Minor Savage

I loved wrestling growing up and, as I said in this post, The Macho Man Randy Savage was my favorite wrestler.  He really was a larger-than-life character.  In that same post I mentioned that I would have liked to do a minor league baseball card of Randy but someone already created a card in the 1974 Topps baseball style of the Macho Man when he was a part of Cincinnati Reds’ farm system.  Whomever made the card did a great job.  No word if there was physical copies produced or if it’s just a digital card, either way it’s pretty omnipresent if you’re researching Randy’s minor league career online. 

1971 Topps baseball

When I was myself reading up on Randy’s baseball career I discovered he played professional baseball for four years starting at age 18 in 1971 through 1974.  Savage (actual last name, Poffo) played Class A ball in the Florida State League, the first three years for the Cardinals and the last with the Reds.  Well, there it is, right there!  There’s room for another custom card without having to simply recreate the one that was done in the ‘74 design.

First I had to find a photo, which I did.  Only problem was that it’s in black-and-white.  Problem easily solved.  I just linked up with the talented Kristian from KCS Designz and he handled the colorization.  This is the 3rd card Kristian has helped out with, the other two can be seen here and here.

A few fun facts about the Macho Man’s baseball career:

Randy was signed by the Cardinals in 1971 being the only player out of 300 in an open tryout in St. Louis... Randy hit .254 in his minor league career with 16 triples and 16 home-runs, and he stole 21 bases and drove in 130 runs in 869 at-bats... Randy played catcher, first base, and outfield... After a shoulder injury to his throwing arm Savage taught himself to throw lefty

Mega Powers

In the flesh, baby!

I love the Rocky movies.  What guy doesn't?  Hell, I don't even hate Rocky V all that much.  If I was forced to pick a favorite in the franchise it would be Rocky III.  Mr. T was great as Clubber Lang and who could forget the The Ultimate Male, Thunderlips!?

I really like how the Randy "The Ram" Robinson card came out in the 1985 WWF inspired design so I was itching to give that template another try. Who better to do that with than The Ultimate Object of Desire?

I thought this went so well I decided to make a card for the other half of The Mega Powers.

Bone Saw McGraw

I've been wanting to do a Randy Savage card of some sort for awhile now but just couldn't figure out what type of card. Someone out in cyberspace already beat me to a Randy Poffo minor league baseball card so that was not an option.

The Macho Man was my favorite wrestler growing up. I don't watch wrestling anymore because for me it's just not the same. You no longer have gimmicks, just a bunch of scripted guys going out there using their first and last names. If it's not a real fight it should have more fantasy involved. It's showbiz, it should be fantastical. The character gimmick, in my opinion, were great, and the best ones were the ones that made you believe that that's who that guy really was. Come to find out that the Macho Man character was only a slightly magnified version of who Randy Savage was in real life. The guy was intense and he lived his gimmick as he treated it like an art form. It was tough losing a larger-than-life personality like that; can't believe it's been seven years already.

In 1990 I missed series one of Impel's Marvel Universe cards, but I more than made up for that in with the second and third series the next two years. I loved those cards! Even though I wasn't much of a comic book collector (none of the store's around me really had them) I collected the crap out of these cards. What kid doesn't love super heroes? Despite not having the books I knew a lot about different characters stories and origins thanks to these cards. But, for me it wasn't about the backstories it was about the artwork. As a kid my best skill was my drawing ability and there wasn't anything cooler to me than drawing comic book characters. Later, when I was able to find comic books, that fire was stoked even more by the brilliant work Image comics was doing at the time.

The 1991 Marvel cards had a subset called Arch-Enemies which filled you in on the super heroes biggest nemesis' were. I got the idea to do one one these cards for the epic battle between Spider-Man and Bone Saw McGraw in 2002's Spider-Man.