Macho Man Randy Savage vs. The Ultimate Warrior (Oct 1990 – Mar 1991)

Background

Randy Savage lost the WWF Championship to Hulk Hogan at WrestleMania V in April 1989, in 17:54.[14] By that summer Sensational Sherri was in his corner, and on August 30, 1989, he beat Jim Duggan for the "King of the WWF" crown and became the Macho King.[14][15][2]

The Ultimate Warrior was headed the other way. At WrestleMania VI on April 1, 1990, before 64,287 at the SkyDome in Toronto, he pinned Hogan to win the WWF Championship.[2]

Elizabeth was still in the story in 1990, but on the other side. At WrestleMania VI she was in the corner of Dusty Rhodes and Sapphire when they beat Savage and Sherri, shoving Sherri on the floor to set up the finish.[2] She stayed with Rhodes and Sapphire through a summer of house-show tag matches against Savage and Sherri, hitting Sherri with her purse in Boston and Columbus in August. After that she was gone from WWF shows.[2]

Off screen, she was still what she had been since December 30, 1984: Randy Savage's wife.[7][10] The marriage was kept off television; the audience would only see a wedding when the WWF staged one in 1991.[10]

The man who would take Warrior's title came back that summer as a heel. In vignettes taped from June 1990 on, Sgt. Slaughter said he was no longer proud of his country, calling America soft for welcoming Nikolai Volkoff.[2] By the end of the year, with the Gulf War underway, the WWF had him as an Iraqi sympathizer headed for Hogan.[16][1]

Build-up

On the road, Savage had been challenging Warrior for the title for months, usually losing or winning by count-out.[2] On television, the story heading into 1991 was a champion saying no to a title shot.[3]

It came to a head at the Royal Rumble on January 19, 1991 in Miami. Early in the show Savage told Sean Mooney that Slaughter had promised him a title shot if Slaughter won the championship that night. When Mooney asked whether Warrior had made the same promise, Savage pointed at a monitor.[3] Sherri was dragging Gene Okerlund to the interview platform in the arena, where she called Warrior yellow until he came out.[3]

Sherri questioned him over and over, then tried to seduce him into the match, dropping to her knees. Warrior shook, yelled "No" into the microphone, and walked off.[3] Backstage, Savage threw things around his locker room, then ran down the hallway and through the crowd to the platform where Sherri was still standing.[3]

The revenge came in the title match. Sherri grabbed Warrior's leg and he chased her up the aisle, where Savage jumped him, clotheslined him, and hit him across the back with a spotlight stand while Slaughter kept the referee busy.[3] Warrior came back with the flying shoulderblock and was ready for the gorilla press when Sherri distracted him from the apron. He pulled her into the ring and press-slammed her onto Savage, who had just reached ringside.[3]

Seconds later, a knee in the back from Slaughter left Warrior draped over the middle rope, and Savage hit him in the head with the scepter. Slaughter dropped an elbow and pinned him for the title.[3] When Warrior came to, he ran to the back looking for Savage.[3]

Savage was scheduled to be the 18th entrant in the Rumble match that night and never came out.[3] In a backstage interview he and Sherri talked about costing Warrior the title until Warrior started pounding on the dressing-room door, and Savage ran off.[3]

In early February, WWF television reported "unconfirmed reports" that the two had challenged each other to a career-versus-career match at WrestleMania VII, and it was then confirmed: the loser would retire.[3] Savage and Sherri went on the Brother Love Show to say they would be there to watch Warrior's career be buried.[3] A February WrestleMania VII Report on WWF television carried comments from Savage, Sherri, and Warrior, and Okerlund interviewed Warrior about what the show was now calling his "Career Ending" match.[3]

WrestleMania VII had its own problems. It was supposed to be held at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, set up for 106,000. Less than two months out, the box office showed about 14,000 tickets sold, and sales had stopped by early February.[16] With the Gulf War still going, the show moved next door to the Sports Arena.[16]

The Matches

WrestleMania VII took place March 24, 1991, at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena, with an announced 16,158 fans.[16]

It drew a $722,035 gate and a 2.8 pay-per-view buyrate, well below the 5.9 WrestleMania V had done two years earlier.[17] The WWF had announced Regis Philbin, Alex Trebek, and Marla Maples as the show's hosts, with Willie Nelson singing "America the Beautiful."[3] Later that night, Hogan beat Slaughter in 20:26 to take the WWF Championship back.[18] A video package on the feud aired before the Savage match, and the show included a debate on instant replay between George Steinbrenner and Paul McGuire, inspired by Savage costing Warrior the title.[3]

