TONIGHT, IN THAT GREAT RING IN THE SKY, THE MAIN EVENT—MACHO MAN RANDY SAVAGE VS. DICK THE BRUISER… “OOH YEAH!”

5/26/11

It is amazing how remiss I was in my last batch of posts in not writing ANYTHING about the passing of Randy Mario Poffo, better known as Randy “Macho Man” Savage. Equally amazing is that, after I sent my weekly (or bi-weekly sometimes) e-mail informing my regular readers of recent goings-on in the Pontificator, two guys with whom I worked at Kemper long, long ago almost immediately and simultaneously expressed their flabbergastedness (a word I just made up) at my omission. I can only say that I must have been awfully busy last Friday, the day when another friend from the money business, who goes back with me almost as far as my two aforementioned Kemper colleagues, called to inform me of the untimely death of the Macho Man. How else could I not have opined on the Randy Savage and taken the opportunity to reflect on the evolution of pro wrestling? Maybe I was trying to spare my readers from what should prove to be a long post, but one that I hope will be entertaining, insightful, and perhaps a bit poignant, all the while generously fertilized with the type of cynicism you can find nowhere else but here.

What most of my readers don’t know, but those who’ve known me for a long time do, is that pro wrestling has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. Before I started writing this commentary, I used to write a political and financial newsletter called The Insightful Irregular Commentary and, before that, The Insightful Weekly Commentary. One of the best of those commentaries was written when World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) went public. That seminal, but now lost, piece was an extensive study of pro wrestling and its evolution, of its many near death experiences that abruptly ended with the emergence of a new medium that needed programming. Wrestling’s several golden ages coincided with the advent of, in order, television, UHF television, closed circuit broadcasts (a minor medium, at least as far as wrestling goes), cable television, and pay per view television. The last of these two go hand-in-hand, of course, and Savage was part of the 1980s golden age that drew its strength from cable television’s attaining truly national stature and thus needing plenty of programming both for its “no extra charge” extravaganzas and its pay per view mega-extravaganzas. More on this later.

What I didn’t realize until I had a moment to reflect on the Macho Man’s death is the ongoing, if minor, part he played, indirectly or directly, in my near lifetime of observing his “sport.” When UHF television was first making its debut in the mid to late 1960s, the new channels (WCIU channel 26 and WFLD channel 32 in Chicago, followed a bit later by channel 44, the call letters of which I don’t recall) needed programming desperately. The obvious choice, besides Red Hot and Blue (with your host Arkansas Big Bill Hill, featuring world famous blues guitar legend Otis Rush and sponsored by Don’s Cedar Club and Dell’s Discount Furniture Mart) and the very oddly juxtaposed Amos and Andy, was All-Star Championship Professional Bob Luce Wrestling. It was watching those grainy broadcasts with my brother in our room (Our parents were not pro wrestling fans so we couldn’t watch wrestling on the color set downstairs, but that made no difference because wrestling was in black and white anyway.), while trying to get remotely decent reception from the special UHF aerial on the back of our portable Zenith, that I developed my love of wrestling which, albeit almost exclusively in memory form, remains to this day.

Back in the mid to late ‘60s, wrestling remained a regional business in which the stars and scenarios were jealously, and often aggressively and violently, guarded by local promoters who were by no means unfamiliar with business tactics that approximated those displayed by their properties in the ring. In Chicago, the promoter was the aforementioned Bob Luce (though I heard recently, but have never been able to verify, that Mr. Luce was little more than a front man for Richard Afflis (mentioned in this same sentence under his real name for those of you paying close attention), who really ran the promotion around here) and the big stars were Moose Cholak, Wilbur Snyder, Verne Gagne, Mad Dog Vachon, Johnny Valentine, the Assassins, the Kangaroos, Big Cat Ernie Ladd, Pretty Boy Larry Hennig and Handsome Harley Race, along with their inimitable manager then known as Beautiful Bobby Heenan, the Crusher (occasionally called “Crusher Lisowski” in order to distinguish him from Crusher poseurs), and, towering (figuratively, by no means literally) above the others, Dick the Bruiser, who may have been able to, as they said, pack any arena in the country, but, given the disjointed nature of the “sport” at the time, rarely got the chance to do so outside the Midwest.

About this time, one of the many strokes of good luck that have seemed to characterize my life took place. One of my dad’s friends from the meat business, who obviously had some political clout, got the job of Wrestling Commissioner for the state of Illinois, which involved little more than collecting a pay check and getting free tickets to the matches at the old International Amphitheater on 42nd and Halsted, almost literally around the corner from the meat packing plant that my dad and his partners operated on the outskirts of the stock yards. The Amphitheater may have been the scene of four national political conventions by then (with the most infamous, the ’68 Democratic convention, still to come), but to me it became famous because it was the place where my dad, my brother, and I could sit ring side and watch Dick the Bruiser get his just revenge on the likes of Johnny Valentine, Mad Dog Vachon, and the various minions of Beautiful Bobby Heenan. The stories I have from those early years of watching wrestling are legion, and if I ever write another book that does not involve Chairman Eamon DeValera Collins, I will record them all. But for purposes of this post, I will only note that a mid-card figure (not the first match, where the aspiring palookas recruited largely from street corners, barrooms, loading docks, or, occasionally, college or high school wrestling programs, took up time while the crowds filed in, but not the main or even the preliminary main match, either. Hence, the description “mid-card figure.”) at those events was a guy named Angelo Poffo, who, at the time, and unbeknownst to me or anyone else in the arena, for that matter, had two sons a few years older than I named Randy and Lanny.

