Liz stuck by Macho through feuds with Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat and the Honky Tonk Man, among others. When Savage became a fan favorite, their relationship was able to shift into grayer, more uncertain terrain. Just as Liz was a signifier for beauty and perfection, her relationship with good-guy Savage became a signifier for romance—for true love—with all of its highs and lows.
As the couple moved into what was arguably their career pinnacle—Savage’s team-up (and later falling-out) with Hulk Hogan—the WWF kept the whole thing very conservative, but saucier subplots were there, bubbling underneath the surface, for anyone who cared to look. Liz was billed as “lovely” but never “sexy.” She didn’t ostentatiously seduce their opponents—like the “Million Dollar Man” Ted DiBiase and Andre the Giant—to gain an advantage, but she did flash some leg at ringside to help her men win. She didn’t sleep with Hogan when Macho Man started showing signs of his old heelish behavior—but, rather, she was carried tenderly into the locker room by the Hulkster when she had been knocked out cold. Elizabeth’s deliberation between the two alpha males was the subject of great on-screen intrigue, but at the end of the day, her uncertainty left her all alone—because Hogan didn’t need a woman, and Savage was once again playing the bad guy.
We had already seen the dynamic of the evil Savage paired with the accommodating Elizabeth, so Liz was shunted off and replaced with the more sexual—and frightening—“Sensational” Sherri Martel. But when that relationship dissolved, of course, Liz was there to pick up the pieces. (Perhaps it was the abuse he suffered at Sherri’s hands that finally allowed Savage to understand what he’d put Elizabeth through.) Their relationship thereafter was a romantic whirlwind: Savage proposed, and the two were married at SummerSlam 1991.
But somewhere along here the wheels came off the fantasy. The relationship had gone as far as it could go, storyline-wise, and the pair didn’t ride off into the sunset. The magic was soon gone, and propriety went along with it: In a notorious angle, the lascivious “Nature Boy” Ric Flair claimed to have “been with” Liz before Savage had met her. So much for the fuzzy implications of years past. Liz’s reputation was eventually restored, but the Age of Innocence had ended, and with it Miss Elizabeth’s raison d’être. Her WWF career was soon over.
Several years later, Elizabeth signed with WCW, as just about every wrestling star of her vintage and wattage did. She appeared there as a new woman—no longer in ball gowns but in a leather skirt and sleeveless top, her hair teased and frosted like a saucy forty-something midwestern newswoman. And once again, she was touted by the announcers—though not so much as a symbolic beauty as a symbol of the past. Her career there—and the inanity of WCW’s booking during that period—is perfectly summed up in this Wikipedia synopsis:
In January 1996, Miss Elizabeth returned to wrestling as a valet for Savage. She later turned against Savage and became Ric Flair’s valet in the Four Horsemen. She later turned against the Four Horsemen and joined the New World Order (nWo) alongside Savage and Hogan. In June 1998, she parted ways with Savage once again by joining Hogan’s side of the nWo, nWo Hollywood. Then, she accompanied Eric Bischoff on his way to the ring for the next few months.
The only real point of significance here was her pairing with Lex Luger because somewhere around this time the two started dating in real life. For the few true believers still out there, this may have signaled the end of the line for the Savage-Elizabeth fairy tale. Although Macho and Luger did eventually actually feud over Liz in WCW, it wasn’t much of an epic by her earlier standards.
This was a modern era, and Liz was (nominally) a modern woman, liberated (somewhat) from the dependence of her Rapunzel youth. The art of wrestling storytelling had changed: Lex and Randy did not heroically vie for her love (or her “managerial duties”), and Lex did not win her hand, and he did not carry her off into some vision of chaste bliss.
Though their real-world relationship continued, it did not end happily. In April 2003, Luger was charged with battery against Liz, and two months later (after several instances of erratic behavior on his part), Luger called 911 from the townhouse they shared in Marietta, Georgia, to report that Liz wasn’t breathing. When paramedics arrived, she couldn’t be revived. A medical examiner listed the cause of death as “acute toxicity,” brought on by a mix of painkillers and vodka. Liz Hulette was forty-two years old.
