10 Wrestlers Who HATED Losing
9. Bruno Sammartino
Bruno Sammartino was a salt of the earth man, a trait so earnest and authentic that it allowed his adoring, Italian-American immigrant public to bond with him. Together - and it reads as corny, but you need only listen to the molten archive footage and read the statistics of his drawing power to believe it - they informed his legacy.
He wasn't quite humble; early in his career, he repelled promoters through his refusal to lose, even in the early, unproven stage of his career. Blackballed, he had to prove himself in Canada before returning to the northeast. Sammartino reasoned that "If anybody can really beat me, fine - but that's the only way I'll go down."
Sammartino was a man of preposterous strength - a strength informed by total, unadulterated drive. This strength was coded in his DNA; famously, his mother kept the sickly Sammartino alive by evading Nazi forces in their small, occupied village of Pizzoferrato, Italy. Bruno escaped the fate of four of his siblings, who died living on nothing but snow, and built his body, after emigrating to America, becoming a weight-lifting machine in defiance of bullies. He resolved never to become that sickly boy again. Strength became his primary personality trait.
Sammartino wasn't an egotist. He had overcame something so arduous that he couldn't reconcile the though of losing something so frivolous in comparison.