his propensity to get stoned, and whether, given that reality, Jimmy could be relied upon to hold down the top spot on the card. The question in Vince Sr.’s mind was whether Jimmy could be relied upon to show up every night, and to show up prepared and ready to wrestle in the main event in every building he appeared in.

I know that after the fans had turned Snuka into a babyface, Vince Sr. was thinking about making Snuka the next champion. We talked about it. Ultimately, however, Vince Sr. decided not to give him a run with either the world title or the Intercontinental belt because the front office guys concluded that there were just too many negatives on the personal side to entrust the business to him. It would take a man like Vince McMahon Sr. to make a decision that would value integrity over money—and that’s exactly what he did in making the decision not to put a belt on Snuka, who was unquestionably as big a draw as anyone in the federation at that time. Had it not been for his personal demons, I think Snuka would have ended up with the world title sometime in 1982, either by taking it directly from me, or by quickly winning it from a transitional heel champion. What I respected most about that whole episode, though, is that once again, Vince McMahon Sr. came to me directly—he just came right out and asked me, “What would you think of Snuka as a champion?” To me, that indicated the level of trust and respect that I had earned from Vince Sr.—a fact that made me very happy.

Snuka, of course, went on to turn babyface in September 1982. The office, faced with the fact that they couldn’t maintain the façade of Jimmy as heel any longer, scrambled to come up with a scenario that would make it official. Ultimately, they did it through the Buddy Rogers Corner television vignette. There, Rogers, who had been the federation’s first world champion in 1963, returned to the federation and “exposed” the fact that Captain Lou Albano had been “stealing” all of Snuka’s gate money, and that Jimmy was, in fact, broke. Jimmy then “fired” Albano, and asked Buddy Rogers to be his new manager. In reality, Buddy was hired back because he needed the money, and Vince Sr. needed someone to drive Jimmy around and make sure that he got to the arenas on time and in proper shape to wrestle.

Jimmy got attacked and took a piledriver on the concrete floor by Ray Stevens in a memorable television angle, and Jimmy’s face turn was complete.

From there, Snuka would go on to have a memorable feud with Ray “The Crippler” Stevens that headlined many buildings in the fall of 1982 and then a sensational feud with Don Muraco over the Intercontinental title in the summer and fall of 1983. By that point, though, Buddy Rogers had quit driving Snuka because, as it was explained to me, he didn’t want to be associated with Snuka’s continuing drug use and chemical dependence.

Vince Sr. was running more than one show a day on many days, and was using Muraco’s Intercontinental title defense as the main event on many of the cards where I did not appear to defend the world title. Given that newfound responsibility that the Intercontinental Champion was shouldering, Jimmy’s personal demons kept him from getting a run with that belt as well. Of course, by that time, Jimmy’s personal problems extended well beyond chemical dependence after his girlfriend, Nancy Argentino, was found dead in his motel room in Allentown in May 1983 after a television taping, and Jimmy found himself at the center of a major crimes investigation. I had left for home hours before this tragedy occurred because I only recorded promo interviews and did not wrestle that night at the Allentown taping, so my work was done late in the afternoon.

That same night, another young wrestler on the roster, Eddie Gilbert, was involved in a serious car accident.

Needless to say, it was a tough night for the federation. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

At the television tapings in Allentown the week before the steel cage blowoff with Snuka at the Garden, I had picked up my bookings for the upcoming three weeks and saw the following odd notation in Vince’s calendar.

Seeing that I was heading down to the Omni, which had become the Madison Square Garden of the NWA, for a match on July 4, I figured this was going to be something pretty big. Likewise, WTBS out of Atlanta had become one of the first national television superstations that was broadcast all over the country, which had provided the NWA with a nationwide promotional platform. I tracked Vince Sr. down and asked him who I’d be wrestling there. He told me that I would be facing the current NWA World Heavyweight Champion, Ric Flair, in a world title unification match.

The match had been arranged between Vince Sr., Jim Barnett, who at the time was still running Georgia Championship Wrestling, and Jim Crockett, the promoter in charge of the Mid-Atlantic region and the then-president of the NWA.

There were some pretty interesting goings-on between the NWA and the WWF at the time. In June 1982, Vince Sr. and his partners sold their interests in Capitol Wrestling Corporation (the entity that ran the WWF) to Vince’s son. Vince Jr. had until mid-1983 to make the required payments to acquire the shares. I think this whole situation created some heartburn among some of the major players in the NWA, because although those guys had enduring relationships and reverence for Vince Sr., they didn’t really like or trust Vince Jr. Vince Sr. was still in charge of the booking, however, and had made the arrangements for the match with Jim Barnett, who I knew well from my days wrestling for him in Georgia. I was actually excited to go down there and have a match like this with Flair.

