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The G.O.A.T. 100 #87 | Superstar Billy Graham
- Peter Edge
- 3 hours ago
- 16 min read
Welcome to the G.O.A.T. 100 where we will count down with PWM wrestling historian Peter Edge the 100 greatest wrestlers of all time, based on many different stats and criteria. A new wrestler will be added on Mondays and Thursdays every week. Here is a link to an introduction essay with Peter explaining his GOAT100 concept. At the bottom of the article you can find the GOAT 100 Portal with links to all profiles so far published, as well as a visual key... Enjoy learning more about the history of our great hobby!
The words pioneer and trailblazer will turn up a lot in this series. Heck, I’ve already used "trailblazer" in my opening gambit about Jaguar Yokota. But certain people are just associated with being pioneers without having to think about whether it’s a worthy distinction.
Eldridge Wayne Coleman Jr. was born into a working-class family in Phoenix, Arizona on June 7th, 1943. Coleman was attracted to weightlifting while in the fifth grade and would gain a body that his father was jealous of. So much so that he beat his son – but Jr. would fight back against Sr. eventually when he got older.
He would excel at athletics, in the Shot Put discipline and also boxing, participating in the 1959 Golden Gloves. As an adult, he took part in the Atlantic Coast Football League playing for the Waterbury Orbits in the league’s inaugural season. He impressed people enough in the teams’ second-place finish in the Northern Division that he would join the Oakland Raiders squad in the 1967 AFL season – but Coleman would never see action. He then went to the CFL and played for Montreal for 5 games in the 1968 season. But bodybuilding was his main expertise, especially in his teenage and early adult life.
Eldridge won the Mr. Teenage America Bodybuilding contest in the West Coast division in 1961. He worked out at Gold’s Gym with Arnold Schwarzenegger with the idea that he could become a star in the world of posing, but in a conversation with fellow CFL alumni Bob Lueck (who played for the Calgary Stampeders) Lueck encouraged Coleman to train with Stu Hart in the now world-famous Dungeon in Calgary.
Being stretched by Stu in the basement of the Hart house didn’t deter Eldridge from becoming a pro wrestler, making his debut within months of his first stretching by the patriarch of the Hart family. Going by his middle name and surname for his stay in Calgary, after he changed his wrestling name to Billy Graham using the evangelist preacher of that name as inspiration.
The evangelical style of preaching was also an influence on Graham and his promos. The ability to connect with the audience that made the original Billy Graham a star can easily by seen as a necessary trait for a successful pro wrestler, and “Superstar” Billy Graham would use his mic skills to connect with his audience – even if for him the end goal was for those masses to boo him, and pay money to see him get his ass kicked.
Before Hogan made the term famous, Graham was the first to popularise the term “brother” in interviews, which was actually a verbal tic taken from his exposure to revival meetings and the religious folks in attendance who would refer to each other that way.
Whilst in Florida, Billy was made a younger brother of Jerry, Eddie and Luke Graham, three of the main characters of Championship Wrestling from Florida. He spent time in San Francisco and Hawaii before setting up shop in the upper Midwest’s AWA for three years. It would be his fake brother Jerry that advised Billy to dye his hair blonde from his original dark-brown colour.
He used his muscular look to do an “Arm Wrestling Champion of the World” gimmick and later a weightlifting angle with Ken Patera (a silver medalist in the 1971 World Championships in weightlifting before pro wrestling.) He also teamed with Dusty Rhodes in the months before Dusty made his career-defining face turn.
After his stay in the Midwest, Graham went to North Carolina where he was Ric Flair’s first big feud after the Nature Boy’s plane crash. In Japan, he feuded with Antonio Inoki not long after the disastrous Ali / Inoki fight, helping to rehabilitate Inoki. And then after Graham unsuccessfully attempted to start up a promotion in Southern California – seen as an outlaw promotion by the NWA – Dusty welcomed him back into the NWA fold by offering him a spot on the Florida roster, where Superstar was booked to take the Florida Heavyweight belt off of Rhodes.
That reign lasted 85 days before Dusty took the belt back in Tampa on February 15th, 1977. 74 days after that night, Billy became the WWWF Champion, taking the belt off Bruno Sammartino in Baltimore. He would hold the belt for 296 days, the longest reign ever for a heel champ in the ultimate babyface territory up to that point. Even in all the years since, it wasn't until this decade with Roman's reign that any full-on heel held the WWF/E World Championship for longer:
Vince McMahon Jr. later readily conceded that it had been a mistake when his father took the title off Graham in 1978 for Bob Backlund – that Graham should have been turned babyface and had a longer championship run. Graham went into depression after losing the title, essentially because he drew so well as champion and thought, by the way wrestling was done at the time, that meant he should have kept the championship…
Graham was the biggest drawing card in the entire business in both 1977 and 1978 after being No. 3 behind Sammartino and Antonio Inoki in 1976, (the year of Inoki vs. Muhammad Ali and Willem Ruska) and he was the best promo in the industry for three years straight, starting with the year the decision was made for him to replace Sammartino as WWWF champion, 1976.
