Trivia / Bruno Sammartino

• Creator Backlash: His time as a commentator and as his son's tag team partner in the WWF.
• Fountain of Expies: His nickname is "The Living Legend". WWF tried to reproduce his success with Pedro Morales but, although he was quite successful in his own way, it did not really take.
• Money, Dear Boy: While he did love the business of his era, he always tried to negotiate high paydays in order to provide for his family and justify all the time spent away from them, as he would have found local work as a laborer otherwise. Even while he disapproved of Vince Jr.'s product, he always praised the additional income that talent received from merchandise and likeness licensing.
• Referenced by...: Bruno Mars named himself after the wrestler. They got to meet shortly before Sammartino's death.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Bruno could have been NWA World Heavyweight Champion but it required a grueling schedule he would only agree to if he could have Sundays off. The WWWF wanted to keep most of their Sammartino dates in addition to various territorial promoters wanting time with champion, meaning his first month at least would have probably only given him one day off, so it wasn't to be.
  • There are a couple of rumors about opponents Bruno was scheduled to face:
  1. In the spring of 1980, as Hulk Hogan was being established as a serious threat to Bob Backlund and André the Giant, supposedly several matches were signed to have Hogan face Bruno. Bruno's own story — which many agree with — was that had these matches taken place, Hogan would not have lasted five minutes and that Bruno would win easily. Indeed, no explanation has ever been given as to why there have never been a Sammartino-Hogan series, but one possible scenario is that Vince McMahon Sr. (who was in charge then) caught wind of the planned matches and determined that, to maintain him as a serious and credible draw, Hogan wasn't ready at this point in his career to keep up with Sammartino in the ring and, in having Hogan no-show for these matches, scrapped the whole thing. Additionally, Sammartino was busy in his feud with Larry Zbyskyo. Had the Sammartino-Hogan matches taken place — keeping in mind this was two years before Vince Jr. took over the WWF and began hatching his national expansion plans, with Hogan as the centerpiece — Hogan's push surely would have been damaged enough that he never would have gotten seriously over anywhere else.
  2. Shortly before WrestleMania III, supposedly Bruno was to face André the Giant to help establish Andre's heel turn and make him an undefeatable force (as in, make him an even more dire threat to Hogan, as Sammartino himself had rarely if ever been beaten decisively, much less been pinned or forced to submit). For unknown reasons that are as unclear as whether such a feud was even seriously being considered, that never happened. Much more likely to have been planned, but still never came to pass, was Bruno's own desire to take on Andre in the late 1970s (perhaps sometime late in his second WWWF World Heavyweight Championship run) ... but like he would do with the Sammartino-Hogan matches in 1980, Vince McMahon Sr. found out and decided that the planned match wasn't a good idea — in this case, because Bruno and Andre were the top two good guys and fans (of that era, anyway) wouldn't take to it. (And besides, in storyline and real-life, Andre and Bruno were reasonably good friends, and the two did team together more than once.