Vince hadn’t said anything to me about unifying the titles, so I knew that the booking would be either a Broadway or some sort of inconclusive finish that I would get from Barnett when I got down there. If Vince Sr. had agreed to a title change, even for a short period, I know that he would have sat me down and explained the booking to me before I left for Atlanta—as he had when we did the short switch with Inoki in Japan in 1979.

I went down to Atlanta, wrestled a match in the ring in the WTBS studios, and then, the following day, did a face-to-face interview with Flair at ringside conducted by Gordon Solie. I had wrestled Flair once a couple of years earlier up in Toronto for Frank Tunney when Flair was the NWA’s US Champion, so I knew him to be a great performer in the ring. I had also been around Ric for a time in Florida—so we knew each other well enough. Ric had really come into his own and grown into his character since defeating Harley Race for the NWA World Heavyweight Championship, and had blossomed into an enormous box office draw all over the NWA territory. Flair was being bankrolled by the NWA to live his character, and as such, was legitimately wearing expensive suits, and Rolex watches, and alligator shoes, and being chauffeured around the territory in a limousine. His gimmick had gotten him over as a larger-than-life character with the NWA fans who were turning out in droves to see him wherever he went.

Unlike Harley and I, however, Ric and I did not have a long history together, or a shared level of trust. Ric and I were not close.

I knew that Flair was a good athlete and a great performer, though, so I knew we were going to have a heck of a match. I felt pretty relaxed during the interview with Gordon Solie, and just tried to look into the camera and give the NWA fans a straightforward, credible interview like any professional athlete preparing to compete for a world championship would give. Ric, who was better on the microphone than I was the day he came out of the womb, gave a somewhat toned-down and respectful, but still pretty cocky accounting of himself. That interview was broadcast across the country on Superstation WTBS, and set the stage for our confrontation. It would be a matchup of two world champions with very different styles: Ric, as the rich, flashy, entitled champion—and me, as the amateur-based, hardworking man-of-the-people. Even though the fans in Atlanta hadn’t seen me regularly for five years, they got behind me right away as someone who had the credentials to shut Flair up, take his belt, and unify the world championship. I also liked Gordon Solie a lot—he had been very polite and complimentary to me, and the other wrestlers at the studio had greeted me kindly.

That Sunday taping concluded early in the afternoon, and we went right to the Omni from there. When I got to the locker room at the Omni, I got a workout in while they were setting up the ring, but then, as I was getting ready and doing the stuff that I normally do, something didn’t feel right. I don’t know why, but I just had a sixth-sense that something was wrong.

No one had greeted me at the arena when I arrived, and no one had come around to talk about the finish or what we were going to do. In the several other world title unification matches that I had done with Harley in New York with Vince Sr., in Miami with Eddie Graham, in St. Louis with Sam Muchnick, or in Toronto with Frank Tunney, we had always had a little meeting with the promoter in the dressing room beforehand to talk about how the match was going to go. On each of those occasions, I had spent a few minutes talking with my opponents about what things we each wanted to get into the match and how best to capture the hearts and minds of the people. That night at the Omni, however, there was no sign of either Barnett or Crockett, or Flair.

I called Vince Sr. from a payphone in one of the Omni’s hallways, explained to him that although I couldn’t put my finger on anything specific, after being in so many different places with the belt wrestling for so many different promoters, there was something fishy going on that I didn’t like. Something didn’t feel like business as usual.

I was worried that there might have been some sort of double-cross in the works.

I told him that I would do whatever he wanted me to do—and I asked him what that was.

As it turned out, Vince Sr. had been on the phone arguing with Crockett, the president of the NWA, about the finish. I did not know Vince and Crockett to be close, and they traded talent very infrequently, so I was much more on edge about this match than I ever was wrestling in Florida for Eddie, or in St. Louis for Sam, or even over in Japan where “unusual” things were known to happen on occasion and blamed on the language barrier. Vince Sr. told me that several people on the NWA Board had gotten themselves involved in the discussions. He told me not to worry, but to sit tight and stay near the phone, and that he would call me back.

