Eddie Guerrero

If you're not a pro wrestling fan, you might have heard about the death of Eddie Guerrero on Sunday and wondered what all the fuss was about. Wrestler deaths have become sadly routine over the years, but this one gained more traction in the mainstream media than most.

Wrestling has always been a unique blend of reality and illusion that no sport or entertainment vehicle will likely ever be able to match. Of course the results are staged and plots are scripted out months in advance. But the wrestlers who connect best with the audience have always been the ones who come across as real.

In a world of larger-than-life characters, Eddie Guerrero was distinctly a real, down-to-earth human being, with real strengths and real, well-known foibles. He wasn't much bigger than the people in the crowd. The audience knew Eddie wrestled under his real name. They knew he spent his entire life in wrestling. His father, Gori, was a wrestling legend in Mexico, and his older brothers -- Chavo, Mando, and Hector -- have been around the wrestling business so long that everyone knows the Guerrero name. They even knew that the current Chavo Guerrero was Chavo Jr., Eddie's nephew, and not his brother, as he was portrayed on TV.

They also knew of his personal battles with painkiller addiction -- a battle he's said to have kicked four years ago -- and with depression.

Eddie was a real person, like the audience, not a comic-book character.

And he was a person with an absolute unquenchable desire to be one of the greatest performers in the history of the industry. He might have never realized it, but it was a goal he achieved.

I've been watching wrestling just about my whole life, something I freely admit to, and Eddie was involved in what I consider to this day the single greatest wrestling performance I've ever seen. He was in a feature match on a Mexican wrestling pay-per-view event in Los Angeles at a sold-out Sports Arena in 1994. He and his bad-guy tag team partner, Art Barr, had never been given a real chance to get ahead in the American wrestling business, and they were determined to tear down the house for the national TV audience. Guerrero and Barr put on an absolute blowaway performance against opponents El Hijo Del Santo and Octagon that nearly caused a riot and had fans hopping the rails. Security barely kept a lid on things. It was unreal. Or was it all too real? That's the thing with wrestling.

Then there's my favorite memory of Eddie. A couple years back, the WWE sent him out to wrestle a string of small-time shows. This one was at the Quincy, MA National Guard Armory. Couldn't have been more than 400 people there. Eddie wrestled a three-way match with two local stiffs whose names I cannot remember. The crowd was happy to simply have a big name in their little gym and wouldn't have cared if he just showed up and went through the motions. But he put on a 20-minute clinic that had the local guys looking like superstars by the time he was done.

The fans left the building that night buzzing about the show Guerrero put on. With Eddie, it didn't matter if he was the headline act at Madison Square Garden or if he was at Podunk High -- if the people paid their money to see wrestling, he was going to give them their money's worth.

That's the highest real compliment you can pay a professional wrestler. But it also hints at the not-so-secret dark side of the industry, the one with the alarming body count. Remember Barr, Guerrero's partner from that 1994 show? He was dead nine days later at the age of 28 after a bad reaction to painkillers. Way too many wrestlers like Guerrero and Barr have gotten caught in a trap -- they're told they are "too small" to headline, so not only do they feel the pressure to get bigger, but many of them choose to perform a more legitimately physically punishing style in order to stand out, and end up on painkillers, and that doesn't even factor in the grind of being on the road 300 days a year. It is a combination that has caught up to way too many wrestlers over the past two decades.

Which might lead a non-wrestling fan to ask why anyone could support such a business. That's a valid question. It is one I ask myself every time wrestling's horrible side rears its ugly head. Right now, I don't have a good answer.