The year 1984 saw the debut of the aforementioned cartoon Hulk Hogan’s Rock ’n’ Wrestling, which featured Hogan and his band of fan favorites—including Captain Lou—in an orgy of semicomical, multicultural animated horseplay opposite “Rowdy” Roddy Piper’s team of bad guy all-stars. Sold to children on Saturday mornings, wrestlers were fully in the mainstream, albeit in animated form. And it must be said that their portrayals were borderline parodic and oddly inauthentic—the wrestlers didn’t even voice their own on-screen avatars.* This was followed in short order by wrestlers on talk shows, on awards shows, seemingly everywhere. Here was the ultimate victory for the Rock ’n’ Wrestling movement: Wrestling had been there all along, lurking in the shadows, but suddenly it was inescapable.
And there in the middle of it all was Captain Lou, the nominal patron saint of the whole WWF. Now commonly appearing in too-tight T-shirts emblazoned with his own visage, he was wrestling’s ambassador. Hogan—the champion, the figurehead—appeared on MTV and in commercials, but Albano was the era’s true crossover star, amplifying his wrestling career with appearances in Lauper videos, on TV shows Miami Vice and 227, and in the movies Body Slam and Wise Guys.
Of these, only Body Slam merits special mention. It’s a straightforward, comedic rendition of the WWF universe, a story about a hapless music manager who finds fame and fortune bringing wrestling to the masses. With a game Dirk Benedict roughly portraying Vince McMahon and Roddy Piper repackaged and polished into a clean-cut babyface, the film was either easily digestible rasslin’-lite for the nonfan or a mind-bending circus-mirror caricature of the sport for the zealous viewer. If Albano’s turn in “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” imperiled kayfabe, this mockumentary treatment did more to dismantle the barrier than anything in wrestling until the late ’90s, when a postmodern wave discarded the whole concept altogether for the sake of the pseudoreality of in-jokes and obscenity. In Body Slam, Albano, as was his standard, more or less played himself. Technically, his character went by “Captain Lou Murano,” but he wasn’t trying to be anything other than Captain Lou Albano—in some ways he was a sort of bastion of wrestling “reality,” a concrete connection to the “real” fiction of the ring beyond the “fake” fiction of the film. But more than that, the resemblance of Murano to Albano actually underscored the gap—or lack thereof—between pro wrestling’s unreality and Hollywood’s plain falsehood.
And again, there was something off-putting about the ease with which he moved between worlds. His familiar presence made the movie seem palatable, but it raised deeper questions: If pro wrestlers weren’t going to keep up the facade, then why should viewers continue to act like they believe, or care? When Albano appeared on Gleason’s show under a new identity, the television market was new and its ramifications for kayfabe were indiscernible. With Body Slam, though, the same couldn’t be said. Albano and Piper either didn’t know what they were doing, or they didn’t care.
Albano did finally put on another costume, but only in deference to a cultural icon even greater than himself: He portrayed the live-action Mario in The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! (He also voiced the cartoon Mario.) Albano once said that he almost turned down the show out of reluctance to shave his famous goatee, but that too proved to be disposable.
Despite a paltry number of unique episodes, the series has achieved remarkable cultural currency. It functioned not just as a touchstone but also as a larger culmination: the union of the new (video games) with the old (children’s programming). The cartoon sequences were mundane, no more remarkable than those of Hulk Hogan’s Rock ’n’ Wrestling, basically fantasy adventures based on the video game lore. But the live-action segments—featuring the two Mario brothers running a plumbing outfit from a basement in Brooklyn—were often bizarre and Beckett-esque nonlinear quandaries; somehow grounding the fantasy in live-action reality made the enterprise even more bizarre. There were frequent celebrity cameos, and Albano and Danny Wells (as Luigi) sometimes played other characters, including female versions of themselves. One of the most bizarre sequences has Lauper appear in pursuit of a missing Captain Lou, whereupon “Mario” professes to be a big Albano fan. This can certainly be viewed as a great victory, if not for wrestling at large than certainly for Albano: His fame was suddenly on equal footing with Mario’s, the role to which he subjugated himself.
