Jake The Snake Roberts vs. Ravishing Rick Rude (Mar 1988 – Nov 1988)

Background

Jake Roberts, born Aurelian Smith Jr., debuted in the WWF on March 8, 1986 at the Boston Garden, a month before he wrapped his snake Damien around George Wells' head at WrestleMania 2.[3] He'd been using "The Snake" since his Georgia Championship Wrestling days.[3]

His first big WWF feud, with Ricky Steamboat, began with a DDT on the exposed concrete on Saturday Night's Main Event in May 1986. Roberts initially refused to do it on the floor; Steamboat told him he could protect himself, then hit his head anyway and was knocked unconscious.[3] Roberts also hosted his own interview segment, "The Snake Pit," on Wrestling Challenge and then Superstars until July 1987.[3]

The crowd turned him before the office did. When he challenged Randy Savage for the Intercontinental Championship, McMahon expected fans to side with Savage; they cheered Roberts instead. The WWF had also planned Roberts as a challenger to Hulk Hogan, but when he hit Hogan with a DDT on "The Snake Pit," fans chanted "DDT" rather than for Hogan, and McMahon dropped the idea.[3] In a 2015 shoot interview, Roberts jokingly thanked fans for ruining what would have been the most profitable run of his career.[3]

He turned babyface in a feud with the Honky Tonk Man, who hit him with a guitar during a "Snake Pit" segment. The guitar hadn't been prepared to break easily, and the shot really injured Roberts' neck; he later said he was picking pieces of wood out of his back for weeks.[3] They met at WrestleMania III with Alice Cooper in Roberts' corner.[3] The injury also cost Roberts a planned Intercontinental Championship win and a program with Ted DiBiase, as the office decided to leave the belt on the Honky Tonk Man.[3]

Rick Rude, born Richard Rood in St. Peter, Minnesota and trained by Eddie Sharkey, came into the WWF under Bobby Heenan's management.[4]

Before a match he made a show of removing his robe while insulting the men in the crowd as "fat, out-of-shape sweathogs." After a win, he'd kiss a woman Heenan picked out of the audience. He wore airbrushed tights that became his trademark.[4] The robe routine was likely inspired by Austin Idol's.[4]

Rude had debuted on Superstars of Wrestling on July 15, 1987 as the newest member of the Heenan Family, and his first feud was with the man Heenan dropped to make room for him, Paul Orndorff; Rude beat Orndorff at Madison Square Garden that November.[4] At the first Survivor Series, he was on André the Giant's winning team against Hulk Hogan's.[21] He challenged Hogan for the WWF Championship at the Boston Garden on January 9, 1988.[4]

Roberts, away from the ring, had been married to Cheryl Hagood since 1984. They had four children together.[16][3]

Build-up

The WWF Championship was vacant going into WrestleMania IV. André had beaten Hogan for it on The Main Event in February in a finish involving referee Dave Hebner's twin brother Earl, and a tournament was set to crown a new champion.[21]

Roberts and Rude were matched first on that card. At WrestleMania IV on March 27, 1988, in front of 18,165 at Trump Plaza in Atlantic City, they met in the first round of the tournament for the vacant WWF Championship, with Heenan in Rude's corner.[2] They went the full 15 minutes to a time-limit draw that eliminated them both and gave the One Man Gang a bye into the semi-finals.[2][21] Dave Meltzer rated the match minus two stars.[2] Out of the draw, the WWF placed the two in a feud, Rude's second high-profile program after months in the mid-card.[21]

The feud got its hook a month later. On the April 23, 1988 Superstars of Wrestling, Heenan picked Rude's post-match kiss from the crowd, and neither of them knew who she was. She refused, and told them she was Jake Roberts' wife, Cheryl.[3][4]

When Rude started insulting Roberts, she slapped him. By Jake's account the slap busted Rude's eardrum; Rude grabbed her wrist and berated her on the microphone until Roberts ran out of the dressing room to make the save.[4]

Rude answered with the tights. He came to the ring with Cheryl's likeness stenciled on the front, and Roberts charged in and stripped them off him.[4] On television, the result was censored with a black spot, as if Rude had been left naked; the live crowd saw him stripped down to a g-string.[4][9]

