Randy Savage vs. Ricky Steamboat at WrestleMania III is considered by many to be an all-time classic and a predecessor for what modern pro wrestling would come in the decades that followed. Ric Flair gave his thoughts on the match on the latest To Be The Man Podcast, admitting that he hadn’t watched the match until last year. He also compared the WrestleMania match he’d wind up having years later with Savage over the WWF Championship.ย
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“I thought their match was great,” Flair said (h/t WrestlingNews.co). “But you know, you have to remember, which takes nothing away from the match whatsoever, but when you take George ‘The Animal’ Steele and you take Miss Elizabeth, there’s a lot going on. There’s a lot of activity that created a lot of excitement to the match as well. So it takes nothing away from the two of them, but there was a lot of outside activity, which brought I thought a lot of drama. I didn’t watch the show that much back then, but I understood what was going on. It’s a little bit different from the kind of matches I had with him.”
Flair’s trilogy with Steamboat took place in the late 80s at the Chi-Town Rumble, Clash of Champions and WrestleWar and resulted in Steamboat winning the NWA World Heavyweight Championship from “The Nature Boy” before dropping it back to him a little over two months later. As for his WWF feud with Savage, Flair was the WWF Champion in 1992 and seemed destined to have a WrestleMania clash with Hulk Hogan only for those plans to get scrapped. Hogan was eventually paired up with Sid Justice, while Flair began a program with “The Macho Man” while claiming to have dated Miss Elizabeth prior to her relationship with Savage. Flair wound up dropping the title to Savage midway through WrestleMania VIII.
“Well, I think their matches were much better. I’m sure they had other matches that were better than me and Randy. I could never adapt to that laying it out. I mean, we had decent matches, but nothing like Ricky and Randy had together,” Flair said.
