Backlund

Eager to get back into a knowingly profitable series of matches, many of the promoters around the territory looked to recapture old magic by starting the new year booking title matches between me and the newly returned “Magnificent” Muraco.

Since our historic series of matches in 1981, Don had split his time between the mid-Atlantic and Georgia areas, and had also done some tours of Japan, but returned to the territory retaining his rugged look and exceptional ring skills. Needless to say, I was thrilled to see him return to the territory, and we immediately started a series of matches in Boston, Pittsburgh, Hartford, and Landover—places that had passed up long series with Graham and Stevens.

At the Garden, however, on January 22, 1983, I faced the challenge of Big John Studd. Since Vince Sr. had sidestepped booking me into “big man” world title matches with Blackjack Mulligan in 1982 and Hulk Hogan in 1980 to leave those guys unscathed for their matchups with Andre, I had not faced a true “giant” at the Garden since Ernie Ladd in 1978.

Coming into the match, Studd was promising the people on television that he would not just beat me, but to hurt me so badly he would retire me from the world of professional wrestling. Even Vince McMahon Jr., in our pre-match promotional interviews, warned that notwithstanding my many victories over formidable men at the Garden over the past five years, people were calling Studd the “prohibitive favorite” in the bout.

I hope nobody actually took McMahon’s advice and laid money on the challenger that night.

Because of Studd’s size and girth, there wasn’t a whole lot that I could realistically do with him in the ring. It’s not like I could throw credible armdrags and hiptosses and dropkicks at a guy who stood six feet ten inches tall. Further, unlike Ernie Ladd, Studd was not particularly agile, and wasn’t the kind of big man who could quickly get up and down a lot in our match. When we met with Vince Sr. in the dressing room before the match, Vince Sr. called for me to go over Studd by pinfall with a quick leverage move that would be made to look like a total fluke. That way, Studd would look like he could have handled me easily, and as such, would still be strong for his upcoming summer series with Andre.

As John and I had not met in the ring since 1977, we retreated into the bathroom, reminisced a little bit about that night, and then quickly set about to working out a few things that we wanted to do in the ring, including what kind of move would work for the kind of finish that Vince Sr. was looking for. John came up with the idea of catching me in his finishing hold, the over-the-shoulder backbreaker, clamping it on, and making it look like I had no choice but to surrender the title, before he stumbled a little too close to the ropes which would allow me to use the top rope to kick myself off of his shoulder and backdrop him while holding onto his legs into a quick pinning combination that would knock the wind out of him, causing him to roll out a split second too late.

Since John was going to be holding onto me rather than spreading the impact of that move across a wider area of his body when he hit the mat, that was a very big, and largely unprotected bump for a 364-pound guy like Studd to take. It was inevitable that he was going to hit the mat pretty hard on the way down with my 234 pounds on top of him. I had been thinking of some kind of simpler and much less dramatic leverage move down on the mat, so John’s willingness to take that big bump for the good of the match and to put me over in that way was very generous of him.

We needed to make sure that my win was both credible and flukey—just a quick and clever little leverage move that would allow me to get past Studd, but leave him with all of his heat for his future series with Andre. The plan we hatched in the bathroom was for John to block everything I tried to do to him and to just pound on me and totally dominate the match—because, in reality, how would it be any other way? Studd had me by eight inches in height and more than 130 pounds, so the only way to make this match look legitimate and leave Studd with his heat was to have him totally and completely manhandle me for the whole match prior to the finish. I had to be the underdog with no way to win—except to survive what Studd threw at me and hope he would make one mistake that I could capitalize on and catch him with … and that’s exactly the way the match came off.

It was a shocking and sudden ending to the match less than eight minutes in, but I think it made sense both to the storyline of the match, and for the overall quality of the event. In reality, John had been working hard from the opening bell beating on me and pouring on the offense—and at 364 pounds, he wasn’t someone who was going to deliver a lot of quality output fifteen minutes into a match, so we were thinking that a high-quality match with a quick and fluky finish, coupled with my quick escape back to the dressing room with the belt while he screamed at the referee, was the way to go.

I think the fans at the Garden bought into it. Studd and I did a few more turns around the territory in Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and in a few of the towns in upstate New York—but a lot of the cities stayed away from this match, opting instead to keep Studd fresh and unscathed before putting him in the ring with Andre.

