Life & Legacy of Bruno Sammartino
Friends and fans pay tribute to the Living Legend.
For almost eight years, Bruno Sammartino successfully defended the WWE Championship, overcoming killers, cowboys, barons, monsters, diabolical doctors and foreign menaces from all over the world.
As with every fighter, each battle took a piece out of the champion, wearing him down year by year until the 18th day of 1971. Unbeknownst to the sold out crowd in Madison Square Garden, their Italian Superman had found his kryptonite in the form of a Russian Bear.
After 18 minutes of action, Ivan Koloff ascended to the top rope, leaping onto Sammartino knee first, knocking the wind out of the champion. Three slaps to the mat later, an era ended in New York City.
“You could hear a pin drop,” said Bill Apter, who was shooting photography of the match for Pro Wrestling Illustrated. “I remember seeing Bruno’s fan club president, Georgian Orsi, sitting in the front row, crying. Many other fans wept as well. I felt like we were all at a funeral as Bruno left the ring.”
That type of reaction wouldn’t be experienced again until more than 40 years later in New Orleans. “Undertaker’s streak ending is the closest thing we have to that in the modern era,” said Brian Solomon, author of Pro Wrestling FAQ.
People that don’t watch pro wrestling would have a hard time understanding why an audience would care so much about a predetermined outcome. Young wrestling fans probably don’t understand why that particular audience had that visceral reaction to a title change. To understand why this moment was so important, why those attendees would be crestfallen over their hero’s loss, is to understand who Bruno Sammartino was and what he meant to the Northeastern United States.
“There was a certain kind of success that Bruno represented,” said Zach Linder, former digital producer at WWE. “In New York, you get the sense that it’s a hard place to live, but the people who live there love it. There is this mentality of we’re all in this together. Bruno really represented this striving to be the best and being successful no matter what, working hard and doing it honestly and with integrity.”
Often donning a suit and tie, perpetually in fantastic shape, Sammartino greeted people with a firm handshake and direct eye contact. He called adults “sir” and listened to what children were tugging on his sleeve to tell him. As many of his fans who grew to become his friends can attest, he had an uncanny ability of remembering folks. A consummate gentleman, he dedicated his life to representing his family, the Italian community and the pro wrestling business with class.
Chris Cruise, former WCW announcer, befriended Sammartino while working with WWE to promote the first WrestleMania. They struck up a friendship and talked almost every day for 35 years.
“His single priority in life was that he not embarrass his mother,” Cruise said.
Humble Beginnings
Born on Oct. 6, 1935, in the small village of Pizzoferrato in central Italy, Sammartino was the youngest of seven children.
After his father immigrated to America, the rest of his family fled invading Nazi forces, hiding in the mountains of Abruzzo for more than a year. His mother would sneak into the seized town to scrounge up food and supplies for her family, risking her life in the process. Four of his siblings didn’t survive the harsh conditions, and Bruno almost met similar fate after contracting rheumatic fever. Miraculously, the remaining family was able to join their father in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1950.
Speaking little English and weighing barely 90 pounds, Sammartino was an easy target for bullying in high school. That lit a fire under the future world heavyweight champion, motivating him to hit the gym and build his impressive physique. By graduation, he weighed 225 pounds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iMQnSFQQEA
In his prime, he weighed 270 pounds and bench-pressed 565 pounds. He also developed a passion for wrestling, working out with the University of Pittsburgh wrestling coach and almost gaining a spot on the 1956 Olympic weight-lifting team. Earning many accolades and national recognition for his power lifting success, Sammartino was invited to appear on a local TV show hosted by Bob Prince, the legendary voice of the Pittsburgh Pirates. That’s how Capitol Wrestling promoter Rudy Miller, partner of Vince McMahon Sr., noticed him.
“He grew to respect the business and love it for what it provided him and his family,” Cruise said. “In the end, he was in it to make money. He approached it in a very professional way.”
