Heart Punch Remembers Eddie Guerrero
The sudden death of popular WWE wrestler Eddie Guerrero left the world of wrestling in shock. No people more than the "smarks", the Internet fans like us for whom names like Guerrero and Benoit are measuring sticks for everything we love about Our Great Sport(tm Tony Schaivone.).
Heart Punch writers have come together for the site's first collective effort, sharing a few KB of thoughts on the one man who could lie, cheat, and steal...and be a huge babyface doing it.
-----
Shane Osman
Life is eternal; and love is immortal; and death is only a horizon; and a horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight. - R.W. Raymond
What it is it that makes a man worthy of the mantle of "hero?" Is it simply an extension of fame? That he has been blessed with so much talent he basically transcends his chosen profession, turning it into an art form? Is it the fact that the same man, apparently at the top of the world, is all too human, willingly walking down the wrong path only to realize (perhaps too late) that the hole he'd dug himself wasn't where he wanted to be? That he could stumble and fall so frequently, but pick himself up, dust himself off and keep moving forward, a mischievous grin on his face the entire time?
Eddy Guerrero embodied all of those things and yes, he was a hero. A hero to the race he so proudly represented. A hero to anyone who thought that they had thrown their lives away only to discover that it *is* possible to move on, regardless of what has happened to you. A hero to anyone who places importance in faith and family. A hero. Fallen.
I'm still at a loss as to what to write here. Not quite sure how I feel. I've said it time and again, but on some level I find it fairly ridiculous that the death of someone I've never met has hit me so hard. It's almost embarrassing. It still largely feels like someone kicked me in the gut every time I try to watch one of his matches. Eddy was one of those rare guys (like Flair, Bret, Rey, Benoit, etc.) who I would never even list as one of my favorite workers. It's a no brainer. Who doesn't like Eddy Guerrero? As I think about it more and more, it's not just his death that has shaken me up, but the loss of everything he represented.
Like Butch, I remember geeking out because Eddy was in the main event picture, but figured that he was basically filling time until they found a "money" feud for Brock. But then the impossible became possible and a man who had spent so many years busting his ass finally had a chance to live the dream. Some would claim that it was his birthright. And had he stayed in Mexico, it very likely would have been.
But instead of taking the easy path, he decided to build a name in Japan and then later in the US. His name meant nothing here. Instead he was just a guy who was "too small" to succeed. In some eyes, I'm sure he was "too Latino" to make it as well. But he turned negatives into positives, working a Lucha-influenced style that made him stand out among the typical cast of brawling heavyweights. He accentuated his heritage and became one of the most entertaining characters of the last ten years. He lied, he cheated, he stole and we loved him for it.
He certainly wasn't the typical everyman, but when he reached the top of the mountain, he represented us all the same. Goodbye, God bless and thank you.
Die happily and look forward to taking up a new and better form. Like the sun, only when you set in the west can you rise in the east. - Jelaluddin Rumi
------
Rob T
I cried.I didn't even realize it, but when I looked at Heart Punch and saw that graphic...before it even really hit me, tears were brimming in my eyes.
The first instinct was disbelief. After all, it was Chris Gates posting it. :) Wrestlingobserver.com. There's the headline. WWE.com. Maybe Dave got some bad info....there's the graphic. The first step is always denial....
I could say all the things about Eddie and his career that a lot of people have touched on. There were a lot of Eddie memories that make me smile. I'm sure you'll see plenty of that in this tribute. I could spend quite a while on just his pre-WWE stuff (some of which a lot of you, like the Basketball later on, haven't seen.). But I'm gonna take this in a bit of a different direction.
It hit me hard, as I noted at the start. I've kind of been pondering why the loss of a man I knew only on the Silver Screen mattered that much to me. Then Shane, in discussing the setup of this tribute, verbalized what I'd been thinking quite a bit: I seriously feel worse about the death of someone I never met than I have about the deaths of some people that I knew my entire life. Can't explain that at all....
So why is that?
I thought a lot about it, and my answer is this: Eddie fell down. Drugs got the better of him. He injured himself in his first match in the WWE, doing his frog splash. He lost his partner, Art Barr, sadly and ironically the exact same way he would eventually die: dropping dead in a hotel room due to issues related to an enlarged heart.
Everyone battles adversity.
