The video package for “Macho Man” Randy Savage that played the Monday after his passing is the last thing that made me weep openly. This from a man who, in 1989, participated in an angle where his opponent was rubbed down with oil in front of 15,000 men who were asked to vote, with their full-throated cheers, for the wrestler they believed to possess the better physique. I don’t mean that in the sense that I watched WWE’s hatchet-job DVD The Self-Destruction of The Ultimate Warrior and thought “Wow, this guy was an asshole.” I mean that he was a difficult artist in that he was a homophobe in an extremely public manner, taking money to give lectures about how “queering doesn’t make the world work,” and penning missives about how Heath Ledger’s child was better off without a father who’d stoop to playing a faggot cowboy in some Hollywood film with a queer liberal agenda. Warrior, the man, was a difficult artist. Difficult artists, however, I can do without. It’s difficult art that I appreciate the most. It isn’t easy, going back and watching these men work, knowing what I now know about the body, the brain, why it’s a bad idea to take a steel chair to one’s face. One of them died having murdered his family. Most of my childhood heroes are dead now. It taught me to distinguish a human being from their work, the art from its artist. Looking up to wrestlers as a kid, I think, taught me a valuable skill. I wanted that face paint-I needed that face paint-because anything else was a reminder that The Ultimate Warrior was just a man, just Warrior, and Warrior wasn’t enough. Still, I found it hard to be too bitten by this-The Ultimate Warrior was always something of an enigma unlike Hulk Hogan or Randy Savage or Bret Hart or Jake “The Snake” Roberts, he was a figure from the tapes I devoured who came and went as he pleased, too frequently for me to attach the role of childhood hero to. I don’t care about long-held grudges in wrestling and just don’t have much use for Warrior beyond nostalgia, so no number of DVD releases, tell-all interviews, or motivational speeches would have made up for his appearing at WrestleMania as Warrior, husband and father and inspiration, and not the character that allowed him to do this. But Warrior wasn’t there for nostalgia’s sake. I was disappointed that Warrior-this is the man I’m talking about, now-didn’t appear at WrestleMania XXX in The Ultimate Warrior’s face paint because I’m petty, maybe, and because I expect nostalgia acts to play their part in my satisfaction. Always his music, his sprinting, his paint, his tassels, his shaking the ropes. Warrior won the WWF Championship from Hulk Hogan that night and every weekend thereafter, until I learned that there was such a thing at new wrestling on TBS. My mom would put us in a crib with these things, me an avid Hulkamaniac and wrestling lunatic even that young, her accepting the Warrior because he had make-up on his face and tassels on his arms, and we’d put on impromptu steel cage matches.The first wrestling event I can remember seeing is WrestleMania VI, The Ultimate Challenge, on a bootleg tape at my babysitter’s house. Mine is a WWF Brawling Buddy of Hulk Hogan. There’s a picture of my sister and I from one Christmas.
The Ultimate Warrior has always been in my life, even in the spaces that are filled in largely by old photographs or memories that may have actually been dreams. He cut a promo about his legacy that, in all honesty, ranked among his absolute best even without its later context.
He put on a plastic mask that approximated his famous warpaint (but wasn’t half as satisfying). I would have to wait until I was at home on Monday, watching Raw, to see The Ultimate Warrior. His music played, and what emerged was a middle-aged man in a tuxedo.
#Ultimate warrior soundtrack full#
I was at WretleMania XXX in New Orleans, and despite everything on the card being custom-designed to appeal to my lizard brain, there was no bigger reason for my being there than the promise that The Ultimate Warrior’s music would play, he would charge down to the ring in full gimmick-face paint and airbrushed duster-and shake the ropes a bit before once again disappearing into the recesses of my memory, where he exists in an odd liminal zone I’ll eventually come around to discussing.
I’ve also been thinking a lot about the man, Warrior (or Jim Helwig, if you’re not into calling people by the names they choose to self-apply). I’ve been thinking a lot about The Ultimate Warrior lately.
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