10 Times Wrestlers Refused To Accept Certain Finishes
6. Bruno Sammartino (On More Than One Occasion…)
Even during his early days, defeats for Bruno Sammartino were few and far between. By his own admission, though, that might have had something to do with the fact that he wasn’t the easiest guy to deal with.
In a 2005 interview with David Block, Sammartino confesses that “I wouldn’t cooperate with promoters. I told them ‘if anybody can really beat me, fine. But that’s the only way I’ll go down.’ I was a real young guy, and I wanted to establish myself. I didn’t want to be a preliminary boy, so the promoters took a negative stand against me by black balling me all over the country.”
That negativity, along with an incident that saw him banned by a local athletic commission after no-showing an event he was double-booked for, saw Sammartino’s opportunities dry up. Eventually, he wound up wrestling in Canada. Though as luck would have it, an NWA Toronto title run saw promoters south of the border come knocking once more.
He’d later end up back in the States, rising to fame with the WWF where he held the world title for 2,803 days—another run during which defeats for Sammartino were few and far between.