Roberts has said the stripping was not in the script. "Oh, yeah. That was a shoot," he said on Going Ringside. "I told him, I said, 'If you go out there, I'm coming out and ripping them off.' That's exactly what I did."[10] He called it "a little bit too much. That's why I ripped them off."[10] Years later on his own podcast, he was blunter: "I didn't like it. Give me a break, I got feelings, too. No, I thought it sucked, you know? And I didn't think it was anything to play with."[11]

Through the summer the two worked the program around the country. Roberts beat Rude in 11:54 at the Philadelphia Spectrum on May 21.[5] Rude won by count-out in Los Angeles on July 15, and they fought to a double count-out in 15:44 at WrestleFest in front of 25,866 at Milwaukee County Stadium on July 31.[6][7]

That outdoor card ran fifteen matches, headlined by Hogan against André in a steel cage and Randy Savage defending the WWF Championship against Ted DiBiase; Roberts and Rude went on tenth.[7]

Roberts won in Los Angeles on August 13, and Rude took another count-out win in Philadelphia on August 27.[1][8]

At the first SummerSlam, on August 29 at Madison Square Garden, in front of a reported 20,000, the two weren't booked against each other. Rude faced the Junkyard Dog instead, and partway through climbed to the top rope and pulled down his tights to show a second pair underneath, with Cheryl's face on them.[9] Roberts ran to the ring and attacked Rude, and the referee disqualified the Junkyard Dog, giving Rude the win.[9] Later that night Roberts beat Hercules, reversing a slam attempt into the DDT.[9]

Roberts never got an explanation for why the match everyone expected didn't happen at SummerSlam. "Ask Vince. I have no idea, brother," he said in 2023. "Feels like we got the short end of the stick, don't it? Yeah. What the f**k? Disappointed to have the match. I didn't get the money either."[11]

The fall run went Roberts' way. He beat Rude at the Meadowlands on September 11 and, with Cheryl at ringside, in Los Angeles on October 16, then won a "Rude Awakening vs. DDT" match at Madison Square Garden on October 24 in 12:24.[20][19][12][4] On Saturday Night's Main Event, taped October 25 in Baltimore and aired October 29, Roberts and Rude opened the network show, with Jesse Ventura and Vince McMahon calling it. Roberts won by disqualification in 7:22, with Cheryl in Jake's corner and Heenan in Rude's, on a card that also had Hogan against Haku.[13]

The Matches

The feud closed at Survivor Series on November 24, 1988, at the Richfield Coliseum in Ohio, in front of about 13,500 people.[14] It was settled inside a ten-man elimination match, third of the four on a card built around the Mega Powers, with Gorilla Monsoon and Jesse Ventura on commentary.[14] Roberts' team was Jim Duggan, Ken Patera, Scott Casey, and Tito Santana; Casey had come in after the Junkyard Dog and then his replacement B. Brian Blair both left the WWF.[15]

Rude's side was the Heenan Family's André the Giant and Harley Race, with Dino Bravo and Mr. Perfect, and both Bobby Heenan and Frenchy Martin at ringside.[14] The match ran 30:03 in all.[14] A year earlier, at the first Survivor Series, André had captained a team with Rude on it to a win over Hulk Hogan's.[21]

It went badly for Roberts' team early. Rude hit Patera with the Rude Awakening and pinned him at 8:18, and Bravo pinned Casey a minute later.[14][15] Santana got one back by pinning Race with the flying forearm at 13:19, but André crushed Santana at 14:40, and Duggan got himself disqualified for using his two-by-four on Bravo at 21:22.[14][15]

That left Roberts alone against four men. He held on, and when Rude cockily turned to tag one of his partners, Roberts caught him from behind with the DDT and pinned him at 28:45.[14][15]

André went after Roberts and was disqualified at 29:39. Mr. Perfect then eliminated Roberts at 30:03, and Perfect and Bravo survived to win the match for the Heenan team.[14][15] The Wrestling Observer rated the match one and three quarter stars.[14]

Rude's elimination left the Heenan team at three, and the numbers caught up with Roberts within two minutes.[14]

Roberts' individual account with Rude ended the way most of their year had. Across 1988, Rude's wins over Roberts came by count-out; Roberts' came by pinfall, disqualification, and the DDT.[1]

Aftermath

André's disqualification at Survivor Series pointed Roberts at his next opponent. Roberts moved from the Rude feud straight into a program with André, another Heenan client, built around André's fear of snakes.[3] On Saturday Night's Main Event in March 1989, André interfered in a match between Rude and Brutus Beefcake, and Roberts came out to help Beefcake.[3] On the house show circuit André won most of their matches, and Roberts' one notable win came by disqualification at WrestleMania V, when André attacked special referee Big John Studd.[3]

The André program came with its own dressing-room test. In their first match, in Los Angeles, André gave Roberts almost no offense and sold nothing, working him like a squash.