Eddie Guerrero beat it. Not only beat it, but made it his bitch the day he stood on the biggest stage in his business and held the World Title over his head. Celebrating in a massive stream of confetti along with his best friend (Chris Benoit, who is a different kind of hero - but that's a story for another day).
Made it his bitch that day....fatefully, just a few days before he passed on...when he celebrated four years of being clean.
In doing that, he bought hope to everyone who has or would fall into the depths.
Eddie Guerrero was an inspiration to us. To me, to Shane, to millions of his fans.
And he was a quiet one - he just cleaned himself up, came to work, put his family back together, and was eventually rewarded with wrestling's ultimate honor. To overcome and live and perform with the joy Eddie did....
That's living. Is there anyone who would not have traded places with Eddy during those final moments of Wrestlemania 20?
Liar. (Eddie would have been proud!)
ORALE VATO! Rest in peace, Eduardo Gory Guerrero. You are gone but certainly not forgotten.
----
Matt Spaulding
Truth be told, Eddie Guerrero wasn't my favorite wrestler at first.
But that's only because I hadn't seen much of him.
I think the first time I really noticed him that I remember was back in 1999 during the quasi-legendary Revolution vs. Filthy Animals feud. Even then, I was only seeing him work — he wasn't really getting a chance to show off that magnetic charisma I'd heard about. And I was only hearing about most of these things that I hadn't seen — the series with Dean Malenko in ECW, the nuclear heat he and Art Barr got (I have When Worlds Collide but have never watched it. Shameful), the car accident that he was coming back from that, by all rights, should have killed him. But it wasn't until he made the jump to the WWF in 2000 with the Radicalz that I began to appreciate just how good he was... and how seemingly star-crossed his life had been. Getting hurt in his first match doing his signature move? An awful break, and one that he seemed to have more than his fair share of.
What sold me on realizing "This guy's good" was what he was able to do after that. It was during a Radicalz tag match — it might have been the six-man at No Way Out 2000 — and Eddie was ringside with the guys, arm in a sling, and the biggest chant coming from the crowd?
"EDDIE SUCKS! EDDIE SUCKS!"
What was this? This was madness to me. The man wasn't even in the match and he was getting the biggest reaction out there. You looked at Eddie with his mullet and the barely detectible sneer on his face, and the man just looked like a shady character. He knew how to be a heel, he knew how to get heat. He was given the European Title as soon as he got healthy, and won match after match with deviousness, daring, and just plain dickishness. The thing was, he was so damn good at what he did and how he did it that you had to respect him, even if you were supposed to be booing him out of the building. As Ric Flair said to him on Raw once, “You are so cool.”
Cool enough to help bring honest-to-goodness wrestling back to the WWF.
Cool enough to win the Intercontinental Title a month after returning to the WWE from rehab.
Cool enough to turn lying, cheating and stealing into a crowd-pleasing act.
Cool enough to become arguably the most unlikely WWE Champion in history.
Whatever pain Eddie was ever in, you couldn’t see it when he was performing. He was one of the ones who you could tell just by looking at him that he loved what he was doing, loved being in the moment. You hear recovering addicts talk about that, about how the recovery’s never fully complete, about how it’s a day-to-day struggle. How it’s about moments, and getting through moments.
Eddie had a way that only the very best do of making moments mean something. My favorite Eddie moments were his promos building up to the WWE Title match in February 2004. I couldn’t tell you a single word he said. What I remember is the emotion he conveyed. Even something as real as where he had come from to get to that point could fall flat in the wrong hands. Making it work would have been difficult enough. Eddie didn’t just make it work, he brought it to another level.
Eddie Guerrero became my favorite wrestler.
And even though he’s gone, I’ll always remember what made him my favorite.
And I’ll smile, knowing that he’s finally at peace.
---
Max Chittister
My grandmother died about three years ago. I was very
close to her, and miss her terribly. So every so
often, when I can scrape together the money, I go to a
psychic in San Francisco to try to get in touch with
her.
Don't look at me like that; I believe that people can
communicate with their dead loved ones, and this
psychic's helped me talk to Grammy several times in
the last year.
I went last night, and the psychic made contact with
her really quickly. She was pretty excited about
something, so I asked her what it was. She said that
she was thrilled because she'd just gone to the halo
polisher.
"The halo polisher?" I asked.
