Author: Matt Schudel / Source: Washington Post
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 275-pound 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.
Mr. Sammartino, who was once among the highest-paid athletes in the United States, died April 18 at a hospital in Pittsburgh. He was 82.
The death was confirmed by a family friend, Christopher Cruise, who said he did not know the exact cause.
Mr. Sammartino, who was a 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. Mr. 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 home town of Pittsburgh, soon adopted Mr. 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 Mr. Sammartino’s ability or good nature, he made it clear that 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) , Mr. Sammartino told the reigning champ that the match would be on the level, that he wasn’t following any script.
Mr. 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,” Mr. Sammartino said.
The match was over in less than a minute.
Mr. Sammartino remained wrestling’s…
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