💪Books & Biceps 346

Oooohhhhh yeahhhh!!!

Welcome to a SPECIAL MACHO MANIVERSARY ISSUE of Books & Biceps

What’s a Macho Maniversary?

Simple: This week is the one-year anniversary of the release of my definitive, bucket list biography of the Macho Man Randy Savage.

It’s the anniversary of bringing Macho Man back to WrestleMania XL in Philly last year, promoting the book right on the floor next to the ring:

It’s the anniversary of John Cena himself endorsing the book:

And it’s the anniversary of doing book signings with dudes like Jake “The Snake” Roberts and “Hacksaw” Jim Duggan. Look at this crew of heavy hitters:

I loved every single thing about promoting Macho Man. It was a legitimate lifetime experience that I will never, ever forget. Even got a photo of me and the book and my son and the Mouth of the South, Jimmy Hart!

And I owe so much of this experience to you all, because your support for the book was tremendous. We spent nearly four months in the top 10 of wrestling books and we’ve never been below 50. The book trailer alone has nearly 500k views across all platforms. If you missed it, or want to rewatch it (of course you do), here you go.

Man, I love this trailer:

The crazy thing is that since the book came out, we’ve more than DOUBLED our crew of Sophisticated Meatheads here at Books & Biceps. Yeah. We had just over 10k last April and we’re over 23K now. That’s WILD.

To show my appreciation, I wanted to give every reader a little Macho Maniversary gift today - a free sample chapter. Whether you’re a wrestling fan or not, you’ll love this section of the book.

Because my Macho Man biography isn’t just a wrestling biography or a sports biography… It’s the biography of a unique, driven icon who started his career in a completely different field: baseball. Ready? Oooohhhhhh yeahhhhh. you are!

No downloads. No clicks. Just pasting the excerpt below:

Please enjoy your Books & Biceps EXCLUSIVE Macho Man book excerpt about one of the most impressive, fascinating athletic accomplishments of Randy’s life, which took place during his minor league baseball career:

…In one of the last games of the year, still fighting for a roster spot, still fighting for his baseball life, Randy rounded third for what he knew was going to be a close play at home. As the ball sped through the air to the catcher, Randy thundered down the line, lowering his right shoulder like a battering ram, preparing for impact.

“If there was a play at the plate, he wasn’t going to slide around,” teammate Jim Lett said. “There was going to be a collision.”

Oh, there was a collision.

Boom!

Randy slammed into the catcher with everything he had, trying to jar the ball loose through brute force. The catcher, protected by his padding and facemask, got up weary but unharmed. Randy separated his right shoulder and tore several muscles on his right side. His season ended on the spot. His baseball future was instantly in doubt.

Then the Cardinals cut him a few months later. Rock bottom.

“Another hard day,” Lanny says. “He believed that perhaps he had come to the end of his career.”

Perhaps.

Or perhaps not.

In fact, if you knew Randy back then, you’d know there was no way in hell he was going to let his dream die on a smashup at home plate. No chance.

But what he did next was unheard of:

Bang!

A baseball slaps against the weathered cement on the backside of a Publix grocery store. It skips off the oil-stained gravel and hops into Randy Poffo’s outstretched right-handed glove. He quickly palms the ball with his left hand, sets his feet and launches it back against the wall.

Bang!

The ball rifles off the gray stone and bounces back into his glove. He pivots, palms it again and rockets it back towards the wall.

Bang!

Poffo has been at it for over an hour. Throw. Catch. Throw. Catch. Nonstop. The humid air in Sarasota is thicker than a strip steak. Sweat waterfalls off his body.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

It had been a few weeks since Randy separated his right shoulder - his throwing shoulder. For most ballplayers, a throwing arm injury is a season killer. And for those clinging to the bottom rung of single-A ball, it might be a career death sentence.

Not for Randy. No freaking way. So what if his right arm was useless? He had two arms didn’t he? Why not learn to throw with his left?

Delusional? Maybe.

Impossible? We’ll see.

One night after the injury, Randy made a commitment to himself (an oath, really) that if he was going to wash out of minor league ball it wasn’t going to be because of his bum right arm. That next morning he woke up and brushed his teeth with his left hand. Ate cereal with this left hand. Combed his hair, opened doors and even held drinks with his left hand.

“I did everything left-handed,” Randy said of his ambidextrous ambition. “I ate left-handed, drove left-handed, learned to play cards left-handed. It took me eight months.”

Most importantly, he willed himself to throw as powerfully with his left arm as he had with his right by following a grueling regimen he concocted himself:

One thousand five hundred baseballs.

Thrown lefty.

Every day.

He’d either throw against the giant wall behind a shopping center near his tiny apartment in Sarasota or at his second favorite spot, a wall on a tennis court in Payne Park off of South School Avenue.