"Yes. I met the nicest man who told me that my halo
was starting to look a bit dingy, and he'd be happy to
polish it up nice and shiny for me. So I gave him my
halo, and he said that I'd have it back by next
Thursday, or Friday at the latest. Isn't that sweet?"
You do realize what this means, right?
Fuckin' Eddy Guerrero stole my Grammy's halo.
---
Butch Rosser
I saw Eddy Guerrero, and thought maybe Telemundo had rerun SmackDown. Since I'd missed it going to see JiM, I was psyched.
Then I saw it was the news station.
The last wrestler I saw on the news was Owen Hart.
I've been watching that cursor blink for 3 minutes trying to get my head right. It's why I'm not watching RAW right now--the last time I cried before the terrorists was RAW is OWEN and I'd much rather not have history repeat itself. I keep thinking maybe I can unlearn what I know, that maybe if I don't watch, Eddy will be all right. I know it's wrong. I still hope I'm right.
What it is, is that Eddy Guerrero was a perfect wrestler.
I love watching Samoa Joe hit the shit out of people. I hope I never hear him talk. It'd sort of ruin things for me.
I love watching Monty Brown cut a promo. Oh, sure, it's bingo: Alpha Male Serengeti POOOUUUUUUUNNNNNNCEEEEEEE....period. I don't want to see him wrestle a match longer than 2 minutes.
Eddy...
Eddy was a whole different story. Eddy would make you care about the match. Then he'd go out and put out a good one. If you were lucky, it'd be a great one.
It didn't matter which side of the coin Eddy was on, either. In fact, towards...what's the end. Shit. Jesus. Towards the end he was working with Batista. The plan was originally for Eddy to play babyface and turn even more dickish heel. There was only one problem: nobody wanted to boo Eddy Guerrero. So they remained an Odd Couple tag team. In fact, Eddie might've been set to win the injured Batista's title last night due to the big man's injury.
Who knows. Who can say.
Eddy was so popular he had to pick on the smallest wrestler on the roster and go after his family to get jeered. And that was only by most--people still cheered, anyway. It was Eddy, for god's sakes. What sort of self-respecting fan who thinks independently is going to boo a wrestling god like Eddy Guerrero?
It started with one simple, shirt-friendly motto.
Lie, Cheat, and Steal: It's A Family Tradition.
So he and his cousin Chavo--before he became that thing that he is now--did. They did all 3 of these things. A funny thing happened on the way to heel heaven: the fans began cheering. Both of them deserved credit, but it was usually Eddy leading the charge. Whacking the opponent with the chair, then ditching it and pretending he got hit, too. Throwing them the foreign object and holding his head so they'd get DQed. Fake clap tags. Tight-pulling. Fake injuries, fake illness. It was hilarious. It was brilliant. This is how they evened the odds. And after a while, nobody cared about them being "bad". It was all about what were they going to get away with next. And how? Had we seen it? Was there going to be some new trick out of the bag to knock us all on our ass? It was great.
Jump a couple months. For the first time, Eddy got pushed as a #1 contender. We all thought the same thing. "It'd be cool. But it'd never happen in a million years."
I was busy with my first date that night when I got home and found out.
15 minutes past a million years.
Little Eddie Guerrero was the WWE Champion.
WCW had screwed him over, and the WWE hadn't done much better by him despite the beloved Latino Heat character. But Eddie Guerrero was the WWE Champion?
Anything and everything seemed possible now. A world where I dated and Eddy was allowed to run with the ball--what an age we lived in. It was rumored he'd cracked due to the strees and his daily fight against alcohol and drugs he'd been in since '01, but it didn't stop us from loving Eddy any less, didn't stop us from watching his matches--
--and this is what kills me. I saw Los Guerreros once, against the World's Greatest Tag Team. December '03, if I'm remembering right. They were slowly turning Chavo heel, but as of tonight Eddy was still riding shotgun in the lowrider with him. Chavo started the match.
And everybody--everybody--was chanting for Eddy. Of course we were. We were just a wrestling crowd; that was Eddie Fucking Guerrero standing on that apron, in the heart of the real new Mexico. And Eddy, as he always did, made the crowd work for him. He looked out at us.
He began to chant for Chavo.
What else could we do? Us, wrestling crowd. He, Eddie. We chanted for Chavo. And then, some group came up with an entirely different tactic. I remember it for the innovation. I remember it for the uniqueness, because I never heard another crowd chant it. I remember how perfect it was on both the level of the match and in the long-term storyline.