He was told by Eddie Graham and Vince McMahon Sr. that Sammartino wanted out as champion and was told months ahead of time that he would win the title from Sammartino on April 30, 1977, in Baltimore, and would lose it on February 20, 1978, in Madison Square Garden, to Bob Backlund.
Winning the championship that only five others had held in its so-far 14-year history should have been the best moment of his career. But that night, he was more worried about getting out of Baltimore alive after he would put his feet on the ropes and do the unthinkable – pin Sammartino in a WWWF title match.
Beating Bruno 1 vs. 1 was something only one man, Ivan Koloff, had done in the 14 years since Sammartino had been The Man. Graham did get out alive, and business boomed with him on top. He defended the WWWF title not only in the NYC territory, but in a number of major NWA cities. He did a 60 minute draw at the Orange Bowl in Miami in a title vs. title match with Harley Race in front of 12,000 fans in a rainstorm at the Superbowl of Wrestling as well as defences in St. Louis against Bob Slaughter (before he became a "Sergeant") and multiple defences in Championship Wrestling from Florida against a now-babyface Dusty, as well as Rocky Johnson.
A feud with Dusty Rhodes in the World Wide Wrestling Federation included a Texas Death match so bloody that the BBFC (the body that gives age-appropriate rating to movies and DVDs in Britain) forced the match to be taken off the Dusty Rhodes DVD sold by WWE in the late 00s.
The New York territory had been built around heel managers bringing in new heels to face the babyface champion. It was a system that had been used since the rise of Sammartino in 1963 and was the basic foundation of business until the end of the Hulk Hogan championship era, and many feel this formula was the basis for the WWF/E’s best years, both creatively and pound-for-pound fiscally.
But heel Graham drew fantastically well as champion, and he was brought up in a business where it was all about what was working at the box office. But Vince McMahon’s father had made his plans and was going to stick with them. He had promised Backlund the belt and he wasn't going to break that promise.
Two days before the planned title loss was the biggest match in the history of Philadelphia up to that point. Graham was defending against Sammartino in a cage match. The fans in Philadelphia knew that Sammartino never lost cleanly and never lost cage matches. Bruno had avenged the 1971 loss to Koloff many times over. So the fans at the Philly Spectrum expected Bruno to win. Of course, they didn’t know that Sammartino, no matter what he claimed in his promos, actually did not want the title.
In those days, most tickets were usually sold in a walk-up. But on this day that wasn’t the case, as 19,500 tickets had all sold well in advance – not for the first time with Bruno and Superstar, but this was much bigger. The newscasts on television, (who never covered wrestling, no matter how big the interest was) covered this match – if only to note to stay away from the Spectrum, and that it was sold out and you couldn’t get a ticket. Still, it was one of the biggest traffic jams in the city as of that era, because many thousands – the low estimate being 6,000 – ignored the news on television and the radio and tried to find a way to get into the building. There’s no telling how many people it could have drawn if it wasn’t the depths of winter, and if they had tried to run a stadium.
They did a fluke finish, rare in a cage match at the time. But it was the only way they could do it – Sammartino would pound on Graham for most of the match, but then throw a powerful punch that knocked Graham out the cage door to the floor. Thus Graham was the winner at a heated 7:43. That kind of finish would be shat on today, but then it didn't matter.
Once Backlund was champion, Sammartino couldn’t challenge, but future matches against Graham in Sammartino’s limited appearances meant giant payoffs by the standard of that time.
But Graham had a plan to skip the Backlund match. Sammartino was to accidentally injure him and he'd try to work everyone – thus missing the MSG match where he was to lose. The hope was that McMahon Sr. would see what most of his talent saw – that this was hardly the time to change the title. But McMahon had crafted his plan back in 1976, and had been executing it for a year. Deep down, everyone knew Backlund was beating Graham for the title for months. They just didn’t know when.
Of course Graham made a mistake on this plan, working out of the territory the next day at Maple Leaf Garden in Toronto where he retained the title over Edouard Carpentier.
Graham then showed up in MSG, told Vince Sr. that his knee was blown out and there was no way he could work. Graham’s reputation for telling tall tales was hardly a secret and Sr. never would have bought the knee injury suddenly on this day to begin with. But unbeknownst to Graham, he also knew Superstar had worked the night before in Toronto. Vince basically told him that, knee injury or not, he was going to the ring and putting over Backlund.
