Macho Man Randy Savage vs. Ricky The Dragon Steamboat (Nov 1986 – Oct 1987)

Background

Randy Savage arrived in the WWF in June 1985 billed as "the top free agent in pro wrestling," and the company ran an on-screen sweepstakes in which its established heel managers competed for his services. On the August 24, 1985 Championship Wrestling, Savage rejected all of them for an unknown: Miss Elizabeth, a soft-spoken woman with no wrestling résumé who was, though television never said so, Elizabeth Hulette, his real wife since the previous December.[3][10]

Six months later Savage won the Intercontinental Championship from Tito Santana at the Boston Garden, knocking him out with a steel object stashed in his tights.[3] By late 1986 he had held the belt nearly a year, feuding with George "The Animal" Steele, whose kayfabe crush on Elizabeth ran through their WrestleMania 2 match.[3]

Ricky Steamboat had debuted in March 1985 as "The Dragon," a martial arts babyface pushed on pure in-ring credibility. He worked his way through Don Muraco and Mr. Fuji before a 1986 program against Jake Roberts that produced one of the era's scariest moments: a DDT on the exposed concrete floor at a Saturday Night's Main Event taping that left Steamboat with a legitimate concussion. Roberts later said he only agreed to the spot, which Vince McMahon and booker George Scott insisted on, after Steamboat assured him he could protect himself.[2][16]

WrestleMania III was going to be the biggest show the company had ever staged, and the Hulk Hogan vs. André the Giant main event was the spectacle selling the tickets. Savage and Steamboat were paired off to give the card its great wrestling match, and Savage's year-long title reign gave it stakes.[1][15]

Build-up

The angle that launched the feud aired on the November 22, 1986 Superstars of Wrestling, taped the previous month.[2][3] Steamboat challenged Savage for the Intercontinental title and lost by countout.

Then Savage kept going. He draped Steamboat throat-first across the ringside guardrail and came off the top rope with a double axhandle. He dragged Steamboat back inside, took the ring bell from the timekeeper's table, climbed the top rope, and leapt off, driving the bell into his throat.[1][15] The WWF announced that the attack had crushed Steamboat's larynx.

Steamboat disappeared from television. For weeks the WWF ran vignettes of him in recovery: doctors, speech therapy, a voice reduced to a rasp. The company never confirmed on air whether the injury was real.[15] "From the time he dropped the bell on my throat until WrestleMania, we had a three-month buildup," Steamboat said later.[1]

On the January 3, 1987 Saturday Night's Main Event IX, Savage defended the title against George Steele and went for the ring bell again. Steamboat, unseen since November, ran out and stopped him, saving Steele from the same attack that had put him on the shelf.[2][15]

The challenge for WrestleMania III followed. Steamboat wanted revenge, Steele wanted Elizabeth's attention and Savage's hide, and Savage, increasingly unhinged on the microphone, was defending a belt he'd held for nearly fourteen months.[3]

Between January and WrestleMania there was no televised rematch and no further beatdown. The injury was the story, and most of the show's promotional attention went to Hogan and André. Savage and Steamboat spent those months wrestling each other on the house show circuit instead, trying out sequences in front of live crowds that television never saw.[15][18]

By the time the Silverdome filled up, the two had, by both men's later accounts, planned the match in more detail than any WWF match before it, a story told below in Behind the Scenes. Jesse Ventura and Gorilla Monsoon called the card, and Ventura, the heel voice, would later call the match "the greatest match I ever saw. Ever."[1]

The Matches

WrestleMania III took place March 29, 1987, at the Pontiac Silverdome, before an announced 93,173 fans. Later research puts the real figure closer to 78,000.[4] Savage entered with Elizabeth. Steamboat came out with George Steele in his corner, insurance against the ring bell. Dave Hebner refereed, at Savage's specific request.[1]

The match ran 14 minutes and 35 seconds and packed in around twenty near falls, at a time when a typical match had about seven. Steamboat has said the two of them planned twenty false finishes.[1][15]

