R.I.P. Macho Man Randy Savage

[u2roolz]

 

Savage suffered a heart attack around 10AM today on a highway in Tampa, Florida before losing control of the vehicle and crashing. It was later confirmed by Savage's brother, Lanny Poffo (also known as The Genius). According to the Florida Highway Patrol, Savage was driving a 2009 Jeep Wrangler when he "veered across a concrete median ... through oncoming traffic ... and "collided head-on with a tree." His wife Lynn was a passenger but survived with "minor injuries".

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53hiHAkK6KA

 

"Snap into a Slim Jim!!"

[jff]

One of the all-time greats. Wrestling used to fun, funny and campy.

 

That youtube clip was very Tom Waits-ian.

[Winston Legthigh]

I know they split, but The Lovely Elizabeth has been waiting for him...

[The High Heat]

You put me against the wall, man!

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfosfT8Ojbg

[marino13]

As a kid I used to do elbow drops off the top of my dresser onto my bed imitating the Macho Man. Will never forget the Wrestlemania match against Ricky "The Dragon" Steamboat.

[ih8music]

It's odd how sad the news of his death is making me. So many childhood memories are flashing back... God forbid the Hulkster passes any time soon!

[The High Heat]

Macho Man's first career was as Randy Poffo, minor league ball player.

 

Stats

 

 

(high school)

[Sweet Papa Crimbo]

Must be a generational thing. Not that it is a competition by any stretch of the imagination, but it's a little surprising to me that this thread has more responses than the Harmon Killebrew thread. I guess our respective childhoods had different arcs.

 

I didn't watcht the WWF very much, but I do remember some of the schtick.

[u2roolz]

^ Yeah, I'd agree with your theory. I know of Harmon and my dad either has or had his autographed baseball. He collected all of the 500 Club. I never saw him play being only 32, so I feel a bit fake to put something in that thread. I still obviously feel bad that he died the way that he did, but there's no real connection there for me. I probably felt a smidgen of a bit more for someone like Liz Taylor who I feel that I know through films.

[uncool2pillow]

Harmon led a life away from the spotlight for the past 35+ years. He's beloved in Minnesota, but not nationwide. "Macho Man" did all he could to maximize his national exposure beyond his prime. Killebrew was 74, Savage still in his 50s. I am much sadder about Killebrew's death because I've been a Twins fan since childhood (around the time he retired), but I understand why most people are more shocked and/or saddened by Savage's death.

[Sweet Papa Crimbo]

Harmon led a life away from the spotlight for the past 35+ years. He's beloved in Minnesota, but not nationwide. "Macho Man" did all he could to maximize his national exposure beyond his prime. Killebrew was 74, Savage still in his 50s. I am much sadder about Killebrew's death because I've been a Twins fan since childhood (around the time he retired), but I understand why most people are more shocked and/or saddened by Savage's death.

 

Yeah...I'm neither from nor have even been to Minnesota. But Harmon Killebrew was on my radar. Oh well.

[Chinese Apple]

As a rookie reporter starting out, I was given an "exclusive interview" with MM Randy Savage when he toured Asia the mid 1990s.

 

Randy wanted to talk about his failed career as a baseball player in the minor leagues. He told me major league ball was his big dream growing up, and that he worked his ass off trying to get there, but wasn't going anywhere. When the wrestling opportunity came up, he found a success he hadn't planned on. He said he saw himself as a role model and wanted kids to know that you might fail at what you set out to do, but you can still succeed at plan B.

 

Even though he was dressed in a neon green and electric pink cowboy outfit, I thought his message was poignant and wrote it up as earnestly as only a rookie reporter could. When it came out in print the next morning, the editors (one of whom is now AP bureau chief in Bejing) thought I was being ironic, and slapped me on the back for my wry sense of humor. :-( They said the piece was terrific, so I laughed along. I was subsequently promoted to weekend editor. I still think about that interview as somehow a pivotal moment.

 

Sniff. Very sad that he is gone. A lovely lovely man.

[jff]

Harmon Killebrew

 

I've never heard of him. Rest in Peace, Harmon.

[Sweet Papa Crimbo]

I've never heard of him. Rest in Peace, Harmon.

 

Grace and humility defined the great slugger Harmon Killebrew

Nobody had more wrong names than Harmon Killebrew, whose nickname --Killer -- always seemed ironic, in the way huge bikers are called Tiny, or sweet puppies are called Mad Dog. When Killebrew retired from baseball in 1975, having circled more bases with his head down than any player in baseball history, he became the first Killer on record to sell insurance in Boise, Idaho.

 

Harmon's first name was no better, as it always got shortened to Harm, an ill-fitting verb for a guy who -- 30 years after teammate Danny Thompson died of leukemia -- kept alive a golf tournament in memory of the Twins shortstop. Killebrew died of cancer Tuesday in Scottsdale, Ariz., at age 74.

 

Worse still was that surname, Kill-a-Brew, which inspired a college drinking game called Harmon Killebrew. Never mind that the Killer's beer of choice was the one he marketed: Killebrew Root Beer, a phrase underscored on bottles by the words "Old-Fashioned," which would complete the public perception of Killebrew -- Loyal Friend, Insurance Salesman, Root Beer Aficionado -- if he weren't also a Hall of Fame Slugger.