Savage came out with Sherri. Warrior walked to the ring rather than running, the first time in his WWF career he had done that.[6] Sherri was active on the floor throughout.[6]

The match ran 20:48.[18][17] Savage hit five straight flying elbow drops, and Warrior kicked out.[3][6] Warrior answered with the gorilla press and the splash, and Savage kicked out of that too.[3]

Warrior talked to his hands and to the sky, as if asking what more he had to do to beat this man.[6] Then he hit three flying shoulder blocks, each one knocking Savage to the floor, and Gorilla Monsoon called one of them "a spear job." Warrior pinned him with one foot on his chest.[3][6]

After the bell, Sherri threw referee Earl Hebner out of the ring, screamed at Savage, and started kicking him.[3] Elizabeth jumped the rail, ran to the ring, and threw Sherri to the floor.[3]

Savage came to thinking Elizabeth was the one beating on him, then realized it had been Sherri. After a pause, with Elizabeth crying, the two embraced. On the way out he held the ropes open for her, then took a final bow.[3]

The Wrestling Observer gave the match four and a quarter stars, the highest rating on the card.[18][11] The Hogan-Slaughter main event got two and a half.[11]

House Shows

Savage and Warrior worked each other on the road almost nightly from late October 1990 through January 1991.[2][3] The early run was built on count-outs. Savage beat the champion by count-out in East Rutherford on October 26 and then on most of a November swing through Chicago, Indianapolis, Salt Lake City, Austin, Milwaukee, Las Vegas, Oakland, and Philadelphia, which let him win without taking the belt.[2]

Some nights the finishes were spelled out. In Sacramento on November 11, Savage won by count-out when Warrior chased Sherri around the ring; in Hershey on November 17, Savage jumped Warrior from behind during the same chase.[2] In Fort Wayne on October 30, Warrior pinned him in 1:31 with the gorilla press and splash.[2]

By December the results flipped. Warrior won most of that month's matches, some by pinfall and some by count-out when Savage walked out, in Tampa on December 11 and in Milwaukee and Chicago on December 29.[2] The pattern held into early January.[3]

After the Royal Rumble, with Warrior no longer champion, the matches moved into a steel cage. At Madison Square Garden on January 21, Savage beat Warrior in 10:33 by climbing out over the top while Warrior was distracted. He won cage matches in Cedar Rapids and Omaha that week too, and Warrior won one in Normal, Illinois.[3]

Then Savage's wrist went. Through February, arenas from Boston to Montreal to Tempe that had advertised Warrior against Savage in a cage got Sgt. Slaughter instead, usually with Sherri at ringside.[3]

In Oshawa, Ontario, on February 16, the listing gave the reason: Savage had a broken wrist.[3] Later that day in London, Ontario, Slaughter beat Warrior by disqualification at 14:52 when Warrior clotheslined the referee on purpose.[3]

Savage was back for at least one more cage match before WrestleMania, beating Warrior in Milwaukee on March 15.[3]

Aftermath

Savage wrestled one more time before the retirement took hold. Two nights later in Las Vegas, with Elizabeth in his corner, he pinned Rick Martel with the flying elbow after a piledriver on the floor. The match had been signed before WrestleMania and was billed as his final bout.[3]

Sherri moved on too. At a March 11 television taping in Pensacola, Ted DiBiase introduced her as his new manager, and Savage, on commentary, walked out of the booth in disgust.[3]

He stayed on the broadcast team, and the Elizabeth story played out on television. In late May, Elizabeth said on Prime Time Wrestling that she loved him, and Savage promised to announce his true feelings.[3] At a Madison Square Garden taping on July 1, he said he would propose on the coming week's Superstars and that if she said yes, they would marry at SummerSlam. He did, and she did.[3]

At WrestleFest in St. Louis that July, Savage was the special referee when Hogan beat Slaughter, coming off the top onto Slaughter to break a Camel Clutch.[3] At SummerSlam on August 26 at Madison Square Garden, Savage and Elizabeth were married in the ring.[3] At the reception afterward, Elizabeth opened a gift box with a king cobra inside, and Jake Roberts and the Undertaker attacked Savage until Sid Justice ran them off with a chair.[3]

The feud with Roberts ended the retirement. At an October 21 taping in Fort Wayne, Roberts goaded Savage out of the broadcast booth, trapped him in the ropes, and let the cobra bite his arm. Elizabeth said on TV that she hoped WWF President Jack Tunney would reinstate him, and Savage led a crowd in a chant of "reinstate."[3] At Survivor Series, Tunney said the two would meet at This Tuesday in Texas on December 3, and Savage pinned Roberts with the flying elbow.[3]

