DDP Reveals Why He Wrestled With Taped Ribs For So Much Of His WCW Career

DDP was one of the mainstays in Ted Turner’s WCW. Diamond Dallas Page was involved in a high-profile feud with the late great “Macho Man” Randy Savage during the Monday Night Wars. He also took a lot of punishment in the process.

It was this feud that elevated Page to the upper echelon of WCW. Macho Man suggested he would take the Diamond Cutter from Page, something that put Page huge with the fans.

DDP recently sat down with Sean Sapp of Fightful to talk about his legendary feud with Savage. According to Page, a nasty elbow from Savage caused him to wrestle with taped ribs for the rest of his WCW career. The WWE Hall of Famer had quite a story to tell.

“It’s funny because I literally was pissing blood for thirteen out of fifteen weeks and it was because Randy was dropping that elbow across me. He lands right on your ribs. I was like, ‘Randy, can you just land a little lower and land on my stomach?’

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“That was a pay-per-view, the second one, he was going to go over in, where Randy hit me with the belt. Scott gave me his finish and then Randy came off the top and gave me and he landed on my face that time.

“If you see it, they were screaming, ‘Go home! Go home!’ ‘Cause when you get to three hours and one second, it’s the next program. So if you’re not done, like Goldberg and my match at Halloween Havoc because Hulk and Warrior went forty minutes. So it ate up all our time.

“Well, we got out there to lockup, it went to three hours and a third of the country didn’t see it. That’s why it played on Nitro the next night. So on that match with Randy, you’ll see Scott finally raise Randy’s hand and I go to sit up and I lay back down. It goes to black.

“Next thing I know I’m walking backstage and I stated to my wife Kimberly, I stopped, I looked down, I go, ‘Did I just wrestle?’ She’s like, ‘What?’ I go, ‘Is it Nitro? Did I just wrestle?’ She goes, ‘Stop it, Page. You’re scaring me.’ I go, ‘What the fuck? What happened? Am I wrestling? What’s happening?’ She goes, ‘No, no, no. It’s the Great American Bash. You just wrestled Randy Savage. Oh, God. What happened?’

“What I did, I sat up again like the Undertaker, came to my feet, they’re facing that way. I come to my feet behind them, they turn around and see me as I’m stepping back and I fall through the ropes to the floor and give them both the finger and walked down the aisle and here we are.”

“I’m like, ‘Oh, no.’ That’s fighting in the backwoods. You don’t do that. That’d be like John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Sylvester Stallone all going boom-boom-boom-boom and you pull a Tony Montana and you come out with Scarface, ‘Ahh, you can’t kill me!’ He could do that, he was a star. But you get shot, you go down and you die.

“You take a belt and two finishes—especially those finishes—you don’t get up. They kicked that door in, man, and I have a table in front of me. I was like, ‘I don’t remember anything! I was knocked out!’ They were like, [barking noises]. I go, ‘You really think I would do that?’ [barking noises]. I threw the table and go, ‘Let’s go. You knocked me out.’ [barking noises] and they walked out. The next day, boy, my face was like a Chipmunk, man.”

Many people wondered why DDP wrestled with tape on his ribs for so long. It turns out that he had the Macho Man to thank for that little character attribute.

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