“Son, never trust a man who doesn’t drink because he’s probably a self-righteous sort, a man who thinks he knows right from wrong all the time. Some of them are good men, but in the name of goodness, they cause most of the suffering in the world. They’re the judges, the meddlers. And, son, never trust a man who drinks but refuses to get drunk. They’re usually afraid of something deep down inside, either that they’re a coward or a fool or mean and violent. You can’t trust a man who’s afraid of himself. But sometimes, son, you can trust a man who occasionally kneels before a toilet. The chances are that he is learning something about humility and his natural human foolishness, about how to survive himself. It’s damned hard for a man to take himself too seriously when he’s heaving his guts into a dirty toilet bowl.”

James Crumley, The Wrong Case (1975)

On February 20, 1978, in the middle of New York’s famed Madison Square Garden, Bob Backlund, an earnest farm boy from the small town of Princeton, Minnesota, became the champion of the Northeastern professional wrestling territory then known as the World Wide Wrestling Federation, the “WWWF.” Backlund was strait-laced and clean-cut, with a legitimate, impressive background in amateur wrestling. His was an odds-defying success story, bringing a child of an alcoholic and abusive father facing a likely future laying down sheet rock to the mecca of sports entertainment.

Some 16 years later, on November 23, 1994, the championship once held by that lovable, unassuming, unapologetically square everyman was won by a man who, for a short time, came to be one of the most hated villains pro wrestling had ever seen, a maniacal, bowtie-clad lone crusader for what he saw as society’s vanishing moral code. The twist was this: The man, now going by an emphatic “Mr.” Bob Backlund, was one and the same. How he went from late-’70s hero to early-’90s archvillain is a story less about him than about us.

Pro wrestling in the late 1970s was still serious business, a rough, gritty, and oft-bloody echo of the era. Today’s comic sketches and finely choreographed aerial displays bear only the faintest resemblance to that era’s product.

Of the many distinctions between that epoch and our own, the key one is this: In the late 1970s, pro wrestling was still intent on never lifting the veil, on convincing us that the show we were watching was the real deal. “Real” meant it had to be unscripted—and not just that it had to look unscripted. (The contemporary product fails by either metric.) The best way to achieve realism—both in the in-ring action and in the pre-match “promos” in which wrestlers and their managers endeavored to talk us into buying a ticket to an upcoming match by threatening each other with various species of violence—was to allow for lots of improvisation.

The promoters and bookers who ran the regional wrestling territories set the overarching agenda, which meant the big storylines (“angles”) being built up from week to week and month to month, who was going to “go over,” i.e., win, in any particular match, and—when it mattered—how the finish of the match would go down. They would also often have input into the development of a wrestler’s “gimmick,” the character he was portraying. At the same time, wrestlers whose gimmick was sufficiently honed and notorious would often be signed to come into a territory with a name they had already made for themselves; they would go on to work in that territory for a matter of months or a matter of a few or even many years, and then, when the potential of their gimmick had been exhausted in that territory, move on.

Those were the lines, but the wrestlers themselves would color the picture. They would be told how much time they had to work with, but beyond that, they might be given only big-picture notes about the length and overall complexion of a match or a promo. The rest was left to the realm of individual talent and creativity. They would rarely script out entire promo monologues. Sometimes, they would talk it through with their opponent a bit beforehand, but often, especially if the wrestlers knew and trusted each other, they would call it entirely in the ring. Like the “lead” in a partnered dance, the bad guy (“heel”) would generally be the one who would call the match, finding ways of communicating instructions to the good guy (“baby-face”) all through the bout. Two sufficiently able and experienced fighters wouldn’t have to do much talking at all.

The goal in the ring was threefold: (i) tell a compelling story; (ii) make it look sufficiently believable to keep the wool pulled over our eyes; and (iii) don’t kill or maim yourself or your opponent in the process. The contemporary circus-style acrobatics that pass for wrestling matches rarely, if ever, achieve any of these goals. Sequences often make no sense: apparently serious injuries that are forgotten as matches go on; athletically impressive but senseless somersaults and double backflips; seemingly devastating moves that should rightfully end a match but from which contemporary wrestlers spring up and move on in seconds; and an all-around level of real peril for the athletes involved that results in legitimate injuries that routinely shorten careers.