We chanted...for Guerrero.
In my mind's eye, I see a lot of Eddie right now. I should be crying. It just makes me smile, honestly. I remember the smirk, the evil look he had on his way to the epic Halloween Havoc match against Rey where he was getting nuclear heat--because that's what the news showed last night--, the Scarface-style shirt I got after that date didn't lead to a happy ending (THANK YOU, BEN MORROW), the Guerreros coming down to the ring in the Sports Arena, the slingshot senton bomb...
...and the last thing.
...during Vengeance a few years back ('03?), Rhyno had run down to the ring. Instead of spearing Eddy, he speared his then-partner and longtime friend of Eddy Chris Benoit. Eddy covered up as much as he could, suddenly realized he hadn't been hit. Rhyno roared. Eddy shirked back in fear two steps. Rhyno left. Eddy looked at Rhyno departing, looked down at Benoit (still down), then looked at the center camera and gave a perfect "Fuck it, I'll take it" look complete with shrug. All those little things made Eddy awesome. But even more than that I remember now, is him flying through the air with the frog splash.
Once upon a time, Eddy had partnered with a man named Art Barr. They were the biggest heels in Mexico, quite possibly in lucha history. Eddy turned heel and renounced his heritage. This wasn't America, where our idea of getting back at you is a sign and the word "BOO!"--this is fucking Mexico, where lucha is treated like a sport, and little old ladies swing purses at you when you fall in the front row and their grandsons, if they're feeling particularly vengeful, come at you with a knife.
One day before a show, they called Art Barr's hotel room.
He didn't answer either.
They found him dead, too.
32.
That's obscene.
Enlarged heart, too.
After his death, Eddy changed finishers.
Rob got higher. D'Lo got more air.
But nobody ever, ever, did the frog splash better than Eddy Guerrero.
What happened to his partner happened to him, you could think. But Eddy at least got to taste the fruit of his labor. He got to shine. And we all loved him for it.
All I know, is that if heaven exists, Eddy and Owen are making the most devious tag team in wrestling history in the ring and laughing with the angels outside of it.
I guess what I'm saying is I should pick up Cheating Death, Stealing Life.
Because the obvious is sort of hard. Eddy was one more for playing on subtleties.
---
Heart Punch writers have come together for the site's first collective effort, sharing a few KB of thoughts on the one man who could lie, cheat, and steal...and be a huge babyface doing it.
-----
Shane Osman
Life is eternal; and love is immortal; and death is only a horizon; and a horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight. - R.W. Raymond
What it is it that makes a man worthy of the mantle of "hero?" Is it simply an extension of fame? That he has been blessed with so much talent he basically transcends his chosen profession, turning it into an art form? Is it the fact that the same man, apparently at the top of the world, is all too human, willingly walking down the wrong path only to realize (perhaps too late) that the hole he'd dug himself wasn't where he wanted to be? That he could stumble and fall so frequently, but pick himself up, dust himself off and keep moving forward, a mischievous grin on his face the entire time?
Eddy Guerrero embodied all of those things and yes, he was a hero. A hero to the race he so proudly represented. A hero to anyone who thought that they had thrown their lives away only to discover that it *is* possible to move on, regardless of what has happened to you. A hero to anyone who places importance in faith and family. A hero. Fallen.
I'm still at a loss as to what to write here. Not quite sure how I feel. I've said it time and again, but on some level I find it fairly ridiculous that the death of someone I've never met has hit me so hard. It's almost embarrassing. It still largely feels like someone kicked me in the gut every time I try to watch one of his matches. Eddy was one of those rare guys (like Flair, Bret, Rey, Benoit, etc.) who I would never even list as one of my favorite workers. It's a no brainer. Who doesn't like Eddy Guerrero? As I think about it more and more, it's not just his death that has shaken me up, but the loss of everything he represented.
Like Butch, I remember geeking out because Eddy was in the main event picture, but figured that he was basically filling time until they found a "money" feud for Brock. But then the impossible became possible and a man who had spent so many years busting his ass finally had a chance to live the dream. Some would claim that it was his birthright. And had he stayed in Mexico, it very likely would have been.