Meanwhile, on the undercard of my match with Studd at the Garden, for the second time in three years, Don Muraco stripped Pedro Morales of the Intercontinental Heavyweight Championship. Don had done very well in his previous run with the Intercontinental title, both in the ring and at the box office, when he held the belt for six months in 1981. He still looked tremendous and had a couple of years more experience, so shortly after his return to the territory, Vince Sr. had opted to have him go over Pedro again and reclaim the number-two spot in the federation. Once Muraco had the Intercontinental title, it was a natural thing to declare him the number-one contender and to again set him up for a matchup with me.

Muraco was, by that point, enough of a draw that he could headline smaller to midsize venues by himself against a credible contender for the Intercontinental Championship. The office was starting to do two-a-days much more often, especially in smaller venues during the week, so with Muraco holding the Intercontinental heavyweight championship, they could put Muraco in there against popular babyfaces like Snuka, Rocky Johnson, Tony Atlas, Ivan Putski, or Mil Mascaras at the top of a card in one building, and me and a top heel on the top of the card in another building, and run two successful shows on the same night. You need a reliable guy who can also draw consistently to be able to pull that off, and Muraco fit that bill perfectly.

Many of the promoters around the territory who opted to stay away from a Backlund-Studd main event in their buildings went right to Muraco even before he had taken the Intercontinental Heavyweight Championship back from Pedro. Don and I had drawn so well everywhere we went in the territory back in 1981 that the promoters, some of whom had experienced some raggedness in their booking and softness in their gates since my series with Snuka ended, were anxious to get back to something reliable. Boston, Landover, and Pittsburgh are just three of the towns I remember that launched directly into a series with Muraco even before it had the allure of a champion versus champion encounter.

At the Garden, however, which, of course, was the WWF’s marquee arena and where everything was done in a more “orderly” fashion, Muraco and I had our first bout in February 1983, which was champion versus champion. Vince knew that another Backlund-Muraco feud would, as it had in the past, provide box-office gold, so right out of the chutes, it was decided that I would be disqualified in that first match to set up a Texas Death rematch at the Garden for the March 1983 card.

As always, our match generated tremendous interest and crowd reaction. Muraco was one of the most credible heel challengers I faced as WWF champion—and I think it is fair to say that after watching him pin the formerly unbeatable Pedro Morales not once but twice in the span of two years—the fans definitely believed that Muraco had the goods to strip me of the WWF World Heavyweight Championship as well. The first match ended when I had the Chickenwing Crossface on Muraco, we got tangled in the ropes, and the referee disqualified me for refusing to break the hold.

The beginning of March brought the first really definitive signs of the coming changes. On March 5 and March 6, we made our first trip out west for full WWF cards based in San Diego and Los Angeles, California. Mike LeBell’s Los Angeles–based territory had just folded, and Vince Jr. saw an opportunity—so we flew out there and rented cars and ran a couple of test cards. I wrestled West Coast guys in the main events on each of the cards out there (Ray Stevens at the San Diego Sports Arena and Buddy Rose in Los Angeles) so fans would at least be familiar with the challengers. We also used some of the local talent from out there to fill out the cards—but even with that, and a fair amount of promotion, the buildings were each less than half full. This again pointed to the critical importance of having local television to familiarize the fans with the wrestlers and the angles.

Elsewhere around the territory, the expansion was also underway—except that expansion meant running two or more cards almost every night of the week, and splitting the roster to fulfill those dates. That made Muraco an even more important player, because when he and I were not wrestling each other in the larger arenas, or part of the six-man, eight-man, and even ten-man tag-team matches that the promoters were experimenting with in 1983, we were nearly always split up to headline different cards on the same night. Doing that meant that each venue got a title match, either with me defending the World Heavyweight Championship, or with Muraco defending the Intercontinental Heavyweight Championship. As I have mentioned before—to be a main eventer in the WWF, you needed to be a reliable guy who could be counted on to show up on time, in shape to wrestle, and possess the skills to bring the people to the box office. Muraco could check all three of those boxes, so he was the man chosen to carry the other end of the WWF banner with me as we expanded the territory in 1983.

Our series at the Garden culminated in a Texas Death Match in our second bout of the series in a rare Sunday matinee on March 20, 1983. I was a little surprised that Vince Sr. chose to end that series after two bouts, rather than stretching it to the full three match series this time. When we wrestled at the Garden in August and September 1981, the August match was our first sixty-minute Broadway, and the September match was a Texas Death Match—and we then wrestled a whole series of matches all over the territory, from Broadways to cage matches, to Texas Death Matches, banging out buildings for almost the entire time that Don was in the territory. So I was looking forward to the chance to go three with Muraco at the Garden, but it was not to be.

