Martel vs. Roberts: The Blindfold Match, Explained

Background

Jake Roberts arrived in the WWF in 1986 already a fully formed character — the slow-talking, calculating antihero who carried a python named Damien in a burlap sack and finished opponents with the DDT, a move he'd innovated and that no one else used.[1] By 1990, he was a firmly established babyface and one of the most over acts on the roster. He'd recently come through a high-profile feud with Ted DiBiase over the Million Dollar Championship — Roberts stole the belt and dared DiBiase to reach into Damien's bag to retrieve it, a program that ran through WrestleMania VI in April 1990, where DiBiase won their match via count-out.[1] After a brief program with Bad News Brown through the summer, Roberts was available for a new direction by the fall.

Rick Martel's path to the feud ran through a reinvention that he'd pushed for himself. Born Richard Vigneault in Quebec City, Martel broke into the business at seventeen in 1973, filling in for an injured wrestler at his brother Michel's request on a Montreal card.[2] He had a serious pedigree: an AWA World Heavyweight Championship reign that lasted nearly nineteen months after beating Jumbo Tsuruta in May 1984 — the longest world title reign of the 1980s in that promotion.[2] In the WWF, he'd teamed with Tito Santana as Strike Force, winning the Tag Team Championship in 1987.[3] But by WrestleMania V in April 1989, the team was done — Martel turned heel by walking out on Santana mid-match against the Brain Busters after an accidental forearm.[3]

Martel himself pitched the heel turn to Vince McMahon, believing he'd exhausted his babyface potential. McMahon, according to Martel's RF Video shoot interview, "nearly laughed him out of the room" initially but reconsidered and approved it.[4] McMahon and J.J. Dillon named the resulting gimmick: "The Model" Rick Martel — a preening narcissist in a turquoise sweater tied around his neck and a lapel pin reading "Yes, I am a model."[4][5] By the 1989 Survivor Series, Martel had introduced his signature prop: an oversized perfume atomizer filled with "Arrogance," his fictional cologne brand.[2] The atomizer looked ridiculous, which was the point. It was also a weapon — Martel sprayed it in opponents' eyes to blind them, a spot he'd used against several wrestlers before the angle with Roberts gave it its biggest stage.

Martel loved being a heel. "Much more creativity and freedom," he said in the shoot interview.[4] His wife's reaction when he told her about the gimmick: "At least it's not the Red Rooster."[4]

Build-up

The feud started on the October 6, 1990 episode of WWF Superstars, during a Brother Love Show segment.[6] Martel was the guest, promoting Arrogance. Roberts came out with Damien. When Martel sprayed the atomizer at Damien's bag, Roberts shoved him away — and took a full blast of Arrogance directly in the eyes.[6] Roberts collapsed, clawing at his face. The segment ended with him being helped to the back, unable to see.

What followed was one of the more committed pieces of injury selling the WWF had done to that point. Roberts appeared on television for weeks in dark sunglasses, the kind you'd associate with a blind person, carrying a white cane.[7] He wore white contact lenses to simulate blindness in backstage segments.[7] He visited an optometrist on camera. The WWF played the angle straight — Roberts wasn't working through the injury, he was living with it, and the segments gave him room to show a vulnerability that his usual cool, coiled-snake persona rarely allowed. Martel, meanwhile, mocked him relentlessly. On follow-up Brother Love Show appearances, he called himself "a great human-an-tarium" and presented Roberts with a walking stick as a gift.[7] WrestleCrap, which inducted the eventual Blindfold Match, nonetheless called the six-month build "a work of booking art."[7]

At Survivor Series 1990 (November 22, Hartford Civic Center), the feud was woven into the elimination tag format. Martel captained the Visionaries — himself, the Warlord, and Power and Glory (Hercules and Paul Roma). Roberts captained the Vipers — himself, Jimmy Snuka, and the Rockers (Shawn Michaels and Marty Jannetty).[8] Martel's team won in a 4-0 clean sweep, the first in Survivor Series history.[8] Roberts couldn't get his hands on Martel in the match that mattered, which deepened the frustration driving the angle.

Both men competed in the Royal Rumble (January 19, 1991) and had confrontations during the match, keeping the rivalry simmering through WrestleMania season.[1] By this point, Roberts' vision had "returned" in storyline, but he didn't want a normal match. He wanted Martel to know what it felt like to be blind. The Blindfold Match stipulation was set for WrestleMania VII.