But instead of taking the easy path, he decided to build a name in Japan and then later in the US. His name meant nothing here. Instead he was just a guy who was "too small" to succeed. In some eyes, I'm sure he was "too Latino" to make it as well. But he turned negatives into positives, working a Lucha-influenced style that made him stand out among the typical cast of brawling heavyweights. He accentuated his heritage and became one of the most entertaining characters of the last ten years. He lied, he cheated, he stole and we loved him for it.
He certainly wasn't the typical everyman, but when he reached the top of the mountain, he represented us all the same. Goodbye, God bless and thank you.
Die happily and look forward to taking up a new and better form. Like the sun, only when you set in the west can you rise in the east. - Jelaluddin Rumi
------
Rob T
I cried.I didn't even realize it, but when I looked at Heart Punch and saw that graphic...before it even really hit me, tears were brimming in my eyes.
The first instinct was disbelief. After all, it was Chris Gates posting it. :) Wrestlingobserver.com. There's the headline. WWE.com. Maybe Dave got some bad info....there's the graphic. The first step is always denial....
I could say all the things about Eddie and his career that a lot of people have touched on. There were a lot of Eddie memories that make me smile. I'm sure you'll see plenty of that in this tribute. I could spend quite a while on just his pre-WWE stuff (some of which a lot of you, like the Basketball later on, haven't seen.). But I'm gonna take this in a bit of a different direction.
It hit me hard, as I noted at the start. I've kind of been pondering why the loss of a man I knew only on the Silver Screen mattered that much to me. Then Shane, in discussing the setup of this tribute, verbalized what I'd been thinking quite a bit: I seriously feel worse about the death of someone I never met than I have about the deaths of some people that I knew my entire life. Can't explain that at all....
So why is that?
I thought a lot about it, and my answer is this: Eddie fell down. Drugs got the better of him. He injured himself in his first match in the WWE, doing his frog splash. He lost his partner, Art Barr, sadly and ironically the exact same way he would eventually die: dropping dead in a hotel room due to issues related to an enlarged heart.
Everyone battles adversity.
Eddie Guerrero beat it. Not only beat it, but made it his bitch the day he stood on the biggest stage in his business and held the World Title over his head. Celebrating in a massive stream of confetti along with his best friend (Chris Benoit, who is a different kind of hero - but that's a story for another day).
Made it his bitch that day....fatefully, just a few days before he passed on...when he celebrated four years of being clean.
In doing that, he bought hope to everyone who has or would fall into the depths.
Eddie Guerrero was an inspiration to us. To me, to Shane, to millions of his fans.
And he was a quiet one - he just cleaned himself up, came to work, put his family back together, and was eventually rewarded with wrestling's ultimate honor. To overcome and live and perform with the joy Eddie did....
That's living. Is there anyone who would not have traded places with Eddy during those final moments of Wrestlemania 20?
Liar. (Eddie would have been proud!)
ORALE VATO! Rest in peace, Eduardo Gory Guerrero. You are gone but certainly not forgotten.
----
Matt Spaulding
Truth be told, Eddie Guerrero wasn't my favorite wrestler at first.
But that's only because I hadn't seen much of him.
I think the first time I really noticed him that I remember was back in 1999 during the quasi-legendary Revolution vs. Filthy Animals feud. Even then, I was only seeing him work — he wasn't really getting a chance to show off that magnetic charisma I'd heard about. And I was only hearing about most of these things that I hadn't seen — the series with Dean Malenko in ECW, the nuclear heat he and Art Barr got (I have When Worlds Collide but have never watched it. Shameful), the car accident that he was coming back from that, by all rights, should have killed him. But it wasn't until he made the jump to the WWF in 2000 with the Radicalz that I began to appreciate just how good he was... and how seemingly star-crossed his life had been. Getting hurt in his first match doing his signature move? An awful break, and one that he seemed to have more than his fair share of.
What sold me on realizing "This guy's good" was what he was able to do after that. It was during a Radicalz tag match — it might have been the six-man at No Way Out 2000 — and Eddie was ringside with the guys, arm in a sling, and the biggest chant coming from the crowd?
"EDDIE SUCKS! EDDIE SUCKS!"
