A body slam usually followed.īut while bodyslamming Sammartino, Hansen accidentally dropped him on the back of his head and broke his neck. Then when the guy bounced off and headed towards him, he would “close line” him. A huge man at 6’4 and 310 lbs, his favorite move was “The Lariat.” He would hurl his opponent into the ropes. Hansen had been a college football star at West Texas State. In April 1976, Bruno wrestled a relative newcomer named Stan Hansen. He was the main attraction and wrestled at big venues like Madison Square Garden and the Spectrum in Philadelphia. Then the But Sammartino rarely, if ever, wrestled on these televised shows. The IWA didn’t last very long, so most of the wrestlers joined one of the other three federations. The chief villain of the IWA was Bulldog Brower, who had a heated rivalry with the Mighty Igor, who later became a very popular wrestler using the name Ivan ‘Polish Power’ Putski. Mascaras was one of the few wrestlers who had an unlimited array of moves, and he would usually finish off his opponent by diving off the top rope. He wore a mask that his opponents were always trying to take off but, of course, never could. The champion of that federation was a very athletic Mexican wrestler by the name of Mil Mascaras. It was televised on Channel 9 (WOR) out of New York City and it didn’t come on until midnight. While staying up late one Saturday night, I discovered a new federation had sprung up named the International Wrestling Association. He was the champion of the World Wide Wrestling Federation.īack then, the three most popular federations were the National Wrestling Alliance, which covered most of the Southern territory, The American Wrestling Association, which covered the Midwest, and the World Wide Wrestling Federation, which covered the area where I lived, the East Coast. That’s when I first saw Bruno Sammartino wrestle. If you weren’t Spanish, the only reason you would search UHF was for the wrestling ( Lucha Libre in Spanish). For those who didn’t grow up in the 1970s and haven’t a clue what I’m talking about, rabbit ears are what we called the antenna on the television. It had reasonably decent reception–provided you could get the ‘rabbit ears’ set just right. Later that year, I discovered I could watch pro wrestling on local Channel 47, a UHF channel. There was Ivan ‘The Russian Bear’ Koloff, Dick ‘The Bruiser’ Afflis, Superstar Billy Graham, Chief Jay Strongbow, and of course, the living legend of professional wrestling, Bruno Sammartino. The magazine had lots of pictures of all the top wrestlers. I was around 12 years old at the time, and I asked if I could look at the magazine. It started with a wrestling magazine that someone had brought to school. From roughly 1975 to 1985, pro wrestling had me hooked.
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