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.[12][13] Off screen, Savage and Elizabeth had been married since 1984.[13]

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. The Observer reported that Warrior would work with The Undertaker for a couple of months while Roberts rested an injured back, then switch to Roberts in mid-October.[17][18] It never got the chance: Warrior was gone from the WWF the night of SummerSlam, which the Observer reported as a suspension rather than a firing, and the freshly turned Roberts was a villain without a victim.[1][18]

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 went to work.

The one problem was Savage. The Observer reported that he still insisted he didn't want to come back full-time, and that McMahon was threatening to pull him off TV if he didn't. Savage agreed to a pay-per-view match with Roberts but still considered himself retired.[18] By late September he still hadn't committed. He had talked with WCW and given his notice, and the WWF ran a storyline about Savage trashing Jack Tunney's office to explain the delay.[19]

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 highlights aired on the WWF's syndicated and cable shows, with still photos of the attack on the August 31 Superstars: gifts, toasts, and a final present that Elizabeth opened to find a king cobra coiled inside.[6][16] 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.[2] On the house show circuit, Roberts was working Sid Justice instead, until Sid got hurt; a scheduled Sid vs. Roberts match at an October 22 Wrestling Challenge taping in Dayton didn't happen because of the injury.[16] While it lasted, the Observer reported, advance sales were weak because it wasn't the match people wanted.[19]

The segment that broke the dam was taped at a Superstars taping on October 21 at the Allen County War Memorial Coliseum in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in front of 6,000, and aired November 23, 1991.[3][16] 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. Elizabeth and Roddy Piper came out to help, and Roberts held officials off until a delirious Savage was pulled from the ring.[16] The bite, as Behind the Scenes covers, was entirely real.[3][5]

The Observer reported that the angle got over huge with the live crowd, though some of the kids there were upset by it.[20] When it aired uncensored on USA, it drew a lot of complaints; Meltzer liked it but thought it was too much of a hotshot. Savage was pulled from the house shows to sell the bite, with Sgt. Slaughter taking his spot.[21]

Four days later, Survivor Series opened in Detroit with a pre-taped announcement from Tunney: because of the snake attack, Savage could not compete, Roberts was pulled from the show as punishment for his actions, and the two would meet one on one the following Tuesday in San Antonio.[16] The Observer gave the real reason Roberts was pulled: it evened up the sides after an injury to Sid, and it meant fans who'd been promised Roberts didn't see him.[22] Both men gave separate interviews to Gene Okerlund on the show.[16]

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, announced as a 20,000 sellout.[2][16] 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 with a DDT, then another.[2][23] He reached for a bag like the one that carried the cobra. Elizabeth ran to the ring and threw herself over her unconscious husband, begging.

With Elizabeth pleading with him to stop, Roberts slapped her across the face, and Tunney and the agents had to come out and make the save.[2][10][23] Meltzer called the match average but the angle memorable: "This was just about the most dramatic angle I've ever seen."[23] Roberts has said he was inundated with death threats afterward.[10]

The match was also Savage's first televised in-ring appearance since WrestleMania VII.[16]

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.[7] Savage hit a double axe handle to the floor that sent Roberts throat-first into the steel barrier, and after the pin he went up for a second elbow, jumping over the officials trying to stop him, then went after Roberts with the timekeeper's bell.[24] Meltzer gave it two and three-quarter stars and said Savage worked harder than he had since his retirement.[25]

The ending that mattered again happened after the bell. Roberts slipped backstage, took up a steel chair, and waited behind the curtain as Savage and Elizabeth came back. The Undertaker took the chair from him and hit Roberts with it instead.[1][24] The Observer later noted the segment was spliced: the shot of Savage walking down the aisle was taped on a Monday, and the shot of Roberts waiting behind the curtain on the Tuesday after.[26]

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 with a running knee at 39:30, then went over the top rope after him to keep attacking. He wasn't eliminated, because no opponent had thrown him out.[24]

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 6:41, pinned after a Tombstone on the floor as he tried to take the urn from Paul Bearer, 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][12][24] Meltzer rated it three-quarters of a star, "real bad" for how anticipated it was, with The Undertaker no-selling two DDTs. He reported that Roberts had quit before the show, which explained how badly he was beaten.[28]

The signs had been there. Roberts missed the February TV tapings with no explanation, and in March he turned up backstage at a WCW taping.[27][29] Savage, meanwhile, talked about retiring after WrestleMania when Hogan did, before he and the company worked something out.[29] 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.[13] 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.[11][15]

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]

Savage told the rest himself. His arm "blew up like a balloon for days," and about five days later he was rushed to the hospital with a 104-degree fever and put on antibiotics. The snake died, about twelve days after the segment. "He was de-venomized, but maybe I wasn't!" Savage joked, and Roberts told him, "You killed my snake, dude."[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][14]

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.[11][15]