What was this? This was madness to me. The man wasn't even in the match and he was getting the biggest reaction out there. You looked at Eddie with his mullet and the barely detectible sneer on his face, and the man just looked like a shady character. He knew how to be a heel, he knew how to get heat. He was given the European Title as soon as he got healthy, and won match after match with deviousness, daring, and just plain dickishness. The thing was, he was so damn good at what he did and how he did it that you had to respect him, even if you were supposed to be booing him out of the building. As Ric Flair said to him on Raw once, “You are so cool.”
Cool enough to help bring honest-to-goodness wrestling back to the WWF.
Cool enough to win the Intercontinental Title a month after returning to the WWE from rehab.
Cool enough to turn lying, cheating and stealing into a crowd-pleasing act.
Cool enough to become arguably the most unlikely WWE Champion in history.
Whatever pain Eddie was ever in, you couldn’t see it when he was performing. He was one of the ones who you could tell just by looking at him that he loved what he was doing, loved being in the moment. You hear recovering addicts talk about that, about how the recovery’s never fully complete, about how it’s a day-to-day struggle. How it’s about moments, and getting through moments.
Eddie had a way that only the very best do of making moments mean something. My favorite Eddie moments were his promos building up to the WWE Title match in February 2004. I couldn’t tell you a single word he said. What I remember is the emotion he conveyed. Even something as real as where he had come from to get to that point could fall flat in the wrong hands. Making it work would have been difficult enough. Eddie didn’t just make it work, he brought it to another level.
Eddie Guerrero became my favorite wrestler.
And even though he’s gone, I’ll always remember what made him my favorite.
And I’ll smile, knowing that he’s finally at peace.
---
Max Chittister
My grandmother died about three years ago. I was very
close to her, and miss her terribly. So every so
often, when I can scrape together the money, I go to a
psychic in San Francisco to try to get in touch with
her.
Don't look at me like that; I believe that people can
communicate with their dead loved ones, and this
psychic's helped me talk to Grammy several times in
the last year.
I went last night, and the psychic made contact with
her really quickly. She was pretty excited about
something, so I asked her what it was. She said that
she was thrilled because she'd just gone to the halo
polisher.
"The halo polisher?" I asked.
"Yes. I met the nicest man who told me that my halo
was starting to look a bit dingy, and he'd be happy to
polish it up nice and shiny for me. So I gave him my
halo, and he said that I'd have it back by next
Thursday, or Friday at the latest. Isn't that sweet?"
You do realize what this means, right?
Fuckin' Eddy Guerrero stole my Grammy's halo.
---
Butch Rosser
I saw Eddy Guerrero, and thought maybe Telemundo had rerun SmackDown. Since I'd missed it going to see JiM, I was psyched.
Then I saw it was the news station.
The last wrestler I saw on the news was Owen Hart.
I've been watching that cursor blink for 3 minutes trying to get my head right. It's why I'm not watching RAW right now--the last time I cried before the terrorists was RAW is OWEN and I'd much rather not have history repeat itself. I keep thinking maybe I can unlearn what I know, that maybe if I don't watch, Eddy will be all right. I know it's wrong. I still hope I'm right.
What it is, is that Eddy Guerrero was a perfect wrestler.
I love watching Samoa Joe hit the shit out of people. I hope I never hear him talk. It'd sort of ruin things for me.
I love watching Monty Brown cut a promo. Oh, sure, it's bingo: Alpha Male Serengeti POOOUUUUUUUNNNNNNCEEEEEEE....period. I don't want to see him wrestle a match longer than 2 minutes.
Eddy...
Eddy was a whole different story. Eddy would make you care about the match. Then he'd go out and put out a good one. If you were lucky, it'd be a great one.
It didn't matter which side of the coin Eddy was on, either. In fact, towards...what's the end. Shit. Jesus. Towards the end he was working with Batista. The plan was originally for Eddy to play babyface and turn even more dickish heel. There was only one problem: nobody wanted to boo Eddy Guerrero. So they remained an Odd Couple tag team. In fact, Eddie might've been set to win the injured Batista's title last night due to the big man's injury.
Who knows. Who can say.
Eddy was so popular he had to pick on the smallest wrestler on the roster and go after his family to get jeered. And that was only by most--people still cheered, anyway. It was Eddy, for god's sakes. What sort of self-respecting fan who thinks independently is going to boo a wrestling god like Eddy Guerrero?
It started with one simple, shirt-friendly motto.
Lie, Cheat, and Steal: It's A Family Tradition.