After he was booked to lose more matches than he had been winning, Sammartino reasoned that he could make more money getting a regular 9-to-5 job and come home every night to his wife Carol. Instead, the San Francisco promoters came calling, offering him a spot on the West Coast. Agreeing to fulfill his obligations before departing, Sammartino was unknowingly booked for two cities on his final day: Chicago, which he showed up for, and Baltimore.
He only learned of his double booking after being suspended in San Fran, and subsequently blackballed from the business. Luckily, there was a huge Italian population in Toronto, and promoter Frank Tunney decided to bring in Sammartino to capitalize on the ethnic appeal.
That’s where the “Italian Samson” was born.
“He was a larger-than-life superhero, but his kindness and humble nature really endeared him to people,” said Brian Shields, who wrote Sammartino’s section in the first WWE Encyclopedia. “When he got in the ring, his power and fire and athleticism, his ability to take on all evildoers, really resonated with people.”
David Onda, senior entertainment editor at XFINITY, interviewed Sammartino in 2007 for a career retrospective story. Expecting a 15-20 minute chat with the Living Legend, Onda was on the phone for nearly an hour, or 14 full Word document pages worth of stories.
“I sat on my bed with my phone pressed to my ear, rarely interrupting, listening to one of the greatest grapplers of all time recall his greatest hits,” Onda said. “Bodyslamming Haystacks Calhoun at Madison Square Garden (‘I thought the roof of the Garden was going to pop off’), defeating Buddy Rogers for his first WWWF World Title on May 17, 1963, and his eventual defeat seven years, eight months and one day later.
‘It was amazing,’ Sammartino said of the night he lost the title. ‘One had to be there to believe it.’
Even on the phone, he was a powerful presence – somehow gentle, kind and humble, yet fiercely confident, convicted and intimidating at the same time.”
Northeast Popularity
After Sammartino returned to the U.S., McMahon Sr. anointed him as the champion and centerpiece of the Northeast territory. Similar to Tunney, McMahon played off Sammartino’s ethnic appeal, capitalizing on the melting pot of Italians, Greeks, Jews, Irish, Polish and Latinos having immigrated to New York City during that time. Every six to eight weeks, another villain would enter the territory, demolishing jobbers and midcarders until they were ready for a title shot.
“Bruno was like Captain America,” said Prof. Ouch, owner of Prof. Ouch’s Odditorium in Philadelphia. “He would fight this endless parade of monsters, fighting for his family and for what was right. He was the quintessential hero for the Northeast.”
Back then, the champion rarely, if ever, wrestled on television. If you wanted to see Sammartino in action, you’d have to buy a ticket. But he would be seen in interviews and constantly referenced by announcers and challengers, as well as on the covers of wrestling magazines.
“In the early 1970s, there was a magazine all about Bruno, about 64 pages,” said Bud Carson, owner of Bud Carson’s Pro Wrestling World until retiring this past January. “I bought it and inside there was a subscription to Wrestling Review. I got the subscription and from there on, my world just changed. Pro wrestling became the biggest thing in my life.”
Emulating his hero when he would wrestle with his brother in the backyard, Carson describes Sammartino’s style as “down to business.” “He would start out the match with scientific wrestling, doing arm drags and hip tosses,” Carson said. “Then one of the wrestlers would foul him and get into a slugfest, which was never a good idea.”
Despite being highly critical of Hulk Hogan over the years (Onda recalls him calling Hogan “the biggest dud of all time”), Sammartino’s style was similar to that of his predecessor. As a matter of fact, he would hulk up during his comebacks while Hogan was still eating his Flintstone vitamins. “There were guys that were better workers, but that didn’t matter because Bruno had charisma,” Solomon said. “He would have the crowd in the palm of his hand because they believed in him. I know when you see him in the ring, there are a lot of bear hugs and bodyslams, but he was really more than the sum of his parts.”
According to Sports Illustrated, Sammartino, Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle were the top paid athletes of the 1960s. He was a household name, appearing on The Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder and even having a private audience with the Pope Paul VI. Bruno Mars was even named after Sammartino.