The other thing was that when we got together in the ring, as we had proved in 1981, Don and I actually liked to wrestle. We didn’t really need the gimmick of the Texas Death Match to get the match over with the fans—we could do it just by virtue of the fact that we were wrestling in a title versus title match and by building the drama of the match through chain wrestling. On top of that, Dick Kroll (the referee that night), normally the fed’s top guy, had an off night and forgot that the match was a Texas Death Match. He broke chokes and counted when we were out of the ring—to the point that we had to actually remind him about halfway through the match that it was actually a Texas Death Match and to stop counting.

But the match was billed as a Texas Death Match, so we had to give the fans something that qualified—so near the end of the match, I threw Don into the ringpost and he bladed a gusher and bled all over the place, and sold the blood loss for the rest of the match as having weakened him severely. From there, we went into a series of false finishes, with me catching him in an over the shoulder backbreaker, Don backflipping out of it and backdropping me into a pinning combination in the middle of the ring, me bridging out of it and putting him in the Chickenwing Crossface, Don kicking off the ropes, and me giving Don a German suplex into a bridge for the pin. That little sequence was something that we had worked on. We had wanted to make it like the end of a fireworks show—emptying the bag with everything we had to throw at each other—where ultimately, Don’s blood loss weakened him enough for me to get the three count on a suplex and bridge.

It was a great finish to a great match that I think the fans really enjoyed. I wish we could have gone three at the Garden—especially given the way the rest of that summer’s bookings went. We sold out the Garden and the Felt Forum for the Texas Death Match that Sunday afternoon, and I remember hearing in the dressing room that there were hundreds of people milling around outside who wanted to buy a ticket but couldn’t get in! I think that pretty clearly demonstrated that Muraco and I had again struck a chord with the fans in New York, and could easily have filled that building for a third time.

Tremendous Humility

In 1983, when I came back and carried the Intercontinental Championship again, we often had two crews running different shows on the same night, and Bob had one crew and I had the other. I had a lot of heat on me at the time, so I just tried to read the newspapers and watch TV and try to keep current with pop culture so I could keep my interviews sharp, but the WWF was already expanding then, and there was a lot of talent, so it wasn’t really so much just me and him anymore, there were a lot of people we could rely on to draw.

I think the main thing to say about Bob was just how professional he was in everything he did inside the ring and outside, and the way he represented our profession. He always wore a suit and tie when he traveled, he always traveled alone, watched his diet, and he always did the right things. You know, back in those days we were always heavy kayfabe, so we never really had the chance to get real close. He seldom came out after the matches—most of the time, he drove home to be with his family. I got to know Bob best over in Japan. We went on a tour together over there, and so I got to know him better from being in the dressing rooms and on the busses with him, and running around working out and having a few beers with him after the matches over there when he could let his hair down a little bit more.

For the era we were in, Bob was different from everybody else. What you saw was what you got. He was an honest, hardworking, simple guy who had tremendous humility, a big heart, and who always just worked his ass off. I was proud to have had the chance to work with him, and to have had the matches we did. I was proud of the way he represented the business for me, because I wasn’t exactly what you would call a role model for others. He was the consummate pro. I just have the utmost respect for the man.

—Don Muraco

I remember that day at the Garden well—because I showered after the match and drove back to Glastonbury—but not to my home. I was doing double-duty that day. After the matinee at the Garden, I was main-eventing a benefit card in my home town at Glastonbury High School that night against Ray “The Crippler” Stevens—marking the first time that I had wrestled in front of my hometown crowd since Mad Dog Vachon back in Princeton at the beginning of my career.

The April 1983 television tapings saw the return of another one of my favorite opponents—Sergeant Slaughter. Knowing that Slaughter would be one of my primary opponents in the territory throughout the summer, we wanted to do something that would generate some real heat between us right away. I came up with the idea of attempting to do the Harvard Step Test—a challenge of strength and endurance where you step up and down on a step—on television for an hour, and having Sarge come out somewhere late in the hour, criticize my performance, and then attack me and whip me with his riding crop while I was in a weakened physical state.

