Umaga is dead; or, is it Edward Fatu? I’m not sure.
When I read the news, in my mind, there were three different perspectives to be taken from this event: sympathy, tragedy, and comedy.
The sympathy was for the man’s family and those that knew him. It’s a natural response to one’s passing; you rally around the survivors to share in their pain, even if you don’t know them directly. It’s not something you dwell on. We all die. Some survive a bit longer than others. You give your condolences and you move past it.
The tragedy was the man himself. A heart attack is a tangible reality to an intangible concept like death, something made even harder to grasp by the fact that he was an athlete. Athletes don’t die in their prime. They’re mythic figures in our culture not unlike Greek gods that just slowly fade from memory until one day they simply cease to exist in our collective consciousness.
But then, wrestling isn’t like most sports is it?
We know this because the wrestlers seem to be fighting amongst themselves to see who gets to be the next body thrown onto the pile. 72 – that’s the number of wrestlers that have died before the age of 50 since 1985 (http://prowrestling.about.com/od/whatsrealwhatsfake/a/wrestlersdeaths.htm). Wrestling, the sport, seems like a bad car wreck that mangles all who are a part of it. Occasionally, someone dies and the survivors limp past the growing pile of bodies on the side of the road content in thinking, “Hey, better him than me.†And we, the fans, drive past, but make sure to slow down just enough to stare at the flaming wreck and mangled bodies out of a morbid curiosity while thinking, “They can make their own decisions. They’re grown men.†So we just continue to stare from a distance while more and more cars crash and more bodies are added to the pile.
This is the tragedy. Regardless of how Edward Fatu died, he’s just another body on the side of the road for us to stare at; he’s just another statistic to be referenced when discussing dead wrestlers. Should we blame him? Should we blame Vince McMahon? Should we blame ourselves? Who should we blame? We have to blame someone.
And this, the saddest part, is the comedy; the absurdity of discussing how he died and who’s responsible. Does it even matter if he suffered a heart attack because of drug abuse? Does it even matter if he died of some other cause? He’s dead. He can’t speak for himself at this point. Anything we venture to put out there about him now is based mostly on speculation and conjecture. I’m not saying we should sugarcoat his life as if he was a saint, but we should allow for a few moments to reflect on what he accomplished instead of immediately jumping to conclusions.
All we have left to judge him on is what he left us with; we have a body of work that he left behind as a performer. But the thing is, and I find this extremely funny, we’d all rather discuss the merits of his death rather the merits of his work. And the thing is, it’s not something I feel comfortable laughing at because it’s something I find myself laughing at far too often.
