Bruno Sammartino, Pittsburgh's wrestling legend, dies at 82

Bruno Sammartino spent almost his entire life fighting. Starvation. Disease. The German Army when it was marching through the hills of central Italy in World War II.

Then, after immigrating from Pizzoferrato to South Oakland at the age of 15, he battled the world’s best professional wrestlers to become the World Wide Wrestling Federation heavyweight champion and one of the biggest names in the history of the sport.

Mr. Sammartino died Wednesday at the age of 82. He had been hospitalized for two months, according to The Associated Press.

Vincent K. McMahon, chairman and CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, the industry behemoth formerly known as WWWF and then WWF, called Mr. Sammartino “one of the finest men I knew, in life and in business” in a Wednesday afternoon tweet. Mr. McMahon’s father, Vincent J. McMahon, owned the WWWF when Mr. Sammartino was one of its centerpieces.

“Bruno Sammartino proved that hard work can overcome even the most difficult of circumstances,” the younger McMahon wrote. “He will be missed.”

If Mr. Sammartino’s name carried weight nationally, it meant even more in Pittsburgh. Until the end of his life, he maintained a reputation not just as a man of the people, but as a pillar of his profession, his city and the neighborhood that shaped him.

“He was sort of a humble guy, a gentle man to talk to,” Ace Freeman, a professional wrestler for 40 years, once said.

Sammartino began building that reputation locally in 1950, when he, his mother, Emilia, and his siblings joined his father, Alfonso, on South Oakland’s Cato Street.

Born Oct. 6, 1935, Mr. Sammartino was an 87-pound teenager who spoke little English and had spent a chunk of his childhood hiding from German soldiers.

“We lived off the land in Italy,” Mr. Sammartino once said. “I became a weakling due to the war. We lived in the mountains for 14 months without much food. People were dying from starvation.”

Mr. Sammartino said he was “a skeleton” himself, catching pneumonia, and that his mother “put leeches on me because they believed that in the old country.”

Mr. Sammartino’s mother lamented not leaving Italy sooner: “But I said, ‘Mom, I don’t look at it that way.’ It was because of that war when we were kids, it was because of the starving and the deaths and the suffering, that we never forget and keep our feet on the ground.”

The younger Sammartino’s reception in the United States, though, was not immediately a positive one.

“My brother [Paul] and I were getting beat up every day for being different,” he once said. “So we joined the Young Men’s Hebrew Association, where we took up weightlifting and wrestling.”

Mr. Sammartino, a longtime resident of the North Hills and a 1955 graduate of Schenley High School, eventually added enough weight and strength to play two years of high school football.

“They used to line up two guys in front of me, but I knocked them on their cans and creamed the quarterback,” Mr. Sammartino once said. “At Schenley, all the guys used to say, ‘Don’t mess with Sam.’ I came out of Schenley a 225-pound, good-looking athlete.”

He became a carpenter’s apprentice and helped construct many of the buildings in Gateway Center. Eventually he turned to weightlifting, appeared on Bob Prince’s show on KDKA-TV in 1955 and narrowly lost out on an Olympic spot in 1956.

In 1958, a story featuring Mr. Sammartino appeared in The Pittsburgh Press titled “Pittsburgh Hercules.” It touched on his exercise, diet and weightlifting regimen; according to the story, Mr. Sammartino drank seven quarts of milk a day. Breakfast was a dozen eggs and a loaf of bread.

“I’m generally hungry when I leave the table,” he said at the time.

Later, a wrestling promoter spotted him and Mr. Sammartino got his first match, defeating Jack The Neck Vansky in Aliquippa. By the early 1960s, Mr. Sammartino’s star was on the rise, including regular appearances on the local TV production “Studio Wrestling.”

Mr. Sammartino’s heritage made him a hero to Italian-Americans — and was inseparable from his in-ring persona. A Post-Gazette story from Dec. 28, 1961 referred to him as “a local Italian,” and his matches against Polish, German and Russian wrestlers were often promoted as clashes between countries. One Canadian rival, Johnny Powers, paid to publish an open letter to Mr. Sammartino in The Pittsburgh Press ahead of their Oct. 2, 1964 match.

“Don’t forget to bring along your belt,” Mr. Rogers wrote, “for Pittsburgh will see a new champion crowned.”

Pittsburgh did not; Mr. Sammartino beat Mr. Rogers in the main event at the Civic Arena.

Before the arena’s construction, the biggest shows went on at Forbes Field — blocks from Sammartino’s childhood home. He did his best to fill the stands with his people, and he enlisted his mother’s help. Emilia Sammartino would regularly drop off stacks of tickets at a dress shop on Oakland Avenue “to give to our Italian friends and all the guys who came from there so we could go watch at Forbes Field,” longtime Oakland resident Leo Pasquarelli said on Wednesday.

Mr. Pasquarelli said his mother, Felicia, worked as a seamstress at the shop. They were friends with the Sammartinos dating back to Pizzoferrato.

“He would always do stuff like that. He was always a very, very nice guy, and he never forgot where he came from,” Mr. Pasquarelli said.

Mr. Pasquarelli would know; as a middle-schooler, he said he caught the garter at Sammartino’s wedding, then was forced — against his will — to return it.

Later, while Mr. Pasquarelli was working as a plumber on a crew renovating Mr. Sammartino’s home, the family’s “pretty [darn] big” German shepherd bit his leg. A tetanus shot followed.