With the possible exception of Vince McMahon or maybe Bobby “The Brain” Heenan, no on-air personality has ever meant more to the WWF without actually wrestling than Miss Elizabeth.* Liz held captive an audience of young men in a way that nobody did before and no one has since, not even in today’s era of manufactured divas. For a few years in those simple, magical days, she was everything we ever wanted in a woman.
WEDDINGS IN WRESTLING
The very mention of a wedding angle in wrestling is enough to make most fans anxious. It’s a long tradition, but not a particularly proud one. If you delve into the history of WWE weddings, you see that they all follow the same basic script: Party A marries Party B by common will, trickery, or force; then Party C objects and/or physically intervenes, and hijinks ensue, tears are shed, punches are thrown.
The first on-screen marriage in the WWF was between Butcher Vachon and Ophelia in 1984. Captain Lou Albano ambled in and objected on the grounds that Vachon had been married “five or six times before,” and because Ophelia was a virgin (although Vachon clarified that she was not, in fact, so pure, and Albano withdrew his objection). Then “Dr. D” David Schultz bodyslammed Vachon; later, at the reception, Schultz gave the bride a pie in the face as Vachon stood there passively. The best part was Vince McMahon’s uncontrollable laughter at the drunken reception, and when the Samoan contingent forced midget wrestler Sky Low Low to sing with them. The 1985 marriage of Uncle Elmer, a Hillbilly Jim hanger-on, and Joyce was even more ridiculous, except that it was an actual wedding—as in, the two actually emerged a married couple—which goes contrary to the very fabric of pro wrestling.
The most famous wedding in WWF history was that of “Macho Man” Randy Savage and Miss Elizabeth. The pair was already married in real life, but because Savage played the heel and emotionally abused his ladyfriend, their on-screen union could only be consummated once Savage mended his evil ways. The WWF decided to play the in-ring ceremony totally straight, without interruption or other rasslin’ contrivance—with the exception, of course, of Savage’s ridiculous white-and-gold wedding gear in the ring and Bobby Heenan’s snarky commentary. The reception, however, was famously crashed by Jake “The Snake” Roberts and the Undertaker, who had hidden a cobra in a gift box as a surprise for the groom, whom they loathed. During the toast, announcer “Mean” Gene Okerlund referred to “the new bride and groom, mister and missus Macho.”
The latter-day weddings run in quick sequence, like a matrimonial fever dream. In 1999, Stephanie McMahon (daughter of Vince) was tied to a cross and forced to marry the Undertaker in a sort of pagan ritual until “Stone Cold” Steve Austin intervened. Later that year, Steph got the wedding of her dreams when she wed Test. Triple H derailed the proceedings when he informed the wedding party that he had married a comatose, post-bachelorette-party Stephanie at a Vegas drive-through chapel. This ceremony, such as it was, was really the high-water mark of the Attitude Era. It had implied kidnapping and rape, large-scale impropriety, and a healthy dose of Triple H’s throaty sexual innuendo voice. It turned out that Triple H and Steph were in cahoots all along. They renewed their vows months later in an in-ring ceremony that needed no interference since Triple H hijacked it himself after learning that Stephanie had faked a pregnancy to keep his affection. “Stephanie,” he said, “as I look into your eyes tonight, I see you for what you truly are: a no-good, lying bitch.” And then he beat up Vince.
There have been many other weddings, all vulgar and nonsensical and wonderfully awful in their own ways: Lita married Kane and then almost Edge, and Edge married Vicki
e Guerrero; Dawn Marie married Torrie Wilson’s dad and nobody cared; there was a gay marriage between Billy Gunn and Chuck Palumbo in 2002 that turned out to be a publicity stunt; SmackDown General Manager Teddy Long got married to Kristal in 2007 but had a Viagra-induced heart attack before the final “I do”; and Goldust married his protégée Aksana not too long ago, which was some sort of marriage of convenience, for either a Green Card for the bride or a beard for the pseudohomosexual groom.
WWE teased a wedding angle in 2012, when female wrestler-cum-groupie AJ proposed marriage to CM Punk, only to receive a counterproposal from Daniel Bryan, which she accepted. The AJ-Bryan wedding was interrupted by Vince McMahon, who appointed AJ to be Raw’s general manager. Bryan flew into a rage and destroyed the set. It may not have been true love, but hey, at least that was some passion.