The Matches

WrestleMania VII took place on March 24, 1991, at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena.[9] The venue carried its own backstory: the show had originally been booked for the adjacent LA Memorial Coliseum, a 100,000-seat outdoor stadium. The WWF publicly cited security concerns related to the Gulf War and the Sgt. Slaughter Iraqi-sympathizer main event angle as the reason for the move.[10] The actual reason was ticket sales. By early February, only about 14,000 tickets had sold for a venue that seated 100,000-plus.[10] The Coliseum's general manager confirmed the WWF requested the move: "They asked about moving the event next door to the Sports Arena... It was not our decision."[10] Official attendance at the Sports Arena was listed as 16,158; Dave Meltzer reported paid attendance of roughly 10,500.[9]

The Blindfold Match was the fifth bout on the card. Both Roberts and Martel wore black hoods — essentially cloth bags over their heads, with some limited visibility through mesh, as both later admitted.[7][11] The match ran 8:34.[9]

What made it work — or not, depending on who you ask — was the crowd. The entire match was built on audience participation. When Roberts, the babyface, pointed in a direction, the crowd roared louder as he got closer to Martel and went quiet when he moved away, essentially playing a game of hot-and-cold with a live wrestler.[11][12] When Martel tried the same thing, the fans screamed to misdirect him — sending him into turnbuckles, making him grope at empty air. The actual wrestling was minimal by design: reaching, stumbling, near-misses, a few strikes when they briefly found each other, then separation and more fumbling. Bruce Prichard, on his Something to Wrestle podcast, called it "absolute great storytelling" and emphasized the psychology of the crowd interaction.[12]

The finish: Roberts found Martel, hit the DDT — his finisher and the only move that could end this — and pinned him. Even after hitting the DDT, Roberts fumbled around before locating Martel for the cover, staying in character to the end.[11]

Roberts himself had no reservations about the match. He called blindfold matches "the easiest money I ever made" and praised the concept as "genius" for getting fans to participate in a way that no other stipulation could.[11] "People still tell me, decades later, that they were screaming directions at their TVs," he said.[11]

Aftermath

Roberts' next chapter was darker and more memorable than the Martel feud. By mid-1991, he turned heel — a jarring shift that produced one of the most infamous segments in WWF history. During a program with Randy Savage, Roberts tied Savage in the ring ropes and let his king cobra bite Savage's arm on live television.[1] The image of the cobra latched onto Savage's bicep, with Elizabeth screaming at ringside, remains one of the most disturbing visuals the company ever broadcast. The heel turn led to a feud with the Undertaker after Roberts attacked Paul Bearer and slammed Undertaker's hand in a coffin. Roberts lost to the Undertaker at WrestleMania VIII in April 1992 — his final WWF match for nearly four years.[1]

He departed reportedly upset that Vince McMahon had reneged on a promised creative position.[1] What followed was a long, public descent. A brief WCW run in 1992-93 went nowhere. His addiction to alcohol and drugs, rooted in a childhood of extraordinary trauma, worsened through the 1990s and into the 2000s. His 1996-97 return to the WWF as a "born again" character was uncomfortable to watch, and his personal life continued to deteriorate. The turnaround came in 2012, when Diamond Dallas Page took Roberts into his home and helped him get sober through DDP Yoga — a story documented in the 2015 film The Resurrection of Jake the Snake.[13] Roberts was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2014 by DDP.[1] He later worked as a manager and advisor in AEW and holds a WWE Legends contract.

Martel continued as The Model through the mid-1990s but never climbed higher on the card than the upper-midcard. His post-Roberts feuds included programs with Tatanka (a loss at WrestleMania VIII), a brief rivalry with Shawn Michaels over Sensational Sherri at SummerSlam 1992, and a challenge to Bret Hart for the Intercontinental Championship.[2] He left the WWF in 1995 and worked the independent circuit in Canada, including a stretch teaming with Don Callis as "The Supermodels" and feuding with a young Edge and Christian.[2]