Given that Sarge had actually been a drill instructor in the United States Marines Corps, he was the perfect person to do this with. Sarge did a lot of great things in his career, but whipping me like a dog on television was definitely one of those memorable moments that everyone still remembers thirty years later—and was one of those high points that propelled him to superstardom as a heel. Of course, Sarge was straight out of central casting—he looked more like a drill sergeant than an actual drill sergeant did—but more than that, he was a fantastic performer in the ring.

Sarge was also a terrific guy outside of the ring, and he was actually very nervous about this angle because he wanted no part of legitimately hitting me with the whip. I that we needed to legitimize our feud in the eyes of the fans so we could set the world on fire across the territory that summer. I reassured him, repeatedly, that I wanted him to hit me as hard as he could with that whip to make sure that it raised welts on my body that the people could instantly see on television—and still see later when we took the match out on the road. Sarge absolutely hated the idea of doing that to me, so I pretty much had to tell him that if he didn’t hit me hard enough with it to make the angle work, that I would take the thing away from him and do it to him.

Whipping the Champ

I asked Bob if he had ever been whipped by a riding crop, and of course, he said, “No,” and I said, “Well, it’s going to hurt and leave marks on you,” but he was intent on making that attack look as realistic as he could, so he said, “We only have one shot at it, let’s make it count!” Well, he was about fifty-seven minutes into the Harvard Step Test and his skin was sweating a lot and just primed for that riding crop. I felt bad every time I hit him with it because he was up on his tiptoes and I knew that it had to hurt, but he was all about making that angle a winner.

—Sergeant Slaughter

As it turned out, unlike the debacle with Graham, this was a hugely successful angle on television—maybe the best one I ever did. Although I had to reassure Sarge right up to the moment that I went out to start the Harvard Step Test, he did actually hit me with the whip as hard as he could, and that thing hurt like heck when it bit into my skin again and again. Some of the strikes went deep enough into the skin to draw blood, and I had those marks on me for a couple of weeks or maybe longer. Whenever I took my shirt off in the gym or in the arena, the people could see that the marks were real—and that made the whole thing take off and lent credibility to the angle, although Corki was madder than heck that I agreed to let someone do that to me.

Slaughter’s look and his personality, coupled with the fact that his finisher—the Cobra Clutch—had again gotten totally over with the fans, really made the whole thing work. Ours became a really hot feud, and we milked it all over the territory all summer. We needed it, too, because with Vince Jr. taking over the business from his father, the flow of new heels from the NWA territories into the WWF had slowed considerably, and there weren’t as many new guys around for me to wrestle.

Meanwhile, at the Garden in April, I faced the challenge of another returning heel—“The Russian Bear” Ivan Koloff. Koloff was another guy with a lot of history in the business, and a lot of miles already logged in WWF rings. He, of course, was the man who beat Bruno at the Garden in 1972 to end Bruno’s first and seemingly insurmountable nine-year reign as WWF champion, which, of course, gave Koloff a lot of credibility with the fans. Because Koloff had beaten Bruno, who many thought to be invincible, the fans figured he was capable of beating me too, and that was something that put people in the seats.

Koloff had significantly slimmed down from the 300-pound strongman he was in the 1970s to a 240-pound wrestling machine. Although we were booked as one-and-done in most places during this series in 1983, my matches with Ivan tended to be lengthier than most of my other challengers because Koloff was a master of chain wrestling, we could start slow and build and tell the story that way. Our matches were very credible, and were among the best and most satisfying of my career. They were also a nice diversion from the matches with Slaughter that were happening at the same time—because the series with Slaughter was more of a feud, and as such, featured more brawling than wrestling.

At the Garden, I beat Koloff with the Chickenwing Crossface after about thirty minutes of really solid wrestling in what was one of the best technical matches I ever had in that building. In other arenas around the territory, Ivan and I wrestled for as long as forty-five minutes before calling for the finish. We were having a great time, and in most of the places we wrestled, we had the fans on the edges of their seats simply by featuring old-school mat and chain wrestling. It was great to see that the fans had learned to appreciate that kind of old-school, psychology-driven wrestling match.

By contrast, my two matches with the Sarge at the Garden were total brawling affairs almost from bell to bell—which is not to say that the matches were any less compelling to the fans. He was a terrific worker with tremendous agility for a big man. He was also 100 percent about the match, all the time—which made him a real pleasure to work with. In our first match at the Garden in May 1983, I caught Sarge in the Chickenwing, and he grabbed the whip from the Grand Wizard, who was at ringside and started whipping me with it, causing the referee to declare a disqualification.