Steamboat opened with his signature deep arm drags before going straight after Savage's throat, and Savage answered with the double axhandle and his flying over-the-top-rope exit, the same weapons he'd used in November.[6] The middle stretch was an escalating trade of sunset flips, cradles, rollups, and small packages, each one bought by the crowd as the finish.[6]

Then Hebner went down in a collision, and Savage hit his flying elbow, the finisher that beat everyone, flush with no referee to count.[6] Rather than wait for Hebner to recover, Savage went for the ring bell again. Steele grabbed the bell away, kicked back at Savage, and shoved him off the top rope. Savage crashed onto the mat and came up holding his back.[1][6][19]

He hauled Steamboat up for a scoop slam anyway, and Steamboat rolled through it into a small package as Hebner crawled over: one, two, three.[4][6] Lanny Poffo, Savage's brother, described the finish: "Randy picked him up, and then, all of the sudden, one simple small package — 1-2-3," with Savage putting a hand on his injured back before attempting the slam.[1]

It was the first time in WrestleMania history the Intercontinental Championship changed hands.[4] "The roar of 93,000 people was just ... I had nothing to compare that to," Steamboat said.[1] Dave Meltzer rated the match ★★★★½ at the time, and it won Match of the Year for 1987 from both the Wrestling Observer and Pro Wrestling Illustrated.[4][14]

Aftermath

There was never a televised rematch. The return matches happened on the house show circuit, mostly inside a steel cage. Steamboat defended the title 26 times in his 64 days as champion, roughly 15 of them cage matches against Savage, blowing the feud off arena by arena while television moved on.[1][7]

Then the reign ended in the strangest title change of the era. Steamboat asked Vince McMahon for time off because his wife Bonnie was expecting their first son, Richard Jr. The office, which by multiple accounts had groomed him as a long-term champion, decided that if he was leaving, the belt was too.[2]

The plan for the June 2, 1987 TV taping in Buffalo was for Steamboat to drop the title to Butch Reed. Reed no-showed. Jimmy Hart's newest client, The Honky Tonk Man, an Elvis impersonator gimmick that had been getting laughed at more than booed, was slotted in on the day. He beat Steamboat in under four minutes by reversing a small package and grabbing the ropes for leverage, the same move Steamboat had won the title with at WrestleMania.[7][8][9] Steamboat's son was born about a month later.[2]

Savage won the inaugural King of the Ring tournament that September, then turned babyface when Honky Tonk Man proclaimed himself "the greatest Intercontinental Champion of all time," a claim aimed at the man Honky beat and the man Honky's belt used to belong to.[3]

On the October 3, 1987 Saturday Night's Main Event, Savage challenged Honky, won by disqualification, and was beaten down by Honky and the Hart Foundation until Elizabeth ran to the back and returned with Hulk Hogan. The save created the Mega Powers, and six months later Savage beat Ted DiBiase, with Hogan's help, in the WrestleMania IV tournament final to win the WWF Championship.[3]

Steamboat came back from paternity leave to no program at all: a Survivor Series appearance, a Royal Rumble, a WrestleMania IV tournament loss to Greg Valentine, and by spring 1988 he was gone from the company.[2] He resurfaced in the NWA in January 1989 and went straight into his celebrated trilogy with Ric Flair.[2]

Behind the Scenes

The most famous thing about this match is how it was made. Over the weeks before WrestleMania, Savage and Steamboat wrote the entire match down and memorized it. "We were using the yellow legal pad and writing down steps. And it got into like 100-something steps," Steamboat recalled. "We would quiz ourselves, and I would say, 'OK, I'm at step No. 55, it's this and this. Now tell me the rest of the match.'"[1] In another telling he put the count higher: "at about the fourth page, I'd say, 'Okay this is step 112. I'm going to do this, this, and this. Tell me the rest of the match.'"[5]

They drilled it physically too. Referee Dave Hebner described sessions at the company's Stamford headquarters: "We went to the [WWE] office, where they have all the rings set up. We worked our butts off."[1]

Full pre-scripting was heresy in 1987, when matches were called in the ring, and Steamboat spent years defending it. Savage, he said, was a perfectionist unlike anyone he ever worked with: "I have never, ever met a performer that was a stickler to critical moments and moves."[1][5]