If Vince had called back and told me that he was worried that the Crocketts were up to something, I would have done whatever was necessary to protect the WWF title that night, including shooting on Ric Flair if that’s what was necessary. Other than running away and getting counted out of the ring, there is absolutely nothing that Flair would have been able to do about it. That’s what made this whole situation so strange. The NWA Board knew that when they decided to have Flair beat Dusty for the belt, they had chosen to put the NWA World Heavyweight Championship on a man who was a great worker in the ring, and a great performer on the microphone, but someone who could absolutely not protect himself in the ring, and would stand no chance against a guy who decided to shoot on him.

Ordinarily, no one would have had any concerns about me trying to do that to Ric, because I had grown up in the NWA, had a lot of respect for most of those promoters, and had worked with a lot of them. But now, I was in Atlanta representing Vince McMahon Sr. and the rival WWF at a time when tensions between the WWF and the NWA were high, and I was prepared to do anything necessary to protect Vince Sr.’s and the WWF’s reputation. Business was business.

The silence, however, coupled with the knowledge that I had just gained from Vince Sr. that there was some “dispute” going on over the finish to our match, was very unnerving. If there wasn’t some discussion about one of us going over the other in some fashion, then what could possibly have been serious enough to get so many members of the NWA Board of Directors on the phone on the night of a match? A decision to go Broadway would have been expected, so that wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow. A decision to call for a disqualification or countout finish, whether it put Flair over or put me over, wouldn’t have hurt either one of us at all, and that wouldn’t have merited such a call either. So the finish being discussed must have been something more serious. Put into context of what was going on politically at the time between the WWF and the NWA, it was not at all beyond the realm of possibility that the Crocketts might have been trying to pull some kind of power move on Vince Sr.

Whatever the problem was, Vince apparently solved it by talking to Jim Barnett, who acted as a go-between with the Crocketts. A little while after Vince and I talked, and before Vince even called me back, Barnett approached me and tried to smooth things over. He had the Crocketts in tow, and they all explained to me that the match was going to spill out of the ring and end in a double-countout. I eyed them all suspiciously, and just nodded to acknowledge that I had heard them, but I didn’t say much.

No one will ever convince me that a double-countout finish was enough to warrant scrambling so many members of the NWA Board of Directors for a conference call on the day of the event—so you really have to wonder what it was that had started the controversy. I have never been able to find out, but I’d love to know.

Apparently, one of the ways that this disagreement and concerns about a possible rogue finish was resolved was by a mutual agreement between Vince Sr. and the Crocketts not to tape the match. That way, if anything funny happened, there would have been no proof of it to put on television. As amazing as it seems in retrospect, this historic match was, in fact, not taped. That was a pretty unusual decision for a match of this magnitude and historical significance, especially given the fact that it had received so much national attention on WTBS. It was certainly not a choice that would have been made voluntarily and in the ordinary course of events.

I never got to the bottom of it, but something had definitely been up, because by the time Barnett found me and tried to calm me down, word that I was onto it had gotten back to Flair, and now he was then worried about what I might do to him in the ring that night. When Ric found me before the match later that evening, he was acting strangely and was very sheepish toward me. I guess he felt like had to say something to me to break the ice and to put my mind at ease and to let me know that the plan, whatever it had been, was off—because the first thing he did when I saw him was to come up to me in a friendly, joking way and say, “Don’t hurt me, Bob.”

Notwithstanding these strange circumstances, I liked Ric. I wasn’t worried that he was inclined to try to do something on his own, nor was I worried about my ability to take care of myself in the ring with him if he did. What I was worried about, though, is what his boss might have instructed him to do, or that something else might be going on with a referee that might have been made to look like a mistake or an accident after the fact. My lack of familiarity with the players involved definitely made the situation tense and uncertain. Ric was relatively new in his role as the NWA World Champion, and obviously wanted to make himself and the NWA World Title look as powerful as he could. Of course, I wanted to do the same for myself and the WWF. The growing strain between our two organizations, however, was the new variable that hadn’t been present in these types of matches in the past—and that was weighing heavily in my mind. Beyond that, I knew that having to wrestle defensively and not being able to completely trust Ric would detract from the overall quality of the match—both for us and for the people watching that night at the Omni.