Last names that ended in vowels, from the Grassi family to the Palumbo family, loved Sammartino for being a good, clean wrestler that made the Italian community proud. “Growing up in an Italian-American family in New York City in the 1970s and 1980s, Bruno Sammartino’s name was like Frank Sinatra and Joe DiMaggio,” Solomon said.
Despite his magical aura, Sammartino remained calm, cool and collected. Sure, he showed fire in the ring, but was more athlete than character. He had no entrance music, no lavish robes, no glitz and glamor. Just boots, trunks and a hairy chest.
This is my favorite photo of Bruno Sammartino. A simple shot but Bruno is in his prime here and looking like the strongman that he was. Also, we get a great clean look at the original WWWF Championship that sits around his waist. pic.twitter.com/SOCXr8jIH9
— Old Wrestling Pics (@OldWrestlingPic) April 19, 2018
“Even though his popularity is attributed heavily to his Italian roots, I think he was just the hard-working European immigrant that hit a chord with everyone,” Prof. Ouch said. “Any working guy could relate to Bruno the way they related to Steve Austin many years later. While Bruno represented the America of working hard, being honest and overcoming evil, Austin represented the more modern version of giving it to the man, having a beer and saying the heck with it. They both encapsulated what a hero was for their respective eras.”
His fame wasn’t restricted to North America – he was a superstar in Japan as well. Despite the McMahons having a working relationship with New Japan Pro Wrestling, Sammartino was loyal to All Japan co-founder Shohei Baba, having many classic battles with his old friend. “One time he flew to Japan, got off the plane and all these paparazzi were there,” Cruise says. “Bruno was disappointed because he thought there was somebody famous on the plane and he didn’t meet them. He started walking away, and when he turned around, they were following him. He couldn’t believe it.”
Second Reign
The three-year period in between his title reigns was one of the best times of Sammartino’s life, Cruise says. He was in demand and well paid, taking bookings at his leisure for anywhere in the country. In the meantime, he’d relax and spend time with his family. “Every day he’d go to see his mother and father and they would just talk about the old country and the old days,” Cruise said. “He was a 40-year-old man and all he wanted to do was sit and talk with his parents all day for three years.”
Unfortunately for Sammartino, his plan to slow down had been put on hold, as McMahon needed him back as champion. Pedro Morales was drawing well at Madison Square Garden, Cruise said, but he wasn’t filling arenas in the rest of the territory. Therefore, Morales dropped the title to transitional champion Stan Stasiak, who was then conquered by the Italian strongman in the Garden on Dec. 10, 1973.
“Bruno had to come back long after his prime,” Cruise says. “Most of the matches you see of Bruno are from his second title reign. There is a lot of brawling because his body just couldn’t do what he used to do. Any 40-year-old athlete can’t do the things they could in their 20s.”
If his in-ring ability had diminished, his drawing power sure hadn’t. Sammartino headlined a trilogy of supershows titled Showdown at Shea, which in many ways was the precursor to WrestleMania. In 1972, he challenged Morales for the WWE Championship in a rare babyface vs. babyface bout, paving the way for Hogan and Ultimate Warrior nearly 20 years later. After 75 minutes, they fought to a curfew draw. In 1976, he sought revenge against Stan Hansen for legitimately breaking his neck two months prior, retaining the title by countout. In 1980, he sought revenge once again, defeating his jilted protégé Larry Zbyszko in a steel cage.
“Those three matches at Shea Stadium are so important to the history of wrestling, and they’re not really talked about much,” Linder says.