Ordinarily, a challenger getting disqualified would be a booking tool to get him out of a championship series with me without having to get beaten cleanly. It was usually a tool used to keep someone strong for a later series—often with Andre. In this case, however, it was a finish that allowed me to demand the rematch, even though technically Sarge was no longer the number-one contender after losing the match by disqualification. On television, much was made of this point, and of the fact that I might be “losing my cool” a little bit by demanding a rematch with such a dangerous challenger—and that the fact that Sarge had gotten under my skin might prove to be my undoing.

The booking worked great—as the Garden was again full for our rematch in June, which had all the makings of a Pier Six brawl. That match was likewise booked to end inconclusively, with me getting counted out after Slaughter clotheslined me off the ring apron with the Slaughter Cannon after I had been distracted by the referee. This time, however, the blowoff Texas Death Match between Slaughter and me was set for the Meadowlands Arena in East Rutherford, New Jersey, which provides you with the answer to the oft-asked trivia question—who was the only one of my challengers I never defeated cleanly at the Garden? Despite two series against Sarge in 1980 and 1983, he was the only heel that I faced for the championship that I never defeated. We did, however, completely sell out the Meadowlands for that Texas Death Match, where I finally got that elusive pin over the Sarge.

The middle of 1983 was a time of transition in the office, and it definitely showed in some of the bookings around the territory. Things began to feel less planned and less organized as Vince Sr. started to loosen his grip. Whereas bookings around the territory used to follow a clearly set schedule and matches and challengers followed a more predictable order, now we were traveling to places that we had never been before and running two or sometimes even three cards a day, and as a consequence, the overall quality of the cards started to diminish.

I faced a strange array of challengers to the title in the summer of 1983, from the expected matches against Muraco, Koloff, and Slaughter in the larger arenas, to other, less plausible matches against Afa, Mr. Fuji, and Iron Mike Sharpe in some of the smaller towns. I think the theory was that simply getting the world champion and a world title match would be enough to draw a house—but as I have always said, it takes two to tango, and it didn’t make a whole lot of sense to the fans to see Mr. Fuji getting a title match against me when he had lost a mid-card match in the town a month or two before. That is not to take anything away from Mr. Fuji’s ability to put on a great match—it’s simply a commentary on the fact that the match wouldn’t necessarily be a great box office draw in advance of the card.

Around that time same time, a twenty-two year-old kid by the name of Eddie Gilbert, another second-generation wrestler, had just arrived in the territory. Vince Sr. approached me at the television taping where Eddie debuted and asked me if I would mentor him a little bit by taking him under my wing, train with him, and keep my eye on him out on the road. Naturally, because Vince Sr. was asking, I agreed, and set about to show Eddie the right way to live his life and do the things a young wrestler needed to do to work his way up the ladder. I didn’t know at the time why Vince Sr. was asking, but as I would soon find out, Eddie had already taken some shortcuts.

I made time for Eddie, worked out with him, and showed him how to diet to keep his body in top form. Then, one night in Salisbury, Maryland, he was scheduled to wrestle in a singles bout and he was so goofed out on drugs that his opponent had to carry him through the entire match. A few minutes in, I went down to the ring, threw Eddie over my shoulder, and carried him back to the dressing room because he was such an embarrassment. I was furious with him—and when I confronted him about it, he wouldn’t look me in the eye, and he wouldn’t even admit that he was doing drugs.

That’s what the wrestling business can do to you—it can eat you alive if you let it.

I didn’t enjoy working with Gilbert not only because was he not doing things the right way, but because he didn’t even want to acknowledge he had a problem. I think Vince was hoping that my example would rub off on him, but Gilbert was already caught up in the rat race as young as he was in 1983. Once that happened, and once I realized that he wasn’t willing to even acknowledge that he had a problem, I didn’t care to be around him anymore.

I didn’t even have to tell Vince about what had happened—he had already heard about it from Phil Zacko—the promoter that night. Someone from the front office was in charge of every building where we appeared, and would report in to Vince Sr. either at the end of the night or the next morning. Even though Vince Sr. wasn’t out on the road other than at the Garden, he knew everything that went on at the matches, from how big the gate was, to who no-showed, to what matches got the best crowd reaction, from the agent on duty. Anything out of the ordinary would be reported.