Our match was the final one that night, and when we got to the ring, everything went well. We did the short-arm scissor, which really got the crowd going, we did the double bridge, and a whole series of holds and reverses and suplexes and speed moves that the average person out there couldn’t do. He got me in the figure-four leglock in the middle of the ring, which as the closest we got all night to any kind of false finish. I could tell from the way Ric applied the hold that night that he had no intention whatsoever of getting cute with me, or even leaving open any possibility for any misunderstanding about that. Everything Ric did in the ring that night was feather-soft. I sold the figure-four for him for awhile before I eventually reversed it to escape. Because of all of the pre-match suspicion, however, neither of us permitted any close calls or two counts that night in either direction. I was in their territory, and once the referee calls for the bell and raises someone’s hand, what are you going to do? So I wasn’t about to allow my shoulders to be down for a two count and leave myself vulnerable to a referee changing his cadence or making a quick count, or some other mistake. Meanwhile, based on the comment that he had made to me, I’m sure Ric was also a little concerned that if he let me get him in a compromising position with his shoulders on the mat, that I might not let go, and the referee would be forced to make the three count against him.

The match came off as well as it could have given our defensiveness stemming from the cloud of suspicion that hung over the match that night. It was not the kind of fluid, easy, enjoyable match like I had had so many times with Harley, or like the match I had had with Nick Bockwinkel up in Toronto—where you could just put yourself in the hands of the other guy, who was as talented as you were, and not have to worry about a thing. The match was stiff and lacking in drama, and given our unwillingness to include any near-falls, in the end, I think the match was a bit of a disappointment.

Back in the dressing room, Ric and I shook hands, and thanked each other, which was customary after a big match, and that was the end of it. Nothing more was ever said about the controversy that surrounded the match, although perhaps not surprisingly, July 4, 1982, was the last time there was ever a unification match between the NWA and the WWF World Champions. The WWF withdrew from the NWA shortly thereafter, and the war was on.

After the match with Flair, I flew back home, then headed down to Wildwood, New Jersey, with Corki and Carrie for a week on the shore, and I enjoyed some much-needed time off.

After the three-match brawl with Snuka, which featured very little in the way of actual wrestling, Vince Sr. was looking to shift gears and again give the fans a little something different. Bob Orton Jr. was the guy he called on. As I mentioned before, I knew both Bob Jr. (Randy’s father) and his father, Bob Orton Sr., from my time in Florida. Eddie Graham had liked Orton enough to make him the Florida Heavyweight Champion, so I anticipated that he would have talked Orton up to Vince Sr. enough so I would get to do at least a couple and maybe three matches with Orton at the Garden.

The match hadn’t done a great advanced sale at the box office, which probably had more to do with the date, August 2, than with the fans’ response to Orton. New Yorkers tended to escape the heat of the city and head for the shore in early August. Vince Sr. decided to feed Orton to me in a one-and-done match at the Garden, and also called for Orton to submit to the Chickenwing Crossface—a new submission move I had recently debuted.

The Chickenwing Crossface was a fun addition to my matches. Up to that point in my career as champion, I had beaten nearly every challenger I faced with some form of pinning combination—either the atomic kneedrop, the rolling reverse, the inside cradle, or the German suplex. Adding a legitimate-looking submission move was something that made sense for someone like me, who tended to use a lot more wrestling moves in my matches. I had also wanted to do it to add psychological interest to my matches. Now I could “soften up” a challenger’s arm during the early stages of a match, not simply to try and disable it for the purpose of rendering the challenger’s finisher less workable, but to make my own finisher more credible. Applying the Chickenwing Crossface was also pretty dramatic-looking. It was a complicated hold that had never been seen or done before in the history of the WWF—so I was excited to bring that new element to the fans and see how they reacted to it.

Orton and I had a nice match at the Garden full of fast-paced, amateur moves, playing off the television storyline that we had known each other since our high school days in the amateurs (which was not the case). Orton was in shape, and had no problem keeping the pace of the match fast and furious—and we played it up that when I got the upper hand, he got frustrated, which increased my credibility with the fans. He applied his finisher—the “Superplex” (a suplex off the second rope), and then strutted around, cockily jawing at the fans before giving me a lackluster cover in the middle of the ring, which I kicked out of. Eventually, I slipped behind him and applied the Chickenwing Crossface, and the fans reacted to the hold in a way that made it very clear to both Vince Sr. and to me that we had something.

I was very grateful to Orton for putting the hold over like that. I wish we could have extended our series at the Garden, because I really enjoyed wrestling him. He was a perfect match for me, physically, as we were both about the same size and the same shape, and could use just about everything in both of our repertoires. It would have made perfect sense, coming on the heels of three months of brawls with Snuka, to do a Broadway with Orton in our first match—but the timing just didn’t allow for it.