Zybszko betraying his mentor is Lewis Carlan’s earliest memory of pro wrestling, igniting a nearly 40-year love affair with the entertainment genre. “The first time I ever heard Bruno’s name was from my grandfather when he asked if I knew who Bruno was,” says the Pro Wrestling Personified host. “Being a huge fan at the time, he loved to hate the heels. He also knew that any heel coming in was going to get their comeuppance from Bruno.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfFB0S-3bq4
For almost four years in the mid-1970s, Sammartino once again reigned supreme in the Northeast, not only beating old foes like Killer Kowalski and George Steele but also slaying new monsters like Bruiser Brody and Bobby Duncum Sr. “When you watch one of his comebacks, the crowd just goes crazy, especially in Madison Square Garden,” says New York native Ron Matejko, founder of Turnbuckle Magazine and @OldWrestlingPic. “Whereas today’s crowd is more of a sing-a-long, back then there was so much emotional investment, especially in Bruno.”
One of those young fans invested in the Living Legend was Gary Michael Cappetta. The legendary ring announcer for WWE, AWA and WCW made his debut in Wildwood, New Jersey during Fourth of July weekend 1974. The main event pitted Sammartino against Nikolai Volkoff.
“I was beside myself, so nervous because Bruno was my hero,” Cappetta says. “He was the reason I became a wrestling fan. Not so much because of his wrestling, which was very impactful and exciting, but because of his interviews. When he would talk, I felt like he was talking directly to me. I was in the sixth grade and he would look into the camera and tell me he needed my support. If I didn’t come to the arena that weekend, he might have lost his title.
It made me feel like I had to go to help this guy out.”
His second reign ended just as the first did: Sammartino requesting to drop the title to rest up his aching body and spend time with his family. On April 30, 1977, he was pinned by “Superstar” Billy Graham in Baltimore, with the challenger’s feet illegally draped on the ropes for extra leverage. It was a changing of the guard for WWE, and a changing of the times for the entire industry.
One-Man Crusade
Although he competed against the likes of “Rowdy” Roddy Piper and “Macho Man” Randy Savage in the mid-1980s, Sammartino considered himself retired in 1981. Refusing to end up like most broken marriages in the business, he reduced his schedule over the years until it was time to get off the road for good. He wanted to be around his family, which had grown to include sons David, Danny and Darryl.
“He saw the business changing as early as 1981, when he saw steroids come in and guys taking performance enhancing drugs,” says legendary wrestling journalist Mike Mooneyham, who had many conversations with Sammartino over the years. “Bruno was a straight shooter. I can pretty much guarantee he never took any PED.”
In the early 1980s, McMahon Sr. had handed the reigns over to Vince McMahon Jr., who also couldn’t let Sammartino ride off into the sunset. So the former champion transitioned into a commentator’s role, even receiving his first action figure as part of the LJN Wrestling Superstars line in 1986. His son David was hired to the full-time roster, which Sammartino would later reveal was merely a ploy by McMahon to lure Sammartino out of retirement.
“When he came back to wrestle Roddy Piper and Randy Savage, he was well past his prime,” Matejko says. “But you can tell by the way he was booked, he was treated with respect by the office. Just by putting him in the ring with two of the all-time greats in their prime, especially at that point in his life, shows how highly they thought of him.”
Perhaps an anachronism in the Rock N Wrestling Era, Sammartino played the role of noble elder statesman in this cartoon world, not afraid to speak his mind when things got out of control. When push came to shove, he also wasn’t afraid to mix it up, even at his advanced age. Kevin Scholla, Breitbart Sports columnist and Mama Grizzly Radio host, can still recite Sammartino’s line to HotRod: “Piper after the disgrace you’ve put on my profession, you schlub, I swear to you you’re going to pay.”
“Sitting there as a kid, you didn’t know him, but you knew of him,” Scholla says. “It was like seeing Vince Lombardi, Babe Ruth, Gordie Howe or Bill Russell.”
As the industry evolved from pro wrestling to sports-entertainment, Sammartino simply couldn’t digest the on-screen direction of the company, let alone the sex, drugs and manipulation behind the scenes. McMahon was positioning the company as a family-friendly product, yet the backstories of these childhood heroes were more Brothers Grimm than Disney. Worst of all, McMahon had committed the cardinal sin: acknowledging and even embracing that pro wrestling was scripted.
