Everything peaked with his Steamboat feud, which started when Savage "crushed" Steamboat's larynx with the timekeeper's bell. (Steamboat "lost" the ability to speak, which led to some of the unintentionally funniest interviews ever done. In general, Ricky Steamboat made Vin Diesel look like Daniel Day-Lewis.) They settled their score in Detroit in front of something like 90,000 people, with their Wrestlemania III battle becoming the first great modern match, the Hagler-Hearns of wrestling moments. In a memorable sports year that included Leonard upsetting Hagler, the Lakers outlasting the Celtics, Indiana shocking Syracuse, Elway unleashing The Drive and Calgary toppling Edmonton, I'd put Steamboat-Savage against any of them. It was that good. The full potential of professional wrestling, realized.

For those first few WWF years, Savage simply couldn't miss. He picked the best possible manager and feuded with the best possible people. His nickname doubled as the single best wrestling nickname of that decade unless you want to argue for "The Million Dollar Man." His entrance music ("Pomp and Circumstance") was obviously a better choice than the Village People's "Macho Man," but kudos to him for making the right call. He wasn't opposed to wrestling with his sunglasses on (a lost art, really), and his crazy beard/thinning hair/bandanna/sunglasses look shouldn't have worked but always did. His interviews were phenomenally bizarre and undeniably entertaining, and, by the way, he might have been the first wrestler to refer to himself almost entirely in the third person. The Macho Man was like the Rickey Henderson of wrestling, right down to the fact that you never knew what the hell he was talking about.