Shortly after that, Eddie was involved in a horrific car accident after a television taping in May in Allentown, during which he suffered serious neck and chest injuries. That also happened to be the same night that Jimmy Snuka’s girlfriend was found dead at the motel where the boys were staying. Needless to say, that was a long and tragic night for a lot of people, and the weeks that followed were a pretty tough time for the business. After the car accident, Eddie had to recuperate for nearly four months, and didn’t return to the circuit until the fall.

We made our second collective trip out to California, again for matches in Los Angeles and San Diego on July 2 and 3. We flew commercial—everybody just flew to LAX from wherever they were on the circuit at the time. Since I had wrestled in upstate New York the day before—I had driven home that night and flew out from Hartford the next day and then rented a car to use in California.

Once again, the cards were a mix of people who had wrestled in the promotions out on the West Coast, and our guys. I main-evented the buildings on both nights, against Sarge in Los Angeles, and against Koloff in San Diego. We drew much better crowds this second time around, and it was exciting to be bringing our brand of wrestling to a new audience. When you’re wrestling in an unfamiliar place, you don’t really do anything any differently—you just develop the storylines the same way and draw the people in.

Back in those days, we didn’t need scriptwriters or long televised vignettes. We could get people to love us or hate us just by being a good worker in the ring, and doing things we knew would draw the fans into the match. Given enough time in the ring on a given night, a gifted worker could get the people whether or not the person had any television exposure beforehand. The people would tell you what your next move should be, and the direction you should take the match. You can’t script or choreograph the next thing you should do in a wrestling match–because you can’t plan how the crowd is going to react to a certain move. You have to be able to listen to what the people are telling you, react, and then reflect that back at them without them knowing you are doing it. That’s the art of professional wrestling—and I’m afraid that art is passing into history with my generation of wrestlers—the last group of guys who actually know how to do this and are capable of teaching it to the next generation.

During the summer of 1983, as soon as school let out, we had another of the regular biannual visits from George “The Animal” Steele. Just as he had done so many times previously, Steele took about one television taping to get his wild-man gimmick “over” with the fans. At the June Garden card where Sarge had beaten me by countout, Steele had mauled Chief Jay Strongbow to a bloody pulp, to the point where the match had to be stopped. That was all it took to set up the inevitable main event with me for the following month.

As Gorilla Monsoon used to love to say in response to watching the wrestling fans, “people are basically sadistic,” and although many of them were legitimately frightened of “The Animal,” they couldn’t wait to buy tickets to the July Garden card where the same guy who had just mauled the Chief would get his chance to become the world champion. And wouldn’t you know it, we sold out both the Garden and the Felt Forum that night—and turned several hundred people away from the Garden. The match had sold through so well that even though we hadn’t really been planning for it, Vince Sr. couldn’t help but call for an inconclusive finish. Steele was just so over with the fans that all it took was for him to come running out into the ring, pull off his shirt to expose the jungle of back hair that he had, eat a turnbuckle, and jam me with the tape-wrapped can-opener that he kept hidden in his boot or his tights or his mouth, or wherever the referee wasn’t looking for it.

The fans just ate it up. It was a novelty act, and you couldn’t go to it too often, but the “fight for your life” gimmick was box office gold all around the territory, and, if you think about it, all around the world. People came out in droves all over the NWA territory and in Japan, the Caribbean, Mexico, and Australia to see Abdullah the Butcher carve people up with a fork night after night, or to see the Sheik conjure up and throw a fireball at someone. In the WWF, no one had mastered the gimmick like George Steele had—and the people just kept coming out to watch the mayhem.

Our first match at the Garden was booked to end in a disqualification after the referee saw me hit Steele with the object after I finally got it away from him. It was a passion play intended to make the fans empathize with me for having to get into the ring and wrestle this guy at all, and then to get them to hate the referee for being so stupid. And what red-blooded American guy doesn’t love to rain hatred down on umpires or referees? The matches with Steele were almost all booked this way, because they were a guaranteed hit.

We came back the following month in the rematch, which was booked as a no-holds-barred Texas Death Match in some places, and just as a “return bout” in others—but the plan in nearly all of those rematches was for Steele to not let me into the ring, and for the referee to have no ability to control him to get him to let me into the ring—and to play off of the predicament for five or seven minutes while the fans became increasingly emotional just watching the simple act of me trying to climb into the ring. Finally, I would just take off my ring jacket outside the ring, hand the belt to Arnold, sneak into the ring, make one move, trick George, pin him, and escape further danger before anyone knew what had happened.

