Macho Man Randy Savage vs. Jake The Snake Roberts (Aug 1991 – Feb 1992)

Background

By the summer of 1991, Randy Savage was a retired man with the hottest storyline in the company. He had lost the career-vs-career match to the Ultimate Warrior at WrestleMania VII, moved to the broadcast booth, and gotten Miss Elizabeth back, with a televised proposal in June and a wedding, "The Match Made in Heaven," booked for SummerSlam on August 26 at Madison Square Garden.[15][16] Off screen, Savage and Elizabeth had been married since 1984.[16]

Jake Roberts came into the story from the opposite direction. A beloved babyface since his 1986 arrival, he had spent the summer turning into something new.

In a series of vignettes, the Ultimate Warrior came to Roberts to learn "the knowledge of the dark side" before facing The Undertaker. Roberts locked him in a coffin, buried him alive, and finally sent him wading through a room of snakes to a chest that held "the answer": a king cobra that struck as the lid opened, while Roberts revealed he had been in league with The Undertaker and Paul Bearer all along. "I'm a snake," he told the poisoned Warrior. "Never trust a snake."[1]

The heel turn was supposed to pay off in a Roberts vs. Warrior program. It never got the chance: Warrior was suspended the night of SummerSlam over a pay dispute and left the company, and the freshly turned Roberts was a villain without a victim.[1][4]

The redirect was sitting right there on the same card. Savage was retired, adored, newly married on television, and in need of a way back into the ring; Roberts needed someone whose happiness was worth ruining. The WWF pointed its darkest character at its most sentimental storyline, and Roberts, by his own later account given unusual creative freedom over his own material, started writing.[4][5]

Build-up

The ambush came before the honeymoon. After SummerSlam went off the air, the company filmed Savage and Elizabeth's wedding reception for television, and the footage aired on the September 7 Superstars: gifts, toasts, and a final present that Elizabeth opened to find a king cobra coiled inside. As she recoiled, Roberts and The Undertaker attacked the retired Savage, Undertaker clubbing him with the urn, until Sid Justice chased them off.[1][6] Nothing in Savage's life was out of bounds: not his wedding, not his retirement, not his wife.

Through the fall, the heel could reach the babyface, but the babyface couldn't reach back. Savage's WrestleMania VII retirement was still in force, so while Roberts taunted him from the ring week after week, Savage could only seethe from the announce position and petition WWF President Jack Tunney for reinstatement. Tunney kept denying it, even as the broadcasts claimed more than a million fans had called and written on Savage's behalf.[2][18]

The segment that broke the dam was taped at a Superstars taping on October 21 and aired November 23, 1991.[3] Roberts called Savage down to the ring and dared him; Savage came; the trap closed. Roberts beat him down, tied his arms in the ropes, and pulled his king cobra from the bag.

The snake struck Savage's arm and did not let go, footage so graphic that the broadcast covered the closeup with a giant X.[3][4] What viewers could still see was real blood running down a bound man's arm while Roberts smirked. The bite, as Behind the Scenes covers, was entirely real.[3][5]

Four days later, at Survivor Series on November 27, Tunney announced his ruling: Savage could not be medically cleared to wrestle on the show, all reptiles were barred from ringside, and Savage was reinstated for a match with Roberts six days later at This Tuesday in Texas.[7]

In his promo that night, Savage described the bite as a living hell in which, hallucinating, the one thing he could hear and see was Elizabeth crying, and said her tears hurt worse than anything Roberts had done to his body.[7] Roberts swore with mock sincerity that he had believed the cobra was devenomized, blamed Tunney and the WWF for letting it happen, and said that after six years people had finally caught on: the thing in the bag was a toy, and he was the real snake.[7]

The Matches

This Tuesday in Texas, the WWF's experiment with a Tuesday-night pay-per-view, took place December 3, 1991, at the Freeman Coliseum in San Antonio, before about 8,000 fans.[2] Savage didn't wait for the bell: he attacked Roberts during his entrance, swinging wildly with the taped-up, snakebitten arm. Roberts took over by going straight at that arm and went for the DDT, but Savage slipped free, climbed, and dropped the flying elbow for the pin at 6:25.[2]

Savage wanted more, grabbing a steel chair that officials confiscated and then the timekeeper's bell. While a referee wrestled it away from him, Roberts struck: one DDT, then a minute later a second.[2] He reached under the ring for a bag shaped exactly like the one that carried the cobra. Elizabeth ran to the ring and threw herself over her unconscious husband, begging.