To our jaded contemporary eyes, conversely, a 1970s-style match would be a laborious slog. Overstimulated by the fusillades of high-impact, high-flying moves (what are known as “high spots”) that are now deployed in many matches from start to finish, we might be more than a bit perplexed watching, say, a late ’70s tag-team such as the Minnesota Wrecking Crew wrestling in a manner that actually hangs together, staying firmly anchored to the mat while focusing on one particular body part that both members of the team target with strikes and holds all through a match. Nor would we have the patience to endure the slow build of matches working their way up to a lone high spot at the tail-end.

Though the old matches might underwhelm those with sensibilities jaded by the contemporary product, the same cannot be said of the old promos. Today’s over-scripted segments often speak in a single voice. While allowing individual wrestlers to communicate their own particular schtick and catchphrases, the promos still sound as if individual flavors are struggling to express themselves through a thick, suffocating layer of saccharine glaze. Missing is all the spontaneity, the unpredictability and combustibility, the roughness-around-the-edges that gave the old art form its idiosyncratic charm. What no longer comes through, as it were, is the persona behind the mask.

Wrestlers played characters to varying extents in that earlier age. Some, like the prime 1980s version of Hulk Hogan, were largely putting on an act—an individual who is, by all accounts, a clever and deliberate careerist adopting the gimmick of an exuberant do-gooder who wears his heart on his sleeve, lets it all hang out, and will stop at nothing in pursuit of truth, justice, and the American way. Others, like the limousine-ridin’, jet-flyin’, kiss-stealin’, wheelin’-dealin’ baddie Ric Flair during the same decade were an exaggerated version of their real selves.

And then there was Bob Backlund. Even in the late ’70s, Backlund was already a throwback to a yet-earlier era. His wholesome look and demeanor had even sympathetic crowds chanting comparisons to “Howdy Doody.” But with Backlund, the unassuming everyman image went way beyond appearances. 

He had taken up sports, both football and wrestling, just to avoid having to come home to face his abusive father. The start of his amateur wrestling career had been inauspicious: He lost nearly every match. But he learned old-fashioned Puritan values: working hard, never quitting, and resisting the temptations of drugs and alcohol. (Even after getting into pro wrestling, he recalls an incident where some fellow wrestlers had begun smoking marijuana in a car he was in, and he demanded that they pull over and let him out; when they did not do that, he simply proceeded to take the very long walk home once they had reached their destination.) Those values helped him rise, eventually, into the upper echelons of amateur wrestling as a collegiate athlete.

His pro wrestling career began with his driving his old Chevrolet down from Princeton, Minnesota to Louisiana and sleeping for weeks in the trunk of that car in a church parking lot. He got by on cans of tuna. In the ring, to start matches, he often insisted on shaking his opponents’ hands. Even once he was established in the big leagues of wrestling, his promos, like this one, were often so lacking in even the slightest trace of glibness, artistry, menace, or threat of any sort as to defeat the very concept of a promotional build-up for a match.

In contrast to the vast majority of pro wrestlers who used stage names, including fanciful names such as Haystacks Calhoun, Sergeant Slaughter, or Killer Kowalski, Backlund went by his real name—and, more importantly, left little distance between who he was as a pro wrestler and who he was as a man. “I think my gimmick was being myself,” he would later observe. He saved his eloquence for the ring, in which he could wow crowds with his effortless grace and technical proficiency, while also having the know-how to fend off those rare attempts by opponents—more common than today—to take liberties, whether by striking too hard, laying a hold in too snugly or otherwise failing to cooperate to keep a match chugging along in the right direction.

As WWE champion, defending the title against a rogues’ gallery that included such luminaries as George “the Animal” Steele, Mr. Fuji, Big John Studd, “Superfly” Jimmy Snuka, and The Magnificent Muraco, he held the belt for nearly six years, a monumental span of time unheard of in the modern age and second in WWE history only to “The Living Legend” Bruno Sammartino’s seven-and-a-half-year reign between 1963 and 1971. The curtain on Backlund’s run as champion finally closed on December 26, 1983, when Backlund’s manager Arnold Skaaland, possibly in cahoots with the Iron Sheik, threw in the towel after his protege refused to submit despite being trapped in the Iron Sheik’s feared “camel clutch.” Less than a month later, the Sheik would lose the belt to a rising star named Hulk Hogan, and the flashy rock-‘n’-wrestling era of Hulkamania that spanned much of the decade would begin.

