![]() ![]() It was not just steroids, although there has been plenty of that (Benoit, only 5-foot-8, was a jacked 220 pounds at the time of his death). Since at least the 1980s, when fans began flocking to wrestlers who resembled excessively muscled cartoon characters, professional wrestlers have abused drugs in a way that makes the heavy-handed East German athlete-doping programs of the 1970s seem like carefully controlled clinical experiments. “Drug-fueled” is an inexact and elastic term, because most of wrestling’s premature deaths could in some ways be attributed to drugs. The roll of the dead includes major stars, such as Eddie Guerrero (died in 2005, age 38), a World Wrestling Entertainment champion from a distinguished wrestling family, and the lesser-known and anonymous lugs who plied the VFW halls and grimy, bare-bulb auditoriums depicted in “The Wrestler.” Among the most famous dead wrestlers of all is Chris Benoit (died in 2007, age 40), who came to widespread public attention after killing his wife, 7-year-old son and then himself in an apparently drug-fueled frenzy. You would have to go back to the early-TV generation, the era of Gorgeous George and Freddie Blassie, to find a cohort that survived more or less intact into old age. ![]() The list of prematurely dead wrestlers of the last generation is so long, stretching to more than five dozen names, that there is a Web site dedicated to those who have died before age 50. Professional wrestlers of Warrior’s generation (he was 54) have experienced a mortality rate that would be considered a crisis and a scandal if it happened in some other context - say, to football players, racecar drivers or boxers. In dying unexpectedly on Tuesday, the professional wrestler known as the Ultimate Warrior (né James Hellwig) had this in common with many of his contemporaries: He expired long before his time. ![]()
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