RIP Randy Savage

Randy Mario Poffo, the "Macho Man" himself, died in a car crash this Friday. I will miss his personality.

Someday, when I can get some more introspective without wincing at my younger self, I'll have to delve into my years as a wrestling fan. These were not the years when it grew into a prime time event. This was the 80's, just after Andy Kaufman's career was wrecked partly because of his association with the pseudo-sport. The then WWF was confined to UHF stations and the drudge hours of the USA Network. To be into it and know who was fighting who back then was not a bragging right or even a conversation topic to casually bring up.

I can't mince the sad truth: I got into wrestling because I thought it was real. I was dumb, gullible and raised on a diet of comics books that made all the good guy/bad guy drama seem just palatable enough to want to follow. My Dad, bless him, humored me and let me go to matches at the Providence Civic Center. I went to three before I kind of figured out the whole fixed thing and backed away from the pass time much in the same way a kid backs off from talking about Santa after they hear their parents wrapping presents late Christmas Eve.

Randy Savage was part of the WWF in those years. Even then, his personality was too big for the rings he jumped around in. The tributes to his life list his match with Ricky "The Dragon" Steamboat as one of his best matches. I saw those matches on TV, but I best remember his feud with Tito Santana, a good deal of which I saw live after Savage won the Intercontinental title from Santana. I was at the Providence Civic Center for the first rematch since the then-heel Savage cheated with a "foreign object" to win the title in the first place.

I was there in the small stadium to root for Santana, though he never got the belt back. More unforgettable was standing up to see Savage enter the ring with his trademark fanfare while a group of young men behind me quietly took out a large banner, with no fanfare and in spite of the fact that there were no visible cameras documenting the event, let alone them.

The banner, with a painted dragon on it I believe, simply said, "Savage Rules."

I didn't know it then, but it was my first experience with the idea of the antihero.