The slap is where the work collided with real families. Roberts told the fallout story on Eric Bischoff's podcast. Savage, he said, had promised Elizabeth's family she would never be hurt, and after the slap her grandfather pulled a gun on him: "Don't you even think about coming in the house!" To make it right with the family, Roberts said, Savage had to "clean my clock" in the ring, and the feud that should have gone on to WrestleMania was cut short.[9]

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."[8]

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."[11][15]

Legacy

At the time, the Observer called the post-match slap just about the most dramatic angle Meltzer had ever seen, and the cobra bite drew a lot of complaints when it aired uncensored on USA.[23][21]

The Observer's read on Roberts as a top heel was mixed at the time. In December 1991 it reported that he was bombing as a house show main eventer, and after the slap Meltzer thought the company had done something big with him but wasn't sure it would get him over as a main-event heel.[22][23]

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.[9][10][9]

Elizabeth and Savage divorced in September 1992; she died on May 1, 2003, at 42.[13] Savage died at the wheel on May 20, 2011, and went into the Hall of Fame in 2015.[12] 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.[1][15]

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. 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/
8. 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
9. 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/
10. 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
11. 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
12. Randy Savage — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Savage
13. Miss Elizabeth — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Elizabeth
14. 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/
15. Jake Roberts in WCW: Money, Grudges, and Personal Ruin — Pro Wrestling Stories. https://prowrestlingstories.com/pro-wrestling-stories/jake-roberts-wcw/
16. WWF 1991 results (TV tapings, house shows, and pay-per-views) — The History of WWE. http://www.thehistoryofwwe.com/91.htm
17. Wrestling Observer Newsletter, August 26, 1991 — issue recap, "Wrestling Observer Flashback–08.26.91," Scott's Blog of Doom. https://www.blogofdoom.com/2017/01/05/wrestling-observer-flashback-08-26-91/
18. Wrestling Observer Newsletter, September 2, 1991 — issue recap, "Wrestling Observer Flashback–09.02.91," Scott's Blog of Doom. https://www.blogofdoom.com/2017/01/06/wrestling-observer-flashback-09-02-91/
19. Wrestling Observer Newsletter, September 30, 1991 — issue recap, "Wrestling Observer Flashback–09.30.91," Scott's Blog of Doom. https://www.blogofdoom.com/2017/01/12/wrestling-observer-flashback-09-30-91/
20. Wrestling Observer Newsletter, October 28, 1991 — issue recap, "Wrestling Observer Flashback–10.28.91," Scott's Blog of Doom. https://www.blogofdoom.com/2017/01/18/wrestling-observer-flashback-10-28-91/
21. Wrestling Observer Newsletter, December 2, 1991 — issue recap, "Wrestling Observer Flashback–12.02.91," Scott's Blog of Doom. https://www.blogofdoom.com/2017/01/28/wrestling-observer-flashback-12-02-91/
22. Wrestling Observer Newsletter, December 9, 1991 (Survivor Series review) — issue recap, "Wrestling Observer Flashback–12.09.91," Scott's Blog of Doom. https://www.blogofdoom.com/2017/01/31/wrestling-observer-flashback-12-09-91/
23. Wrestling Observer Newsletter, December 16, 1991 (This Tuesday in Texas review) — issue recap, "Wrestling Observer Flashback–12.16.91," Scott's Blog of Doom. https://www.blogofdoom.com/2017/02/01/wrestling-observer-flashback-12-16-91/
24. WWF 1992 results (TV tapings, house shows, and pay-per-views) — The History of WWE. http://www.thehistoryofwwe.com/92.htm
25. Wrestling Observer Newsletter, February 17, 1992 (Saturday Night's Main Event review) — issue recap, "Wrestling Observer Flashback–02.17.92," Scott's Blog of Doom. https://www.blogofdoom.com/2017/02/14/wrestling-observer-flashback-02-17-92/
26. Wrestling Observer Newsletter, March 2, 1992 — issue recap, "Wrestling Observer Flashback–03.02.92," Scott's Blog of Doom. https://www.blogofdoom.com/2017/02/16/wrestling-observer-flashback-03-02-92/
27. Wrestling Observer Newsletter, February 24, 1992 — issue recap, "Wrestling Observer Flashback–02.24.92," Scott's Blog of Doom. https://www.blogofdoom.com/2017/02/15/wrestling-observer-flashback-02-24-92/
28. Wrestling Observer Newsletter, April 13, 1992 (WrestleMania VIII review) — issue recap, "Wrestling Observer Flashback–04.13.92," Scott's Blog of Doom. https://www.blogofdoom.com/2017/02/25/wrestling-observer-flashback-04-13-92/
29. Wrestling Observer Newsletter, March 23, 1992 — issue recap, "Wrestling Observer Flashback–03.23.92," Scott's Blog of Doom. https://www.blogofdoom.com/2017/02/21/wrestling-observer-flashback-03-23-92/

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)