What had transpired behind the scenes to bring matters to this precipice holds part of the key to understanding what exactly Bob Backlund was all about and how the scene was unwittingly set for his notorious return in the 1990s. And to understand all that, it is also necessary to know a bit about the man from whom Bob Backlund captured the title in 1978. The ’70s were still an age when athletes who were fan-favorites were generally expected to conduct themselves with modesty, dignity, and class. The controversial, braggadocious antics of Muhammad Ali had already seeded the groundwork for our boorish modern sports mores, but that kind of conduct was still not widely accepted. For that reason, in society, as mirrored by the world of pro wrestling, such behavior was for villains.

Enter Eldridge Wayne Coleman, a man who, in nearly every respect, was the polar opposite of Bob Backlund. While Backlund’s background was in the fundamentals of amateur wrestling, Coleman came from the appearance-driven world of pro bodybuilding, a sport in which he had won prestigious championships. The dangers of steroids were not yet widely known, nor were steroids prohibited in bodybuilding at the time; Coleman used the advantage conferred by these chemicals to the fullest. 

Building up an incredible physique unseen at the time in professional wrestling, he entered wrestling through the Calgary territory’s Stampede Wrestling promotion in 1970. Not long after, he joined the Los Angeles promotion that had been part of the National Wrestling Alliance (“NWA”), where, teaming with the villainous Dr. Jerry Graham, in order to pass himself off as a blood relation, he changed his name to Billy Graham in tribute to the famous evangelist and bleached his hair blond. A bit later, taking his cue from the Broadway musical Jesus Christ Superstar, he assumed the persona in which he would became famous: “Superstar” Billy Graham.

Once the bell rang and the match began, Graham was nothing special. In contrast to Backlund, the actual “wrestling” part of the job was not and never became his forte. His offense was limited to the basics: punches, kicks, knees, elbows, headlocks, and the signature bearhug he would use to finish the job. But it was what he did before the action got underway that made Graham the single most important figure in changing pro wrestling. Backlund may have been the real deal, but Graham looked and sounded like the real deal.

While Backlund made a virtue of his understated, aw-shucks demeanor, Graham had charisma in spades. Sporting his bleach-blond hair and tie-dye threads, flexing and posing obstreperously while the crowds jeered, Graham unleashed torrents of words, largely conveying self-adulation. A natural showman with an ear for language, he adopted the lilting inflections of black American vernacular, channeling none other than Muhammad Ali: In one of his most famous promos, he proclaimed, his massive arm raised, brandishing the heavyweight title overhead, “I am the greatest. I am the strongest. This is my belt. I’ve got the proof. I am the man of the hour, the man with the power, too sweet to be sour.” He had acquired that title on April 30, 1977, bringing Bruno Sammartino’s second reign, spanning four years, to an end.

“Heel” champions in the WWWF in those days were transitional, used to turn the belt over from one great “baby-face” to the next. Thus, “The Nature Boy” Buddy Rogers’s reign had lasted 36 days before the inception of Bruno Sammartino’s first, seven-year run; “The Russian Bear” Ivan Koloff had held the belt only 21 days before turning it over to the fan favorite Pedro Morales; and Stan Stasiak had lasted a mere nine days before Sammartino took the strap again. But Graham was different, and even if he was way ahead of his time, the difference was palpable. His title reign lasted 296 days. 

As the days ticked by, at least some substantial portion of the boos began to turn to cheers. For all Graham’s showboating and arrogant prattle intended to rouse up animosity, the man’s flamboyant personality was absolutely electric. He was selling out show after show, and not all those ticket-buyers were coming because they wanted to see him lose. Recognizing what was happening, Graham approached ownership, imploring them to embrace the crowd’s response and turn him into a fan favorite of an entirely new breed that the crowds could really get behind.

