10 Wrestlers You Didn't Know Were HUGELY Influential
4. Randy Savage
What does wrestling look like without Randy Savage?
Unrecognisable.
To borrow two music analogies, Savage was basically the Velvet Underground and the Beatles in one incredible technicolour package. He was the cool, vastly influential band who everybody ripped off, whether they even knew it or not, and the enormous mainstream household name act that could also play. Such a massive draw on top as a babyface that he did what nobody else could do until 1998 - deputise for Hulk Hogan - Savage was a bonafide top draw when, pre-rights fees, drawing fans actually drove the financial bottom line.
He was also the man whose creative spark changed everything forever. In driving Ricky Morton through a table, he invented (or popularised/perfected) the most over spot in wrestling over the next 40 years. He drove Morton through that table amid a fierce and unprecedented invasion angle, in which his outlaw territory attacked the NWA-affiliated Memphis group, thus opening the Forbidden Door. When he broke big, in the WWF, he infamously faxed the move-for-move layout of their classic WrestleMania III match to Ricky Steamboat.
Say, at AEW x NJPW Forbidden Door 2024, a wrestler smashes their opponent through a table in a match that, like every other match, is called well in advance to the last granular detail: Randy's fingerprints would be literally everywhere.