HAWK, OF THE ROAD WARRIORS
There’s something to be said for the dramatic properties of elevation, particularly when there are monsters involved. King Kong scaled the Empire State Building and found himself on top of the world—and thus a target for military attack. At that great height, he was at once expressing dominance and exposing himself to harm. It’s the former part that makes him a monster and the latter part that makes us care.
Elevation carries its own special thrill in professional wrestling, lending to the proceedings both a superhero aspect (Look! Up in the sky!) and an element of unfakeable danger. Wrestling has certainly seen its fair share of high-wire acts: Snuka leaping from the top of the cage; Shawn Michaels’s WrestleMania XII zip line entrance; various balcony spots in the gonzo ECW promotion; Mick Foley’s masochistic Hell in a Cell tumbles; and of course the late Owen Hart’s tragically ill-fated entrance as the Blue Blazer.
At NWA Starrcade in November 1986, something superheroic was certainly in the air. They called it “Night of the Skywalkers,” and though Joseph Campbell certainly would have appreciated the Star Wars reference, the scene was more like something out of a comic book. The Road Warriors, Hawk and Animal, were facing their archrivals, the Midnight Express, in a scaffold match, which meant that the teams were to brawl on a plank two stories above the ground—a shockingly real sort of brawl, where life and limb were indisputably on the line.
It must be said that scaffold matches were, in retrospect, real almost to the point of boredom. The wrestlers were so consumed with safety—both their own and that of their opponents—that most of the combat took place in prone positions, and the punches and kicks were decidedly low-impact. But twenty or twenty-five years ago, through the semicredulous eyes of the premodern wrestling fan, those matches were stunning. To win the match, you had to knock your opponents—allow me to italicize—off the platform and into the ring below. On tape, you can see the kids and adults in the audience standing in awe, necks craned. The act was one part monster movie and one part Marvel Comics, and plainly very, very dangerous: No suspension of disbelief was necessary.
I first watched “Night of the Skywalkers” belatedly, on a homemade VHS compilation tape a buddy of mine had put together. The rolling lines of static only served to up the ante: I felt like I was watching a bootlegged copy of Faces of Death. It might not have been much of a match, but it took place thirty feet in the air, and it ended with the nefarious Midnight Express duo falling from the scaffold into the ring (each was hanging from the underside of the platform, monkey bars style, to minimize the distance of free fall). They were followed in their plummet by their insufferable manager, Jim Cornette, who stupidly climbed the scaffold after the match to escape the Warriors’ manager, “Precious” Paul Ellering. Cornette—nowhere near the experienced stuntman that his Midnighters were—blew out both knees when he landed in the ring.
Oh, and Hawk wrestled the match with a broken leg and never let on. But that’s less surprising. The Road Warriors were forces of nature in the ring and two of the sport’s true tough guys outside of it, muscled to their ears and notorious for working “stiff” in matches—wrestling parlance for not easing up on their various punches, chops, and stretches. Needless to say, they weren’t the most popular team to go up against, but you can’t tell a monster to take it easy—and you don’t mess with that kind of popularity.
Michael Hegstrand—who would come to be known the world over as Road Warrior Hawk—was a big kid from Minneapolis who fell under the tutelage of pro wrestling trainer Eddie Sharkey, who trained a metaphorical murderers’ row of wrestlers: Hegstrand, Curt Hennig, Rick Rude, Barry Darsow (a.k.a. Krusher Khruschev, Smash of Demolition, and the Repo Man), and, of course, Joe Laurinaitis, who would become Hegstrand’s tag team partner.
As wrestling writer Rick Scaia puts it: “Hegstrand was basically a bodybuilder in the early ’80s: a time when bodybuilders [were] really coming into vogue in the wrestling business. The successes of Billy Graham and Jesse Ventura were fresh in everyone’s minds, and a musclehead by the name of Hulk Hogan was just starting to turn heads.” Hegstrand and his bodybuilder’s physique debuted professionally in Vancouver. He went under the name Crusher Von Haig, and despite his build there was little in that first match to mark Hegstrand for any sort of greatness.
