I thought I'd seen every Savage v Santana match from this feud years ago. Thought I'd gone through all of it for a greatest WWF matches ever poll back in the faraway time of 2009. I guess I was wrong because I didn't remember this one at all, and I'm sure you're shocked to hear that it was awesome and I loved it. What an amazing feud.
Randy Savage was very good at the pro wrestling. I don't even know if I'd put this up there as one of his very best performances, which says a whole lot about his consistency, but it was still a performance that struck me as world class. There are a few words I'd use to describe him here - desperate, opportunistic, cowardly, reactionary, fevered. They all applied at various points, sometimes for different reasons, sometimes for the same reasons. The match started with him throwing Liz in the line of fire, then jumping Tito when he stopped to check on her. It was a pretty cowardly way to approach a fight. There were also times where he outright tried to scramble away from Tito only to be dragged back by the tights, although I guess some would call that smart rather than cowardly. His desperation jumped off the page on everything he did; every run of the ropes, every pin attempt, every punch, every axe handle off the top, every bump, every twitch, every movement. Sometimes he never created openings of his own as opposed to using Tito's momentum and fire against him. Tito was going hell for leather to win that belt back so he could push the envelope a bit without worrying about getting himself disqualified, but a few times he pushed it too far, let his heart and fists drive him rather than his head and Savage used it to his advantage. I've also said this a bunch of times about Savage over the years, but for someone who was notorious for planning everything in a match to the tiniest detail beforehand, there's almost never an occasion where I watch him and get the sense he knows what's about to happen next. Nothing comes off as rehearsed or pre-planned. He's almost the definition of reactionary, in response to not just his opponent but the environment, the world around him. There was a fan about five rows in with a sign that read "I WANT TO SLAM ELIZABETH" and I swear to god I expected Savage to drag the match those five rows deep just to take a swing at the guy. There's a level of immersion I get with Savage that I get with only a handful of other wrestlers in history. I don't want to turn this into a tirade against modern wrestling, but there are so many instances today of wrestlers trying to communicate desperation and urgency, despair, frustration, whatever, and just about all of it comes off as bad method acting. The shocked, bug-eyed staring when the opponent won't stay down, it's some of the worst stuff going and it seems to happen in every WWE match nowadays (and probably most AEW ones). No matter what Savage did in this match it never felt like he was performing or actively trying to communicate something. His urgency and desperation were a state of his being and not once did I see the gears turning, the strings moving, the acting out of whatever ropey screenplay had been written before they walked through the curtain.
Savage's desperation is never more obvious than late in the match, bloodied up after being ran into the post, when he turns around and cracks the referee. I've seen him do that in a few of his matches with Santana and Steamboat, but I wasn't expecting it here and it was an amazing "to hell with this" moment. It was as pure an example as any of what a madman will do when his back's against the wall and his title's in jeopardy and Savage was as mad as they came. He couldn't escape by taking the disqualification here but it did save him from being counted out after the flying elbow, which as an aside looked fucking spectacular. The finish is the same as some of the other no DQ matches they'd ran around the horn, with the ref' coming to again just as Savage reverses a roll-up by grabbing the tights. Naturally everyone involved would've walked through that finish before the match, rehearsed the steps and the timing and everything else to get it just right. Yet every time I see it I fully believe it's what Randy Savage would've done in that moment. An incredible pro wrestler.
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