R.I.P Brian Pillman (20 Years Ago)

[auph10imitated]

Gutted I missed posting this thread yesterday and I cant see that anyone else has, apologies if there is but threads move so fast. 5th October 1997 stands out for me as not only was it the first death of an active competitor (I did watch when Joey Marella passed away but the referee's to me at that age pretty much meant nothing) so this was unbelievably shocking to me, especially as Pillam had fast become of my favourites and I was loving the Godust & Marlena story line at the time. It was so surreal, almost like a family member, which at 14 I had not experienced. I remember thinking about it all that day at school, that whole week in fact. The PPV felt so dark like a black cloud hanging over it, same with the following RAW.

R.I.P Brian.

[Squirrel Master]

A healthy Brian Pillman would still be at or near the top today. R.I.P. Flyin' Brian.

[cjb01: Limited Edition Item!]

You think he'd still be wrestling now or still around the business? I'd say he would have kept going at a high rate as long as he could.

I'll never forget that McMahon interview with his Wife the day after on RAW, has to be one of the most tragic and awkward things they ever signed off on doing... like seriously I know it was a breaking news story and you wanted information but that woman was in no condition to answer any questions... as she logically wouldn't have been!

[Pushed to the Moon]

Jericho has a special podcast today talking to Meltzer about him. Sounds like his ankle was totally messed up from his car accident so I'm not sure how long he'd have been able to keep wrestling.

[Deleted]

It’s a shame his body failed him when everything else clicked he was perfect for the attitude era and in a perfect world he should have been an Austin opponent for years to come but in reality he was a wreck and had to bump on his face.The guy was super creative and could have been involved behind the scenes for years to come or he could have been a great announcer if he put his mind to it.I always loved Pillman he’s one of my all-time favorites during the years I’ve been a fan.

[alexwrightspackage]

Man...a non-injured, Loose Cannon Pillman would've been great. I imagine some early 2000s matches b/w him, Kurt, Benoit, Jericho and Edge could've been fun. Dunno if he would've reached Rock/Austin levels, but then, I didn't think HHH would consistently main event either (regardless of how he did).

[government mule]

Interviewing Melanie with the intent of trying to exhonerate the WWF from as little blame as possible the day after the tragedy is still the scummiest thing Vince has ever done.

If Pillman could have performed to the level of his 'Flying Brian' days in the WWF, I think he could have main evented. I supposed the injury forced him to do something different, but his character in the WWF and his ring work in WCW would have been perfect.

[Totorob101]

In Ring he was great until injuries took their toll, his persona was amazing, crazy as hell which would have worked brilliantly during the peak of the attitude era but he was sadly taken from us far to soon, such a damn shame.

[HisRoyalGreeness]

Pillman was one of my favorites at the time and I was really broken up when I heard he passed. I was just watching Badd Blood yesterday and realized that WWE definitely got better with dealing with the death of an active wrestler. Seeing Vince bring it up on the show a few times was rough. I've been following Brian Jr. on Instagram and he started training with Lance Storm so it probably won't be long before we see what he can do. He definitely has the look and the personality.

[ratingskiller8]

Pillman was a very good talent.

If he was around today he would be the best full time talent along with Orton. It was harder to stand out 20 years ago due to the vast array of talent working in WWF and WCW. Today's WWE roster is a joke in comparison.

[auph10imitated]

His Observer Obituary

It would be convenient to label the death of Brian Pillman from an apparent heart attack at the age of 35 as another in the unfortunately long line of tragedies within the industry and then go on to the next chapter.

The death, at first believed to be from an accidental overdose of prescription pain killers, was after further examination believed to be from a heart attack while he was sleeping with a theory that the pain killers he had taken may have kept him from awakening which resulted in him dying in his sleep. Medical examiners found heart damage, some of which was congenital. He had a family history of heart problems including his father dying from a heart attack at the age of 50 when he was only three months old. Police Sgt. Jim Ryan said an overdose of the prescription drugs is one possibility as to the cause of the heart attack but no official determination can be made until toxicology reports are completed which was expected to be later in the week.

It's a death, more than any other at least since the almost unavoidable Von Erich family tribulations, that is going to cause a lot of people to go through a lot of unpleasant introspection.

There is the industry itself. After all, this isn't the first and won't be the last death of a young man leaving behind a family of young children. There is the World Wrestling Federation, the company that employed him learning of the tragedy literally minutes before going on the air live and a group of wrestlers and office personnel were forced to try to postpone their collective grief for a few hours and try put on an entertaining show with a happy face on. The death of any star wrestler is a tragedy. Finding out about it in regards to the timing only made a terrible situation that much worse. And there are his friends. Their grief itself had to be multiplied many times over because of feeling, whether justified or not, that this didn't really come out of the blue and there were scary warning signs known best to those closest to him. It isn't as if any of his problems were ignored, or anyone attempted to have them swept under the rug because of his star status. There is a question that is bound to be asked questioning how everything was handled based on the end result. Perhaps if the situation was handled perfectly, the end result could have been different, and perhaps, based on the cause of death, that isn't the case. It also could be easy and convenient to blame the industry and even the company, but it also wouldn't be fair. When Melanie Pillman stated on television that he gave his life for this profession, that would be a fair assessment. The reality is this isn't a movie, or a pro wrestling angle, or escapist entertainment and there is simply no way to really know. And the situation is no less of a shock just because there were eerie premonitions by some close to him afraid of exactly what ended up taking place.

