[1991-12-03-WWF-This Tuesday In Texas] Randy Savage vs Jake Roberts / Interview: Jake Roberts

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Loss]

Jake's interview before this match is unbelievable. This was a really fun short match. I love Savage going for the ring bell after the match, as that's something that has worked for him in the past. But Jake ends up DDTing Savage twice. And he has hidden another snake at ringside and is about to repeat history when Elizabeth runs down and begs him to stop. Instead, Jake gives Savage a third DDT and taunts Liz. He ends up grabbing Liz and slapping her and I'm shocked that this didn't result in a riot. This would get a territory kicked off TV. Jack Tunney is finally out to stop all of this. Just wow. It still has the same impact now that it had 22 years ago.

 

Jake's post-match promo takes this to yet another level, saying it felt so good to slap Liz that he should have to pay for it. He begs Savage to let him touch her again, and says he could cultivate her into something even he could want.

 

We cut to Savage doing yet another amazing interview blaming himself.

[Kevin Ridge]

Real creepy Jake promo who was very excited seeing how much terror Miss Elizabeth was in during snake attack. Roberts is not at fault for any of his actions. If I remember correctly he used that stance during his feud with DWB in 94. Jake is great.

 

Savage wastes no time and jumps his entrance to attack Roberts. Hebner avoided a typical referee bump spot! Finish came out of nowhere. I just don’t see what make Roberts so weakened at end to being lying there to take big elbow. Jake gets his heat back big time after by hitting DDTs on Savage. Another one right in front of Elizabeth. Where are the WWF officials? Roberts smacks Elizabeth in the face. This draws out Tunney who gets Roberts to finally leave. Savage is just as crazy afterword. There will be no stoping him.

[PeteF3]

"Please, I refuse to--Gorilla Monsoon let's get back to--GET OUT OF HERE! Get the hell out of here! I DON'T WANT TO TALK TO YOU." Gene at his best.

 

I could write about this whole setup for awhile, but it's early and I don't think I can do it real justice at this time. This, folks, is as dark and terrifying as professional wrestling gets. That it came during what was still the so-called "family entertainment" era of the WWF makes it even more mind-blowing. Jake is less of a wrestler and more of a horror movie mastermind, and not a Leatherface/Jason the Terrible-type either. He terrorizes Elizabeth and Savage with a bag that wasn't in the corner and didn't actually contain a snake, which gets his point across without violating Tunney's sanctions. He cuts two killer promos only to be topped by Savage who's in one of the most psychotic rages you'll ever see. I don't think any WWF babyface had ever gone through as much hell as Savage has the past few months.

[Zenjo]

Jake is an amazing promo, what a sick fucker he is. Like Pete I was thinking what a great Hollywood bad guy he could have been. The furious Savage gets a temporary measure of revenge for the snake bite. A short match that was good while it lasted but the main fun was afterwards. Macho Man tries to do more damage but things go downhill in a big way. Liz comes in to protect her man. The evil Snake taunts and tortures poor Liz and then slaps her in the chops! Seriously, this was for kids? Fantastic feud.

[soup23]

Jake was on another level on this show. My wife sometimes will be in the same vicinity as I am watching and never pays much attention but she was entranced by Jake's performance here and thought he was the creepiness man alive. Savage was super as a babyface performer and overall this is one of the best things WWF has ever produced. Brilliant all around.

[DR Ackermann]

The post match promo with Jake is probably my favorite interview ever. So sick and twisted. Savage's was really good too in a different way and I love how this feud is warping his mind.

[DR Ackermann]

Those signs that said 'the madness us back' had no idea.

[garretta]

The postmatch was so powerful that it made the match itself completely irrelevant, so it's hard to remember that Randy actually beat Jake clean here. I don't know if there could have been any other ending possible under the circumstances, especially with what was to come.

 

Jake did work on the bitten arm and did so quite impressively, and Savage sold it just as impressively. I was afraid that they would both forget about it as far as working the match went.

 

Did Jake legit crack a rib when Randy blocked the DDT the first time, or was he just playing possum? If he was selling it was a great job, because he did it right up until Liz hit the ring.

 

I love how Randy's determination to kill Jake led to the whole postmatch mess. He was right to blame himself; if he'd just taken the three-count and run, none of what happened afterward would have happened.

 

With all of the DDTs Jake was giving to Randy, surely he had a spare in his back pocket for Earl Hebner. I didn't need to hear Earl's constant yelling and screaming; it did nothing to advance the angle and was a pain in the ass to boot.