The undercard of that match saw Andre wipe out Blackjack Mulligan in a wild Texas Death Match. That’s the problem with a glut of great heels like we had in the summer of 1982—eventually, you have to start giving the people some clean outcomes so they don’t get frustrated with the booking—and Andre got one here over Mulligan, which really made it impossible for Vince Sr. to then book him into a title match with me the following month. All of this goes back to Snuka, and the fact that, when these three guys were brought into the territory in the early spring of 1982, no one anticipated how “over” Snuka was going to get, which ended up creating a booking logjam that forced Mulligan and Orton into their secondary matches (with Andre and Morales respectively) before either of them got a main-event opportunity with me.

The July 1982 television tapings saw the arrival of “Playboy” Buddy Rose from Don Owen’s Pacific Northwest Territory. Rose exemplified the old saying that you should “not judge a book by its cover.” He was a bleached blonde playboy character who was, even at that time, pretty overweight and utterly lacking in muscular definition, but a legitimately good athlete who had played baseball and hockey, and who could flat out work. Knowing that the fans would prejudge him on his appearance, Vince Sr. and Don Owen conspired to put some heat on Buddy before he ever set foot in a WWF ring, and to create some buzz and fan interest around his arrival. To accomplish that, they filmed some fun television vignettes to announce Buddy’s arrival in the WWF, including shots of him boarding “his” Lear jet, playing hockey with NHL players and baseball with MLB stars, and being followed around everywhere by two female valets who tended to his every need, including taking his robe off when he made his ring entrance.

This led to the natural booking idea of Buddy, having been born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth, wrestling me, the handscrabble, poor Midwestern boy from Minnesota. Vince Sr. knew that the largely blue-collar and middle class fans of the WWF’s big cities would instantly relate to that storyline, and would relish the opportunity to watch the coddled rich guy get his shoulder ripped apart by the Chickenwing Crossface.

Buddy and I had some great matches together. He was a very agile worker with a lot of great moves, and given how athletic he was, we could do just about anything in the ring together, which really allowed us to put together entertaining matches for the fans. He was also willing to do anything for the match and the storyline, including submitting at the end of most of our matches. Many heels were reluctant to do that, because it is such a decisive victory that it steals a lot of a heel’s heat. But Buddy didn’t care about that. He understood the storyline and knew that it would really get the people amped up to see him forced into that position—and the people responded. All you need to do is listen to the roar of the crowd at Madison Square Garden at the end of our match in August 1982 when Buddy submits to the Chickenwing, and you’ll see what I mean. I think Buddy was probably my most “underrated” challenger in terms of the fans’ expectations—I doubt there were many people who saw one of our matches who left the arena disappointed.

As was usually the case, September represented a new “season” in the wrestling business. With the kids back in school, parents settled back into their school-year routines, and everybody back around to watch the television shows on weekends, it was time to roll out the next big angle.

The September television taping in Allentown, Pennsylvania, saw the return of “Superstar” Billy Graham—the man I had beaten for the championship now almost five years earlier. But the Billy Graham who returned to the WWF in 1982 was not the same man who defeated “The Living Legend” Bruno Sammartino to become the federation’s seventh world champion, and who had thrilled crowds around the territory for most of 1977. I hadn’t seen much of Billy since he left the territory in 1978, and frankly, like most of the rest of the locker room, I was shocked by his appearance upon his return. Gone was the hulking physique, the rippling muscles, the deep tan, the tie-dye, and the flowing blonde hair that had made Billy such a sensation with the fans. Gone too was the confident, cocky attitude, and the easy manner on the microphone. What appeared instead was a much thinner and less muscular Billy Graham, with a bald head, karate pants, and a mustache. He was pained and tentative, noticeably less confident, and a shadow of his former self. People were actually wondering whether Billy was seriously ill.

Graham was still managed by the Grand Wizard, but this time with a karate gimmick that didn’t make a lot of sense and never really got over with the fans. Meanwhile, at the same time, Vince Sr. had decided that he wanted to get a new, bigger world title belt (the big green one)—which I didn’t like at all. I was used to wearing the one that Bruno and I had worn for years. That one fit comfortably between the top of my trunks and the bottom of my ring jacket, which allowed it to be seen when I entered the ring, but didn’t make it hard to walk while wearing it. The big green belt wasn’t comfortable, and I also didn’t think it looked nearly as good as the smaller one that Bruno and I had worn before.