Roberts pulled Savage up, hit a third DDT, and then, with Elizabeth screaming at him, slapped her across the face.[2][12] Tunney and a knot of officials finally walked him out. Nothing like it had aired on WWF television, and Roberts has said he was inundated with death threats afterward.[12]

The pay-per-view itself was a business failure, drawing around 400,000 buys, well short of hopes, and the company didn't attempt another Tuesday pay-per-view until Taboo Tuesday in 2004.[2]

The feud's last match came at Saturday Night's Main Event XXX, taped in Lubbock and aired February 8, 1992. It ran 5:25 and ended the same way: Roberts hit the DDT but played to the crowd instead of covering, and Savage came back with the flying elbow for the clean win.[8]

The ending that mattered again happened after the bell. Roberts slipped backstage, took up a steel chair, and announced he would hit whoever came through the curtain first. Elizabeth came first. As Roberts swung, The Undertaker's hand closed around the chair, and the distraction let Savage lay Roberts out with it.[1]

Aftermath

Between those two matches sat the Royal Rumble on January 19, 1992, where the feud produced one of the Rumble's strangest moments. Savage eliminated Roberts, then hurled himself over the top rope after him in a rage, both feet hitting the floor. The Undertaker rolled him back in, and Gorilla Monsoon and Bobby Heenan improvised on the air that a man cannot eliminate himself, a rule invented on the spot to cover what appears to have been Savage's mistake, and one fans have argued about ever since.[9]

The Undertaker's chair grab did what the feud's planned ending could not. Two weeks after Saturday Night's Main Event, Roberts confronted him on the Funeral Parlor set and demanded to know whose side he was on. "Not yours," said the Deadman, his first babyface moment. Roberts responded by DDT-ing Paul Bearer, slamming Undertaker's hand in a casket, and beating him with a chair as Undertaker sat up again and again.[1] The Savage program was over; Roberts vs. Undertaker was booked for WrestleMania VIII.

At the Hoosier Dome on April 5, 1992, both halves of the dead feud got separate endings. Savage beat Ric Flair for the WWF Championship in the doctored-photos program built, again, around Elizabeth. Roberts lost to The Undertaker in 6:36, becoming the second entry in what fans would much later canonize as the Streak. Then he was gone, out of the WWF entirely until 1996.[1][15] Why he left, and why the Savage feud never got the WrestleMania blow-off it seemed built for, are backstage stories told almost entirely in Roberts' own voice, covered below.

Elizabeth vanished from WWF television in the spring of 1992, and the real marriage the company had staged a wedding for ended in divorce that September.[16] Savage's title reign carried him through the year. Roberts resurfaced in WCW under Bill Watts, where the snake was banned, the money collapsed, and things got much worse.[14][20]

Behind the Scenes

The cobra was real, the bite was real, and the man who got bitten demanded a demonstration first. Roberts has told the story for years: he pitched the bite angle himself, and Savage, unconvinced the "devenomized" cobra was safe, laid down his terms. "Let me say this: you need to let that snake bite you first," Roberts recalled Savage telling him, followed by, "if you're not going to do that, then you and I are going to have to do a little fighting right now!"[5]

Roberts let the cobra bite him, and Savage stood over him through the wait that followed: "Don't you dare move! Don't take no elixirs! Don't take no antidotes! Don't take nothing!"[4][5] Only after Roberts didn't die did Savage agree to the spot.