It was a booking plan that George and I had worked out together, and it got the fans night after night after night around the territory in 1983. As I have said before, it wasn’t my favorite series, because I preferred the old-school method of actually getting to wrestle with someone and develop the storyline—but there was no doubting the effectiveness of this series in putting butts in the seats around the territory.

Doing the Honors

In 1983 we had two matches again, and after the first match ended inconclusively, Mr. McMahon asked me, again, for the same finish: to put Bobby over in a very short period of time. He looked at me, as if he suddenly remembered what had happened the last time he asked me that, but I just looked at him and said, “Sure.” I think that shocked the hell out of him, because he looked at me and said, “Jim, why is it that you are agreeing this time when you refused last time?” And I explained to him that I agreed with the finish this time because I thought Bobby, who by that time had been the champion for almost six years, was ready for that, and I was at the point in my career where it was the right thing to do. And the fans loved it.

After I did the honors for Bobby at the Garden in 1983, Mr. McMahon Sr. called me into his office and he had tears in his eyes, and he said, “Jim, you’ve been really good to us for a lot of years, and I don’t want you to just become another one of the hang-arounds in the name of a few extra bucks. I think it is time for your career to end right here in the WWF. I think Mr. McMahon might have sensed that his time was short, because he was very emotional. We put our arms around each other, we hugged, and that was the end of my career … I thought.

—George “The Animal” Steele

During the summer of 1983, Vince Sr. was also experimenting with a lot of eight-man and ten-man tag-team matches in main events or sub-main events around the territory. These matches would allow you to tell more of a story than you could in a battle royal, but the point of these matches was to give the people a different visual, and to see whether matches of this size would attract people’s interest at the box office. It was also a way of recycling people who had already had big matches with me back into the ring and to mix up the matchups and just generate interest. Generally, these matches were not elimination matches like the Survivor Series matches are now. They were usually scheduled for the best three out of five falls with a two-hour time limit, which allowed for some internal storytelling and generation of some new storylines.

I was in a number of these matches, usually paired with Andre and some combination of the territory’s other main babyfaces (Snuka, Morales, Atlas, Johnson, Putski) against the Samoans and two or three heels who were playing out their string in the territory. It was certainly a good photo-op, and an interesting visual to see five men on a side during the introductions to these matches, and then to see four men on each side hanging on to the ropes on the apron of the ring while two guys did battle in the ring. These matches, of course, were more like a night off, since everyone needed to get some things in, and even if the match went thirty or forty minutes, that left only five to eight minutes of actual in-ring time to any one guy.

During the remainder of the summer of 1983, I wrestled Koloff, Slaughter, and Steele in the primary buildings, secondary civic centers, and finally, in many of the high school gyms or ice rinks in the smaller towns in the territory.

The first set of August television tapings on August 2 and 3 in Allentown and Hamburg saw the first appearances of the Masked Superstar—the first masked heel to come into the territory during my tenure as WWF champion. Superstar featured a terrific-looking finishing move called the Swinging Neckbreaker, in which he would catch his opponent in a front facelock and then, holding his opponent’s other wrist in his hand, corkscrew around before slamming his opponent neck and back first into the canvas. The hold was put over from the first matches Superstar wrestled on television as one that had been “banned” in several states, and one that had crippled wrestlers across the country. The first two men he wrestled on television were stretchered out after falling to the finishing move in the ring. Vince McMahon Jr. and Pat Patterson sold the move like crazy on the television broadcast.

Superstar was a big and agile man, and most of all, a man of mysterious origin. He was extremely articulate, and served notice, with piercing blue eyes staring through the eyeholes of his wrestling mask, that he would cripple whomever he needed to until he was granted a world title match against me. From the outset, guesses were made at his identity, as on television, announcers Vince Jr. and Pat Patterson fueled speculation that he was a famous athlete who wanted to conceal his identity.

This was actually all a ruse. The Masked Superstar was actually a guy named Bill Eadie, who I did not get to know too well outside the ring, other than that he was a former schoolteacher who was bright, articulate, and very interested in making sure that an angle or a match was as good as he could possibly make it. Prior to coming to the WWF, he had traveled the world, and was well-experienced in telling a compelling story. Obviously, the front office loved his Swinging Neckbreaker and wanted to get that move over with the fans—and this angle accomplished that in spades!

