Randy Savage's death: Sports section?

Ronald Reagan was an actor, hence entertainment section?

 

Um, Cardinals and Reds, not Indians

 

Never considered it for sports and I'm a big wrestling fan. I actually was the SE once upon a time at one of the Macho Man's minor league stops, Orangeburg, SC. While there I did a story complete with a team picture I found in our archives. Funny thing is Savage got his Macho Man nickname from his baseball days.

The Savage-Steamboat match in WM3 has to be in the top five of all time. Toward the end of his career when Savage's knees went on him his opponents had to absorb more of the force from his top rope elbow drops. Rick Steiner, Arn Anderson and referee Charles Robinson all got punctured lungs (for real, not worked) courtesy of Savage.

 

Don't think it's a sports story at all, unless your area cares about one of the minor league teams he played for and you write it as "Former (insert team here) outfielder Randy Poffo died at the age of X" and then mention his wrestling career. If you're calling him Randy Savage on first reference, it does not belong in the sports section.

 

We ran an analysis piece in our religion section about how the arrival of Randy Savage distracted God long enough to postpone the rapture.

 

http://assets.diylol.com/hfs/bab/948/6f3/resized/randy-savage-meme-generator-i-m-coming-for-you-jesus-no-rapture-on-my-watch-8d809b.jpg

 

Bill Simmons checks in, and I love the first half of this column. Seriously, this is what watching pro wresting was all about. The second half sort of lost it for me, but you can click the link and read on, but I just love these opening paragraphs.

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=simmons/110524

 

We ran it in sports, with a mug, on a slow day for us with a decent place under our scorebaord to square up some ads. I didn't see a problem with it. We didn't play it up, very small headline. We didn't argue with news about it. Agree I won't be doing it again until the likes of Hogan or Flair die though.

 

The list is even shorter if you consider the ones that never became actors. I can only think of Flair and Backlund and BB is marginal.

Cena, Rock, Hogan, Austin and a few more are all actors (or they speak in movies - tough to call it acting).

 

That's a good point about the acting thing. Except for that part in Spiderman, Savage kind of stayed off the grid. Even the Undertaker was in "Suburban Commando" (I think), as one of the henchmen for the bad guys.

 

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0688187/

Looks like he did a voice in that animated film "Bolt." Also played himself in the WCW-produced "Ready to Rumble."

 

Maybe it's simply because I'm feeling reflective this week, but the attitude that "we dare not soil the sports section" with such things seems silly to me. That's the charitable word.

At the Miami Herald when I was there, there was an agate-page home for the weekly pro wrestling results every week. They called it in, we put it in a two-inch spot on the agate page. Why? Because that's where people looked for them.

Why do you put Randy Savage in the sports section? Because A) even a lot of peripheral sports fans knew who he was and B) that's the first place most wrestling fans would look for it, even if they know the sport was fake.

Cost to the sports section? 10 or 12 inches of space, max -- hey, might have been a brief, or a few sentences in a briefs collection -- on a weekday.

It strikes me that there's as much snobbery in sports journalism as in arts journalism or anything else.

People who are pro wrestling fans are much more likely to be sports fans who might only read one part of the paper, the sports section. Put it where they'll find it.