As announced Monday night on RAW in what was a pretty obvious play for ratings, "Macho Man" Randy Savage will finally be inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame this year. It was really a ridiculous and glaring omission, with names like Koko B. Ware and former chaffeur James Dudley going into the Hall before one of the biggest stars in the history of wrestling.
Much of the holdup involved brother Lanny Poffo demanding that the entire Poffo family (Savage, Lanny and father Angelo Poffo) go into the Hall of Fame as a group, although enough goodwill has been built up (or money exchanged, whichever) to bury the bad blood and allow it to happen. And then there's the matter of the rumors surrounding Savage's problems with Vince McMahon, which once led Vince to declare that he would "never do business with Savage again" years earlier. But once Ultimate Warrior buried the hatchet and went into the Hall, it was probably only a matter of time before Vince caved and put Savage in there as well. Not to mention that a recent Randy Savage DVD set appears to be selling well, and clips of Macho Man are all over the WWE Network. A whole new generation appears to be discovering how amazing he was, which makes him a tough act to follow for the current "stars" of the promotion.
Randy Savage (Courtesy of WWE)For me personally, my earliest memories of being a wrestling fan were watching in horror at 12 years old, as Savage defended the Intercontinental title on TV against Ricky Steamboat (back when that title meant something) and got so frustrated by the challenger that he decided to drop a ringbell on his throat and put him out of action for six months. These days Dean Ambrose suffers a crushed larynx in storyline and then returns two days later on Smackdown, but it was a different time, and when they came to Vancouver with a rematch I was out of mind with excitement to go watch Steamboat get his revenge. After Savage's babyface turn and World title win in 1988, I was 100% on board the Macho Man train and he quickly became one of my favorite wrestlers of all time. Later he tarnished his legacy somewhat in WCW, and the less said about his rap album the better, but that's a minor blemish on a career that some of the top stars in history could only dream about. In particular his feud with Hulk Hogan and Wrestlemania V main event was one of the biggest money-drawing runs in the history of anything. It was also one of the greatest prolonged storylines they ever came up with, leading to a Shakespearean redemption by Wrestlemania VII where he retired after a loss to Ultimate Warrior and finally reconciled with Elizabeth once and for all.
Oddly, Savage is set to be inducted by Hulk Hogan, the guy who was his biggest enemy and in out of the ring for many years (Savage wrote a rap song about it! That's how much they hated each other!) Shortly after Savage's death in 2011, Hogan claimed that they had mended fences while waiting together in a doctor's office, but this still kind of stinks of a ratings ploy rather than anything Savage would have wanted. In fact, despite wrestling each other literally hundreds of times between the WWF and WCW over a 15 year span, Hogan never once let Savage pin him, something that appeared to stick in Savage's craw for many years afterwards, and rightly so. Hogan once lost to Jacques Rougeau, aka the perennial comedy jobber known as the Mountie. You might as well do a job for a blow-up doll or a mannequin, and yet he wouldn't ever lose to Macho Man? I'd write a passionate freestyle rap against him, too, if I was Savage.
Hopefully this induction and sudden influx of Savage-related media is a sign that the power shift in WWE (from Vince to HHH) will mellow a lot of the ridiculous old grudges still lingering (Lex Luger, to name one), but I'm just happy to see one of the greatest of all time get the recognition he richly deserves, and hopefully they put Elizabeth in there with him too for good measure.
Dig it? OH YEAH.