Martel debuted in WCW in January 1998, winning the Television Championship from Booker T on Nitro. But at SuperBrawl VIII in February 1998, he suffered a devastating knee injury — torn ligament, fractured leg, cartilage damage — that effectively ended his in-ring career.[2] A brief comeback attempt on Nitro resulted in another injury, and he retired. There was personal tragedy running alongside the professional decline: Martel's sister died from a prolonged illness in 1991, right around WrestleMania VII. He described having "one foot out the door" from the business during that period.[4]

Behind the Scenes

The real dynamic between Martel and Roberts was, by all accounts, a good one. In his RF Video shoot interview, Martel spoke highly of Roberts, saying he "very much admires him" and comparing his ring psychology to that of King Curtis Iaukea — high praise from someone who'd worked across the AWA, WWF, and the territories.[4] Martel credited Roberts for making the blindfold match work, describing how they practiced the match together beforehand and how Roberts assured him the crowd-participation psychology would carry it.[4]

Martel had initially been hesitant about the stipulation. After a test run at a house show in Florida where the visibility through the hoods was a problem, he had doubts about whether the match could work on a WrestleMania stage.[4] Roberts convinced him. "You can't ask for anything more" than that kind of fan participation, Roberts argued, and he was right — whatever you think of the match as a piece of wrestling, the crowd was fully invested for all eight and a half minutes.[11]

The creative origin of the blindfold concept isn't attributed to a single person in any source. Prichard has discussed the match's psychology on Something to Wrestle — the hot-and-cold crowd dynamic, the heel getting misdirected — and called it "absolute great storytelling," but he doesn't take credit for pitching the stipulation itself.[12] The Arrogance-blinding spot was a natural extension of what Martel had already been doing with the atomizer for over a year, and the blindfold match grew logically from the injury angle. Roberts' insistence on the stipulation in kayfabe — wanting Martel to experience blindness — gave it an emotional justification that most gimmick matches lack.

What the audience at home didn't know was what Jake Roberts was carrying outside the ring. Roberts — born Aurelian Smith Jr. — grew up in one of the most troubled families in wrestling history. His father, Grizzly Smith, was a wrestler and a deeply abusive man. Jake suffered physical abuse as a child, was raised by his grandmother until her death in 1966, and then was forced back into his father's household.[14] His half-sister, Jo Lynn Smith, was abducted in 1979 and never found.[14] The full scope of the family's trauma was laid out in Dark Side of the Ring Season 3, Episode 6 — "In the Shadow of Grizzly Smith" — which aired in June 2021 with Jake's participation.[14]

By 1990-91, Roberts' addiction to alcohol and drugs was a known issue within the locker room, though he remained functional enough to work a prominent WrestleMania program. The substance problems had roots that went far deeper than the business. They would consume the next two decades of his life before DDP's intervention in 2012 gave him a path out.[13]

Martel was dealing with his own private grief during the feud's climax. His sister was dying from a prolonged illness throughout early 1991 and passed around the time of WrestleMania VII.[4] He's described being emotionally detached from the business during this stretch, with "one foot out the door."[4] He stayed — The Model gimmick ran for several more years — but the personal toll of that period is part of why the Martel-Roberts feud, for all its comedic surface elements, sits in a more complicated emotional space than the blindfold match alone suggests.

Legacy

The Blindfold Match is genuinely polarizing, and that's part of what makes it interesting to talk about thirty-five years later. WrestleCrap inducted it as one of the worst gimmick matches in wrestling history, calling it "awful" and noting that "if you like wrestling matches with no wrestling, this one's for you." They acknowledged the novelty of the crowd interaction but argued it wore off after about three minutes.[7] On the other end, Tape Machines Are Rolling gave it three out of five stars, calling it "an absolute hoot" that succeeded as pure spectacle despite being "a DUD wrestling match in terms of movesets."[15] The Blog of Doom's retrospective review of WrestleMania VII described it as "the good kind of nonsense."[16]

Prichard has been the match's most prominent defender from the creative side, praising its storytelling on his podcast and advocating for Martel's induction into the WWE Hall of Fame.[12] Roberts, the man who actually worked the match, had no patience for the criticism. Blindfold matches were "the easiest money I ever made," he said — and he meant it as a compliment to the format, not a dismissal. The psychology was simple and effective: give the audience a role, make the babyface sympathetic, make the heel look foolish. "You can't ask for anything more."[11]

The WWF revisited the blindfold stipulation sparingly. Dexter Lumis and Cameron Grimes worked one on NXT in November 2020, ending in a draw.[17] The format has remained a curiosity rather than a staple — partly because it requires a specific kind of story (an injury angle) to justify it, and partly because the Roberts-Martel version, for better or worse, defined what the match is.