After his Mario chapter ended, Lou made a return to WWF television, managing the Headshrinkers. (Lou had a history handling Samoan wrestlers—he managed the Wild Samoans in the early 1980s, and Fatu played Tonga Tom, Piper’s tag team partner in Body Slam.) In his return to ringside, Lou continued to play the good guy, but he otherwise reverted back to the elements of his early managerial heyday: Blustery and grating, he steered the Headshrinkers almost instantly to the tag team championship. He had reappeared in the WWF almost incidentally and disappeared without the booming farewell one might have thought he deserved. It has to be said that Lou’s absence was hardly noticeable—but again, this was his own doing; he had turned his back on wrestling when he donned Mario’s red coveralls. Nostalgia was disposable now too.
In 2008, on his seventy-fifth birthday at a restaurant in Queens, the Sandman, a mainstay of the ECW promotion, gave a drunken toast to his longtime friend Albano, then got into a brawl with the restaurant’s owner. The melee made the New York papers and was heckled widely on the Internet, Albano once again shepherding his sport and all its silly excess into the mainstream.
Much of the story of wrestling is the story of its slow liberation from its old moorings—from the territories, from the traditions, from the physical event itself—so that what actually transpires in the ring now is almost incidental to the sport. To become a part of the cultural wallpaper today, pro wrestling had to absolve itself of its distinctiveness. Above all, it sacrificed a great deal of its wonderfully peculiar internal logic for the logic of television, where there is little room for history or tradition, where there is no such place as “Parts Unknown,” where the culture of disposability will always hold the belt. Albano’s role in this can’t be overstated. He led pop culture into pro wrestling and led pro wrestling into pop culture; he was an ambassador for the crossover success that redefined the wrestling trade, a manager on a grand scale.
The older wrestling fans might see this change as a travesty, and to the late-’80s wrestling fan it might seem wholly insignificant. Pro wrestling is in everyone’s life now to some degree, and Captain Lou was the trailblazer, for better and for worse.
“MACHO MAN” RANDY SAVAGE
June 25, 1984: We’re in Memphis, and the hugely popular Rock ’n’ Roll Express is brawling with the dastardly Poffo clan—Randy (né Poffo) Savage, Lanny Poffo, and their ever-present father, old-school great Angelo Poffo. The melee spills outside the ring and immediately turns frenzied. Event security swarms the wrestlers with postures that suggest they’re not quite as in on the staging of this match as you might expect. There are cameramen and announcers adding to the tangle of bodies, and audience members stand only inches away, visibly nervous. The three villains get the better of Rock ’n’ Roller Ricky Morton, whose legacy is that of opponents getting the better of him. Morton is thrown on top of the nearby announcers’ table, whereupon Savage picks him up and piledrives him through the table and onto the floor.
The crowd on hand is aghast. People throw up their arms in exasperation and dismay. A woman positioned immediately beside the table recoils and covers her mouth with both hands. But then, in the lower right of the screen, ten or fifteen feet from ground zero, three men begin high-fiving each other. A babyface star has been driven headfirst through a table by a maniacal loon who has been antagonizing the Memphis fans for months, and these men are inexplicably cheering. This isn’t the way we are supposed to react.
Even among young wrestling fans, there were some who defied convention and fell under Savage’s spell—likely the same sort who never much caught on to the Rock ’n’ Roll Express fad. There w
as something strangely magnetic about Savage, the wild-eyed brawler who had been stealing airtime (and stealing the show) from Jerry Lawler and his average-Joe cohort over the preceding months. But actually cheering for him was out of the question. It just wasn’t done.
This is not to say that wrestling fans of that era were rubes, but rather that they played their traditional role in the pro wrestling show construct with little deviation: You cheered for the heroes and booed at the villains and whooped at the pretty ladies. Somehow, that night, Randy Savage had turned this convention on its head and, you might say, dropped it through a table. He was engaging even at his most reprehensible, which had everything to do with the unexpected note of pathos in his character, an oddly relatable paranoid streak: We the viewers were suspicious too. Just like Savage, we looked slit-eyed at all the activity in and around the ring, wondering what the angle was.