Mooneyham recalls Sammartino claiming if it ever came down to him denying he ever wrestled, he would do it because he was so embarrassed of what wrestling had become. “If you ever called him a sports-entertainer, there’s no telling what he’d do,” Mooneyham says. “He had a tremendous disdain for that part of the business. To him, wrestling was definitely a sport. When people would ask him if it’s fixed, he would tell them if it wasn’t real, he wouldn’t have had back surgeries, knee surgeries, neck surgeries. To him, pro wrestling was an honorable profession.”
It wasn’t just Sammartino taking great pride in his profession, it was him valuing the enjoyment that his fans had as well. “He would say to me, ‘What do these inside wrestling people want me to do? Tell these fans it was all fake? That I was joking with them? Their memories aren’t real? I’m not going to do that’,” Cruise recalls.
Sammartino washed his hands of McMahon in 1988, making his final appearance on WWE TV for the next quarter century. As steroid allegations and sex scandals rocked the company in the early 1990s, he became an outspoken critic, lambasting McMahon’s antics via various news outlets and talk shows. He would attend fan conventions and work with different promotions sporadically, but his days in the limelight had finally ended.
“It’s a shame because WWE could have gotten a lot more out of Bruno over the years, just being an announcer or figure head,” Prof. Ouch says. “He was one of those guys that always handled himself like a champion. He treated the title, the business and the fans with respect.”
Out of Exile
Before writing WWE publications like Second Nature, Brian Shields worked at Acclaim Entertainment and helped create the Legends of Wrestling franchise. In 2002, the company was brainstorming legends to include in the second video game, and the most requested name was Sammartino. “One day I called George ‘The Animal’ Steele and asked him what he thought about trying to sign Bruno for the game and if he thought Bruno would be interested,” Shields says. “George gave me Bruno’s number and called him ahead of time on my behalf. Bruno was very excited at the thought of younger fans being introduced to him, his career and his legacy.”
Five years later, Brian Solomon was wrapping up his tenure at WWE Magazine, and was tasked with writing Arnold Skaaland’s obituary. Having managed Sammartino during his championship reigns, there was no way his career retrospective couldn’t include insight from the Living Legend. “Everybody said you can’t talk to him, Vince doesn’t want to talk to him, he’s persona non grata,” Solomon says. “But I didn’t care. So I found somebody in the company who had his number and I called him. He was really warm, kind, open and surprised. It was the first time he had spoken to anybody in the company besides lawyers in 20 years.”
It was another five years when negotiations began between Triple H (Paul Levesque) and Sammartino about induction into the WWE Hall of Fame. Now in a position of power, McMahon’s son-in-law made it his mission to convince the Living Legend to take part in the annual ceremony honoring the pioneers of the industry. A student of the game and trainee of Sammartino’s old rival Kowalski, Triple H realized how much Bruno meant to the wrestling world and how his inclusion was essential to establishing credibility for the hall of fame.
“Vince would have never convinced Bruno to come back. It had to be Triple H,” Mooneyham says. “He had to convince Bruno that all the sex and drug scandals he saw back in the 1990s had pretty much gone away. Bruno was close with the WWE’s top physician and made the call to verify what Triple H had told him. The doctor told him the drug testing policy was as strong as anything in professional sports right now. That eased Bruno’s mind as well as them toning down the product and going PG.”
In addition to gripes with the industry overall, Sammartino had some personal grievances that needed to be addressed. After a month-long negotiation process, they reached a sticking point and weren’t going to be able to make a deal. “Bruno wanted restitution for past under payments,” Cruise says. “Paul’s line was ‘I can’t do anything about the past, but I can do something about the present and the future.’ Bruno said that’s unacceptable and the conversation came to an end.”
Having true “walk away” power, Sammartino had nothing to lose. He had saved his money and lived a peaceful life with his friends and family. After being ignored by the company for 25 years, not being included in its “non-existent” hall of fame didn’t matter to him.
