Impetus: WWE legend Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka found guilty for third-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter for the death of an ex-girlfriend back in 1983.
My knee-jerk reaction to this story was the fact that a case that was 32 years old was restarted, ultimately leading to the arrest of Snuka. 32 years. That’s insane. I’m 33 years old, meaning that this incident occurred when I was just a year old. While I’m still sucking my thumb and crawling around on the floor, Jimmy Snuka might have allegedly been assaulting women when he wasn’t fake-assaulting men in leopard-print underwear tights.
I’m obviously no expert in the legal system, but isn’t there supposed to be a statute of limitation or something? Like, some things can fall so far back in the past, that they get to a point where they actually can’t be fired back up? Not that I’m saying I didn’t want to see Superfly get arrested, quite the contrary, regardless of where they are in my memories, criminal activity should be rectified; but I just was puzzled that something over three decades old, was still fair game to reopen investigation.
Either way, I find it disheartening to hear this news. It’s easy for anyone to say that they were big fans of Superfly right now, because he’s (fairly) prominent news, but the truth is that as far as my interest in professional wrestling goes, there is a special place for Jimmy Snuka for me.
Chalk it up to one of those weird moments of elephant-memory clarity, but without any ambiguity, I do remember that the first ever professional wrestling match I ever saw was a Superfly match. It was Superfly versus Black Bart. It was on All-American Wrestling, on a Sunday afternoon, after my family and I had come back home from Catholic church. Being my first match ever, I didn’t realize that the formula back then was Superstar versus jobber, and I had no idea which one was the Superstar, and which one was the jobber. Naturally, such became clearer when Superfly hit the big splash and won the match.
I remembered watching Wrestlemania VII, when Superfly took on the Undertaker. Obviously, knowing the time of when this took place, it’s easy to figure out that the Undertaker was going to win this one very easily, which he did, but it’s also in this particular match that the infamous Undertaker Streak began, where he would then proceed to go twenty more Wrestlemanias without losing, before finally losing to Brock Lesnar a year ago. My memories of this particular match was that the WWF cameramen found Macauley Culkin in the crowd, looking scared out of his piss, same as most impressional children were back in 1990. And that Superfly was wearing boots, which was something he did not do for the better part of the previous decade. He got squashed, to no surprise, getting in a grand total of maybe two headbutts in as his only offense of the match.
The point is, Superfly was a large part of those formative years of wrestling watching; I’m not going to pretend like I was the greatest Superfly fan on the planet, but I certainly do remember his presence, and as I got older, and sought out histories and stories of the past, did I learn more about Jimmy Snuka, like his insane jumping off the top of a cage against Don Muraco, in video clips that are mostly always shown in black and white. Or that if you really dug deep into the lineage of ECW, it’s revealed that Jimmy Snuka was the very first ECW World Heavyweight champion; back when ECW stood for Eastern Championship Wrestling, before Shane Douglas took it Extreme.
Little did I ever stop to think about the man behind the character, nor did I really believe that a guy that was pretty much a face portrayal throughout his entire career, was capable of such horrific things. I’ll be the first to admit that it’s surprising to see that Mr. Good Guy Superfly had in him, but upon thinking about it, as well as a long history of having read autobiographies of wrestlers from the 80s, it’s not really that surprising that drugs, alcohol, wrestling groupies, would lead to these kind of unfortunate events.
I guess what I’m really getting at is that the actions of Superfly are really surprising, disappointing, and most certainly unfortunate. Not that it’s anything to brag about, but with this revelation, I can say that I’ve met now, two wrestlers, who turned out to be murderers (I met Chris Benoit in 2006, years before he murdered his wife and son before killing himself).
The worst part about that statistic is that I really haven’t met that many wrestlers.
The picture above was back in like 2007 or something, when Superfly, along with a few other wrestlers from the 80s and 90s appeared at an event which featured a Christian wrestling federation, with a Stryper concert in between matches. I remember running into Superfly outside of Atlanta’s Center Stage, and how friendly and affable he was, and willing and accommodating to take a picture with a child of the 80s. Naturally, I was more excited to have met a legend of reminiscence, but completely oblivious to the demons he was harboring in the closet. And now, it’s kind of a tainted picture. 🙁
