Did I write about “Superfly” Jimmy Snuka back when he was first convicted of manslaughter last year? [yes I did] I want to say I did, but I still have no means of cross-referencing my own prior posts to verify. It still kills me that I can’t, and adds to the cauldron of unhappiness that I’m dealing with on a daily basis. I want to say that I did, but I can’t with full certainty, but really it has everything to do with the corresponding photo and not necessarily the words I write, although there could very well be an overlap. Whatever
Anyway, I saw news about how Superfly now has terminal cancer in the stomach and has been given around six months left to live. This is pretty sad news for nostalgic old wrestling fans, and it doesn’t help that Big Van Vader just weeks ago was diagnosed with a failing heart and estimates that he has two years to live. Superstars of yesterday are meeting their maker today, in the most unfortunate of circumstances, due to in what will mostly likely be attributed to their younger years in an industry that had a tremendous amount of drug abuse and a sheer lack of concern over head, brain and other physical ailments.
However, given the circumstances that Superfly is under the legal gun and the primary suspect in the 1983 death of his then-girlfriend, I have to admit that my knee-jerk reaction to the news of his health as being one of skepticism and potential nonbelief. Whether it’s a strategic tactic to garner sympathy or pity so that a dying man is not sentenced to prison, or there’s an elaborate plan for Snuka to fake his death and then exile himself back to Fiji where he could presumably live out his life on the run, I have to say the timing of this “I’m dying” scenario is a little too convenient and atypical to the types of diseases or ailments that seem to emerge for anyone with a modicum of notoriety getting put on trial.
Or I could be a tremendous asshole, and Superfly really does have stomach cancer, really has six months left to live, and I’ll feel a little dirty when in May, an obituary for Jimmy Snuka shows up, and I’ll wax poetic about the first time I saw him on a Sunday edition of All-American Wrestling hosted by “Mean” Gene Okerlund, or how he was the first victim in the Undertaker’s Wrestlemania streak.
The thing is, I’m not the only one skeptical about the timing of all this fairly recent news of physical deterioration. Prosecutors involved in his manslaughter trial also seem to think it’s a little convenient that this is all breaking, now, and also think that Snuka might be faking it. Given all the studies and proof that older wrestlers are susceptible to brain damage and mental incompetence due to older lifestyles of drugs and chair shots, Superfly has evidence on his side, but that’s exactly probably why he’s subject to skepticism in the first place, thinking he can slink in and get lost in the crowd of all other former wrestlers who have gone incompetent and should more or less be left alone to live out their rapidly degrading lives.
The bottom line is that it’s sad that this is even a story in the first place, and no matter what the outcome of all this really is, it’s not going to be good. Either Superfly is branded a liar, forced to stand a stressful trial and potentially be found guilty and get sent to prison, he fakes his death and attempts to go hide out in Fiji or wherever he thinks he can live discreetly for the remainder of his life, or the cancer is true, and in six months is on his death bed. Regardless, the ending doesn’t look to be very good.