How much of the plan came from above is one of the few genuinely disputed points. Gene Okerlund's read: "Somewhere along the line, I believe that Randy Savage and Ricky Steamboat made the final decisions as to what they were going to do on their own. It didn't come from Vince McMahon."[1]

Savage also controlled the officiating. He told McMahon, "I want Hebner to do my match," and then, per Lanny Poffo, laid down a rule in the pre-match meeting: "Randy said, 'Here's the deal. We're not going to put heat on the referee. Dave, if the man's shoulders are down, you count to three, and I don't care if it ruins the finish.'"[1] That rule is why twenty near falls worked: the crowd could trust every count.

Savage's jealousy over Elizabeth was not an act. By every colleague's account, the possessiveness he played on screen was a real trait performed at full volume. Ted DiBiase has described Savage keeping a private dressing room so Elizabeth never shared space with the boys.[12] Bushwhacker Luke recalled Savage confronting him for a stray glance: "nobody looks at my Liz."[11] Some retellings go further, claiming Savage locked Elizabeth in dressing rooms; Poffo, his brother, has flatly denied the locked-door stories as fabrication. The paranoia is unanimously attested, but the specifics vary teller to teller.[10][13]

George Steele, whose gimmick was being infatuated with Elizabeth, saw both sides of it up close. He described Savage rehearsing Elizabeth's ring entrances "probably 150 to 200 times so that she wouldn't show too much leg and she could do it very lady-like," and admitted to needling Savage before the WrestleMania match by threatening to chase "some of these young broads," specifically to send him to the ring furious.[1] "The only thing I liked about the match was I got to stand across the ring and look at Elizabeth," Steele said.[1]

Then there is what the match cost Steamboat. The backstage reaction in the Silverdome was rapturous. Steamboat remembered "a bunch of old-timers like Arnold Skaaland and Gorilla Monsoon patting us on the back and saying, 'God damn kid, what a match.'"[1] But the reward structure of 1987 wrestling paid off availability, not match quality.

When Steamboat asked for weeks off for his son's birth, Poffo summarized the company's position without varnish: "When you say, 'I want to take a vacation because my son is being born,' then Vince says, 'OK, you have to lose the belt.'"[1] Management had reportedly planned him as a long-term champion and took the request badly. Steamboat has also said in interviews that Hulk Hogan was unhappy about the semi-main outshining the main event, though that claim rests on Steamboat's own telling.[2][7] The man who had just had the best match in company history spent his remaining year in the WWF with nothing to do.

Legacy

"We knew we stole the show that night, but we never thought it would get us the recognition that it did," Steamboat said. "The match seemed to grow each year."[1] It won 1987 Match of the Year from both the Observer and PWI at the time. Thirty years later, ESPN's retrospective panel ranked it the second-greatest WrestleMania match ever, behind only Shawn Michaels vs. The Undertaker from WrestleMania XXV.[1][4]

Gene Okerlund, 46 years into the business, called it "one for the ages."[1] Chris Jericho wrote in his autobiography that seeing Steamboat with the belt set his career goal, and when Jericho wrestled the 56-year-old Steamboat in 2009, he deliberately recreated the finish: "I wanted to pick Steamboat up for a body slam and have him roll me up for the pin, the exact finish of his famous WrestleMania 3 match vs. Randy Savage."[17]

Steamboat's WWF exit led to the 1989 Flair trilogy, a 2009 Hall of Fame induction, and a standing built almost entirely on his matches rather than championships. His only WWF singles title remains the 64-day Intercontinental reign this feud produced.[2]

Savage got the rocket: within a year of losing the belt he was WWF Champion, and the Elizabeth story that started as his manager reveal in 1985 became the emotional spine of the company through the Mega Powers era.[3]

The real marriage did not survive the storyline. Savage and Elizabeth divorced in September 1992, and Elizabeth died in 2003 at 42.[3][10] Savage died on May 20, 2011, suffering a heart attack at the wheel in Seminole, Florida; he entered the WWE Hall of Fame posthumously in 2015.[3] When WWE produced its tribute documentary, the WrestleMania III match sat at the center of the reel.[1]