A little over a year after WrestleMania VII, Savage was WWF Champion again. At WrestleMania VIII on April 5, 1992, he rolled up Ric Flair, with a handful of tights, in 18:01.[19]

Warrior went into a program with the Undertaker, who locked him in an airtight casket on the Funeral Parlor. Jake Roberts then put him through a series of "preparation" tests, locking him in a casket and burying him up to his head.[3] He teamed with Hogan to beat Slaughter, Adnan, and Mustafa in the SummerSlam main event.[17]

He was gone within days; Sid Justice took his casket matches with the Undertaker from August 30 on, and Warrior didn't come back until WrestleMania VIII, seven months later.[3][19] That night he ran out to save Hogan from Sid Justice and Papa Shango, and the show ended with the two of them posing in the ring. He beat Papa Shango in his first match back.[19]

Behind the Scenes

Start with the scepter, because the scepter was real. In a 2023 interview with Bill Apter, Sgt. Slaughter described the Royal Rumble finish from inches away: "When he hit him with that scepter, he hit him like a baseball bat and knocked him out, because I was trying to pull [him] off the rope, but he was dead weight."[4]

Slaughter offered a theory in the same interview. In his telling, Warrior had hurt Savage's wrist in a match a few months earlier, and the scepter was a receipt: "Randy was very sensitive to those kind of things. You don't hurt somebody in a ring. You take care of your opponents. It was festered in."[4]

The claim is Slaughter's alone. The house-show record does show Savage pulled from his cage matches with Warrior in February 1991, a month after the Rumble, with a broken wrist; it doesn't say how it happened.[3]

The match itself was, by most accounts, a Savage production. George Steele wrote in his autobiography that Savage once "showed up in the locker room with a script that was probably four or five pages long," and Ricky Steamboat has described their WrestleMania III classic being planned as a numbered sequence, "step one through step one-hundred and fifty-seven."[9] No participant has published a spot-by-spot account of the WrestleMania VII layout, so the idea that Savage laid this one out move for move is inference from his documented habits, not a sourced quote.

The Elizabeth reunion sat on top of a real marriage the audience knew nothing about. Savage and Elizabeth had been married for six years when she came over that rail, and the SummerSlam wedding five months later staged, for a live Madison Square Garden crowd, a ceremony the couple had privately held in 1984.[7][10]

The people around them have since filled in the sadder context: Savage's jealousy, the isolation, and Bret Hart's observation that "never being out of each other's sight probably contributed to the demise of their fairytale romance more than anything else."[10] The divorce was finalized in 1992.[7]

Then there is the money. In July 1991, Warrior sent Vince McMahon a letter demanding a new deal, with this match at the center of it: $550,000 as his WrestleMania VII payoff, the same pay as Hogan on pay-per-views, TV, and house shows, and matching merchandise and 900-number royalties.[8] He made it plain he would not work SummerSlam otherwise: "I have been patient long enough… I will not be at the Meadowlands or any other arena until these terms are met."[21]

On July 13, McMahon wrote back agreeing to it, the $550,000 included, and promised to keep working with him "in the same honest and equitable way that I always have."[8] Then, right after the SummerSlam main event, he suspended Warrior, with the company officially citing unprofessional conduct.[8][21]

Warrior was suspended in the summer of 1991, again that November, and fired outright in 1996, and his relationship with the company stayed broken for two decades.[12] The man who lost his career at WrestleMania VII kept his job; the man who won spent the rest of 1991 negotiating his way out of one.[8][12]

Legacy

The match was the best-rated on the WrestleMania VII card, ahead of the Rockers and the Hart Foundation, and WWE has posted it in full on its own YouTube channel.[11][13] The Hogan-Slaughter main event it followed was a two-and-a-half-star match on a show that had been moved out of a stadium for poor ticket sales.[11][16]

The retirement didn't stick. It was about eight months from the foot-on-chest pin to his reinstatement match with Roberts, and a little over a year to a second WWF Championship at WrestleMania VIII.[3][19]

The marriage didn't last long after the televised wedding; Savage and Elizabeth were divorced in 1992.[7] Elizabeth died in the spring of 2003, at 42, found unresponsive after overdosing on alcohol and pills at Lex Luger's home.[7] Savage died on May 20, 2011, at 58, after suffering a heart attack while driving in Pinellas County, Florida.[20] He was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2015, with Hogan doing the honors the night before WrestleMania 31.[5]