On the night, it went wrong anyway. The cobra latched onto Savage's arm and would not release. Roberts described trying to pry its jaws open while Savage screamed at him: "I'm trying — I'm trying! And the snake's just gnawing on his arm."[3]

In Roberts' telling, Savage's arm swelled badly, and days later he spiked a 104-degree fever and needed hospital treatment and antibiotics; the snake, he says, died about twelve days after the segment. Those details are Roberts' account alone: colorful, uncorroborated, and worth exactly that caveat.[3] The censorship became part of the legend, and Roberts thought the X made it scarier too: "Even them putting the X up there and blocking it out, to me, that was even scarier."[4]

Much of the feud's darkest material was Roberts' own. He was famous in the company as "One Take Jake," and his rules for promos double as the feud's blueprint: "To do a promo right, you have to believe what you're saying," never threaten what you can't deliver, and "you don't look at the camera. You look through it."[5][17] His Survivor Series 1991 promo, woven from biblical and fairy-tale imagery, is still cited as a benchmark of menace delivered at a whisper.[17]

The darkness wasn't entirely a performance. Roberts has been candid for decades that he was drinking and using through this period of his career, and that the character drew on a genuinely brutal childhood. The line between Jake Roberts and "the snake" was, by his own testimony, never as clean as kayfabe pretended.[14][20]

The slap is where the work collided with real families. Roberts has told the fallout story more than once, though the details shift between tellings. In one, he said Savage had promised Elizabeth's family she would never be hurt on television, and that when the couple next visited her grandparents, "the old man pulled a gun on him and said, 'Don't you even think about coming in the house!'"[11] In another, the family barred the door with "Get the hell off our property. You lied to us. You said our little girl would never get hurt."[13]

Either way, the consequence Roberts describes is the same: the feud, which seemed pointed at a WrestleMania VIII match, had to be wrapped up fast so Savage could make it up to his in-laws by decisively beating Roberts, which is roughly what the February Saturday Night's Main Event delivered, before both men were rerouted to other WrestleMania opponents.[13]

Roberts' exit has its own broken promise. In a 2023 interview with Steve Fall, he said Vince McMahon had long promised him Pat Patterson's spot on the booking staff: "Vince had promised me that position long before, several years before, that that would be my spot." When Patterson stepped away in early 1992 and Roberts asked, the answer was, "Well, out of respect for Pat, we're not going to fill that position." Roberts' verdict: "Bullsh*t. Pat never left. He was still there. He just wasn't shown on TV."[10]

He gave his notice around WrestleMania VIII and served a 90-day no-compete. During it, the WCW regime that had offered him a rich deal changed, Bill Watts tore up the contract, and, as Roberts put it, "that pushed me off the deep end... I really dug into the coke after that."[14][20]

Legacy

Retrospectives routinely frame Savage vs. Roberts as a feud that would have fit the Attitude Era perfectly, with a wedding ambush, on-air blood, and a woman struck in the ring, arriving six years early in the cartoon WWF of 1991.[19] The cobra bite sits alongside the Piper's Pit coconut on the short list of segments that still shock decades later precisely because they weren't special effects, and WWE itself now packages the segment and the full pay-per-view on its official channels.[3][4]

The feud also changed The Undertaker's career. The backstage chair grab made him a babyface for the first time, the turn that began his transformation from monster heel into a role he occupied for most of three decades.[1]

This Tuesday in Texas killed the Tuesday pay-per-view experiment for thirteen years.[2] The slap generated death threats against Roberts and real-family fallout serious enough, in his telling, to cut the feud off before its natural WrestleMania ending.[11][12][13]

Elizabeth and Savage divorced in September 1992; she died on May 1, 2003, at 42.[16] Savage died at the wheel on May 20, 2011, and went into the Hall of Fame in 2015.[15] Roberts, whose addiction consumed the two decades after this feud, got sober through Diamond Dallas Page's intervention, became the subject of the documentary The Resurrection of Jake the Snake, and entered the WWE Hall of Fame in 2014, inducted by DDP.[1][20]