See Also

Sources & Further Listening

1. WrestleMania 3: An oral history of Randy Savage and Ricky "The Dragon" Steamboat — ESPN. https://www.espn.com/wwe/story/_/id/18802068/oral-history-wrestlemania-3-randy-savage-vs-ricky-dragon-steamboat
2. Ricky Steamboat — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricky_Steamboat
3. Randy Savage — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Savage
4. WrestleMania III — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WrestleMania_III
5. Ricky Steamboat Reveals Why His WrestleMania 3 Match With Randy Savage Was Scripted Move-For-Move — Fightful. https://www.fightful.com/wrestling/ricky-steamboat-reveals-why-his-wrestlemania-3-match-randy-savage-was-scripted-move-move/
6. WWE WrestleMania Flashback: Randy Savage vs. Ricky Steamboat — FanSided. https://fansided.com/2017/03/24/wwe-wrestlemania-flashback-randy-savage-ricky-steamboat-wrestlemania-3/
7. Ricky "The Dragon" Steamboat's Intercontinental Championship Reign — The Wrestling Insomniac. https://www.thewrestlinginsomniac.com/2025/02/ricky-dragon-steamboats.html
8. How Honky Tonk Man's Intercontinental Title Reign Began — WWF Memories. https://www.wwfmemories.com/2016/07/05/how-honky-tonk-mans-intercontinental-title-reign-began/
9. The Honky Tonk Man — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Honky_Tonk_Man
10. Randy Savage and Miss Elizabeth: Their Tragic True Story — Pro Wrestling Stories. https://prowrestlingstories.com/pro-wrestling-stories/randy-savage-miss-elizabeth/
11. "Nobody looks at my Liz" — Details on Randy Savage confronting a WWE Hall of Famer for looking at Miss Elizabeth — Sportskeeda. https://www.sportskeeda.com/wwe/news-nobody-looks-liz-details-macho-man-randy-savage-confronting-wwe-hall-famer-looking-miss-elizabeth-exclusive
12. Ted DiBiase Details The Extent Of Randy Savage's Paranoia — ITR Wrestling. https://itrwrestling.com/news/wwe-hall-of-famer-ted-dibiase-details-the-extent-of-randy-savages-paranoia/
13. Allegation That Randy Savage Locked Miss Elizabeth In The Closet Not True (Lanny Poffo) — Ringside News. https://www.ringsidenews.com/2021/05/18/allegation-that-randy-savage-locked-miss-elizabeth-in-the-closet-not-true/
14. Dave Meltzer Star Ratings — WrestleMania 3 — IWNerd. https://www.iwnerd.com/dave-meltzer-star-ratings-wrestlemania-3-iii/
15. Ricky Steamboat vs Randy Savage — Their Unforgettable WrestleMania III Classic — Pro Wrestling Post. https://prowrestlingpost.com/ricky-steamboat-vs-randy-savage/
16. Jake Roberts Recalls Reluctantly DDTing Ricky Steamboat Onto Concrete Floor — Wrestling Inc. https://www.wrestlinginc.com/1276883/jake-roberts-recalls-reluctantly-ddting-ricky-steamboat-onto-concrete-floor/
17. How Randy Savage vs. Ricky Steamboat Inspired a Generation at WrestleMania III — Bleacher Report. https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2696005-how-randy-savage-vs-ricky-steamboat-inspired-a-generation-at-wrestlemania-iii
18. Behind The Match: Ricky Steamboat vs Randy Savage — WrestleMania III — WrestleTalk. https://wrestletalk.com/features/behind-the-match-ricky-steamboat-vs-randy-savage-wrestlemania-iii/
19. Randy Savage vs. Ricky Steamboat, WWF WrestleMania III (3/29/1987) — HANDWERK match review. https://handwerkreviews.wordpress.com/2024/01/05/randy-savage-vs-ricky-steamboat-wwf-wrestlemania-iii-3-29-1987/

Further Listening

• Something to Wrestle with Bruce Prichard — WrestleMania III episode
• Macho Man: The Randy Savage Story — WWE documentary (2014)
• The Honky Tonk Man — RF Video shoot interview, on the Buffalo title change