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Post by Jindrak Mark on Dec 7, 2021 17:40:59 GMT -5
I don't see Savage taking very well to the idea of being portrayed as "the old man" who was being left in the dust by the cool young athletes. Jealousy of Bret, Diesel or Shawn? Sure. No one played a jealous lunatic better than Savage. He would have been great in any feuds with jealousy as the driving force. But making it about age tells the audience, "Hey, this guy is actually old," and Savage would have wanted no part of that. It would have stained anything he planned to do later. Yeah, he seemed to get over it in the final few years of his life (I remember him rocking the white hair in his final public appearances) but for the longest time there were stories about him being paranoid about seeming old so he'd never have agreed to a "crazy old man" gimmick at that time. When he returned in 1999 he was almost 50 years old wearing weird leather outfits and surrounding himself with young blonde valets to make him seem hip/young and during his brief TNA run he didn't even wear ring gear for his one match because he was self conscious about how he looked. He was never going to intentionally draw attention to him being old or past it for a storyline.
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Mozenrath
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Post by Mozenrath on Dec 7, 2021 17:45:45 GMT -5
Given Macho Man's final WCW run at the end, I think he'd have probably not been keen on playing an uncool old man.
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Post by Milkman Norm on Dec 7, 2021 18:59:19 GMT -5
Also agree about blurring the lines. I remember thinking that when he was in TNA in the mid-2000s. “This crazy old man thing is just a gimmick…right?” I was friends with Nikolai Volkoff for a few years before he passed. I got to meet Bob Backlund twice. I asked Nikolai a few times over the years if Bob was playing a gimmick and he told me he was but I will always truly wonder. The first time I met him he was pretty calm when the other wrestlers were around and fans, he gave me a brussel sprout. Once it was time for fan photos, he put me in the chicken wing and was totally in character. A year later it was before a convention opened to the fans and he was super quiet so I guess it is a gimmick he plays. But, again I truly wonder. From all accounts, he was one of the most straight laced guys there was. With wrestling evolving over the last 20-25 years he probably knew he wouldn't be able to sustain a long term fame if he kept to the old school gimmick. And just recently I read the 1985 Sports Illustrated with Hogan on the cover where, the article about wrestlers, mentions at the time Bob was doing work in the drywall installation business. I'm sure to his neighbors he's totally normal but he's done a really good job of blurring those kayfabe lines. If anything it was him turned up to 10,000. Here's the classic example of him loosening kayfabe on air. www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJ-2yRchbOk
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