Macho Man: The Life of Randy Savage by Jon Finkel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Ohhhh yeah! This is the biography of one of the best wrestlers of all time and that wrestler is the Macho Man Randy Savage, dig it!
I hated Randy Savage with a passion as a kid for what he did to Ricky Steamboat leading up to their showdown at Wrestlemania III. I eventually softened and enjoyed his matches, even though he seemed genuinely crazy a lot of the time. When the ARC of this became available, I jumped on it.
This was pretty bad ass, even though it failed my usual wrestling book test by taking 20% to get to the wrestling bits. With Macho Man, I had to make an exception because Macho Man's obsession with baseball and his insane dedication to be a pro adds a lot to the rest of the tale.
Finkel covers Savage's life and career from beginning to end. He goes pretty deep into the pre-WWF stuff, which is what I was most interested in. The book feels a little lopsided, though. I think I was around 60% at Wrestlemania III with 15 or so years left to cover. WCW is given a brief account and the aborted TNA run isn't even mentioned. The rest of the book is excellent, though. Very thorough. There's a lot of stuff I've never heard before, like Savage making Jake Roberts take the bite from the cobra first and a lot of the ICW and Memphis stuff was new to me.
This is an ARC so I wasn't too harsh but I noticed a couple errors. The championship Angelo Poffo beat Wilbur Snyder for was the NWA United States Championship, not the NWA Championship. Also, Tito Santana's finisher was the Flying Burrito, not the Flying Jalapeno. There was also a sentence in the Ric Flair angle that 'Ric' was used instead of 'Randy' talking about baseball.
Errors and not going into Savage's later career as much as I would like, this was a fantastic wrestling book. 4.5 out of 5 stars. So Snap into it!
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