“He took Paul’s calls because he was nice and persistent and respectful, but Bruno wasn’t going to concede anything,” Cruise says. “The conversation began again a few weeks later after Paul said they could reach an agreement about the past. Bruno got not just money, but respect and acknowledgement that he wasn’t properly cared for in the past. The relationship was pretty beautiful after that.”
Zach Linder was working on the Classics team in WWE’s digital department when he found out Sammartino would be inducted. He was responsible for creating and assembling a lot of content that would be posted as soon as the news broke. In preparation, Linder read Sammartino’s autobiography and watched as much footage as possible. Then one day, his boss ran over to him and said Sammartino and Triple H were doing a bunch of phone interviews with different media outlets, and they had requested one with WWE.com.
“Can you do it in 10 minutes,” Linder’s boss asked.
“I was unbelievably nervous, more nervous than I had ever been,” Linder says. “I’m tripping all over my words and can’t string together a complete thought. But Bruno was an absolute class act. At his age and all the punishment he had taken, he was incredibly lucid and very articulate despite English being his second language.”
Linder would meet Sammartino in person two months later at Madison Square Garden, when WWE archivist Ben Brown would present the icon with the original WWE Championship belt that Sammartino won from Rogers. “It was found in the attic by the widow of an old wrestler,” Linder says. “His jaw dropped. He probably hadn’t seen that title since 1963.”
On April 6, 2013, Sammartino was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame by longtime friend Arnold Schwarzenegger. The ceremony took place at Madison Square Garden, which he sold out a record 187 times, Mooneyham says. “The Hall of Fame ceremony was in New York City and it was like closure. He was glad he did come back because he was received so well. It was time for him to be honored by a new generation of wrestling fans.”
Meeting Your Heroes
Almost five years to the day of his enshrinement, the Living Legend left this world. After being hospitalized for two months, his wife of 59 years perpetually by his side, Sammartino died on April 18 of an undisclosed illness. He was 82 years old.
“We talked that if he was a boxer or in the NFL, his life would have been a huge story and Hollywood movies would have been made of it,” Cruise says. “About 15 or 20 years ago, he got a script from Hollywood that had his mother romantically involved with another man. Bruno was angry, tearful, disgusted and it just turned him off. There’s a script that has been banging around in Hollywood and a number of documentaries that he was happy about, but because he was a professional wrestler, his story just never made the mainstream.”
That wasn’t the case last week as ABC News, NBC News, BBC News, New York Times, Washington Post and Philadelphia Inquirer were just a few of the mainstream media outlets who covered his death. He was the lead story on Pittsburgh newscasts and Madison Square Garden even honored him on the marquee.
A true Garden legend. #BrunoSammartino pic.twitter.com/W3cWAe5RAj
— MSG (@TheGarden) April 19, 2018
“We talk about the wrestling Mount Rushmore, well, he’s arguably on the sports one,” Scholla says. “If you talk to somebody from that era, along with Ali and Reggie Jackson or Sandy Koufax, they’re going to say Bruno Sammartino. Whether they knew wrestling or not, they knew that name.”
Last year, Sammartino was honored in Pizzoferrato with a 10-and-a-half-foot-tall statue. Clearly the most famous person to ever come out of the small village, his story is all the more inspiring when you consider the unbelievable obstacles he overcame to be recognized around the world. “A man of Bruno’s stature should have lived in a castle, but he stayed in his humble Pittsburgh home of over 30 years,” Carson says.
When Carson opened his first superstore in 1997, Sammartino was his first guest. When he moved locations to Merchants Square Mall in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Sammartino was his first guest there, too. “He wasn’t a price gouger for his appearances,” Carson says. “In relative terms, the greatest living baseball player of all time, Willie Mays, you’d pay $200-$300 for his autograph. Even at his last autograph signing, Bruno was less than $25. He knew what he meant to the wrestling fans, but he didn’t put a price on it.”