Roberts confronted him in the locker room afterward and told him he had to give him something or the program wouldn't work. "We're OK Boss. We're good now," André told him, and from then on he sold for Roberts; Roberts later concluded it had been a test of whether he'd complain to management or face André himself.[3]

Rude went after the Ultimate Warrior's Intercontinental Championship, beginning with a "Super Posedown" at the 1989 Royal Rumble that ended with Rude attacking Warrior with a metal pose bar.[4] With Heenan's help he won the title at WrestleMania V, then lost it back to Warrior at SummerSlam 1989 largely because of interference from Roddy Piper, which started his next feud.[4]

Roberts and Rude crossed paths once more, on the same side. In WCW in 1992, with Harley Race and Madusa in their corner, Roberts and Rude teamed in a Clash of the Champions XX eight-man elimination match on September 2, alongside Big Van Vader and The Super Invader against Sting, Nikita Koloff, and the Steiner Brothers, and won.[18][1] Roberts eliminated Koloff in that match, which Meltzer rated three and a quarter stars.[18]

Rude's career ended in 1994 because of injury, with a final match in 1997.[4] He died on April 20, 1999, of an accidental overdose, at 40, while training for a return to the ring.[4]

Behind the Scenes

The angle's weight came from the fact that it used a real marriage. Cheryl Roberts was Jake's actual wife, and Rude's gimmick of kissing women from the crowd was turned against a real person in the audience, whom Heenan picked without, in the storyline, knowing who she was.[4] Cheryl became an on-camera performer for the WWF for the length of the program.[17] Rude, playing a man who went after another wrestler's wife on television, married his own wife, Michelle, the same year.[4]

The two men's accounts of working together are warm. "Yeah, I knew that he was following me, you know, that he was letting me guide him," Roberts said of Rude in 2023. "He was a good worker... I'm not going to bash Rude and say that he couldn't hold his own because he could."[11] Roberts liked the matches physical: "I like it snug. And Rick didn't have a problem with that. Sometimes it went a little beyond. But if you gave one, you got one back."[11]

He was more guarded about the rumors that Rude had legitimately knocked people out in the ring. "I heard that. I also heard that he knocked out Brutus Beefcake in the ring. I don't know anything about that," Roberts said. "But he never knocked me out in the ring. Not to say that he couldn't have because he damn sure could have."[11]

The tights are where the line between the angle and real life got crossed, and Roberts has said that was the point. He described Rude as having ignored a direct warning, and has framed tearing the tights off as a personal response rather than a scripted spot.[10][11]

Behind the television, Roberts was fighting alcohol and drug addiction, and Cheryl later blamed it for the end of their marriage.[16] "It was hard to see, watch him go through what he was going through with the addictions," she said in 2023.[17] Roberts put it plainly himself: "Back in the day I was lost and she had to do the right thing which is kick my ass out."[17]

The records disagree on when the marriage ended: one account lists the divorce in 1997, while Cheryl's own account, as reported in 2023, puts it in 2000.[3][16]

Legacy

The Cheryl Roberts angle is the part of this feud that's remembered, far more than any single match. Their WrestleMania IV draw drew a minus-two-star rating from Meltzer, and their Survivor Series showdown came inside a ten-man match their side lost.[2][14] Their best-rated singles match was the October 1988 Saturday Night's Main Event bout, at three stars.[13]

What lasted was the picture of a real wife slapping a heel who didn't know who she was, and of Roberts tearing the tights off Rude for real.[4][10] Roberts, at least, never enjoyed it. "I thought it sucked," he said.[11]

The real story outlasted the storyline by decades. In March 2023, 24 years after they split, Cheryl announced she and Jake were back together, crediting his sobriety. "In the last two years he has been showing me love without the demons," she wrote. "Making peace with past hurt and pain. Learning to forgive and trust again. Addiction doesn't have to win."[16] Roberts' recovery had been documented in the 2015 film The Resurrection of Jake the Snake.[16]

"Sobriety is a good thing," Roberts said that year. "Now, 24 years later I finally get my stuff right. We're back together."[17]