The WWWF had been owned at that time by Vince McMahon, Sr., the father of the modern WWE’s longtime kingpin, Vince McMahon, Jr. With an old-school mentality and a stellar reputation for honesty and trustworthiness, Vince Sr. was a man of his word. After many years of popular ethnic standard-bearers—Sammartino represented the New York area’s substantial Italian-American community, and Pedro Morales was a Puerto Rican champion the Latino community could embrace—McMahon wanted an “all-American boy” champion. Some months earlier, he had already given his word to Bob Backlund that on February 20, 1978, Backlund would be the one to step into that role—and McMahon would not go back on his word. To Graham and many others, the move was incomprehensible, the organization turning its back on the future to hand the belt to someone straight out of Leave It to Beaver. But the deed was done, breaking Graham’s spirit in the process, sending him on a downward spiral of suicidal ideation and drug abuse—even years later, he could not contain his bitterness about that decision—and leading to Backlund’s nearly six years with the title.

It took a generational change to bring the tectonic shift Graham had heralded to fruition. In 1982, Vince McMahon, Jr. bought the WWWF from his father and saw in a young Hulk Hogan—who had modeled his look and persona in nearly every way on “Superstar” Billy Graham—a path back toward the future McMahon’s father had eschewed. McMahon wanted Backlund to turn heel so that Backlund, after losing the title, could embark upon a feud with Hogan, the new champion. 

But although that approach would have been far more financially rewarding for Backlund, he refused to do it. At that point, his daughter was six years old, and he knew that turning heel would mean her being subjected in school to all the varieties of unkindness young kids could muster. He had, as well, sponsored kids’ tournaments so that wrestling, for them, could become the same life-saving, character-building enterprise it had been for him; he did not want to turn his back on the high-character values he had espoused. Such crossover consequences were perils that pro wrestlers had to endure in a business where, at the time, the gap between fiction and reality was ambiguous and where wrestlers, especially heel wrestlers, often risked the ire of rabid fans taking things a bit too far.

And yet few, if any, of Backlund’s peers would have had the integrity to do what Backlund did. He spent part of 1983, while still champion, earning the last three credits he needed to complete his college degree that a full-time regimen of football and wrestling had prevented him from doing during his college years. Then, at the end of that year, after losing the title to the Iron Sheik on December 26 and doing a few promotional appearances together with Hogan to groom the latter as his successor-to-be, Backlund simply stepped away. As the Hulk Hogan era began in January 1984, Backlund, after a brief stint in another wrestling promotion, vanished from the wrestling scene entirely. 

He returned to the life of an ordinary citizen, living with his wife and daughter in Glastonbury, Connecticut. The former heavyweight champion of New York’s vaunted wrestling territory who had sold out and headlined Madison Square Garden many times over would spend those intervening years in relative anonymity, laying down sheet rock and working for a local heating oil company. He took on occasional gigs speaking to youth groups. Otherwise, he was a largely forgotten man.

When he finally returned nearly a decade later, in 1992, the business he returned to had changed entirely. The most important change had come in 1989, when Vince McMahon had let the cat out of the bag, testifying before the New Jersey State Senate—in an effort to avoid certain tax consequences and oversight by athletic commissions—that wrestling was not a sport, that outcomes were predetermined. Many viewers of McMahon’s increasingly cartoonish brand of wrestling had long understood as much, but it was news for many others, who had grown up watching the more realistic style of pro wrestling prevalent in the other regions, such as the South.

There are those—the French semiotician Roland Barthes in his famous 1972 essay on “The World of Wrestling” comes most readily to mind—who would probably argue that McMahon’s confession was only a formality, tantamount to a confession that a Marvel movie is not a depiction of real events. Pro wrestling, on this view, was always a kind of theater, a moral passion play pitting good against evil. Barthes had even derided the more realistic variant “in which the participants unnecessarily go to great lengths to make a show of a fair fight,” concluding flatly that “this is of no interest.”

The reality, however, was always more complicated. While neither Hollywood actors nor moviegoers have any illusions that actors are the Marvel characters they depict on screen, both pro wrestlers and their fans regularly live out the illusion, with wrestlers often going by their “stage” names as a kind of second self on social media and in many segments of their ordinary lives. Wrestlers endure physical pain and risk slight, serious and even career-ending and life-threatening injuries when they step in the ring. In that respect, they are more akin not to actors but to acrobats performing with a rather flimsy safety net. And in the bad old days prior to McMahon’s confession, especially those wrestlers who engaged in dastardly deeds also risked the wrath of aggrieved fans eager to see justice served. Heel wrestlers would often have to prove their mettle by fending off these irate audience members, would sneak out of event spaces or use police escorts, would have their tires slashed or their families targeted, and were even sometimes the victims of stabbings or other egregious violence.