Graham remained a huge draw after that night, both chasing Backlund and working with people like Rhodes and Sammartino in matches that were probably bigger matches than the title contests on top – as near the top of best draws in the US as any babyface. But the depression of not getting the recognition he had earned for that got to him, and he was never the same.
While St. Louis was one of the best-paying cities in the country, especially for headliners, Graham wasn’t a fan of working there, because the television Sam Muchnick put on was almost all wrestling with very little promo time. He felt without the promo time, you couldn’t get the matches over, but St. Louis was one of the best-drawing cities in the country.
Once Graham, for reasons still not known, missed a main event in St. Louis. Muchnick was so mad about the no-show that he took Graham’s photo down from the office, and told his assistant Larry Matysik that, as far as St. Louis goes, Billy Graham was dead.
Graham still had a few places he could work, including Tennessee, where his magazine covers and fame as WWWF champion were used to give the prestige to create the CWA world championship, that promoter Jerry Jarrett went on to use as the top belt in Memphis from then on.
Then, starting in 1980, he wrestled mostly in Houston on Friday nights for Paul Boesch. After that, he didn’t wrestle at all. He disappeared from wrestling. Completely.
Superstar got on what he would later call the heaviest steroid regiment of his life. He bulked up to 325 pounds and was invited to compete in that year’s World’s Strongest Man competition – a major series of events that would air over a couple of months on network television. He really showed his outsized personality to a whole new audience on that show. For example, in a lift of silver dollars, he tried to steal the silver dollars! Growing up in the 90s, I used to watch World Strongest Man Competitions on UK TV and it was exactly what you would imagine – big strong dudes doing big strong things, but showing not much personality in the process, besides maybe roaring when they would do something strong, and sometimes looking like they were constipated when doing the lifting. Billy Graham in this environment was like a rainbow on a day of shit weather.
But unfortunately, he was injured in the competition, and wound up in seventh place behind the younger lifters who had learned to specialize in the event. The competition was won by future pro wrestler Bill Kazmaier – who went on to show no personality as a wrestler, either. Graham beat Kazmaier in the battery hold event, but he just was not the same Superstar that the people had known – visually at least.
He was bulked up, had shaved his trademark thinning bleached blond hair, dumped the sideburns and grew a mustache. The voice was the same and he cut great promos during the season, but the cool look that was his trademark wasn’t there. He was billed as "Superstar Billy Graham, the pro wrestler," but he looked completely different from the Superstar who had rocked the biggest arenas in the world.
After these setbacks, he went through depression, and to him, "Superstar Billy Graham" died as his issues got worse. He was living in Phoenix, making his living in a trade, digging underground sprinklers. He didn’t want to be around wrestling at all, anymore. And he didn’t want word to get out Superstar Billy Graham who was WWWF champion had been reduced to digging sprinklers. He had no job skills past pro wrestling, and at the time couldn’t bear to do pro wrestling.
And then he died.
Well – that was the rumour, anyhow. Because he had disappeared from wrestling, the rumours in both wrestling newsletters, wrestling magazines and bodybuilding publications was that he might have died from cancer. Nobody reported that he did, just everyone heard that was what people were saying, and nobody knew where he was.
Gorilla Monsoon at the time did a column in the Philadelphia Journal, one of the daily papers in the city, and reported that Graham had died on November 4, 1981, at his home of Paradise Valley, AZ.
At around the same time, Art Rosenbaum, a legendary sports columnist in the San Francisco Chronicle, ran a story about steroids in sports, which were known to all the athletes and the gym rats, but not so much to the wider public before this.
Rosenbaum wrote about the side effects, and noted hearing from John Swenski (a former wrestler who later became a promoter in San Jose) who mentioned to him that Graham – who had worked in San Jose regularly early in his career and was so muscular he made Arnold Schwarzenegger look like Twiggy (the famous model nicknamed so because she was as thin as a twig) – that Swenski had heard Graham had died from cancer due to steroids.
Graham found out about the Monsoon story and called him up, telling him he was alive. Gorilla would never write a retraction.
The death of Billy was short-lived. A few weeks later, Graham was announced as being on the January 1982 tour for New Japan Pro Wrestling and feuded with Seiji Sakaguchi, and had matches with Riki Choshu and Akira Maeda.
The McMahons even brought him back to WWF in August 1982 for a main-event run with Backlund for the title. The story for the two was obvious – the current champ has to withstand the challenge of a former champ who had not been around for a while.
They were expecting Superstar Billy Graham, the blond adonis bodybuilder that was larger than life and dominated the screens of WWF television. Instead, they got a much smaller, almost sickly looking Billy at times – particularly compared to what people remembered of Superstar. Still bald-headed, but now older, he still had muscles, but not to the level people were used to seeing from him.
