After nearly eight years of title defenses (which ironically were one fall defenses despite the initial posturing of the WWWF against Thesz’s win over Rogers), Bruno was ready to drop the strap. But as is the usual policy of the McMahon promotion, the belt would be won by an interim heel champion before the new hero became victorious.

On January 18, 1971 Bruno Sammartino lost the WWWF championship to Ivan Koloff. Less than a month later, Koloff lost the title to Pedro Morales

At this point, it would be pertinent to mention some of the tag teams that held the WWWF tag team championship during its early years. Interestingly enough, the tag team championship lineage actually pre-dates the formation of the WWWF by nearly six years. The original champions on the East Coast were billed as "US Tag Team Champions". Rocca and Miguel Perez were the original holders of those belts. They dropped them to Eddie and Dr. Jerry Graham, who went on to wear them on a few more occasions. Other teams to wear the belts during this period were The Kangaroos (Al Costello and Roy Heffernan), The Bastien Brothers (Red and Lou), Cowboy Bob Ellis and Johnny Valentine and several others. The first team to actually hold the WWWF World Tag team championship by that name was Skull Murphy and Brute Bernard.

During Sammartino’s title reign, he was also co-holder of the tag team championship with Spiros Arion. They were one of the more successful duos in the promotion’s history, but Bruno found it increasingly difficult to work as the singles champion and share the spotlight with a partner so an Arion turn was done and Bruno again had a program with a former partner.

Make no mistake about it—whatever wrestling historians might say about Bruno Sammartino’s wrestling ability, or the fact that he was a patterned worker who followed pretty much the same routine in the first several minutes of his matches, he was an outstanding draw in some of the biggest wrestling markets in the country. He faced a wide variety of heel opponents, ranging from veteran greats like Gene Kiniski, Killer Kowalski and Dr. Bill Miller to lesser lights like Tank Morgan and Bull Ortega. And as we shall see, his loss to Koloff and the eventual ascension of Morales to the spotlight was not the end of Bruno’s WWWF career. To refuse to recognize his existence, or to overlook his contribution to the development of the WWWF, is folly. Yet that is exactly what Vince McMahon is doing today. Granted, their split was a bitter one. But when Babe Ruth left the Yankees on similarly bitter terms, that didn’t erase what he had done in the record books for them. Bruno’s place in WWWF, and professional wrestling history, is preserved in sites such as this.

NEXT MONTH:

The next piece will pick up the history of the WWWF with the reign of Pedro Morales.