The point then, contra Barthes, is that if pro wrestling was always a kind of theater, it was a very special kind that thrived on straddling the boundary between the spectacular and the very seriously real. For these reasons, McMahon’s admission drastically altered many fans’ expectations. The sport of pro wrestling became “sports entertainment.” (Later, in 2002, due to a trademark infringement lawsuit by the World Wildlife Fund, McMahon’s organization, then known as “the WWF,” would change its name to “the WWE,” with the “E” standing (at least initially) for “Entertainment.”)

There had been other changes between the early ’80s and the early ’90s as well. The days of the independent territories had gone. McMahon had taken his promotion nationwide, stealing away talent, buying up territories, using the power of nationwide television coverage to drive other territories out of business. At the same time, the complexion of the product itself had changed. Following in “Superstar” Billy Graham’s trailblazing footsteps, the wrestlers of the 1980s and early 1990s—particularly those working for McMahon’s WWF—focused increasingly on style over substance. Like Graham, Hulk Hogan was not a skilled technician by any stretch. His own successor (at least for a short time), the utterly cartoonish Ultimate Warrior, was even less so, little more than a bodybuilder with no affinity or appreciation for the business.

They were but two examples of a new breed of post-Graham wrestler, sometimes referred to as “body guys”: large men with impressive physiques and over-the-top personalities who could appeal to kids and to an audience looking more for big-bang entertainment than for gritty, realistic matches. The wrestlers themselves, now commonly referred to as “Superstars”—yet another implicit tribute to the original “Superstar”—were more in the nature of larger-than-life superheroes, with their supervillain counterparts. They wore flashy clothes, strutted to the ring to the sound of blaring entrance music, and conducted themselves, even if they were cast in the role of baby-faces, with unapologetic aplomb. Outside the ring, the use and abuse of physique-enhancing substances, as well as other substance abuse, was widespread.

Backlund came in unchanged from what he had been in the late 1970s and early ’80s, jogging cheerily to the ring in his robe, towel, and plain-jane trunks, without an entrance theme, trying to shake hands with bewildered opponents, using the same technically proficient style that had brought him fan appreciation and the world’s heavyweight championship during his earlier run. Never a schmoozer or afficionado at career-advancing backstage politics (Hulk Hogan’s forte), he did not, especially upon his return, spend much time in the locker room palling around with “the boys,” because he didn’t care for the behaviors he witnessed and language he heard there.

But, as Backlund himself soon noticed, what had worked for him before was no longer connecting with an audience numbed by overstimulation and grown accustomed to a far more braggadocious breed of athletic heroism, whether in or outside the wrestling ring. The contemporary audience of the 1990s was a reflection of our larger culture, which, itself, had come to resemble pro wrestling. Boxers were using ring entrance themes and delivering wrestling-style promos. Athletes in other sports had started to make one-upmanship in the none-too-delicate art of shameless showboating a regular part of their repertoires.

MTV’s Real World had brought the same fiction-reality-boundary-straddling species of entertainment pioneered by pro wrestling to a wider audience. And the continued incursions of the Culture Industry, bringing an increasingly unabashed and vulgar pop culture to a larger and larger subset of the masses, meant more and more of us were dropping old-world niceties and formalities, speaking in movie lines or modeling iconic sitcom and cartoon characters, parroting the slang, catchphrases, and mannerisms we saw and heard on TV, creating a Rene Girard-style feedback loop of “double mediation,” in which we aspire to imitate those celebrities and superstars who aspire to stand in for us, leaving a hollowed-out echo chamber of meaningless signifiers at our cultural core.

Seeing that his natural, understated, good-guy act, with his displays of good sportsmanship and modesty and espousal of praiseworthy values, was no longer registering with the jaded ’90s crowd looking for the next big “it”-factor sports entertainer, Backlund—with his daughter now substantially older and fans now aware pro wrestling outcomes were fixed—approached Vince McMahon and told him he wanted to try another approach: A decade after he had refused McMahon’s request to go bad, Backlund was ready to make the turn.