“It was incredibly tough, but I just kept working, throwing the ball against the wall,” he said. “I guess persistence was my best attribute. I felt if I can do that, I can do anything. I’d throw against that wall for two hours a day.”

After getting cut by the Cardinals, he took his battered body and bruised ego to a Cincinnati Reds tryout in Tampa, where he earned an invite to Spring Training before the 1974 season. With his right arm healing and his left arm throwing a passable ball, he figured if he was going to make it at this point, it would be due to his production at the plate.

Suddenly we have twenty-two year old Randy Poffo, a rare switch-hitter and switch-thrower, with everything on the line, spraying balls all over the field in front of his idols Pete Rose and Johnny Bench, Joe Morgan, Ken Griffey, George Foster and the rest of the Big Red Machine.

It was dazzling.

During spring training he hit six homers (four lefty and two righty). With two of the bombs on the final day of camp against the Mets, the Reds gave him the last spot on the Tampa Tarpons roster in the Class A Florida State League.

“I said let him swing the bat here,” Nixon, his coach, said at the time. “He is that type of hitter. He wants to play. He has the greatest desire of any kid I ever saw. He is an aggressive hitter.”

That desire manifested itself on the field, too. Mike Moore, a longtime General Manager for the Tampa Bay Tarpons, remembers one incident fondly.

“I’ll never forget this—one day [manager] Russ Nixon and I got to the stadium at 1 in the afternoon, and I peeked out onto the field and saw these baseballs flying across the diamond,” Moore says. “It was Randy, all alone, with a bucket of balls, standing in center and throwing them one by one to home plate, all with his left hand. I said, ‘Randy, what are you doing?’ He looked at me and said, ‘Trying to make myself more valuable.’ He was that type of guy.”

The desire to be valuable came from a slow, crushing realization Randy couldn’t escape: no matter how many balls he fired off the shopping center wall, his odds of climbing from single A all the way to the majors seemed slim.

“I was getting a good chance with them, and I was going all out,” Randy said. “I had been released once, and if you get a second chance, you’re always fearful it may happen again.”

Fear led to focus.

Focus led to home runs.

A bunch of them.

Even with the deep dimensions of the Tarpons home ballpark, Al Lopez Field (340’ to left, 400’ to center, 340’ to right), Randy lit up his new club. Despite concerns about his arm, he pounded 9 home runs, had an average over .290 and led the team in RBIs for much of the season until – during a hustle play, of course – he dove in the outfield and broke the index finger on his left hand.

Now unable to throw well with either arm, the Tarpons moved him to DH, but he never felt comfortable holding the bat. In just a few weeks, his average plummeted down near the Mendoza Line. By the end of the year he was still second in the Florida State League in home runs behind future Hall of Famer Eddie Murray and he led the Tarpons with 66 runs batted in. It wasn’t enough.

“Randy was a good ballplayer, not a great one,” Reds teammate Keith Madison said. “He was an incredibly hard worker. I remember him trying to turn himself into a left-handed throwing first baseman instead of a right-handed catcher.”

It was a tall order. First basemen are expected to be durable power hitters with canons for arms to nail guys stealing second, to turn double plays and toss lasers out to third or home. Randy had potential as a hitter, but with his injury, the rest seemed like it was off the table.

He did, however, give everyone a sneak preview of what was eventually to come in the ring.

It happened during a game between his Tarpons and the West Palm Beach Expos when the Expos pitcher Joe Keener began eyeing Randy warily in the on-deck circle in the first inning. After a few throws home to the hitter, Keener became convinced that Randy was studying his pitches, trying to tip his teammate off in the batter’s box as to what was coming. After several glares, he managed to get the batter out, but the pitcher was fuming.

After the Expos had their turn at bat, Keener headed to the mound, still livid. Randy was up first, and instead of waiting to deal with him at the plate, the furious pitcher had enough. In the middle of his warm-up he adjusted his aim, turned and fired a fastball at Randy’s head.

“I was on the on-deck circle,” Randy said. “The pitcher thought I was looking at his pitches too closely. So I’m getting ready to hit before the inning started and all of a sudden I turn around and there’s a blur coming. And I look and there’s a baseball, right against my face. I hit the mound just like that, both benches emptied and we had a brawl.”…

If you enjoyed this excerpt, order my Macho Man book today!

I appreciate each and every one of you and I personally guarantee that you will LOVE THIS BOOK.

Thank you for reading Books & Biceps. Thank you for coming along on this ride with me.

And if you already read the book, please don’t forget to leave an awesome review right here. They matter A TON:

Macho Man: The Untamed, Unbelievable Life of Randy Savage!

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