Fan favorite dies at 82
Sammartino’s blue-collar style made him one of the most popular pro wrestlers of his era.
Bruno Sammartino fled to the mountains of Italy with his family during World War II and came to the United States at 14, weighing just 80 pounds. Within 10 years, he built himself into a 275pound mound of muscle, whose remarkable strength and relentless, blue-collar style made him one of the most popular professional wrestlers of the 1960s and 1970s.
Sammartino, who was once among the highest-paid athletes in the United States, died Wednesday at a hospital in Pittsburgh, Pa. He was 82.
Sammartino, who narrowly missed making the U.S. Olympic team as a weightlifter and rejected an opportunity to try out for the Pittsburgh Steelers, settled instead for the rowdy but remunerative world of professional wrestling. He began his career when wrestling still maintained the pretense of a quasi-legitimate sport and was not the madcap spectacle it would later become. Sammartino was all business when he entered the ring, wearing trunks and lace-up boots. He had disdain for some of his more colorful counterparts, who wore costumes and whose performance depended more on theatrics than athleticism.
“I complained about the gimmicks,” he told The Washington Post in 1980. “All the nonsense and garbage. After a while I just said I would not wrestle with the guys wearing masks, or guys that had some get-up on. It was demeaning. I refuse to go onto the mat against a Christmas tree.”
Wrestling fans, particularly in his hometown of Pittsburgh, soon adopted Sammartino as the embodiment of immigrant pluck and blue-collar grit. In a business of loudmouths, sadistic giants and outright cheats, he was the lunch-bucket guy who played by the rules (such as they were) and always got the job done.
“He was the most-loved wrestler in the Northeast,” Dave Meltzer, editor of Wrestling Observer newsletter, said in an interview. “He was a product of his time and place. People saw him as real.”
If anyone doubted Sammartino’s ability or good nature, he made it clear he was not be fooled with. In one of his first bouts in 1960, he lifted up one of his costumed opponents — Haystacks Calhoun, a bearded, 600-pound country lad in bib overalls — and dropped him to the floor. When he met “Nature Boy” Buddy Rogers in 1963 in the center of the ring for what was then the World Wide Federation of Wrestling (now WWE) championship, Sammartino told the reigning champ the match would be on the level, and he wasn’t following any script.
Sammartino locked Rogers in bear hug, then hoisted him on his shoulder in a signature hold called the pendulum backbreaker. “I told him to give up or I was really going to break his back,” Sammartino said.
The match was over in less than a minute.
Sammartino remained wrestling’s champion until 1971. After losing his title to Ivan Koloff, Sammartino regained the belt in 1973 and held it until 1977, when he yielded to Superstar Billy Graham. His total championship reign of more than 11 years is the longest in pro wrestling history.
As wrestling’s biggest star, he earned hundreds of a thousands of dollars a year, easily on a par with the highest-paid professional baseball and football players of the time. He appeared at New York’s Madison Square Garden more than 200 times and wrestled in matches all over the world. But his fame and drawing power could not protect Sammartino from the dangers and physical toll of wrestling.
In 1976, he was seriously injured in a match with Stan Hansen, who botched a body slam and dropped Sammartino on his head, breaking his neck. Sammartino continued the bout for 15 minutes, only to learn later from his doctor that he could easily have been paralyzed.
After months of recovery, Sammartino met Hansen again in a series of matches that were top box-office successes. He had other feuds with “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, “Macho Man” Randy Savage and onetime protege Larry Zbyszko before retiring from the ring in 1981.
“You ask if wrestling is for real,” he told The Post in 1980. “Well, I think my own body answers that question. I have broken more bones than any of the others — my neck, collarbone, both arms, wrists, knuckles, all of my ribs, my back. A hairline fracture of the kneecap. My jaw has been wired and rewired. It’s incredible to think people would fake that.”
Sammartino began to lift weights as a way to build up his body and overcome bullying. He played football in high school and reportedly just missed being named to the U.S. Olympic weightlifting team in 1956. He worked in construction while gaining local renown for his feats of strength. In 1959, he set a world record by bench-pressing 565 pounds.
The Steelers asked Sammartino to try out for the team, but when he learned NFL salaries were only about $8,000 a year, he chose professional wrestling instead, beginning his career in 1959.
In retirement, Sammartino lamented the widespread use of drugs and steroids in pro wrestling, shoddy medical care and growing vulgarity. His only leverage was to refuse invitations to be named to the WWE’s Hall of Fame. “I was embarrassed to be associated with it,” he told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 2010. “If I would have accepted induction, I would have been the biggest hypocrite in the world.”
After reassurances that wrestling was cleaning up its practices, Sammartino agreed to join the Hall of Fame in 2013.