WrestleMania VII as a whole is remembered unevenly. The main event — Hogan defeating Sgt. Slaughter for the WWF Championship in a Gulf War-themed program — has aged poorly.[9] The show's enduring legacy rests on the undercard: Savage vs. the Ultimate Warrior in the Retirement Match, widely considered one of the best matches in WrestleMania history, ending with Savage's reunion with Elizabeth.[9] The Blindfold Match sits in a different category — not a great match, not a great story by WrestleMania standards, but a committed piece of gimmick booking built on six months of patient television. The build was better than the blow-off. That's a fair criticism. But the build was genuinely good, and the blow-off got 16,000 people to scream directions at a man in a hood, which is its own kind of achievement.

See Also

Sources & Further Listening

1. Jake Roberts — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jake_Roberts
2. Rick Martel — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Martel
3. Strike Force (professional wrestling) — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strike_Force_(professional_wrestling)
4. RF Video Shoot Interview with Rick Martel (recap) — Blog of Doom. https://www.blogofdoom.com/2022/05/07/rf-video-shoot-interview-with-rick-martel/
5. "The Model Rick Martel" gimmick induction — WrestleCrap. https://www.wrestlecrap.com/inductions/the-model-rick-martel/
6. Rick Martel sprays Arrogance in the eyes of Jake Roberts: Superstars, October 6, 1990 — WWE.com. https://www.wwe.com/videos/rick-the-model-martel-sprays-arrogance-in-the-eyes-on-jake-the-snake-roberts-superstars-october-6-1990
7. "Rick Martel vs. Jake Roberts Blindfold Match" — WrestleCrap. https://www.wrestlecrap.com/inductions/rick-martel-vs-jake-roberts-blindfold-match/
8. Survivor Series (1990) — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivor_Series_(1990)
9. WrestleMania VII — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WrestleMania_VII
10. "The story of WWE's attempt to fill the LA Coliseum for WrestleMania VII" — ESPN. https://www.espn.com/wwe/story/_/id/22956778/wwe-story-wwe-attempt-fill-la-coliseum-wrestlemania-vii
11. "Blindfold matches were the easiest money Jake Roberts ever made" — Wrestling Inc. https://www.wrestlinginc.com/1239165/blindfold-matches-were-the-easiest-money-jake-roberts-ever-made/
12. "Bruce Prichard on the WrestleMania VII Blindfold Match" — 411Mania. https://411mania.com/wrestling/bruce-prichard-wrestlemania-vii-blindfold-match-rick-martel-jake-roberts/
13. "How Diamond Dallas Page Resurrected Jake the Snake Roberts" — Bleacher Report. https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2610389-how-diamond-dallas-page-resurrected-jake-the-snake-roberts
14. "In the Shadow of Grizzly Smith" — Dark Side of the Ring S3E6 — IMDB. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14694058/
15. "Jake Roberts vs. Rick Martel (WWF, 3-24-1991)" — Tape Machines Are Rolling. https://tapemachinesarerolling.wordpress.com/2018/04/02/jake-roberts-vs-rick-martel-wwf-3-24-1991/
16. "Mike Reviews: WWF WrestleMania VII" — Blog of Doom. https://www.blogofdoom.com/2023/03/11/mike-reviews-wwf-wrestlemania-vii/
17. "Odd, unique WWE match format returning after 5 years" — Newsweek. https://www.newsweek.com/sports/wrestling/odd-unique-wwe-match-format-returning-after-5-years-2118846

Further Listening

• Something to Wrestle with Bruce Prichard — WrestleMania VII episode, covering the Blindfold Match psychology
• RF Video Shoot Interview with Rick Martel — covers the Model gimmick, the blindfold match test run, and his relationship with Roberts
• The Resurrection of Jake the Snake (2015 documentary) — Roberts' recovery from addiction with DDP's help
• Dark Side of the Ring S3E6: "In the Shadow of Grizzly Smith" — Roberts' family history and childhood trauma