Death And Wrestling

To be a lifelong wrestling fan is to grow comfortable with death. I’ve followed professional wrestling for over thirty years now. Look back at a show like SummerSlam 1992. I watched it on VHS tape that my older sister’s friend made for us, because unlike our family hers did shell out for pay per view. It’s not a top-to-bottom great show, but it is a good one, chock full of iconic characters from my childhood. Review the card from a distance of nearly three decades, though, and it’s striking. Macho Man Randy Savage, The Ultimate Warrior, Earthquake, Crush, Kamala, both members of The Legion of Doom, Sensational Sherri, and The British Bulldog (who got the biggest win of his career at this event) are all dead. Kamala and Road Warrior Animal were the only two people on this list who made it to sixty. Ironically, The Undertaker, who even then played undead, is the only one from this show who still wrestled as recently as 2020, and remains by most outward indicators in reasonable health and of sound mind.

There are a cavalcade of reasons why wrestlers tend to die young, from the toll physical abuse and travel take on their bodies, to not-unrelated substance abuse issues, to sub-standard medical care from a profession that rarely comes with health benefits or pensions. All of these causes are discussed with greater insight and detail elsewhere. For today’s post, I’m less interested in these causes than what it’s like to watch your childhood heroes die, and what lessons we might take from their lives.

I’m not only a fan of what happens in the ring. I was a relatively early adopter when it came to tell-all books, documentaries, and podcasts about the inner workings of the wrestling business and its history. I don’t have any precise count, but can say with confidence that I’ve read over fifty books by wrestlers and wrestling personalities, ranging from performers like Bret Hart and Ric Flair, to ring announcer Gary Michael Cappetta, and wrestling reporter/photographer Bill Apter. Suffice to say, I’ve watched more wrestling documentaries than that, and listened to easily three-to-four times as many episodes of wrestling podcasts. In fact, as I’ve found is not so uncommon for my generation of wrestling fans, I take more or less equal and sometimes greater pleasure in this kind of behind-the-scenes content as I do in actually watching most wrestling nowadays.

So, it’s little surprise that I’d watch You Cannot Kill David Arquette. The independently produced documentary chronicles Arquette’s journey back into the world of professional wrestling. He is, himself, a self-professed lifelong fan and, more to the point, an actor who got drafted into the world of professional wrestling, when stunt booking saw the hundred-fifty-pounder win the WCW World Heavyweight Championship in 2000. He’s out for redemption from a wrestling world that has laughed and ridiculed him for the feat for two decades, and makes a serious stab at training to wrestle, working on an array of small stages as his camera crew follows him.

It's a well-made film and an inspiring story, though it has its haunting elements. Not least of all, after Arquette suffers a traumatic injury, it's friend and fellow actor Luke Perry who drives him to the hospital—as the documentary notes, only a week or so before Perry himself dies.

So it is that the latter stages of the film take on a tone that seamlessly interweaves sorrow and hope. Arquette is down and out. Perry dies. But so too does Arquette rise up to still work one more, relatively high profile match. So too does Perry’s son Jack, “Jungle Boy,” get introduced as a character late in the film, he himself a fledgling professional wrestler who’s just starting to get noticed. It’s a dynamic all too familiar to devout fans—injury, death, and no shortage of second- and third-generation performers rising to prominence.

As fate would have it, the same weekend I watched You Cannot Kill David Arquette, Jon Huber died.

Huber had been known as Luke Harper for a seven-year-run in World Wrestling Entertainment, and more recently as Brodie Lee in the nationally broadcasted All Elite Wrestling. Wrestlers have a history of dying young, but at least these days, most of them settle into retirement first and the young ages we’re talking about are fifty-ish. Huber was forty-one, still active and more or less at the top of his game in the ring. He was a husband and father to two young children.

Huber’s wife posted to social media after he passed that he had been facing lung issues that were not related to COVID. So, for those closest to him, it wouldn’t have been fair to say that his death came out of the blue, but for us wrestling fans—well, it did.

When I saw that Huber had passed, I thought to a podcast interview I’d heard with him from months before. He talked about his frustrations when he was under contract to WWE, particularly because the company kept him out of the ring and off TV arbitrarily for long stretches. By all indications, he simply didn’t factor into creative plans at the time, and he ultimately wanted out of the biggest money, highest exposure contract of his career because he felt he was burning daylight on the final years of his physical prime, when he could still perform at a high level in the ring.

There’s a sadness in knowing that Huber—like his fans—felt so much time toward the end of his career was squandered. But there’s also a lesson embedded, that he did bet on himself, leaving WWE and signing with the next biggest company, where he was featured to a much higher degree for those final months of his career and life.

There’s a lesson in not missing your chance.

Discussions of wrestling and death and endings bring me back to The Undertaker. He’s that rare star who transcended time, for a wrestling career that, itself, ran over three decades, including most of that time continuously working in high profile roles for WWE. The last three years of his run, in particular, though, were defined by fake-out endings—seemingly natural spots when he might have retired, only to keep coming back for one more fight.

I was there live for the first occasion when I truly thought The Undertaker was done. It was WrestleMania 33 in Orlando. Heather and I road-tripped there from North Carolina to visit The Wizarding World of Harry Potter for a couple of days and then go to the wrestling show. At the end of it, The Undertaker lost his main event match and took off his signature garb in what looked like a ceremonial end to his career.

The morning of that show, we had learned Heather was pregnant.

There’s no comparing us learning of my son’s pending arrival and the end of a wrestling career, just as there’s no real comparison for retirement and death, or for the loss of a human life and the loss of character wrestling fans like me grew up with. But just because these matters aren’t entirely congruent, doesn’t mean they don’t both fuel emotion or have overlap or offer a sensation of recognizing the circularity of life. Endings and beginnings coincide. Lives change, begin, or end. The world keeps turning.

I held my son while he was napping and watched a documentary about David Arquette wrestling. I was still holding my son when I read the news about Jon Huber.

And when he woke, I put on a brave face, and pushed deep, existential thoughts to the side. I’d wrestle with all of that later. My son needed a diaper change, then it would be time to play again.