Rest in Peace, Macho Man

I’ve been told by acting teachers before that if you don’t believe it, you can’t expect an audience to believe it either. Randy Poffo got his wrestling name, Randy Savage, when a promoter remarked that he fought like a wild man in the ring. And there’s the paradox that defines a great pro wrestler right there – to enact their stunt ritual, their “fake” fight, with such fevered commitment that their belief spreads virally through the crowd, through the TV cameras, through the viewer’s imagination. We know we are being tricked, especially these days, but you don’t see people knocking David Copperfield for that. We go to the theater to be transported, and pro wrestling isn’t any different from Broadway when you get down to the core.

Wrestlers can achieve greatness through technical prowess, persona, skills on the microphone, and ring storytelling ability. Taking all four categories together, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who was as great at everything that made a pro wrestler as Randy “Macho Man” Savage, who died this morning when he suffered a heart attack while driving. He was 58 years old – too soon for a man, but compared with his contemporaries, so many of whom have fallen prey to “the sickness” in the business (as another survivor, “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, calls it), a fortunate span.

He joined the then-WWF in the mid-80’s and surged to the top with titanic willpower and charisma. He played both “face” (good guy) and “heel” with equal aplomb, and his voice launched 1,000 imitators (and about 1,000 Slim Jim commercials). If you listen past the often-delirious words in his promos, you hear a mad kind of music at work in his tempo and his random jabs of volume – he could come down harder on the strangest word in a sentence than William Shatner. He could be the florid peacock, in the classic sparkling robe or the rainbow cowboy hat, flirting with female interviewers; but in his on-stage relationship with his one-time wife, “First Lady of Wrestling” Miss Elizabeth, he was also the possessive, ragingly-jealous lover, which, depending on his role for the season, could come off as chivalry or brutality. At wrestling’s late 80’s/early 90’s peak, he brought a crowd to tears when he “reconciled” with her at Wrestlemania VII, and, reversing years of tradition, held the ring ropes open for her. There’s no fairy tale called “Beauty and the Guy Who Was Already Nice From Day One”.

But the way Randy Poffo, a second-generation man in the show, intuitively-grasped the bigger narrative and the role that “The Macho Man” could play within it was only one part of his legacy. It was the mini-stories, the matches themselves, that propelled him to the main event. It’s been said that any man could fake-punch Randy Savage in the stomach, and Savage could sell it like he’d been shot. During the days I first started to follow wrestling, when he had earned the WWF Heavyweight Championship and was playing “face” (while company headliner Hulk Hogan was taking time off the road and filming a movie), one of the first things my friends and I noticed was how thoroughly he could take a beating. The weight of a triumph is multiplied by the gravity of suffering, and the way he could cringe and kick and clutch his head, the way his body snapped into the mat on impact, just made that final moment before victory, when he ascended the top rope and raised his hands in the air before launching the flying elbow, so much sweeter.

Anyone who follows wrestling knows about his match with Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat at Wrestlemania III. On the night when Hulk Hogan body-slammed Andre the Giant in front of history’s biggest wrestling crowd – that moment which is truly the B.C./A.D. flip date for wrestling’s transition from disreputable roadshow to multimedia carnival – the highlight match of the night had already happened, as Savage “jobbed” (a.k.a. losing the belt, but making a good show out of it) the Intercontinental Championship to Steamboat in a 20-minute wrestling masterclass they had been rehearsing for months. Even to as experienced a viewer as Jesse “The Body” Ventura, doing color commmentary that night, the painstakingly-crafted ramp up of reversals, close-calls, staggering aerial stunts, and story tension, inspired him to say “This is the greatest match I’ve ever seen in my life!” before it was even over. And – in a world of fake names and scripted endings, “The Body” was telling us all the truth.

That he had an imperfect private life, that he ultimately fell out with Vince McMahon and the WWE and (unlike so many others) never returned, is best left to those who were personally involved. That he crossed over into the popular culture at large with those commercials, with self-mocking cartoon voice-overs, and with his role as “Bonesaw McGraw” in the first of the Sam Raimi Spider-Man films, is significant, but ancillary to his true legacy. The wrestler does his work when the lights come up, and we reward the ones who, no matter how many hundreds, even thousands, of times they’ve performed the ritual, are still willing to work hard for us, still willing to channel all their skill and fury and believe every night. There’s a short list of the greatest of all-time who would do that. Savage may have been the greatest of them all.