On July 30, 1994, Bob Backlund was booked in a match against then-World Wrestling Federation champion Bret “the Hitman” Hart. Having grown up in a well-known wrestling family, Hart was that rare wrestler who could nearly match Backlund’s technical prowess, and the two put on an impressive, lengthy exhibition that resembled actual wrestling. But then, at the end of match, something surprising for the fans in attendance—and downright shocking for the small minority that remembered Backlund from his 1970s-early ’80s heyday—transpired.

Backlund pinned Hart, thinking he had scored the 1-2-3 pinfall victory. He jumped up happily, his arm raised up high in celebration, then quickly, in a trademark display of good sportsmanship, went to help his opponent to his feet. But Bret Hart, realizing, as Backlund did not, that there had, in fact, been only a 1-2 count and that the match was not over, used Backlund’s extended hand to pull him into an unexpected pin combination to get the real 1-2-3. Backlund checked with the referee, grasped what had occurred, and looked on shell-shocked. He pulled himself together to shake Bret Hart’s hand and watched, ruminating and stewing, as his opponent celebrated with the fans. Then Hart went to shake Backlund’s hand again. This time, however, he was met with a slap, followed by the application of Backlund’s dreaded “crossface chicken wing,” a painful submission hold Backlund had developed toward the end of his earlier title reign but that he would now use as his staple finisher.

Through a series of interviews and vignettes that would unfold over the ensuing weeks and months, Backlund’s new persona would emerge. He took to wearing a gray three-piece suit and red bowtie or a white shirt punctuated by red suspenders and insisted on being referred to with respect, as Mr. Backlund. He blamed his manager for throwing in the towel in the match in which he had lost the title to the Iron Sheik in 1983. Again and again, he would snap, applying the crossface chicken wing maniacally, refusing to let go, then staring dumbfounded at his hands, as though they had been possessed. He refused to give autographs to fans unless they could recite all the U.S. presidents. Referring to the audience as “plebeians,” he unfurled an ostentatious vocabulary, often misusing big words to comic effect. His interviews were peppered with screaming fits.

Underlying his antics and raving was a unitary message: The people—the plebeians—had lost their moral compass. In one of his most unhinged and most notorious interviews, with Vince McMahon himself holding the mic, on October 17, 1994, Backlund unleashed a tirade for the ages (far better to listen to than to read in transcribed form):

Backlund:     …. The best day [beginning to shout], the best day of my life was on July 3, 1994, because I realized that all you plebeians can’t get with it! You don’t have enough…you don’t have enough courage! You won’t pay the price to be successful! You’re doomed! You’re doomed…for…to…down!  You’re down! You’re down in life! I did more to try to boon your life than any athlete in the world! I sponsored kids’ tournaments to try to help your children!

McMahon:   That was then. That was the Bob Backlund of old.

Backlund:     I...I never have ever eaten marijuana! I have never swore in front of my children! How many times, ladies and gentlemen, do you swear in front of your children? How many chemicals do you have in your cabinet at home? How many drugs do you have in your [inaudible]? [Boos begin to rain down.] And why do you expect your children not to take drugs and not to smoke cigarettes and not swear when they’re at school? You should be taking care of your children! I know where my child is at night, and she’s definitely not out there with a gun!

McMahon:   All right, Bob Backlund, what does this have to do, what does this have to do with the crossface chicken wing, the hold for which there is no defense, right? What does this have to do with that?

Backlund:     It has to do with discipline! It has to do with pride! And it has to do with determination! I’m proud of the chicken wing, and I’ll retire if anybody can get out of it! And if any of these people in the Green Mountain State think they can get out of it, I’ll be happy, happy to put it on them. [Loud chorus of boos sounds.]

McMahon:   Now, wait a minute [boos continue]. Wait a minute.

Backlund:     [pointing up toward the cheap seats] Look at that fat guy up there! He’s a plebeian! Up there he’s brave! Up there he’s brave!

McMahon:   You’re challenging, you’re challenging a fan to come down to see if they can escape from the crossface chicken wing?