Going to a new belt wasn’t my choice, but once Vince decided that was what he was going to do—since we knew that something dramatic had to be done to create heat for Graham anyway—we decided to have Graham come out during a televised match that I was having with Swede Hansen, grab the WWF championship belt, and claim that I had “stolen” the belt from him. Graham would then interfere in my match, “knock me out” with the belt, and then proceed to smash it to pieces on the concrete floor claiming that if he couldn’t have the belt, “nobody could.”

The angle, which seemed so promising on paper when we discussed it, fell flat when we did it. First, Graham just didn’t seem nearly as threatening with his body looking like it had wilted away like an un-watered plant. Billy had battled depression and addiction during the years after he left the WWWF in 1978, which forced him to stop taking steroids. Getting off the juice, of course, was an incredibly positive step in the right direction for his physical health, but it had also hurt his look—and losing his look had a serious effect on his confidence. The loss of his look and his confidence then led to a serious effect on his mental health. It was a very tough downward spiral for Billy, and one that everyone reading this should think about. I know that if Billy Graham was sitting here today, he’d want to warn all the young kids out there not to make the choices he made, and what those choices ultimately did to his health and to the quality of his life.

I respected Billy for trying to get off the steroids, and I encouraged him as much as I could, but Billy and I were never that close. Billy and I didn’t have any real heat, but I think he always resented me as the “child” who cut short his run with the title, so there really wasn’t much that I could say that would get through to him. Billy’s problem was that he had created his own prison. The “Superstar” Billy Graham character had gotten over with the fans because of his superhuman appearance—but that superhuman appearance wasn’t sustainable. Steroids give you big muscles and the big muscles give you big confidence—but it’s all artificial. When I worked out at the gym, the muscles and muscular definition that I got was a direct consequence of my diet and exercise, and nothing more. Billy’s muscular definition depended on the supplements he was taking.

Don’t get me wrong, Billy Graham worked out very hard at the gym, and he took his weight training as seriously as anyone in the business—but the problem was that the results he had gotten were muscles supported by chemicals, and that’s what the people had grown accustomed to seeing. When you stop taking the chemicals, you can’t lift the same weights, and even if you put in the same effort, your muscles don’t respond the same way and you don’t get the same look—and when that happens, the confidence that you once had goes with it. The Billy Graham who returned to the WWF in 1982 wasn’t the “Superstar” who had beaten Bruno Sammartino in 1977, and who I’d beaten for the championship in 1978. Graham knew it—and his interviews did not have the power and the confidence that they had back in 1977 and 1978.

Second, Graham’s effort to destroy the belt on television actually failed. He repeatedly smashed it against the concrete floor and then unsuccessfully tried to rip the metal plate off the plastic backing. For Graham, a strongman-type character, to be unable to tear a metal piece off of a rubber backing made him look weak, and made the entire angle look ridiculous.

My part in the angle didn’t come off very well either. I was supposed to have been battered by both Hansen and Graham, so after Graham “knocked me out” with the belt, I couldn’t just jump right up, go out of the ring, and express outrage over what had happened. I needed to appear groggy from the attack I had just sustained—so I crawled out of the ring, collapsed onto the pieces of the belt, and just screamed “Why!?” over and over again. I thought it was okay when I was doing it live, but the way the whole thing came out on tape made me look weak.

To be honest, though, the bad kickoff angle was the least of our problems once Billy and I started wrestling around the horn. The bigger problem was that Billy really couldn’t get up and down much anymore because his hips were so badly damaged from the years of steroid abuse, and his limited wind allowed him to go only ten or fifteen minutes before he blew up and became visibly gassed. So all of that had to be managed as we went around the territory.

Graham had been promised three title matches at the Garden. Because Vince Sr. was a man of his word, Vince Sr. honored that promise to Billy. As a consequence, though, all of our matches at the Garden were shorter than necessary to really draw in the crowd, because Billy’s physical condition limited both his offensive repertoire, which had never been huge to begin with, and his ability to take bumps in the ring, which had once been his greatest in-ring strength. Despite all of these problems, our Garden matches still drew pretty well. The first of these was on October 4, 1982, where, the premise was that I was so angry over what Billy had done to the championship belt that we brawled for twelve minutes before I got disqualified for manhandling the referee and refusing to break a chokehold.

We came back for the return match at the Garden in November 1982 and agreed to just go at it again in an all-out brawl for as long as we could, and then take the match right back into the dressing room with the premise that we were going to blow off with a lumberjack match the following month.

