Throughout my life and all the years that I’ve been brogging, I’ve named many wrestlers, and declared them among my favorites. CM Punk, Chris Benoit, the Big Boss Man, etc, etc. It’s not due to the unfortunate recent event of his passing, but I can truthfully say without any hesitation that my first ever favorite wrestler was the Ultimate Warrior.
I always picked Ultimate Warrior (and Honky Tonk Man) when playing the 1989 arcade WWF Superstars.
When I was eight-years old, I once went to school with rubberbands around my non-existent prepubescent triceps with twist-ties draped off of them and declared myself the Ultimate Warrior. My teacher made me take them off because she believed that they were cutting off circulation in my arms.
The first time I saw Ultimate Warrior in action was in a match against Haku, on Prime Time Wrestling, which starred Gorilla Monsoon and Bobby “The Brain” Heenan. I swear to god Warrior did at least nine clotheslines in that match, which he naturally won.
I was devastated in 1991 when Ultimate Warrior lost the world title to Sgt. Slaughter, due to outside interference from Sensational Sherry and the Macho King, when Randy Savage smashed his glass scepter on Warrior’s head. I still thought wrestling was “real” then, so to a nine-year old, watching your favorite wrestler lose was adequate reasons for some shell shock.
I always picked Ultimate Warrior when WWF Wrestlefest released in arcades in 1991.
When the Undertaker sneak-attacked the Ultimate Warrior during a Funeral Parlor segment and then stuffed him into a casket, where he portrayed passing out after running out of air, I became scared out of my wits of the Undertaker.
When Papa Shango “cursed” the Ultimate Warrior, and there was a segment of him “vomiting” in the trainer’s room, I developed a temporary belief and fear of voodoo magic.
Needless to say, I was a very impressionable and gullible kid back then, but none of these memories were remotely at all difficult to recollect, because the Ultimate Warrior was my favorite wrestler.
Back when I was in high school, and I was already educated and smarky about the business, my friends and I had already heard all the rumors and the jokes, about how the Ultimate Warrior was dead, and that they’ve had several different guys portraying him throughout the later years. We even ran with the joke for a spell, and came up with our own wild hypothetical scenario that somewhere out in the middle of nowhere (Parts Unknown) stood a temple, known as The Temple, where there were numerous men in robes who served there, and when an Ultimate Warrior died, a new robed man within the temple would pull back his hood, revealing a man with a wild hairdo and the iconic Ultimate Warrior face paint, thus giving birth to the next Ultimate Warrior; who would then emerge, enter the business and resume shaking ropes and giving incoherent babbling promos as his predecessors did.
But in reality, there weren’t multiple Ultimate Warriors, there was no The Temple, or no number of dead preceding Ultimate Warriors. (Yes, I know there’s a remark about the Ultimate Warrior WCW counterfeit AKA The Renegade, who is ironically dead as well.) There was always just one Ultimate Warrior, born James Hellwig, who later legally changed his name to Warrior, believing that it would give him legal right to the name over the WWE (which I’m not entirely sure if it worked), that ever existed.
And now, unfortunately, he is no longer with us.
I’ve written about lots of wrestlers who have passed in the past, and in most cases the basic message is the same: another wrestler gone way too early. At just 54 years old, the Ultimate Warrior falls into that category as well. Some wrestler deaths have been legitimately shocking (Benoit), most others are usually sentimental for ironic (Big Boss Man) or humorous (Viscera) reasons, and then there are some that are just plain tragically sad (Randy Savage, Eddie Guerrero), but I don’t not miss any one of those guys, and definitely feel empathy for their families for their losses.
But the passing of the Ultimate Warrior kind of encapsulates all of the above in his passing, because at least once, he fell into every one of those categories throughout his existence, and on top of that, he was my first-ever favorite wrestler as a kid, so it is somewhat notable to me that such an outrageously crazy character’s passing invokes some melancholy emotions.
Certainly, the circumstances behind his death are conveniently ready for skepticism, but in the end, I still think it’s a tragic freak accident, probably not aided by an abusive past lifestyle of steroids and other drugs that professional wrestlers were notorious for being associated with. He collapsed in a parking lot in the company of his wife, instead of being found dead in a hotel room with bottles of pills and booze strewn about, so I’d like to rule out the possibility of a planned suicide. But despite my knee-jerk reaction that something seemed amiss, I don’t think it was suicide, even if, in his last televised appearances, two days before his passing, he basically gave his own eulogy to a raucous New Orleans crowd.
Despite the fact that in more recent years, he seemed to harbor a lot of animosity towards all known past associates, be it wrestlers, promoters, Vince McMahon and Hulk Hogan to name a few, we can at least take solace in the fact that the last words he said to a public audience were coherent, gracious, and full of acknowledgement and gratitude that without us wrestling fans, the Ultimate Warrior would never have become the legend he was.
In conclusion: farewell Jim Hellwig, the Ultimate Warrior. You may have been a target of bad jokes, political disagreement, criticism over your performance capabilities and rambling promos, and questionability over your own identity and whether or not you had clones out there. But there’s no denying the fact that the day I became a wrestling fan, it was the Ultimate Warrior that I always admired the most, and the Ultimate Warrior has the dubious honor of having been my first-ever favorite wrestler.
Man, do I regret now not ever buying one of his paintings, full of inch-thick oils.