Warrior went into the Hall of Fame on April 5, 2014, after two decades of estrangement. He appeared at WrestleMania XXX the next night and spoke on Raw on April 7. He collapsed in Scottsdale, Arizona, on April 8 and died at 54.[12]

See Also

Sources & Further Listening

1. WrestleMania VII — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WrestleMania_VII
2. WWF results, 1990 (WrestleMania VI, house shows and TV) — The History of WWE. https://thehistoryofwwe.com/wwf-results-1990/
3. WWF results, 1991 (Royal Rumble, WrestleMania VII, SummerSlam, house shows and TV) — The History of WWE. https://thehistoryofwwe.com/wwf-results-1991/
4. "He hit him like a baseball bat and knocked him out" — Sgt. Slaughter on Randy Savage's scepter attack, interview with Bill Apter — Sportskeeda. https://www.sportskeeda.com/wwe/news-he-hit-like-baseball-bat-knocked-out-wwe-legend-randy-savage-s-attack-hall-famer-exclusive
5. "The cream rises to the top: 'Macho Man' Randy Savage to be inducted into WWE Hall of Fame" — WWE.com. https://www.wwe.com/classics/wwe-hall-of-fame/macho-man-randy-savage-inductee-2015
6. Match Spotlight: Ultimate Warrior vs. Randy Savage, WWE WrestleMania VII — Wrestling Inc. https://www.wrestlinginc.com/2134080/match-spotlight-ultimate-warrior-randy-savage-wwe-wrestlemania-vii/
7. "'Macho Man' Randy Savage and Miss Elizabeth: Inside Their Real-Life Relationship" — Biography.com. https://www.biography.com/athletes/macho-man-randy-savage-miss-elizabeth-relationship
8. "Controversial Letters Between The Ultimate Warrior And Vince McMahon From 1991 Leak Online" — Wrestling Inc. https://www.wrestlinginc.com/news/2014/01/controversial-letters-between-the-ultimate-warrior-and-569379/
9. Randy Savage and his Unorthodox Approach to Calling a Match (quoting George Steele's autobiography and Ricky Steamboat) — Pro Wrestling Stories. https://prowrestlingstories.com/pro-wrestling-stories/randy-savage-unorthodox-approach/
10. Randy Savage and Miss Elizabeth: Their Tragic True Story (quoting Bret Hart's autobiography) — Pro Wrestling Stories. https://prowrestlingstories.com/pro-wrestling-stories/randy-savage-miss-elizabeth/
11. Dave Meltzer Star Ratings — WrestleMania 7 — IWNerd. https://www.iwnerd.com/dave-meltzer-star-ratings-wrestlemania-7-vii/
12. "Ultimate Warrior: Death, Career & Facts" — Biography.com. https://www.biography.com/athletes/ultimate-warrior
13. "FULL MATCH — Ultimate Warrior vs. Randy Savage - Retirement Match: WrestleMania VII" — YouTube (WWE). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89MyqO6s0D8
14. WWF WrestleMania V (card and times) — Cagematch. https://www.cagematch.net/?id=1&nr=1760
15. WWF SummerSlam 1989 (card) — Cagematch. https://www.cagematch.net/?id=1&nr=1761
16. "How the L.A. Coliseum persuaded WWE to bring WrestleMania to Los Angeles" — ESPN. https://www.espn.com/wwe/story/_/id/22956778/wwe-story-wwe-attempt-fill-la-coliseum-wrestlemania-vii
17. WrestleMania and SummerSlam results, attendance, gates and buyrates — Pro Wrestling History. http://www.prowrestlinghistory.com/supercards/usa/wwf/mania.html
18. WWF WrestleMania VII (card, time, Wrestling Observer rating) — Cagematch. https://www.cagematch.net/?id=1&nr=1768
19. WWF results, 1992 (WrestleMania VIII) — The History of WWE. https://thehistoryofwwe.com/wwf-results-1992/
20. "Report: 'Macho Man' Savage Dies In Car Accident" — CBS News Chicago. https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/report-macho-man-savage-dies-in-car-accident/
21. "The Ultimate Warrior: The Ransom Note That Held SummerSlam 1991 Hostage" — Wrestling News. https://wrestlingnews.co/stories/ultimate-warrior-ransom-note-held-summerslam-1991-hostage/

Further Listening

• Macho Man: The Randy Savage Story — WWE documentary (2014)
• Ultimate Warrior: The Ultimate Collection — WWE home video (2014)
• Something to Wrestle with Bruce Prichard — WrestleMania VII episode