We came back with the lumberjack blowoff match at the Garden in December 1982, which had the added attraction of the first-ever “heel” guest referee—the same Swede Hansen I had been wrestling on television when Graham attacked me to start the feud. That was done to add a little intrigue to the match, and to make the fans wonder if I was somehow going to be robbed of the belt by a heel referee.

Although I didn’t have too many of them, I liked lumberjack matches—it was fun to use the guys outside to help develop the match—especially in a match against a guy like Billy who, at that point in his career, needed the help. As a consequence, I spent the majority of the match letting Graham throw me out of every side of the ring and use the lumberjacks outside to work me over, while Graham got to stay inside the ring to work the fans and preserve his wind. I was hoping that by doing that, we could extend the in-ring time of our blowoff match by a few minutes to build it up a little better. Billy was hurting pretty badly that night, though, so we were even more limited than usual in what we could do.

We teased some false finishes with Hansen doing his part in the drama of the match by giving Graham an extremely fast count when he had my shoulders down on the mat, but giving me an eternally slow count when I had Billy down in a winning combination. That little gimmick also helped us to get the crowd going.

When Billy could only hold me up in the “Superstar Bearhug”—his former finisher—for a few seconds, I knew we had to go home, so we went right from there to the finish, with me applying the Chickenwing Crossface at the twelve-minute mark. It was a nice finish that Vince Sr. had chosen—with Hansen having no discretion to count fast or slow, and being left with no choice but to call the match and ring Billy out in what would end up being one of the shortest title defenses of my career.

I knew that Billy was still angry about the switch in 1978, that he legitimately didn’t respect me as the champion, and that he didn’t want me to be where I was. That was hard for me, given how hard I had worked both to get to be the champion, and after I became champion. I had hoped my hard work would have changed his view of me, but apparently, it hadn’t. This was the man whose brief words to me in the YMCA in Fargo, North Dakota, in 1972 had pushed me to become a professional wrestler. I had a lot of respect for Billy’s ability to work a crowd and work the microphone, and talk people into the seats. I appreciated the fact that when he had been asked to put me over for the belt at the Garden in 1978, even though he opposed the move with every ounce of his being, he had still done so professionally without underselling my offense or doing anything else to make me look bad, and that he had subsequently worked hard in all our rematches around the territory. Billy had been a man ahead of his time, and a real visionary in the profession that many guys, most notably Jesse Ventura and Hulk Hogan, went on to emulate. I felt bad for what had happened to him—although in some ways, I was happy for him, because at least he wasn’t taking the steroids anymore.

What was really alarming, though, is that not being on steroids had changed his look and every aspect of his life. He was a completely different person. There is no doubt that the drugs had propelled Graham to stardom, and had given him all the notoriety, but at what price?

Meanwhile, promoters in other cities around the territory were also reacting negatively to Billy’s look and new gimmick. In Boston, on November 6, 1982, the promoters abandoned plans for a first match and put Billy and me right into a cage match blowoff without any initial development of our feud. In Baltimore, after our first match in October, 1982, ended inconclusively when I was disqualified for hitting the referee after about ten minutes, the promoters decided not to schedule a return match, but instead, to have a battle royal the following month with the winner to get the world title match with me. In Philadelphia, promoter Phil Zacko skipped Graham entirely—opting to give an extra main event to “Playboy” Buddy Rose, and then passing over Graham and moving right on to the returning “Magnificent” Muraco.

It was a sad end for Billy—who had meant so much to the Federation, and to our sport in general. It was very clear to me that the premise of our feud was a good one—but it was an angle and a feud that should have happened a couple of years earlier when Billy was still in good physical shape and still had his “look.” Had this angle been tried in 1980 or 1981, it almost certainly would have been a big hit with the fans.

Meanwhile, the October 1982 television tapings saw the return of the “Magnificent” Muraco and the arrival of Ray “The Crippler” Stevens. Stevens had been Pat Patterson’s partner out in Roy Shire’s San Francisco territory for a lot of years, and Patterson, who was now doing the color commentary on the WWF’s Championship Wrestling and All-Star Wrestling television programs with Vince McMahon Jr., had been instrumental in convincing Ray to come East for a run in the WWF. Stevens was, at that point, approaching legendary status in the business. He was a terrific in-ring talent who understood how to develop a match, tell a great story, and get over with the fans. Outside the ring, he was also a great storyteller. Stevens came in to much fanfare (assisted, in large part, by his old partner Patterson on television), as the master of a “crippling” piledriver that Stevens claimed had been “banned” in several states and, according to Patterson, had put countless people out of wrestling. In a memorable television interview with a visually disgusted Vince Jr., Stevens, who was managed and accompanied by fellow West Coast legend Freddie Blassie, announced that he “would cripple my own grandmother if there was money in it.”

