ESPN’s Bill Simmons has a column up looking at the career of “Macho Man” Randy Savage.
“Nobody — repeat, nobody — was more fun to imitate. Savage said everything in quick bursts, with his voice dropping low, then turning loud, then low, then loud, and any time he couldn’t figure out how to end a point, he just screamed, “Ooooohhhhhhhhh yeah!” He used “ooooohhhh yeah!” as a noun, verb and adjective. It never stopped being funny. I could never decide whether the Macho Man was in on the joke. I’m also not sure it mattered.
By the time Savage won the WWF title, I was heading to college and starting to grow out of the wrestling thing. It happens. As luck would have it, I landed in a room right next to another freshman wrestling fan. We called him the Birdman, and within three weeks, I was knocking on Bird’s door, waiting for him to open it, then whipping baby powder in his face like Mr. Fuji’s salt and “attacking” him. There was no wrestling joke we couldn’t beat into the ground. The Birdman also did a dead-on Savage impersonation, even better than mine, so we wasted countless hours talking like Savage, doing fake Savage interviews and greeting each other with exaggerated Savage-like handshakes. We made multiple field trips to a local mall that had the WWF’s then-superb arcade game, usually arguing over who got to be Savage. Did either of us have a girlfriend? What do you think?”
Full column:
At its apex, Macho Man was wrestling