He treated his peers with that same respect. According to Cruise, Sammartino used to travel with “Sailor” Art Thomas because he could protect Thomas from any issues with promoters or just being on the road as a black man in the 1960s. One time, he brought Thomas to one of his favorite restaurants, and the owner came up and said “We don’t serve niggers here.”
Bruno said, “Gee, that’s not very funny. Don’t joke that way.” The owner said it wasn’t a joke. “If you’d like, you can have him wait in the car and we’ll prepare a meal for you to bring out to him.” Bruno said, “No, that won’t be necessary.” He turned around, walked out and never went back to that restaurant.
“He just wouldn’t put up with that nonsense,” Cruise says. “He wouldn’t tolerate bullying or discrimination.”
Cappetta can vouch for Sammartino’s big brother sentimentality. When he was working with WCW, Cappetta would go into New York City for voiceover work. On one project, he needed to pronounce the name of a town where a boxer by the name of Nino Benvenuti lived. Nobody in the studio knew how to pronounce it, so they figured, let’s call Bruno.
“It had been years since I worked with him, so I wasn’t even sure he’d remember who I was,” Cappetta says. “First thing he says is how’s your family? Then he asked about the family business and remembered that I taught school. ‘You’re not working for WCW full time, are you? Oh, you be careful. Are they treating you okay?’
Everybody can see his body of work and everybody knows how effective he was in the ring, but not everybody had an opportunity to interact with him on a personal level. To get to know your childhood hero is a blessing, but when he surpasses the way you looked at him, it just speaks for itself.”
Legacy
No one will ever break Sammartino’s records, both for sell outs as well as championship reigns.
“In certain ways, he may have been the biggest star that WWE ever had, even though it was a regional operation at the time,” Solomon says. “Bruno was the guy that carried the company on his back in the same way that Hulk Hogan and John Cena have done. But even more than Cena because even though he has been a big star for the past 13 years, Cena has had a lot of help. For Bruno, it was just him. He was the company’s number-one drawing card for the better part of 20 years. Nobody can say something like that.”
Bruno Sammartino reigned as @WWE Champion during the presidencies of John F Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.
— WWE Stats & Info (@WWEStats) April 18, 2018
It’s also highly unlikely that any pro wrestler will ever resonate with a certain group of people like the Italian Samson did. “It was the era of ‘true believers’ and fans were just crazy about Bruno,” Mooneyham says. “They had this tremendous emotion for this guy and he really was the personification of the American Dream.”
Mooneyham recalls Sammartino saying he felt like the luckiest guy around because when he came to this country, he had nothing. But through hard work and determination, America gave this great life to him. It’s something that so many natives of his village never had the chance to achieve. “A lot of the guys that I’ve met over the years, they love the fans for what providing them with a great living, but that’s about as far as it goes,” Mooneyham says. “But whenever I talked to Bruno, he drove home the fact that had it not been for his fans, he would have been nothing. He loved his fans as much as they loved him.”
Although everyone knows to “never say never” in the pro wrestling business, Sammartino’s stand against McMahon and his refusal to compromise his morals speaks to his character. He was a man of principle, unwavering in his convictions, regardless of how the rest of society viewed them. “Bruno didn’t take any nonsense and if he didn’t like what you did, goodbye,” Scholla says. “In a day and age of everybody kissing everybody’s ass in wrestling, sports, politics and everything else, that’s a welcome trait and Bruno had it all the way through.”
When Onda asked him if there would still be a professional wrestling without Bruno Sammartino, he seemed aghast at the concept.
“Oh, my goodness,” he said. “Why wouldn’t there not be? There was wrestling before Bruno Sammartino came into the scene. Why wouldn’t wrestling continue afterwards?”
However, he did reflect on his career with one regret, Onda says: That his chosen profession as one of the world’s greatest showmen meant time away from his growing kids. “You can never get that back,” he said. “You can never recapture that.”
At the end of the day, being with his loved ones is all Sammartino ever wanted. “He had made it to America,” Cruise says. “He had no other dreams other than to have a nice, stable life, marry the girl of his dreams and raise a family.”
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