Backlund:     He’s not going to come down here! He’s brave up there! I know these people like the back of my hand!

Wrestling has always had its heels who made their living antagonizing the crowd. Standard heel moves are name-calling, taking on airs of superiority, flaunting wealth, looks, and status, and so on. Mr. Backlund adopted his share of these tactics, but none would be sufficient to explain why the sometimes deafening choruses of boos with which his efforts were routinely met—on one occasion when he went out to the ring, he was greeted by a five-minute wall of boos without even having to say a word—were so above and beyond the typical reaction heels could generate.

Some great heels, such as Jake “the Snake” Roberts, Terry Funk, “The Taskmaster” Kevin Sullivan, “The Nature Boy” Ric Flair, The Magnificent Muraco, “Rowdy” Roddy Piper and “Superstar” Billy Graham himself, were either stylish or sinister enough to be kind of cool. Others, such as “The Million Dollar Man” Ted DiBiase or “Ravishing” Rick Rude, were such thoroughgoing baddies that, despite the substantial skill those individual performers brought to their roles, the audience understood they were playing a TV villain’s part. And still others, such as the Honky Tonk Man, Brother Love, or Kurt Angle, were effective but over-the-top comedy acts. All of these fantastic heels were ones wrestling fans loved to hate. Backlund, on the other hand, they simply hated.

The unique magic that Mr. Backlund brought to the table was that he was thoroughly uncool, and while he verged on the comedic, still brought such total and utter, near-psychotic conviction to the role that wrestling fans even took to speculating whether Bob Backlund—the real Bob Backlund behind the Mr. Backlund mask—had actually snapped. He was, moreover, hitting on a nerve. His oft-screaming delivery and fanciful locutions and malapropisms may have been plainly exaggerated, but the underlying message hit too close to home to be readily cast aside. The reason it worked is because Bob Backlund’s gimmick, now as ever, was just being himself. As Backlund explained it in an after-the-fact, behind-the-scenes interview,

Our society had changed a lot from the ’80s to the ’90s, and the all-American boy thing wasn’t going to go anyplace…. I went to Vince McMahon and said I’d built up a voluminous vocabulary to agitate the plebeians, and I want to be bad by being good…. I believed every single word that came out of my mouth….  I started a policy that people would have to recite the Presidents of the United States to me to procure my signature. I wanted people to use their minds. I wanted people…to become better students. And that’s not a bad thing.

As he summarized the same strain of thought in another interview, since “the good guys are lying, cheating and swearing, let me be bad by being good.”      

In a sense, the fans who speculated the real Bob Backlund had come unglued were right. But in another sense, they were deeply wrong. It was Backlund who was right: The fans themselves, our society as a whole, had come unglued. Images had replaced reality. We were living in Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. There was not a place anymore for the kind of genuine underdog heroism of a strait-laced, guileless, understated small-town boy from middle America, for a man who actually lived the upstanding values his gimmick-self espoused. We wanted bad-asses, outlaw rebels, pumped-up preeners, and larger-than-life legends.

Having, by the 1990s (still more so today), mainstreamed the licentious and undisciplined spirit of rebellion that the ’60s had unleashed, our culture was well on its way to becoming a full-fledged counterculture, a culture hellbent on destroying its own foundations and replacing them with half-baked fantasies. Thus, in the same way in which the popular imagination—which envies and, therefore, despises high achievers—turns a smart, hard-working student into the caricature of an aggressive nerd, our society, increasingly a caricature out of touch with the reality of time-tested moral verities, had, ironically, turned Bob Backlund into a caricature of himself. The all-American boy was now a villain’s role.

Backlund expertly played the hand he was dealt. And the rabid reactions he had succeeded in eliciting from the crowd did not go unnoticed by the higher-ups. As the weeks went by, he rode his wave all the way back to the top. On November 23, 1994, approximately 16 years after the inception of his first title reign, Mr. Bob Backlund defeated champion Bret “The Hitman” Hart when, in a deliberate echo of how Backlund had lost the title in 1983, Hart’s mother, standing by at ringside, threw in the towel after her son was trapped in the crossface chicken wing. As the crowd booed, Backlund, his expressive face making tentative and then more emboldened forays across the line from disbelief to glee, was the improbable WWF champion once again.

