Here’s a great article from the Sports Illustrated archives about longtime WWWF (now the WWE) champ Bruno Samamartino:

At Pittsburgh’s Civic Arena the wrestling crowd is listless. Periodically someone will scream for action, and the place will thunder with laughter when one of the combatants floors the referee, but mostly the preliminary matches are priming the spectators for Bruno Sammartino. The little old ladies are wearing BRUNO buttons. A fan dressed like a banker and sitting in a corner near the ropes can confide, “There are three pictures above the mantel at home—The Last Supper on the left, Jack Kennedy on the right and in the middle, Bruno Sammartino, the greatest man who ever lived!”

No wonder, then, that as Sammartino approaches the ring the lights dim and a spot spreads bright yellow across the canvas. There is silence, then an explosion of noise. People are suddenly standing and stamping their feet. Kids are shrieking, old ladies are pushing, shoving and holding cameras up high, bulbs flashing. The whole place rocks with a rhythmic pounding chant—”Bruno, Bruno, Bruno!”

Often the scheduled event is just a tag-team match; tonight it is Bruno and his partner Dom DeNucci against Baron Scicluna and George (The Animal) Steele, a vicious-looking man with his head shaved and bushes of strawberry hair sprouting over his stomach and chest. Except for a lot of teen-agers, the crowd hates him, and, like any villain opposing Sammartino, he must be destroyed. “I can’t understand,” Bruno says later, “how some of those kids could like that dirty pirate Steele. He cheats and sneaks and always tries to trick you. I don’t understand kids today—they don’t have to cheer me, but it’s sick to like Steele.”

A little agony, a little ecstasy @ Sports Illustrated