He turned up wearing karate pants and a black belt and claimed that in the time he was gone, he had studied martial arts and was now the martial arts champion of the world. The new approach played off the popularity of Kung Fu, the hit TV show. But Graham did no flashy martial arts moves or kicks. He would throw chops… lots of chops. He was not impressive at all in the ring, and the gimmick just looked low rent.
After leaving New York, he went to Florida and at first was part of Kevin Sullivan’s Army of Darkness in Kevin’s feud with Dusty Rhodes, before turning face when he showed his displeasure with how Sullivan was treating his valet, Fallen Angel. Graham then went to Jim Crockett Promotions where he was part of the Paul Jones Army before, again, turning face and feuding with Paul and his group. (Who said wrestling bookers weren’t original in their thinking!)
By the time Graham left the Carolinas, he had got his mass back and also went back to the tie-dye look associated with the Superstar, just in time for the national expansion of the New York promotion that had made him famous. Back on WWF TV, it would be only in an on-screen managerial role as Don Muraco’s mentor– which went about as well as a babyface Don Muraco run in 1988 would be expected to go. The original plan was for Graham to wrestle, but after a squash match victory against Bob Bradley in September 1986, it was realized that Graham would need a hip replacement before anything physical. His surgery was shown on WWF television to promote his comeback, which started in the summer of the next year. But after three months and a feud with Butch Reed, it became clear Billy’s hip and ankles still just couldn’t take the strain anymore.
Graham would also go into announcing but his commentary stint didn't go as well as you might expect based on his brilliance as an interview. Superstar’s performance in the booth for SummerSlam 1988 showed that – even if you were one of the most gifted men on the mic that wrestling has ever seen – it's a whole different skill set with a headset on. Graham was released by WWF in 1989.
In the early 90’s, Dr. George Zahorian, a doctor in Harrisburg, PA, was federally investigated for distributing steroids to WWF wrestlers and then convicted of the crime in 1991 under the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 – the final act to pass through Congress under Ronald Reagan’s Presidency. This would lead to the 1994 trial of Vince McMahon under the same charges as Zahorian.
Graham sued the convicted doctor and the WWF, claiming that he was coerced to take steroids so he could stay in the position in the card that meant success. The lawsuit was unsuccessful on the basis that Graham had taken steroids for a decade before he went to the New York territory.
He also did the rounds as a talking head on the opposition side to the WWF during the Titangate scandal that saw the Fed under accusations relating to steroids, along with an alleged child sex abuse scandal that has come back to the fore in the last few years. Graham alleged that he saw abuse of minors by WWF officials, something that he would later say that he made up and would write in his book that the false allegations were “his most shameful moment," not only in the wrestling profession, but "in my life”. Graham’s apology would only be acknowledged when he went in for a liver transplant in 2002 after contracting Hepatitis C.
Superstar Billy Graham was welcomed back into the fold in 2004. He was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame, with an induction speech by Triple H, who has said that Graham was an inspiration for him to become a wrestler. (10 place deduction for Billy Graham!)
A DVD dedicated to Graham was part of the catalogue of profile DVD’s that came out in the 00’s. He appeared on television at times and would sign a WWE Legends contract that he remained under until the day he died.
It wouldn’t stop Graham from being critical of McMahon and WWE at certain times. He was one of multiple people that accused Vince of “acting senile” at Rocky Johnson’s funeral, but he was the most vocal about it.
The last two decades of Graham’s life were hard. He had to sell his HOF ring to purchase anti-rejection drugs to help treat his liver post-transplant. He was given a year to live in 2010 unless he would get another transplant of his liver. Billy would purchase a plot of land at the Green Acres Cemetery in Phoenix next to Eddie Guerrero’s grave in anticipation of his death… but then he was given an extra two years if he took Interferon for what was now early cirrhosis (what was initially thought to be advanced fibrosis.)
He went on to live another 11 years, but was in pain throughout. He was hospitalized with double pneumonia and possible heart failure in 2013. Another liver complication in October 2014 put Superstar back into hospital. August 2016 saw Graham undergo a procedure after suffering from internal bleeding. Then in 2022, he had to have his toes amputated due to an infection.
The next year an ear and skull infection caused Graham to go deaf. By spring, his kidneys, heart and lungs would start to fail. Graham lost 80 pounds and then the failure of those organs and sepsis would end the life of Superstar at the age of 79.
Billy Graham only had three years at the very top tier of professional wrestling, but in those three years he paved a road for the modern age of wrestling.
Graham's approach to professional wrestling served as a blueprint for future world champions. His heavily muscled physique, charismatic promos, and fashion-forward presentation were emulated by several prominent wrestlers, including Ric Flair, Steve Austin, (in his “Stunning” days) as well as Scott Steiner when he embarked on his WCW singles run, Triple H, Hulk Hogan and Randy Savage.
Simply put, “Superstar” Billy Graham was a true groundbreaker.
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