 

Getting back to the match for just a second, this is one of the few times that Heenan simply wasn't funny. The jokes were his standard stuff, but they just didn't belong in a match like this with all of its overtones. He was a lot better once he started selling fear of the (nonexistent) cobra in the bag.

 

Gino was passable, but if almost killing Randy with the cobra didn't get Jake suspended for life, why should he be suspended for striking Liz? Shouldn't Tunney then go back and suspend every wrestler who's slapped Sherri around? Calling it despicable and saying that Randy would be out to end Jake's career the next time they met would have more than sufficed. I could have done without him trying to browbeat Bobby into agreeing with him, foo.

 

The fantasy booker in me is still trying to figure out how to improve on Liz's part of the postmatch, but there's not much else they could have done. If Jake was supposed to have a cobra in the bag, she couldn't very well have slapped him, because if he'd dropped the bag both she and Randy would have had it. She was in good shape by all reports, but unless Jake worked with her for weeks beforehand she couldn't have taken the DDT or the short clothesline, even if Randy had agreed to let her (which he almost certainly wouldn't have, and who could have blamed him?). Maybe she could have come in swinging a chair, but she'd never done it before, and a mistake would have made her look foolish.

 

By the way, you can clearly see that Liz still didn't have a mark on her after Jake "slapped" her, no matter what Gino said. Also, I would have thought Liz would have sold it a little by shaking her head or acting dazed, but she didn't. Maybe she forgot to in all the excitement.

 

Nice save by Jack Tunney, perhaps the first of his presidential career. But Jake upstages him by shouting to the camera the punchline to this whole mess: there was never a cobra in the bag. Unfortunately, no one bothered to register this: not Tunney, not Gino, and not Heenan. To paraphrase a timeless philosophical question: if an angle happens in wrestling and everyone ignores the payoff, does it still make money?

 

Jake laps Randy on the mic so badly here it's criminal. Randy's back in full Macho Madness mode for his prematch promo, and (impossible as it may be to believe) oversells his anger afterward. Laying down on the floor and damn near getting into the fetal position? Come on, Mach. Even for what Jake did, that's going too far. Actually, they shouldn't have even had a postmatch interview with Randy; he should have been incommunicado in the back making sure that Liz was all right and selling his own neck and arm injuries.

 

As I said, Jake was better than ever on the mic, but between the slap and his postmatch interview where he begged Randy to bring Liz back so he could hit her again, and maybe even somehow turn her into something he may want, I can see why Liz's family demanded that Randy end the angle. I know that wrestling's a work, but if I had a sister like Liz I wouldn't want someone as crazy as Jake's supposed to be telling the world that he's going to try to make my sister as evil and sick as he is. My favorite part, though, was when he hugged Mean Gene gleefully and told Gene to congratulate him. More than anything else, that gesture reaffirmed that in his own mind, Jake hadn't done a blessed thing wrong since SummerSlam. Unbelievable stuff.

 

Pete brought this up in the Hogan/Taker match thread, but I think the reason we didn't hear from Hogan about what happened was that his interview was taped before the card, and he wasn't supposed to "know" about it yet. Then again, with Taker turning face soon and Hogan wanting a win to go out on, what would have been the point of interjecting him into this feud on top of the ones he already had? Taker and Jake were fighting each other at Mania, so who was left for Hogan to get vengeance on for Savage, even if he'd wanted to?

 

I haven't seen Kevin Sullivan's legendary Satanic run in Florida, but there's no way in hell (no pun intended) that it's any creepier than what Jake's doing now, It's just plain impossible.

 

And on that note, so ends the 1991 Yearbook for me. See you in '92, everyone!

[JKWebb]

This match and the post-match interviews are probably the highlight of 1991, and I'm with Soup... one of the best things they've (WWF) ever produced. I can't get over how awesome Savage and Jake were here. From the match to the insanely on another level promos at the end... this is as good as it gets.

[dawho5]

The match itself was absolutely great. Everything was fought for and had meaning. Jake's promos topped it and I'm not sure there are 5 better heel promos out there than the post-match. The post-match also topped the match with the notable exception of bulllshit official interference causing Savage to take the DDT but doing nothing about the aftermath. I hate that so much, but it doesn't ruin easily one of the top 10 WWF/E angles ever.

 

Edit: Sean Mooney telling Macho he was "just as angry as you are" should have earned him a KO.