So he and his cousin Chavo--before he became that thing that he is now--did. They did all 3 of these things. A funny thing happened on the way to heel heaven: the fans began cheering. Both of them deserved credit, but it was usually Eddy leading the charge. Whacking the opponent with the chair, then ditching it and pretending he got hit, too. Throwing them the foreign object and holding his head so they'd get DQed. Fake clap tags. Tight-pulling. Fake injuries, fake illness. It was hilarious. It was brilliant. This is how they evened the odds. And after a while, nobody cared about them being "bad". It was all about what were they going to get away with next. And how? Had we seen it? Was there going to be some new trick out of the bag to knock us all on our ass? It was great.
Jump a couple months. For the first time, Eddy got pushed as a #1 contender. We all thought the same thing. "It'd be cool. But it'd never happen in a million years."
I was busy with my first date that night when I got home and found out.
15 minutes past a million years.
Little Eddie Guerrero was the WWE Champion.
WCW had screwed him over, and the WWE hadn't done much better by him despite the beloved Latino Heat character. But Eddie Guerrero was the WWE Champion?
Anything and everything seemed possible now. A world where I dated and Eddy was allowed to run with the ball--what an age we lived in. It was rumored he'd cracked due to the strees and his daily fight against alcohol and drugs he'd been in since '01, but it didn't stop us from loving Eddy any less, didn't stop us from watching his matches--
--and this is what kills me. I saw Los Guerreros once, against the World's Greatest Tag Team. December '03, if I'm remembering right. They were slowly turning Chavo heel, but as of tonight Eddy was still riding shotgun in the lowrider with him. Chavo started the match.
And everybody--everybody--was chanting for Eddy. Of course we were. We were just a wrestling crowd; that was Eddie Fucking Guerrero standing on that apron, in the heart of the real new Mexico. And Eddy, as he always did, made the crowd work for him. He looked out at us.
He began to chant for Chavo.
What else could we do? Us, wrestling crowd. He, Eddie. We chanted for Chavo. And then, some group came up with an entirely different tactic. I remember it for the innovation. I remember it for the uniqueness, because I never heard another crowd chant it. I remember how perfect it was on both the level of the match and in the long-term storyline.
We chanted...for Guerrero.
In my mind's eye, I see a lot of Eddie right now. I should be crying. It just makes me smile, honestly. I remember the smirk, the evil look he had on his way to the epic Halloween Havoc match against Rey where he was getting nuclear heat--because that's what the news showed last night--, the Scarface-style shirt I got after that date didn't lead to a happy ending (THANK YOU, BEN MORROW), the Guerreros coming down to the ring in the Sports Arena, the slingshot senton bomb...
...and the last thing.
...during Vengeance a few years back ('03?), Rhyno had run down to the ring. Instead of spearing Eddy, he speared his then-partner and longtime friend of Eddy Chris Benoit. Eddy covered up as much as he could, suddenly realized he hadn't been hit. Rhyno roared. Eddy shirked back in fear two steps. Rhyno left. Eddy looked at Rhyno departing, looked down at Benoit (still down), then looked at the center camera and gave a perfect "Fuck it, I'll take it" look complete with shrug. All those little things made Eddy awesome. But even more than that I remember now, is him flying through the air with the frog splash.
Once upon a time, Eddy had partnered with a man named Art Barr. They were the biggest heels in Mexico, quite possibly in lucha history. Eddy turned heel and renounced his heritage. This wasn't America, where our idea of getting back at you is a sign and the word "BOO!"--this is fucking Mexico, where lucha is treated like a sport, and little old ladies swing purses at you when you fall in the front row and their grandsons, if they're feeling particularly vengeful, come at you with a knife.
One day before a show, they called Art Barr's hotel room.
He didn't answer either.
They found him dead, too.
32.
That's obscene.
Enlarged heart, too.
After his death, Eddy changed finishers.
Rob got higher. D'Lo got more air.
But nobody ever, ever, did the frog splash better than Eddy Guerrero.
What happened to his partner happened to him, you could think. But Eddy at least got to taste the fruit of his labor. He got to shine. And we all loved him for it.
All I know, is that if heaven exists, Eddy and Owen are making the most devious tag team in wrestling history in the ring and laughing with the angels outside of it.
I guess what I'm saying is I should pick up Cheating Death, Stealing Life.
Because the obvious is sort of hard. Eddy was one more for playing on subtleties.
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