Ricky Steamboat’s WrestleMania Advice: Let Your Big Moments Breathe

– Ricky Steamboat spoke with Sports Illustrated for a new interview. Some highlights are below:.

On his advice for competing at WrestleMania: “Pull it back a gear. Pull it back with the things you do in the match, especially if you do some big stuff…Whenever you do big stuff in the ring—a big move or a big hit—you have to let that moment breathe,” continued Steamboat. “That allows a moment to sink in for the fans so they can reflect on it. When you hit a big move in a match, but then you’re up five seconds later running around, you completely forget about that huge move.”

On being frustrated by wrestlers moving their matches along too quick: “I have expression that I like to use, and that’s ‘throwing it all away.’ You are throwing that big move away when you don’t let it breathe. I’m not suggesting that every moment in the match has to be huge, but you’ve got to space it out to have a couple of really outstanding moments. Whenever you hit those big moves, let them sink in for the fans. Let the moves breathe. Let’s see who the first guy that is able to stand up, or who the first guy is who falls back down.”

On why there are less meaningful moments in wrestling today: “Compare today’s wrestling to my feud with Randy Savage. When Randy came off the top rope and hit me with the bell to really set up the feud, WrestleMania III was three months away. Each week on TV, there were vignettes where I was trying to get my voice back. There was a build-up. The question mark was, ‘Will Ricky be able to wrestle?’Randy and me had a three-month run. Today, because the company has a pay per view every three weeks, there is only a three-week window. Once you have the pay per view, you move on to the next guy you’re going to work with. Before, there were only four pay per views throughout the whole year. Guys who were doing soap opera storylines could build them up week after week. We had longevity, and that is one of the main reasons why people remember. For three months, people would see these two particular guys, and the blow-off would be at WrestleMania. Today, it’s much different.”

On Undertaker versus Shawn Michaels from WrestleMania XXV being the best WrestleMania match ever: “I was still with the company, but I didn’t want to know the finish and I didn’t want to know who was going over. I kept my ears shut because I just wanted to sit there and take it in as a fan—and, boy, they took me on a hell of a ride. Looking at back to me and Savage, I’ve been told that changed the blueprint of a match. A normal match would have four or five false finishes and then you’d have the finish, but Savage and I had 21 false finishes in a match that went 17 minutes. We wanted to make it a championship match, and our philosophy was, ‘I’m going to try to beat him for the belt, and he’s going to try to beat me.’ We were trying to beat each other every 45 seconds, and those false finishes also took the people for a ride in the Shawn-Taker match.”