Two days later, Sammartino walked up to another worker and said, “I heard the plumber got bit on the leg. Who is he?” Then, he saw Mr. Pasquarelli — who he didn’t know was part of the crew, let alone the bitten plumber — and yelled, “Leo? What the hell are you doing here?”

Mr. Sammartino had bought the dog to help protect his wife, Carol, who was pregnant with twin sons at the time, while he was on the road. Naturally, he apologized.

“Every time you’d see the guy, he was one of the nicest people you’d ever want to meet,” said Mr. Pasquarelli, who opened his own plumbing business in Oakland decades ago. “Down to earth, and everybody loved him.”

Maybe not everyone. Certainly not the likes of “Killer” Kowalski, Gorilla Monsoon or “Nature Boy” Buddy Rogers. Mr. Sammartino won the WWWF title in 1963, using the backbreaker in a 48-second bout against Rogers. “Give up or I’ll break your back!” he screamed at Mr. Rogers over the roar of the crowd in Madison Square Garden in New York City.

He held the title for eight years — a WWWF record — before losing it to Ivan Koloff. He regained it in 1973 but lost it to Superstar Billy Graham in 1977.

Over those years, Mr. Sammartino’s reputation spread around the world. He sold out Madison Square Garden more times than any sports celebrity (said to be 187 out of 211 appearances). He wrestled in every state and on every continent. He was especially popular in Japan.

His average yearly salary was $250,000 when he retired in 1981. He once offered to meet heavyweight boxing champion Cassius Clay for $250,000 in the ring.

Mr. Sammartino had several serious injuries, including broken wrists, elbows, ankles, fingers and collarbone. His nose was broken 11 times.

In 1976, Mr. Sammartino’s neck was broken when he was slammed to the canvas by 357-pound Stan Hansen. One doctor said Mr. Sammartino would not wrestle again; another said he came within a millimeter of being paralyzed permanently from the neck down. But Mr. Sammartino trained rigorously in his basement gym in Ross and returned to wrestling four months later.

He always insisted professional wrestling, often criticized for being more show business than sport, was legitimate — if scripted.

“My broken neck is for real. When I bleed, it’s my blood and it’s real. Anybody who sees me in person will see the worst cauliflower ears I think you have ever seen. When newspapermen would criticize [wrestling], I’d say get your toughest football player and I’ll show you how quickly I will demolish him.”

Mr. Sammartino built his reputation by avoiding the glitz and showmanship that became a large part of professional wrestling in the 1980s and 1990s. He was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2013 upon the resolution of a falling-out with the company that lasted more than two decades.

“All [fans] ever saw Bruno in was a pair of tights and a pair of plain boots,” Mr. Sammartino said in 1982. “They never saw Bruno in in a fancy jacket or fancy this or fancy that. What they saw in the ring, they believed it. I think people saw me as someone who was real, and not somebody subject to the criticism and ridicule given to my profession.”

That reputation extended beyond his work in the ring. In 2016, the City of Pittsburgh added Mr. Sammartino’s name to Dan Marino’s and Andy Warhol’s on two signs welcoming visitors to South Oakland. Mayor Bill Peduto, Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald and Mr. Marino were among those who attended the ceremony.

Mr. Marino said his dad, a friend of Mr. Sammartino’s, would ride by the markers and say “Why the hell is Bruno’s name not on that sign?”

Mr. Sammartino returned the affection from his old neighbors.

“I don’t want to sound ungrateful for everything else because I’m deeply grateful for everything that’s happened in my life, but [the sign dedication], for me, I’m very deeply touched by it and very grateful that they thought me worthy of this honor with these other guys,” Mr. Sammartino said at the time.

“Everything happened from here for me.”

Statements by Mr. Peduto and Mr. Fitzgerald on Wednesday spoke to that.

“We are saddened by the loss of Bruno Sammartino, a Pittsburgh legend and iconic figure,” Mr. Fitzgerald said. “He came to Pittsburgh as a young man and through hard work and perseverance gained national and international acclaim. He has always made us proud. He embodied Pittsburgh and served as one of the greatest ambassadors for this region.

“This is a great loss for those of us who are of a certain age who remember his accomplishments and achievements in the ring. Growing up, Bruno always made us proud that he was from Pittsburgh and made us prouder to be from Pittsburgh too.

“In the last few years, I’ve had the privilege to get to know Bruno as a man who was extremely proud of his Pittsburgh roots and heritage.

“Our thoughts and prayers are with his family and friends at this time. We hope that it provides some comfort to them to know how lucky we feel that Pittsburgh became home to him and his family, and that we had him as a Pittsburgher for as long as we did.”

Mr. Peduto said the fondest memories of his childhood are “of sitting in the basement with my grandfather on Saturday mornings and watching Bruno wrestle. They both came from the same part of Italy, and when my grandfather – who was 5-foot-8 – would watch Bruno wrestle he became 6-feet-10. I consider it a great personal honor that Bruno and I later became friends.

“I join all other Pittsburgh residents in saying ‘Thank you, Bruno’ and we will miss you.”

Mr. Sammartino is survived by his wife, Carol, son David, a former professional wrestler with whom he briefly formed a tag team, and twin sons Danny and Darryl. Burial services for Mr. Sammartino will be Monday. More details to come.