Savage and the Poffos had been hopscotching around the country ever since Angelo closed down his own territory in Tennessee to get his sons—Randy in particular—more national exposure. When they briefly settled in Memphis, the clan was immediately a major player; Savage called out Lawler, the area’s biggest star, in his first on-screen appearance. (In his mod leather jacket and fedora, he was dressed more as a ’70s-movie villain than a pro wrestling badass.) After the family’s feud with the Rock ’n’ Roll Express cooled off, Savage found himself in Lawler’s good graces, and the pair went up against the monstrous duo of King Kong Bundy and “Ravishing” Rick Rude. The Savage that emerged during this period was a minor revelation as he maintained the derangement of his heel persona while embracing a sort of glam eccentricity: the first real indication of the superstar we would come to know.
As such things go in the world of wrestling, Savage soon reembraced the dark side and reignited his rivalry with Lawler. The feud became violent and heated, but Lawler’s supremacy in the region was never really in doubt, and after Savage lost a rugged steel cage match between the two that was conducted under Loser Leaves Town rules, Savage was sent packing.
Savage soon reemerged on WWF television, presented as the top free agent in wrestling. All of the name managers of the day courted Savage—the “Macho Man,” as he was now commonly known—to offer their services. Savage eventually gathered the cadre of baddie mentors into the ring and sincerely—and hilariously—thanked them one by one “for their consideration” and for the knowledge they had imparted during the selection process (“Mr. Fu-ji, the devious ways that you put in my mind will come to use”) before rebuffing them all in favor of Miss Elizabeth, Savage’s real-life partner and a newcomer to the WWF universe.
The couple’s act was an inversion of the usual wrestler-manager relationship. Rather than leading the charge to the ring and cunningly helping him in his matches, Elizabeth was a fully passive bystander, occasionally clapping and sincerely wincing in reaction to pain inflicted upon Savage. And rather than letting Elizabeth do his talking for him in interviews, Savage issued mind-bending soliloquies with Elizabeth more often than not offscreen, until he deemed her presence necessary and he dragged her into view, bullying her into confirming his greatness.
Savage had been an incredible orator from his earliest days in the business—first as a warbling ecstatic and later as a frenzied, bloodthirsty psycho—but his move to the WWF truly allowed his style to flourish. For the audience, the consummation during this period of the Savage interview style was shocking. Chaotic in flavor and punctuated liberally with his signature “Oooh, yeah,” his interviews sometimes involved more digression than substance as he held forth in metaphor-heavy diatribes on matters of violence, current events, and tough guy hierarchy—much to the dismayed bewilderment of ever-present straight man interviewer “Mean” Gene Okerlund—with only a passing regard for the specific rivalry at hand. It was the wrestling promo as scripted by David Foster Wallace—main text in a high-volume snarl, footnotes in a lupine, maniacal whisper. His oratorical style was a mesmerizing experiment in free associative thought.
Savage’s first noteworthy feud was with Intercontinental Champion Tito Santana, and he finally wrested the belt from Santana at the Boston Garden on February 8, 1986, with the aid of an illegal loaded punch. He soon thereafter became embroiled in an oddball love triangle with burly dimwit George “The Animal” Steele, who had developed a crush on Elizabeth, who seemed too kindhearted to reject him outright. Though the storyline was farcical, Savage’s exorbitant jealousy was at least in some part a reference to reality; Savage’s real-life paranoia and protectiveness, especially in regard to Elizabeth, was well documented. Hulk Hogan has said that Savage would make Elizabeth keep her gaze fixed on the ground backstage at wrestling events so she wouldn’t make eye contact with any of the other guys, and it’s frequently reported that he locked their home—from the outside—when he left, sometimes shutting her inside for days at a time.
Odd (and abusive) as this may be, it’s important to note that there was minimal distinction between Randy Savage the wrestling personality and Randy Poffo the real guy. To the extent that other wrestlers knew him personally, Savage was said to be the same person outside the ring as inside, sometimes to a fault.* But in terms of his on-screen persona, his personal eccentricity was rendered as maniacal psychopathy, and it found a suitable venue in the WWF ring, which was even more an “arena for angry minds” (in historian Richard Hofstadter’s phrase) than the political realm. The “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” of the average Savage interview functionally defined the Paranoid Style in American pro wrestling. He was McCarthy in spandex.