See Also

Sources & Further Listening

1. Jake Roberts — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jake_Roberts
2. This Tuesday in Texas — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Tuesday_in_Texas
3. Randy Savage and Jake Roberts' Infamous Snake Bite Incident — Pro Wrestling Stories. https://prowrestlingstories.com/pro-wrestling-stories/jake-roberts-randy-savage-snake-bite/
4. The Backstage Story Of Jake Roberts' Snake Biting Randy Savage — TheSportster. https://www.thesportster.com/wwe-backstage-story-of-jake-roberts-snake-biting-randy-savage/
5. Jake Roberts On Randy Savage's Request Before Snake Biting Angle, The Secret To Cut Good Promos (via Talk Is Jericho) — Wrestling Inc. https://www.wrestlinginc.com/news/2020/03/jake-roberts-on-randy-savage-request-before-snake-biting-667717/
6. SummerSlam (1991) — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SummerSlam_(1991)
7. Leighty's Retro Review: WWF Survivor Series 1991 — 411MANIA. https://411mania.com/wrestling/leightys-retro-review-wwf-survivor-series-1991/
8. WWF Saturday Night's Main Event — February 8th, 1992 — Scott's Blog of Doom. https://www.blogofdoom.com/2018/08/08/wwf-saturday-nights-main-event-february-8th-1992/
9. Royal Rumble (1992) — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Rumble_(1992)
10. Jake Roberts says he left WWE in 1992 because Vince McMahon broke a promise to him (Steve Fall interview) — WrestlingNews.co. https://wrestlingnews.co/wwe-news/jake-roberts-says-he-left-wwe-in-1992-because-vince-mcmahon-broke-a-promise-to-him
11. Jake The Snake Discusses Slapping Miss Elizabeth (Bischoff on Wrestling) — ComicBook.com. https://comicbook.com/wwe/news/jake-the-snake-roberts-discusses-slapping-miss-elizabeth/
12. On this date in WWF history: Jake Roberts slaps Elizabeth on 'This Tuesday in Texas' — Cageside Seats. https://www.cagesideseats.com/2013/12/3/4833114/on-this-date-in-wwf-history-jake-roberts-slaps-elizabeth-on-this-tuesday-in-texas
13. "Get the hell off our property. You lied to us" — WWE legend allegedly banned from his wife's family home after Jake Roberts segment — Sportskeeda. https://www.sportskeeda.com/wwe/news-wwe-legend-allegedly-banned-wife-s-family-home-jake-roberts-segment
14. Jake Roberts Recalls How Issues With WCW Led To His Cocaine Addiction Getting Worse — Fightful. https://www.fightful.com/wrestling/jake-roberts-recalls-how-issues-wcw-led-his-cocaine-addiction-getting-worse
15. Randy Savage — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Savage
16. Miss Elizabeth — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Elizabeth
17. A Silver-Tongued Devil: The Memorable Jake "The Snake" Roberts Promos — Last Word On Pro Wrestling. https://lastwordonsports.com/prowrestling/2021/06/24/jake-the-snake-roberts-promos/
18. That Was Then: True Feats Of Manliness — The Randy Savage Snakebite Incident — 411MANIA. https://411mania.com/wrestling/that-was-then-3-23-07-true-feats-of-manliness-the-randy-savage-snakebite-incident/
19. The Randy Savage Vs. Jake Roberts WWE Feud Would Have Fit Perfectly In The Attitude Era — TheSportster. https://www.thesportster.com/wwe-randy-savage-vs-jake-roberts-feud-fit-perfectly-in-attitude-era/
20. Jake Roberts in WCW: Money, Grudges, and Personal Ruin — Pro Wrestling Stories. https://prowrestlingstories.com/pro-wrestling-stories/jake-roberts-wcw/

Further Listening

• Talk Is Jericho — Jake Roberts on the cobra bite and the art of the promo
• Something to Wrestle with Bruce Prichard — Episode 76: Jake 'The Snake' Roberts
• WWE Rivals: Randy Savage vs. Jake Roberts — A&E documentary series
• The Resurrection of Jake the Snake — documentary (2015)
• Bischoff on Wrestling — Jake Roberts on slapping Miss Elizabeth (September 2017)