Bruno Sammartino played a sold-out Madison Square Garden practically as many times as the Knicks. But for decades, the Old-World Italian and the ever-edgier WWE wanted nothing to do with each other. Here’s what happened the night they made up.
Bruno Sammartino at home in his North Hills, Pennsylvania.
Via: Andrew Russell / AP
Once upon a time, Bruno Sammartino was a hirsute, Atlas-sculpted ex-bodybuilder who wrestled 13 out of every 14 days in front of adoring crowds all over the globe. He fought an orangutan and won; he set a world record in the bench press; he received a private audience with the Pope. He became wrestling "champion" of the world during John F. Kennedy's only term and didn't lose the title for good until a few months after Jimmy Carter was sworn in, holding the honor of being the industry's most popular draw for somewhere near 4,000 days.
Today, he sits in the lobby of the Westin in Jersey City, wondering if wrestling fans still know who he is. He keeps reminding one of his sons that they're on a tight schedule, and that he still needs to shave his head for the fully bald look. Most of his hair is already gone, and what's left is flecked with gray. His body shows the damage of a work-intensive career and multiple spinal surgeries. There are large indentations in his elongated, mammoth hands, and he'll ask me to speak up when we first sit down because his ears are nearly swollen over with scar tissue.
But he's in good enough shape to exercise regularly, and has lots of thoughts about how the world he once dominated has changed — and how he will be received during a ceremony at Madison Square Garden that's partially being held in his name. The day before WrestleMania 29, which will take place at the Meadowlands, World Wrestling Entertainment's flagship event, Bruno is being inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame, a relatively new internet-only institution which exists to fête wrestlers for their part in a sport that isn't always on good terms with its own past. Bruno played a sold-out Garden a record 187 times during his heyday, but he's worried that at WrestleMania 29 there might not even be 187 people in the building who saw him wrestle, even on television.
"I don't know what to expect tonight because these are younger people," he wonders in a gentle Italian accent. "They weren't around for my career. They heard of me, of course, because today with the internet and all this stuff, they know who you are. But I don't know that I can expect what I used to get there because in those days, every time I stepped up in the ring, people would start screaming my name — 'Bruno, Bruno' — and the whole 20,000 people or whatever.
"Somebody said to me, 'Tonight you're going to hear that.' I said, 'I don't know!' I don't know what to expect tonight."
Via: Focus on Sport / Getty Images
In a fair world Sammartino would've been honored in 1993, when the WWE Hall of Fame officially opened with just one inductee, Andre the Giant. He certainly should've been honored 11 years later, when the Hall idea was revived and began inducting an ever-widening stream of retired stars. But Sammartino was on the outs with WWE chairman and godfather Vince McMahon over the increasingly lurid direction of the organization — remember when "Suck it!" was a cultural slogan? — and uncontrolled usage of performance-enhancing drugs, which had come to light soon after his retirement.
It was actually Vince McMahon's father (Vince McMahon Sr.) who'd recruited Sammartino into what was then the World Wide Wrestling Federation in the early 1960s. Born in Abruzzi, Italy, in 1935, Sammartino had emigrated to Pittsburgh with his family fifteen years later, trained as a vaudeville "strongman," and gotten got in the ring for a local promoter who thought he might make an appealing folk hero to Italian wrestling fans. It was an astute observation: Bruno rose to the height of popularity within just a few years, wrestling all over the country. McMahon Sr. promised him the championship belt for his participation with the WWWF, which he earned ("earned") by beating Buddy Rogers on May 17, 1963. That was the start of the aforementioned title run, which saw him grapple with greats like Killer Kowalski and George "The Animal" Steele. He'd wrestle for up to an hour at a time before eventually putting his foe away with his famous finishing move: the bear hug. He didn't lose the belt until nearly eight years later in front of a stunned crowd at Madison Square Garden, but then gained it back and held it for another four years.
As injuries piled up, Sammartino tried to retire from American wrestling in 1981, though he was constantly prodded back into the ring every now and then over the next few years. But his distance from the league began to grow as stars as big as Hulk Hogan admitted to boosting their superhuman physiques with steroids and the league was investigated by the FBI for promoting a pro-steroid environment. Sammartino saw himself as wrestling's public conscience, splintering his relationship with the company where he'd reigned for so long. He took any opportunity to badger McMahon. When a WWE employee named Terry Garvin was accused of carrying multiple inappropriate affairs with younger employees, Sammartino appeared on Larry King Live with McMahon and Barry Orton, one of the wrestlers who claimed he'd been molested, and what transpired was a famously tense exchange. Sadly, all versions of it have been taken off YouTube, but it involved McMahon seeking to undermine Sammartino's credibility by implicitly suggesting he was going a little senile. Sammartino popped up over the years in similar settings — here's a clip from Live With Dan Abrams following the murder-suicide of Chris Benoit — and in acting as such a willing Cassandra of doom and gloom in the state of wrestling, excluded himself from the version of wrestling history the WWE had begun to curate.
"They were all resentful of me because I was very outspoken about those issues and of course they didn't like it," he says. "Yes, there was much resentment. But I resented them as well because to bring wrestling down, to bring this kind of damage to the business I'd spent 25 years — I was very outspoken about it because I was hoping maybe somebody would listen and something would be done to stop it, because guys were dying from drugs and steroids.
"And so I didn't care who liked it or who didn't like it — I was doing it because of the love I had for the business when I was in it, and I wanted it to stop and change direction. I was outspoken about it for a couple of years. When I saw that nothing happened I said, 'Well I gave it my best shot and now it's time for me to go on with the rest of my life.' And that was it."
Flash forward to 2013 and a different WWE, unafraid to suspend its biggest stars for violating the drug policy, one that has toned down the ribald humor and blood splatter that drove the company's popularity in Bruno's absence. They're downright family friendly — in Wrestlemania's media room, we'll be handed flyers announcing a new partnership with the Special Olympics. Some of the change has to do with the (failed) Senate campaigns of Linda McMahon, matriarch of the McMahon family and the company's former CEO, who pushed a PG direction so that political opponents wouldn't connect her to the WWE's juvenile material. (They did it anyways.) Some of it happened because the WWE could no longer be lax toward drugs after years of deaths — out of good taste, yes, but probably also out of a desire to avoid lawsuits and federal investigation.
Whatever the cause, it was enough of an improvement that Bruno agreed to come back into the fold after being approached about a year ago by Paul "Triple H" Levesque, a star of the '90s who married into the McMahon family and is now an executive within the front office. "It feels fine because I'm coming in the proper condition," Bruno says. "I would not go into the Hall of Fame unless they cleaned all these things out." He watched wrestling programs for a few months until he was satisfied that his long-standing problems had been resolved, and planned his return with perfectly poetic timing: The 50th anniversary of capturing the World Wide Wrestling Federation title for the first time at Madison Square Garden.