After a WrestleMania III loss for which he blamed WWF president Jack Tunney, he started an interview with nihilism and went straight into conspiracy theory:
“Nothing means nothing! . . . I’m justifiably in a position in that I’d rather not be in, but the cream will rise to the top. Macho Madness’s got more to offer than President Jack Tunney thinks that I got. And let me tell you something right now, cards stacked against the Macho Man Randy Savage in WrestleMania III . . . let me say it out loud, and let me point to the president of the World Wrestling Federation, that Macho Man is not happy with your decision. I am the cream in the World Wrestling Federation.”
“Wait,” interjected interviewer “Mean” Gene Okerlund, “do you really blame Tunney?”
“Yeah, I do. Outside interference in my moment of glory! And now I’m living in a nightmare. . . . And now not only the Intercontinental Heavyweight Championship belt must fall, but the World Heavyweight Championship belt! . . . And there is no one that does it better than the Macho Man Randy Savage. On balance, off balance, doesn’t matter. I’m better than you are. And I’m talking to everyone in the World Wrestling Federation, and I’m even talking to Jack Tunney: I’m on my way, and nothing is going to stop me! . . . I’ve been maligned from the top to the bottom ’cause they can’t handle the Macho Man Randy Savage. The cream of the crop. Nobody does it better!”
Amid all of those implications of collusion, he was holding an individual-serving-size plastic cup of coffee creamer, which he would present to the camera every time he pointed out that he was the “cream of the crop.”
Macho Man’s emotional imbalance was paralleled in his punishing in-ring style. While not exactly a physical beast, Savage was convincingly destructive in the ring, the most famous example of which probably comes from his 1987 conflict with Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat. Savage notoriously jumped Steamboat, cruelly shoving his neck down onto the ringside railing and then jumping off the top rope with the ring bell and driving it onto Steamboat’s throat, purportedly crushing his larynx. After a period of recuperation—where Steamboat had to relearn how to speak, to the guffaws of the WWF home viewer—the two men met at WrestleMania III in a match that defined both careers. Any discussion of the legacy of the Macho Man would be incomplete without this match. The show was headlined by the epic clash between Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant, but t
he fifteen-minute brawl for the intercontinental title stole the show.
Between his in-ring performance and his manic, oddly beguiling personality, it was probably inevitable that Savage would be tapped for what’s known in the parlance as a face turn—a bad guy going good. He got into a dispute with then–Intercontinental Champ the Honky Tonk Man,* and when Honky’s stablemates the Hart Foundation aided him in beating Savage down after a match, Elizabeth procured help in the form of Hulk Hogan. The two men did away with their foes and momentously shook hands. The Macho Man’s transformation into a good guy was complete.
The chief signifier in Savage’s transition to the side of right was that he started treating Elizabeth more politely. It should be said that pro wrestling is not a world opposed to misogyny; degradation and abuse of female characters, both mental and physical, is common enough. But wrestling is also a world that leans heavily on more timeless tropes, and “Big Bully Degrading His Girlfriend” was chief among these: We booed him chiefly because we were supposed to. We knew our cues.
But even if Savage’s actions were detestable, wrestling fans were drawn to the character at the core of the Macho Man, just as some women are drawn into unhealthy relationships with bad boys. Part of it was that we could sympathize with Savage’s, well, savagery, with its thoroughly human mix of paranoia and chauvinism that distended cartoonishly enough to let us maintain some ironic distance. And certainly, we were looking for a hint of the man he would become as a good guy.
His association with Hogan established—the pair would come to be known as the Mega Powers, a nod to the wattage the two commanded—Savage began a yearlong period as Hogan’s running buddy, and so began a decade of living securely in Hogan’s shadow. Even at WrestleMania IV, when Savage won a fourteen-man tournament for the vacant WWF Championship—a moment that could have signaled a new era for a federation that had long relied too heavily on Hogan’s singular charisma and for a fanbase that had seen every iteration of the Hogan in-ring comeback—Savage secured the final win only with Hogan’s (illegal) assistance, and the two men celebrated together after the match.* It seemed as much a victory for the broader cause of Hulkamania as for Savage.
The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling Page 16