 

There was something Old-Fashioned about the 573 home runs he hit, the second most of any righthander in American League history, behind the decidedly New-Fashioned Alex Rodriguez, who admitted to using performance-enhancing drugs. Killebrew was Pez, not PEDs, square in body -- 5-foot-10, 213 pounds -- and square in spirit. Asked in a 1963 Sports Illustrated profile if he had any unusual hobbies, Killer replied: "Just washing the dishes, I guess."

 

"Killebrew is so quiet that sportswriters have given up trying to jazz up his image," Time magazine lamented the following season, in a brief, rare, never-to-be-repeated profile.

 

"There is nothing especially exciting or colorful about Harmon Clayton Killebrew," Baseball Digest concurred, the same summer, "except that he hits home runs farther and more frequently than any one else on the current scene." By then, Killebrew was averaging a homer every 12 at-bats, the best rate since Babe Ruth, and the nation's scribes could scarcely ignore him.

 

Though they both wore number 3, Killebrew was never going to be Ruth. He didn't go out, he didn't go ballistic, he didn't go anything but bald. And yard, of course. Killebrew went yard in ways that few hitters ever have. He was the first man to hit a ball over the leftfield roof at Tiger Stadium, three decks and 94 feet off the ground. He hit the longest home run in the history of Metropolitan Stadium, home of the Twins. When it finally landed in the bleachers, 520 feet from home plate, the Twins painted that seat red, which had the same effect on Killebrew's face.

 

POSNANSKI: Sudden rise of a Heartland hero

 

In 1969, when he hit 49 home runs and drove in 140, Killebrew was at once the league's Most Valuable and Least Voluble player. He even led by silence. A simple glare from Killebrew conveyed to Twins teammates that they shouldn't throw their bats, or helmets, or comport themselves in any way that was -- the worst possible word -- unprofessional.

 

The ridiculously long home run, then, was his sole expression of immodesty. His very first homer, as an 18-year-old rookie with the Washington Senators in 1954, was literally a tape measure shot: The team's p.r. director measured it out the next day. The Senators were getting killed by the Tigers -- Washington would lose 18-7 -- and Detroit catcher Frank House told Killebrew, in what was likely an effort at reverse psychology: "We're going to throw you a fastball." It says much about the square-dealing young Harmon that he took the catcher at his word, and sat on Billy Hoeft's fastball, which he promptly hit 476 feet.

 

CORCORAN: As a slugger, Killebrew ahead of his time

 

There would follow, over the next 22 seasons, 572 more home runs, 11th most in history. It's a happy coincidence that Killebrew grew up in Idaho to become synonymous with taters. He was born in Payette, the fourth child of Harmon, a housepainter, and his wife, Katherine, whose three boys often played baseball in the yard. When Katherine complained that they were tearing up the lawn, Killebrew's father told her: "We're raising boys not grass."

 

Killebrew was still a boy, just 17, when he signed with the Senators as a $30,000 bonus baby. In 1961, he moved with the team to Minnesota, to Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington, where I grew up. By the time I was attending games at Met Stadium, Killebrew had retired, and so I remember him as an occasional Twins broadcaster, face framed by a fringe of white. I remember his soft voice, pronouncing the surname of Twins infielder Ron Washington as "Warshington."

 

Mostly I remember that the street leading to the stadium was renamed in his honor, so that I -- and a lot of other Minnesotans -- associate some of life's happiest memories with Killebrew Drive.

 

It is one of a handful of monuments in Minnesota to a man who -- without a bat in his hands -- never called attention to himself. There's a bronze statue of Killebrew outside the Twins' new home, Target Field, that is exactly what the 11-time All-Star never claimed to be: Larger-than-life. Killebrew knew, as he endured esophageal cancer, that life was larger than he, and released a statement on May 13 expressing his "profound sadness" that this "awful disease" had "progressed beyond my doctor's expectation of a cure."

 

In the end, that dignity and humility were what endeared Killebrew to Minnesotans. They will serve as his signature -- along with his actual signature, which was the cleanest in baseball. When he went into hospice care, several Twins and ex-Twins said Killebrew admonished them as young players for the sloppiness of their signatures. The fan that waits for a player's autograph, Killebrew believed, should be able to read it. And so the man with the imperfect name signed that name perfectly. Thanks to him, so do Joe Mauer and Torii Hunter and Justin Morneau. That legacy of class and quiet decency is the true measure of Killebrew's tape-measured life.

 

Which isn't to say that Minnesotans don't love the long ball. Of course we do. When the Met was razed, and replaced by the Mall of America, Killebrew's red bleacher seat was bolted high above the mall's central atrium, in roughly the same space it occupied at the ballpark. It is there to this day, a permanent testament to one man's baseball-crushing powers, on a street still called Killebrew Drive, now and forever a Boulevard of Broken Seams

 

 

 

Read more: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2011/writers/steve_rushin/05/16/harmon.killebrew/index.html#ixzz1NC4Okcjg

[choo-choo-charlie]

 

Why the rapture didn't happen.

[u2roolz]

Why the rapture didn't happen.

 

I posted this pic in the other specific thread.

Thanks though this is much bigger.

[The High Heat]

Savage died the same day Slim Jim closed one of its plants in Garner, NC, putting 200 people out of work. Bad karma, man.