It is amazing the things one remembers when one gets older. To the point of this post, I remember patiently standing at ringside (a few steps from our seats, actually) before a match waiting for Angelo Poffo to autograph my program when some kid in the crowd asked “How do you like Downers Grove, Angelo?” Being from the rather insular far south side of Chicago, I had no idea, at the age of eight or nine, where Downers Grove was; it sounded like a farm community somewhere in downstate Illinois, which may not have been all that far from the truth circa 1966. Angelo just nodded his head and said “It’s alright; my family likes it there.” Now I live two suburbs west of Downers Grove in a town (a city, really) called Naperville, which, I can assure you, might as well have been called Hooterville for all I knew about it back then. Life takes such turns, but I digress.

Even as I got older, supposedly matured, and got dangerously close to being somebody in life, my interest in pro wrestling continued on and off. Let’s fast forward about 17 or 18 years from the night I heard Angelo Poffo opine on the virtues of his new home of Downers Grove. I was by that time a junk bond analyst at Kemper and, as part of my work, would talk frequently with sell side analysts and salesmen about upcoming issues, about developments at companies in which we had invested, and, as is inevitable when people who work together and enjoy each other’s company talk, about other things that interested us. On one occasion, I was speaking with a bond salesman about my age with whom I had grown quite friendly. Knowing my affinity for pro wrestling, he asked me if I had heard the name “Macho Man.” I hadn’t. He reported that he had been downstate that weekend (maybe in Carbondale; that detail I don’t remember) and that he and his buddies and I think his wife had gone to see wrestling and the featured performer was a guy named Macho Man. My friend and colleague was surprised I hadn’t heard of Macho Man, but, at that time, the guy whose stage name was, as I would later learn, Randy “Macho Man” Savage, had not quite made the big time. My friend assured me that I would soon be seeing and hearing a lot of the Macho Man and, as usual, he was right.

A couple years later, I was in one of the institutional broker’s luxury boxes at what was then called the Rosemont Horizon, courtesy of another of my favorite bond salesmen who bravely tolerated my enthusiasm for pro wrestling, an enthusiasm that I managed to spread to a goodly number of my colleagues in the money management business. That night Hulk Hogan was at the top of the card but had wrestled earlier in New York and had jumped on a private plane to fly to Chicago to appear at the top, or end, of the card at the Horizon. The penultimate match of the evening was a contest for the Intercontinental Heavyweight Championship between Randy Savage and Tito Santana, two of the most athletic performers in the WWE. The match, as did any match involving Santana and most matches involving Savage, included aerial escapades, leaps off the top rope, flying body slams, and any number of physically demanding and skill requiring “holds” that, while perhaps not as entertaining as a simple folding chair to the back of the head (the aforementioned Crusher’s signature hold), were, to say the least, thrilling for the fans and exhausting for the wrestlers. The really interesting thing about this match was that Hogan’s plane was delayed by bad weather, and so the Santana-Savage contest, originally scheduled to go twenty, maybe thirty, minutes, about the limit of anyone’s physical abilities, given how these guys practiced their craft, had to go on and on and on until Hulk could make it to the Horizon, which, thank the good Lord, is only minutes from O’Hare. So an astute observer could notice that, each time one of the combatants found himself tossed out of the ring, he would look, exhaustedly, to the ref or to the timekeeping or announcer table as if to ask “Is he here yet? Can we wrap this thing up?” After getting a shake of the head or a shrug of the shoulders, the look of pure agony, exhaustion, and disappointment would be intensified on the face of Santana or Savage as he would reluctantly climb back into the ring for more aerobatics and two-counts. The match went over an hour. From the standpoint of sheer athleticism, showmanship, and a pure “I’m getting paid well, so I’ll do what they ask me to do” attitude, that Randy Savage/Tito Santana match was perhaps the greatest athletic event I have ever seen.

Years have passed, and wrestling has gone from pure sport (way before my time) to quasi-sport of tough guys who led hard lives to an exhibition of well paid guys who were, or made themselves, physical freaks of nature and national celebrities to the silly and pathetic soap opera that so disgraces this piece of Americana today. (I will write more on this if the aforementioned book gets written or if I merely get inspired to write a similarly themed Pontificator piece.) Randy “Macho Man” Savage was a man who spanned all those eras of pro wrestling (except the first), not temporally but stylistically. He was not a tough, brawling guy who, even while having the good fortune of having found a home and a career in pro wrestling, still led something of a hardscrabble life, like his father or other lesser lights of the Dick the Bruiser/Bruno Samartino era. Yet Savage’s life certainly had its tragic elements; witness the death by drug overdose of his former wife and stage “valet” and manager “Miss” Elizabeth Hulette in the home she shared with her lover, wrestler Lex Luger. Macho Man was also a consummate showman in his era of showmen, that of Hulk Hogan, Andre the Giant, Ric Flair, Rowdy Roddy Piper, Jesse “The Body” Ventura, and the managerial career of Classy Freddie Blassie. And one wonders what he thought of what wrestling has become. Maybe he thought the current offerings from Vince McMahon were just fine, another way for the boys to make some substantial dough. But one would hope that, somewhere in the back of his mind, he thought that things had gone way too far, that a physical contest with many elements of a circus had become a circus with few elements of a physical contest.