Shortly thereafter, in a segment of Buddy Rogers’ Corner televised on Championship Wrestling, Rogers interviewed Stevens and Blassie. and Stevens produced a check and challenged Snuka to a match on television. Although seemingly heel versus heel, the purpose of this match was to turn Snuka face, and to ignite a feud with Snuka that would provide another main-event feud that could headline a building when I was elsewhere.

Naturally, Snuka accepted the challenge, and the “match” was scheduled for Championship Wrestling. The match, of course, never began because its real purpose was to allow Captain Lou Albano to attack Snuka, who was being restrained by Stevens. Then Stevens threw Snuka out onto the arena floor (which had been pre-treated with some spilled water) and piledrived him twice into the concrete. Snuka, who had already bladed while getting attacked by Albano in the ring, then bled into the spilled water, making the entire spectacle look like a murder scene. Snuka was then stretchered out of the arena.

At the November 22, 1982, Garden card, Stevens put the piledriver on his next victim—Chief Jay Strongbow—and beat the Chief in under a minute, after which the Chief was likewise stretchered out of the Garden to the horror of the fans. Vince Sr. was really pushing Stevens in an attempt to get him over as a monster heel, and I’m sure that Jay thought they were getting Stevens set up for something pretty big if they asked him to put Stevens over that strongly.

Stevens and I had our first main-event title match out in Harrisburg at the Zembo Mosque a couple of days after Thanksgiving, on November 26, 1982, and surprisingly it didn’t draw well. It felt very strange to be wrestling Ray Stevens in the WWF because I had grown up watching him in the AWA. He’d been around a long time by then, and although he had slowed down some and didn’t have as much fire as he once had, I was truly honored to have the opportunity to be in the ring with such a legendary talent.

Although Ray was one of the best workers in the business, he was short and not particularly well-defined muscularly. The people I’d had the great fortune to work against in the territory over the prior year and a half were a combination of great workers or monsters (or both) so it took a lot for a heel, particularly an unknown heel who had not appeared in the territory before, to measure up in the eyes of the fans. At that point in his career, Ray Stevens, even with his piledriver and his “crippling” of the Superfly, just didn’t move the fans in the same way that Stan Hansen or Sergeant Slaughter or Don Muraco had.

Both Vince Sr. and I wanted Stevens to get over so we could do a longer program with him. Shortly after the match in Harrisburg, I wrestled Stevens again at the television tapings in Allentown because Vince wanted to see Stevens in person and understand why our match, which looked so good on paper, wasn’t drawing the fans’ interest. The same thing happened in Allentown that had happened in Harrisburg—although the match was good from a technical and artistic standpoint, Stevens, with his short stature and pudgy physique just didn’t strike fear into the hearts of the fans. Although Stevens had been a huge success all over California, in Minneapolis, and in virtually every other territory he had appeared in, he was passed over for main-event title matches at the Garden, the Spectrum, and many of the territory’s other primary buildings, and ended up feuding with Snuka for the remainder of his time in the territory.

Buddy Rose was the primary beneficiary of the problems with both Graham’s and Stevens’ anticipated title runs, because he had outperformed expectations and, as a consequence, ended up getting more main-event dates with me around the territory. It was ironic that the glut of heel challengers we had faced not six months earlier had vaporized—and now, with a sudden lack of heel challengers, promoters were forced to schedule me into additional matches with Rose, or to hold a battle royal with the winner to receive a world title match. The battle royal gimmick often had the effect of drawing a curiosity crowd, since the people thought they might get the opportunity to see something novel and unexpected.

Meanwhile, at the November television tapings, a new monster heel in the person of the six-foot-ten-inch, 364-pound Big John Studd made his “first” appearance, and started to take the territory by storm. I put “first” in quotes because Big John Studd, whose real name was John Minton, had previously wrestled in the WWWF as the Masked Executioner #2, and had actually been the first man I ever faced and defeated at Madison Square Garden.

As 1982 ended, the booking began to stabilize, and I looked ahead to the new year, and what, as it would turn out, would be a year of recycled challengers, political turmoil, disappointing bookings, and ultimately, the end of my reign as the WWF champion.

Saturday, July 3	Atlanta, GAWTBS studios TV
Sunday, July 4	Atlanta, GAWTBS studios TV
Sunday, July 4	Atlanta, GAOmni