That same night, with the belt strapped triumphantly over his shoulder, Mr. Backlund delivered a promo that would be his masterpiece:

Interviewer:  I am standing with Bob Backlund. He did exactly what he said he was going to do, agree or disagree with his tactics. He is now two-time WWF ch….

Backlund:     Wait. Wait a minute. First of all, young man, it’s Mr. Bob Backlund. And you’re incorrect: I’ve been the champion since 1978. I never lost the championship. Tonight, I just regained the belt. And I beat the man that represents your society. [Beginning to scream] I beat him so I could save you! I’m gonna scrutinize you to the fullest, pasteurize you, homogenize you, and synchronize you back into morality! You understand ladies and gentlemen? It’s sports education! I’m your champion! And I’ll take on anybody. [Switching to a serious undertone.] Anybody at all, ladies and gentlemen, in your generation, ’cause I’m fighting for something that’s more important than anything in this world, is put morality back into your lives, and now your children have somebody that they could emulate after and try to catch up to [switching to unhinged scream], ’cause I feel like God!”

For Bob Backlund, sports really had been his education, his saving grace from a wrecked home life and the medium through which he had learned the discipline and other life principles he needed to navigate through our growing murk. When he, thus, promised to convert Vince McMahon’s vacuous “sports entertainment” into “sports education,” it was no idle gesture. 

But Mr. Backlund was not given much of an opportunity to make good on his vision. Just three days after his stunning rise back to the top of the pro wrestling world at the age of 45, Backlund lost the title in an unceremonious match against a big guy with a bad attitude, a fan-favorite fittingly nicknamed “Big Daddy Cool.” A split second after the opening bell rang, before Backlund could even extend his arm out for his trademark handshake, the big guy jumped him with an unsportsmanlike kick, followed by his finishing move. And the fans cheered because such were our heroes in 1994, as they remain today.

If failing to recognize the trailblazing potential of “Superstar” Billy Graham to lead pro wrestling into a new era and turning over the belt, instead, to the throwback “all-American boy,” Bob Backlund, is widely regarded as having been Vince McMahon’s father’s greatest mistake, it is a bitter irony that Vince Jr.’s greatest mistake may well have been his failure to appreciate the fact that he had, in Mr. Backlund, a once-in-a-lifetime heel, who could have driven huge ticket sales and viewership “agitat[ing] the plebeians” while various baby-faces chased the title. But just as the gentlemanly, old-world Vince Sr. could not wrap his mind around making a hero out of the jive-talking, bleach-blond, flashy showman, “Superstar” Billy Graham, the unprincipled, strutting, appearance-worshipping Vince Jr. could not bring himself to confer a long title run upon a man who—even as a heel—was a living, breathing rebuke to Vince’s whole world.

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After his loss, Mr. Backlund, along with stints in other organizations, would work with the WWE in various capacities until 2017, both as a wrestler and as a manager, with the company consigning him to a largely comedic framework (including even a fake U.S. presidential run in 1995), wherein the more unsettling implications of his message could be contained. And as for pro wrestling itself, the distinction between it and the rest of our ever-more-scripted society kept on getting smaller and smaller.

If, in the past, wrestling had aspired to realism by seeking to imitate the spontaneous unfolding of its real-life equivalents, our contemporary scene is moving in the exact opposite direction, with a viral TikTok recently predicting that we will soon all be interacting through carefully curated, identity-smudging avatars—not unlike the highly processed identities pro wrestlers assume. In that future, superficial images of heroism, necessarily highlighting its more showy manifestations, will substitute for the real thing. It will be a future that belongs not to heroes but to “superstars.”

Our movies are already dominated by fake superhero franchises, whereas our real lives are already dominated by brittle and opportunistic individuals trying to make heroes of themselves through contrived, conspicuous displays of weakness, i.e., fake victimhood. In that image-obsessed, virtue-signaling milieu, the true heroes—the upstanding citizens, the strait-laced teetotalers, the self-sacrificing homemakers, the stoic laborers, the disciplined ascetics and abstainers, the all-American boys and girls, the boy scouts and girl scouts, whether literal or figurative, and the Bob Backlunds of the world—are dinosaurs. And in a world of little men, dinosaurs are monsters in our midst.