At the heart of childhood is imagination — the ability to believe that something beyond the bounds of your ordinary comprehension is not just plausible, but undeniably true. This is one of the most remarkable gifts we are given as human beings, and it is so mercilessly bled from us as we grow older.
Which is why I sit here, saddened, at the passing of someone whose real name I did not know until minutes ago. The Ultimate Warrior was a character, created by a man named James Hellwig and crafted by the writers at the old World Wrestling Federation, the megalith of fictional sport.
According to police in Scottsdale, Ariz., he died Tuesday evening at the age of 54, collapsing while walking to his car with his wife outside an Arizona hotel. The cause of death was not immediately known — the police statement alluded to a “catastrophic medical condition” — but the decades of the hard pro wrestling lifestyle surely didn’t help.
The Ultimate Warrior did not compete in the same sense as a pitcher or linebacker or goalie. Nor did he purely act as if on Broadway or at the whim of a Stanley Kubrick behind a camera. No, what he did was some strange hybrid, some weird commingling of sport and stage performance that is uniquely American and uniquely of the late 20th century.
If you are of a certain age — now between 25 and 40 — wrestling was possibly a big part of your growing up. As a viewer, you had to give yourself over to the story, to the people and the plots, and invest in the entertainment. Above all, what the Warrior did that made him such an endearing character was that he entertained.
He was never the most gifted athlete, and his freakish physique was almost assuredly unnatural. At different points in his career, he lifted a 300-pound Hulk Hogan over his head; at another, 500-pound Andre the Giant. His signature move was the simplistic running clothesline, which is not to say it wasn’t exciting.
The character of the Warrior would often stare at his trembling, upturned palms and plead to them. He would look to the heavens for answers as though cursing cruel fate. He shook the ropes like a wild man when he entered the ring, a berserk behavior that matched the war paint on his face and his untamed, frizzed-out hair.
At one point, he became so popular that he was awarded — sorry, “won” — the heavyweight championship from Hogan at Wrestlemania VI in front of 67,678 watching at the SkyDome in Toronto and many more tuning in on pay-per-view television. By the next Wrestlemania, he was forced into a “retirement match” with “Macho Man” Randy Savage, which the Warrior won. Next came a feud with the Undertaker, which culminated in the Warrior being locked in a coffin, buried, and bitten by a cobra.
These were confusing days for me, a 6-year-old kid just old enough to know they didn’t really bury this man on television, but not quite sharp enough to understand why it happened. Goodness, the stories that capture your young mind, like a comic book come to life, and you’re allowed to live and breathe along with it.
The next week, Warrior wasn’t there. And for the rest of his career, Warrior would just come and go, with a dramatic re-emergence here or there, but the inconsistency eventually leading me away. Nothing was quite like the energy and intensity he first had. Nothing was quite like when he faced Hogan that first time, and my guy won.
According to some online bios, James Hellwig was born in Indiana on June 16, 1959, and was noticed in Tennessee as part of a bodybuilding quartet that included another soon-to-be-famous wrestler known as Sting.
He fought under the pseudonym “Blade Runner Rock” in the southeastern US in what were then known as wrestling territories — this in the world before Vince McMahon monopolized the sport. In 1986, he entered World Class Championship Wrestling and was renamed “Dingo Warrior” because one of the fellow wrestlers backstage thought he just, well, “looked like a warrior.”
He got his break with the then-WWF in 1987, and by 1990, he was the heavyweight champ.
And all of that, well, does it mean anything? I never met the man, never even got to see him live. By the time I was through middle school, I had all but abandoned my love for professional wrestling. I was unwittingly segueing into the world of adults, where pretend athletics is no athletics at all.
This Sunday was Wrestlemania XXX, and James Hellwig was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame. The following night, on the cable show “Raw,” he donned a bit of the old Warrior makeup and gave a guttural speech.
His words now ring eerie:
“Every man’s heart one day beats its final beat. His lungs breathe their final breath. And if that man did in his life what makes the blood pulse through the body of others, and makes them bleed deeper, [then] something larger than life, his essence, his spirit, will be immortalized — by the storytellers, by the loyalty, by the memory of those who honor him and make [what] the running the man did live forever.”
James Hellwig is dead, and he leaves behind a family. The Ultimate Warrior was nothing more than a character in a story — a story that was silly and melodramatic and based on some rehearsed dance moves.
Now I’m about to turn 30, working as a newspaper writer — a teller of stories myself, when I do my job right. It’s the most human thing there is to do, to relay to another person a sequence of events acted out by a group of people. Whether it’s factual or a figment of one’s imagination, scripted or spontaneous, a good story can bring people together because it gets the listener, the reader, the watcher, in touch with some inkling of the human condition.
We’re born with that imagination, with the ability to reach beyond everyday experience and believe in something otherworldly.
So I’m saddened as a person to hear that on Tuesday in Arizona, someone lost a husband and father.
But as a fan, as the kid who still lives inside me somewhere, I’m happy I got to experience the power of the Ultimate Warrior. It helped open my eyes to the power of stories, and for that, I’m forever grateful.