It was clear to anyone watching that a confrontation between us was brewing. Superstar was, without a doubt, the most interesting and awe-inspiring new heel to come to the federation in some time—and he was quickly gathering a head of steam with the fans, which did not evade the ever-present, watchful eye of Vince Sr.

Thus, at the next set of television tapings, on September 13, 1983, Eddie Gilbert returned after recovering from his automobile accident—which had been acknowledged to the fans—and challenged the Masked Superstar to a match on television. Superstar defeated Gilbert easily after punishing him with not one but two Swinging Neckbreakers in the ring, and then threw him out of the ring and delivered the Neckbreaker to the still-recovering Gilbert out on the arena’s concrete floor. This resulted in Eddie Gilbert not just being stretchered out, but taken immediately into a waiting ambulance. The angle was a slower one—but the idea was that Superstar was going to injure my young protégé first, as a way of serving notice that I would be next.

I always thought it was a liability to have to wear a mask in the ring because you couldn’t show your facial expressions, but Eadie was one of the most successful masked men in the wrestling business. It was an interesting gimmick, and I would put his finisher up there with Hansen’s Lariat, Slaughter’s Cobra Clutch, Snuka’s Superfly Splash, and Adonis’ Goodnight Irene as one of the three or four most “over” finishers with the people that I had seen during my tenure as champion.

On October 8, 1983, I wrestled my first match against the Masked Superstar at the Boston Garden. The building was sold out on the strength of this match and Muraco’s cage match blowoff with Snuka over the Intercontinental title. We were coming back the following month, so I agreed to put Superstar over as strongly as possible by giving him the only other stretcher job I had done in my career. He gave me the Neckbreaker inside the ring, then threw me out of the ring where I got counted out. Arnold Skaaland was at ringside and went over to protect me, but Superstar attacked Arnold and then gave me the Neckbreaker on the floor of the Boston Garden, and then left me laying there to get stretchered out.

On October 23, Superstar did the same thing to me in our first match at the Madison Square Garden, but since I had already done a stretcher job there for Snuka, we didn’t want to go back to that well, so I just laid there and got counted out.

Between those two dates, on October 12, 1983, Ernie Roth, the Grand Wizard of Wrestling, died suddenly and unexpectedly of a heart attack in Florida. Everybody loved Ernie, and the news came as quite a shock to all of us. He had been a mainstay in the WWF for a long, long time, and during his tenure, had managed most of the top guys in the business. He was just terrific on the microphone selling his heels and putting butts in the seats with his scholarly promos. He helped Vince Sr. behind the scenes with tickets and a little bit of everything before, in the later years, retreating to his home in Fort Lauderdale and making appearances only at the television tapings, the Garden, and occasionally at the Spectrum, the Boston Garden, or one or two of the other larger arenas.

It was around this time that I decided to cut my hair short and to go back to wearing a singlet. No one told me to do it—I chose to do that myself. Around that time, the WWF was becoming a bit more focused on entertainment, and a little less focused on wrestling. I always liked wearing singlets in high school and college, so I thought that I would make that little change in my appearance as a nod to my amateur background, and as a reminder to people that notwithstanding the recent changes, the name of the game was still wrestling.

November 21, 1983, was the date of my much-anticipated rematch with the Masked Superstar at the Garden. As he always had, Vince Sr. brought Bill Eadie and me together in the bathroom and told us what he wanted at the end of the match. He told us that Superstar was to try and put the Neckbreaker on me again, but that this time, I was going to block it and catch him in an inside cradle for the three count.

Vince Sr.’s words didn’t seem to affect Eadie one way or another, and he didn’t show any kind of disappointment to learn that he would be doing the honors for me in our second match. I’ll be honest though, I think I was more surprised than he was because of what we had just done in Boston, and what we had done on television. I thought for sure that they were setting us up for a three-match series at the Garden that would culminate in some kind of final match that would resolve the feud, and permit me to get some kind of punctuated revenge against Superstar for what he had done to me and to Eddie Gilbert.

What I didn’t yet know, however, was that the sands running through my hourglass as the WWF World Heavyweight Champion were rapidly running out, and that there wasn’t going to be time for a third match at the Garden between me and Superstar.

That match against the Superstar would prove to be my final successful title defense at the Garden.