Looking for a hero? Oh Yeahhhh!

It was about an hour and half drive to my brother’s house. He had recently relocated to Memphis after accepting a promotion from his workplace. I enjoyed the trips to my brother’s house, of course, but the poor timing that my parents chose to travel had me frustrated. Since this was the first time their eldest son had been away from home, this had become a weekly Saturday trip. For 2 weeks in a row, I had missed wrestling on WMC-TV5.

I had become a wrestling fan around 1978 when flipping through the channels, I stopped to listen to Handsome Jimmy Valiant boast about what he was going to do to Jerry Lawler the following Monday night. From there, I was hooked. I tuned in every week to see Lawler battle Valiant, Bill Dundee, and Austin Idol. The storylines were suspenseful. It was all me and my friends talked about. We could hardly wait until the next Saturday to see what our heroes would do next to gain revenge on each other. If we missed a week of action, we had to imagine it as our friends excitedly explained what had happened. It always seemed like there was a major turn of events on those rare occasions that I missed it. I had missed it 2 weeks in a row. That was like watching the whole season of Dallas, but never finding out who shot J.R.

After hearing me express my frustrations, my step-father came up with a solution. He allowed me to take his TV that he kept in his camper with us on our road trip. The TV also doubled as an AM/FM radio and was powered by 4 D batteries. Although the screen was only about 4 inches and in black&white, I didn’t care. I wouldn’t miss any of the action.

It was shortly after 10:00 and wrestling didn’t come on until 11:00 on channel 5, so I decided to see what I could pick up as we traveled down I-40. Adjusting the rabbit ear antennas, I scrolled the knob until I could get some kind of picture to appear. We couldn’t pick up any of the Memphis channels without cable in Milan where we lived, but I figured I could probably start getting some of the Memphis channels as we traveled closer to the city.

I had seen in the TV Guide that wrestling came on WPTY channel 24 of Memphis at 10:00, but our cable company didn’t offer channel 24. I had always wondered what kind of wrestling was on the channel, but figured that it was just an abbreviated version of the previous week’s Memphis wrestling. An abbreviated version of past shows was shown on some of the other local channels, but I rarely watched them. The TV 5 version was live! I was hoping I could pick up channel 24 on the portable TV to see what was going on. The channel came in a little snowy at first, but cleared up as we traveled down the highway. I had found the wrestling program. However, this wasn’t any version of Memphis wrestling that I had ever seen.

I considered myself a wrestling expert at the age of 12 as I bought all of the Pro Wrestling Illustrated publications and knew wrestlers by name even though I had never seen them. I got excited once when a Goody’s headache commercial aired that starred Dusty Rhodes as he was always on the covers, but I had never actually seen him on a wrestling program. That changed when our cable company added WTBS to our lineup. With TBS, I could now see Tommy Rich, Ole Anderson, Mr. Wrestling II, and an occasional Memphis wrestling favorite who would suddenly turn bad on TBS for some reason. I remember waiting until the next Saturday morning for Memphis wrestling to hear an explanation as to why the favorite turned bad, but it would never happen. The wrestler would be back on Memphis wrestling a favorite again and never mention anything about it. Bewildered, I would tune into WTBS, which came on much later in the afternoon, to see him bad again. I quit trying to figure it out. This had become more common anyway as I read in the magazines of some of my favorite wrestler’s exploits into different states and wrestling territories. As much as I had read and learned about other wrestlers outside of Memphis and what I had seen on TBS, I didn’t recognize any of the wrestlers on the show.

The commentating and action was unlike anything I had ever seen. What really captivated me, though, was the main bad guy that the show seemed to center around. Muscular and tan, yet wild-eyed and bearded with stringy, brown hair. The guy’s voice was like nothing I had ever heard as he made threats to Ronnie Garvin, the only guy that I had heard of as I had read about him in quite a few magazines. This guy was going 90 miles an hour. All of a sudden, this guy grabbed a framed plaque from the announcer’s desk, and breaks it across his forehead. Who was this guy? I wondered as I watched captivated. “I’m the Macho Man, Dig it!” the mad man screamed. The mad man was Randy “Macho Man” Savage.

The next week at school, I tried explaining to my buddies about this new wrestler I had discovered. Unfortunately, one cannot accurately describe someone like Randy Savage to the unknown and do him justice. See is believing. My friends would have to see this guy to appreciate him.

The opportunity for my friends to see the Macho Man would come when WPTY was added to our cable line up. Unfortunately, the talent pool for ICW, the promotion for which Savage wrestled and promoted, had been drastically drained by the time the show was made available to us. The show was terrible to stay the least. It was hard to stay tuned long enough to wait for the Macho Man. Even if you did get to see him, there wasn’t enough competition for him to showcase his talents. There were only a few of us diehards that watched ICW long enough to see it rejuvenated somewhat when savage feuded with the evil Ratamyus. Savage was awesome. He deserved better than this to me.

Eventually, Savage turned up in Memphis wrestling. Most of my friends had no idea who this guy was. As for myself, I was ecstatic. Now all of my friends would get a chance to see him. I was glued to my TV as he battled Jerry Lawler, Austin Idol, Rick Rude, and the Rock & Roll Express. I was disappointed when Jerry Lawler defeated him almost as soon as he entered the territory. I was afraid that the Memphis fans wouldn’t see the same thing that I saw in him when he smashed the plaque across his forehead on channel 24. Ironically, Savage smashed a framed photo of Jerry Lawler during his first appearance on Memphis wrestling. This wasn’t the first time I had a strange sense of Deja vu from the different wrestling programs.

My worries about Savage succeeding were unnecessary. Savage was destined to succeed. He was soon teaming with Lawler, Idol, and Valiant. Eventually, he turned on Lawler. This time around, however, things were different. Savage was more popular than ever. Lawler couldn’t dispose of him that easily. Savage brutalized Lawler in their matches. He showed him who the Macho man was! In the end, Lawler survived and forced Savage to leave town. I knew that there was no way Jerry Lawler was going to lose a loser-leave-town match in Memphis, but I had hopes as I didn’t want to see Savage leave.

Soon the Macho man arrived in the WWF and was a household name. When I heard that he won the tournament to crown a new WWF champion, I asked all my friends if they had heard the news. They didn’t seem as excited as I was. We were approaching our twenties now, and their importance shifted to Super Bowls and NBA playoffs. My passion was still wrestling. Forget about Joe Montana or Michael Jordan, my guy, Randy Savage, had won the big one.