Eight Years Gone

Lie. Cheat. Steal. Win. The credo of Eddie Guerrero. Photo Credit: WWE.com

Eddie Guerrero passed away in a Minneapolis hotel room eight years ago today. He would have been 46 this year, which makes the distance between now and his passing even more harrowing. Anyone dying before their 40th birthday is befalling a fate at a far too young age, let alone a professional wrestler. Even in an industry that chews up and spits out its performers at a more accelerated rate, 38 seems far too young for anyone, even a man whose hard partying and prior addictions set the stage for the heart disease that claimed him years after he got clean. His death more than any except for maybe Randy Savage affected me the most adversely as a fan without the requisite sickness and doubt that the way Chris Benoit went out did.

Guerrero, even more than Chris Jericho or Steve Austin, evoked my truest feelings of fandom because of how fun he was. He always embraced his role in the ring and emitted such a joie de vivre that stood out in WWE during the early Aughts especially. When the talent pool was divided mostly between morosely intense or sarcastically mean-spirited, Guerrero felt like an avatar of light-hearted frivolity.

While Austin was the first real WWE anti-hero top guy archetype, Guerrero was the first to wear his intentions on his sleeve, and I loved him for it. He was at his best when he portrayed a man who loved life, and even though his feuds with Rey Mysterio that involved his own family were fairly good, I could never fully enjoy them because they took the Guerrero I wanted to root for from me.

That free-spiritedness translated to his in-ring wrestling. His personality seemed to inform how he would wrestle, which always made him an utter delight to watch in the ring. Whether his face was obscured by the Black Tiger mask in Japan or whether he was hamming it up against Kurt Angle with the WWE Championship in the balance, Guerrero always brought vibrancy to the ring. He was technically sound, but never dull. He flew through the air and brought panache to everything he did. He made pro wrestling look way too easy. I have seen quite a few people take to the ring in my 20+ years of being a wrestling fan, but I don't know how many, if any, were better at wrestling matches than he was.

I don't know what personal demons he had in his life, and I don't mean to praise him as a man because I didn't know him. However, as a performer in the wrestling industry, few were finer than Eddie Guerrero. My television has been colder since he's been gone, and I don't think a day passes where I don't imagine what he could be doing in the ring with the wrestlers on the roster or on the scene in general today. Rest in peace, Eddie Guerrero. Viva la raza.