Both men were eventually inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame. Roberts went in on April 5, 2014, inducted by Diamond Dallas Page, who had taken him in to help him get sober. "It wasn't at all what I expected," Roberts said later. "It was more about healing between a man and his family."[3]

Rude was inducted posthumously in 2017, with Ricky Steamboat giving the speech and his widow Michelle and their children accepting on his behalf.[4] He also holds an odd distinction from his WCW jump in 1997: he is the only person to appear on WWF Raw and WCW Nitro on the same night, because the Raw had been taped before he left.[4]

See Also

Sources & Further Listening

1. "Jake Roberts vs. Rick Rude: all matches" — Cagematch: The Internet Wrestling Database. https://www.cagematch.net/?id=111&nr=18157&page=2
2. "WWF WrestleMania IV" (Mar 27, 1988) results and Wrestling Observer ratings — Cagematch. https://www.cagematch.net/?id=1&nr=1756
3. Jake Roberts — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jake_Roberts
4. Rick Rude — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Rude
5. WWF at the Philadelphia Spectrum (May 21, 1988) results — Cagematch. https://www.cagematch.net/?id=1&nr=83024
6. WWF at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena (Jul 15, 1988) results — Cagematch. https://www.cagematch.net/?id=1&nr=83193
7. "WWF WrestleFest 1988" (Jul 31, 1988) results — Cagematch. https://www.cagematch.net/?id=1&nr=62053
8. WWF at the Philadelphia Spectrum (Aug 27, 1988) results — Cagematch. https://www.cagematch.net/?id=1&nr=83559
9. SummerSlam (1988) — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SummerSlam_(1988)
10. "Jake Roberts Says Ripping Rick Rude's Infamous Cheryl Tights Off Was a Shoot" — Ringside News (Roberts interview on Going Ringside). https://www.ringsidenews.com/jake-roberts-says-ripping-rick-rudes-infamous-cheryl-tights-off-shoot
11. Andrew Ravens, "Jake Roberts Recalls His Feud With Rick Rude, Not Having Their Match At WWE SummerSlam 1988" — 411Mania, September 13, 2023 (Roberts on The Snake Pit podcast). https://411mania.com/wrestling/jake-roberts-feud-rick-rude-not-having-match-wwe-summerslam-1988/
12. WWF at Madison Square Garden (Oct 24, 1988) results — Cagematch. https://www.cagematch.net/?id=1&nr=18571
13. "WWF Saturday Night's Main Event #17" (taped Oct 25, 1988) results and Wrestling Observer rating — Cagematch. https://www.cagematch.net/?id=1&nr=5614
14. "WWF Survivor Series 1988" (Nov 24, 1988) results, eliminations, and Wrestling Observer rating — Cagematch. https://www.cagematch.net/?id=1&nr=1758
15. Survivor Series (1988) — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivor_Series_(1988)
16. "Wrestler Jake 'The Snake' Roberts Rekindles Romance With Ex-Wife Cheryl Hagood 24 Years After Divorce" — Yahoo Entertainment, March 6, 2023. https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/wrestler-jake-snake-roberts-rekindles-172341333.html
17. Scott Johnson, "Jake 'The Snake' Roberts, now sober, reunites with ex-wife after 24 years" — News4JAX (WJXT), June 14, 2023 (interview with Jake and Cheryl Roberts). https://www.news4jax.com/news/local/2023/06/14/jake-the-snake-roberts-now-sober-reunites-with-ex-wife-after-24-years/
18. "WCW Clash Of The Champions #20" (Sep 2, 1992) results and Wrestling Observer rating — Cagematch. https://www.cagematch.net/?id=1&nr=4042
19. WWF at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena (Oct 16, 1988) results — Cagematch. https://www.cagematch.net/?id=1&nr=83712
20. WWF at the Brendan Byrne Arena (Sep 11, 1988) results — Cagematch. https://www.cagematch.net/?id=1&nr=83575
21. WrestleMania IV — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WrestleMania_IV

Further Listening

• The Snake Pit with Jake Roberts (podcast, September 2023 episode) — Roberts on the Rude feud and the missing SummerSlam match
• Going Ringside — Roberts on the tights being a shoot
• The Resurrection of Jake the Snake (2015 documentary) — Roberts' recovery, and the road back to Cheryl
• Beyond the Mat (1999 documentary) — Roberts' addiction struggles in the years after this storyline