But what a difference some facepaint and a reverse mohawk make. Hegstrand and Laurinaitis were recruited to the Georgia territory to be part of manager Paul Ellering’s new stable of behemoths to be called the Legion of Doom, the name (fittingly) swiped from a Justice League cartoon show. It certainly was a villains’ all-star team: King Kong Bundy, Jake “The Snake” Roberts, the Iron Sheik, the (original) Sheik, Arn Anderson, “Maniac” Matt Borne, and the Spoiler. Hegstrand and Laurinaitis—now Hawk and Animal—were dubbed the Road Warriors and modeled directly after the Mel Gibson movie. They wore simple, tribal-style facepaint, mohawk-style haircuts (Animal’s a true mohawk and Hawk’s a reverse mohawk that better suited his hairline), and leather-studded accoutrements. (It took a while to get the look right; at first, they more closely resembled patrons at a gay bondage bar than anything out of our dystopian future.)
The faction soon dissolved, but the “Legion of Doom” moniker would come to be synonymous with the Road Warriors for the rest of their careers. Right from the start, the Warriors’ charisma was evident. They were nightmarish but cool—their extreme musculature, painted faces, and growling monologues set them apart from the then-standard wrestler. They were freakish next to the toughish-white-guy norm of the period—see their stablemates Jake Roberts and Arn Anderson for examples—but much sleeker and more electric than the pure monsters of the day, guys like Abdullah the Butcher and Kamala, who were garbling, corpulent grotesques whose peculiarity was such that no fan could root for them. But for the most part, the Road Warriors didn’t scare fans away—they were gargantuan antiheroes, titans for a new era.
Their interview style was groundbreaking for two reasons: one, because the up-close format was the television viewer’s first chance to really appreciate the He-Man physiques of the two men (particularly when they stood next to Ellering, who, though a serious bodybuilder in his day, was a shrimpy sort of guy), and two, because of their comic-book-villain intensity. Hegstrand excelled in these interviews, threatening the lives of his opponents-to-be in increasingly amusing and gory ways (“We’ll rip your masks off Warrior-style—with your heads still in them!”) and delivering the sort of catchphrases that would come to dominate wrestling in the coming decades: “We snack on danger and we dine on death,” for instance, or, in closing every promo, “Ooooooooh, what a rush!!!”
Their in-ring style was brutal, and the audience probably perceived the too-real-to-be-fake grimaces on the faces of their poor opponents. Their no-punches-pulled routine actually started at the behest of Georgia Championship Wrestling booker Ole Anderson, who instructed the Warriors not to recoil at their opponents’ assaults so as to disguise the fact that Hegstrand and Laurinaitis weren’t skilled enough to realistically react. It was a winning gambit, and it became the Road Warriors’ signature—they didn’t show pain and
couldn’t have if they wanted to. Hawk in particular came to be known for “no-selling” his opponent’s moves—even in later years, after his in-ring skills had improved considerably. Jim Ross says that when Hawk’s opponents for the evening got to the arena, their first question would almost uniformly be “What kind of mood is Hawk in tonight?”
The Road Warriors ran through their Georgia competition and soon left for the greener pastures of the AWA. This was also the first hint of a pattern that would wind up defining the Warriors’ career: Though their early days coincided with the tail end of the Territorial Era, they jumped from federation to federation, always leaving when their popularity was at its pinnacle. Whether this was shrewd business dealing, diva-style machination, or the unpredictable wanderings of untamed beasts is unclear—presumably, it was a little bit of all three.
It was in the AWA that the Road Warriors’ irresistible popularity really took hold. People loved them, even if they were supposed to be the baddies. They were decidedly fresher than most of their competition there—they entered the ring in their facepaint and spikes to the strains of Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man”—and their early opponents couldn’t match their appeal. These were guys like Baron von Raschke, Dick the Bruiser, and the Crusher, who were all getting on in years and who looked rather like three guys from the Elks Lodge decked out in spandex. (The Crusher and Dick the Bruiser’s entrance theme was “The Beer Barrel Polka.”) The guys in charge took a look at the Road Warriors—oversized, ominous, and bizarre—and saw monsters, and monsters in pro wrestling were always bad guys. What they failed to see was that the Warriors were a new breed of baddie: more cartoonish and more human at the same time, and thus more compelling; the old guard saw Mothra when really they were looking at Batman. (The only time the Road Warriors earned real boos from the crowd was when they brutally attacked young golden boy Curt Hennig, who was local wrestling royalty. They nearly incited a riot.)
The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling Page 18