Pillman was found at 1:09 p.m. Central time on 10/6 dead on his bed at the Budget-tel Motel in Bloomington, MN. There were several bottles of pills, muscle relaxers and pain killers, all prescription medication along with one empty beer bottle, all found near his body when the police opened the door to try and find him. Unlike in other similar situations where it well-known wrestlers would clean up a victim's room before calling police to protect the business, nobody had seen Pillman since 10:45 p.m. the previous night and the entire crew was already in St. Louis before anyone knew anything was amiss. There were no illegal drugs found in the room, and the bottles were not empty, nor was there a note, basically eliminating the possibility of it being a suicide. Even though Pillman had his own personal demons, those closest to him, remembering his reactions to a former girlfriend who was the biological mother of one of his children that later committed suicide, believe that the last thing he would ever do would do anything that would harm his children or their future. He had relied on pain killers heavily, particularly in the wake of his April 1996 humvee wreck that destroyed his ankle and subsequent September 1996 reconstructive operation when the ankle failed to heal properly. While everyone in the industry knew about the severity of the injury and it was apparent watching him wrestle on his recent comeback just how much it affected him athletically, Pillman really tried to hide from nearly everyone just how severe his daily pain was. The truth is, let alone compete at a high level athletically in pro wrestling, Pillman couldn't even play the field with his local softball team, the "Loose Cannons," and would be in tremendous pain, which he'd largely keep to himself, just running the bases.

This was a double frustration, because he prided himself on his athletic ability in the ring for most of his career and he took his level of performance professionally as seriously as anyone in the profession. He was the prototypical student of pro wrestling. He liked to read whatever he could, and reacted passionately to it. He watched tapes of old-timers, and loved to talk with them, to learn little forgotten tricks of the trade. When he first went heel, he wanted to see tapes of Buddy Rogers. He read, in fact, memorized the Lou Thesz booker Hooker in one weekend and went crazy trying to verify all the anecdotes and went crazy when some of them turned out not to be historically accurate. When he and Steve Austin were put together as a tag team, he wanted to see tapes of Pat Patterson & Ray Stevens. Secondarily and most importantly, he was in constant severe pain to the point just getting through airports was difficult, let alone the pain from wrestling even though the promotion understood his limitations and kept his non-television matches short.

He had wrestled the previous night at the St. Paul Civic Center and was scheduled for a major series of angles continuing his saga with Goldust and Marlena on a PPV that afternoon in St. Louis, and continuing at television tapings the next two nights. According to the story that ran nationally, ref Ed Sharkey at the matches in St. Paul noted that Pillman was sleeping on the floor in the dressing room during the card, which is very unusual and said he had a real strange look to him. He had a few drinks after the matches with some of the wrestlers and was described as being "tipsy" when he declined invitations to go out with other wrestlers to dinner and went back to his room at about 10:45 p.m. that night and left a message at home to his wife on his answering machine which is the last anyone heard from him.

The next afternoon, neither Pillman nor Bret Hart had arrived at the Kiel Center in St. Louis as of the mid-afternoon for the evening Badd Blood PPV show. The feeling was they probably were going to take the last flight out of the Twin Cities, but when Bret arrived and Pillman wasn't with him, they became concerned since the show was scheduled to start in less than two hours. Pillman had missed two house show in recent months, one of which was due to suffering an auto accident on the way to a show in early August. His behavior stemming from the pain killers had plenty of people in the company worried. When they called his house in St. Louis about 30 minutes before the free-for-all was to begin, his wife Melanie didn't know anything. Just minutes later, the police came to her door and upon hearing the news she fainted. At about the same time, a WWF official called the hotel in Bloomington that he was staying at and was given the news that the police had come and found him dead in his room.

He was in the middle of an angle that was taking advantage of his greatest strength as a performer, his acting ability and his ability to play as convincing a real-life as opposed to a cartoon version of borderline psychotic, with Goldust and Marlena. It was an angle that after the two sets of tapings this week was to result in Marlena leaving Goldust for him. The angle appears to have been completely dropped, as the proposed renewing of the vows angle hyped for weeks to take place at the Kansas City Raw taping was dropped without any sort of explanation, nor were the names Goldust nor Marlena ever mentioned during the show. Since coming up with his "loose cannon" character in late 1995, a character that made him the single most talked about performer in the industry in early 1996, it was a characterization that he took with him almost all the time. His lasting contribution to pro wrestling unfortunately was nothing short of changing the industry in many ways with his angle that blurred the line between work and shoot to the point that not only did the wrestlers have no idea where the work ended, but even the scattered few in on the angle from the start that thought they knew really didn't. If anything, the bizarre interplay the next night in Kansas City between Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels, and the interview that Ric Flair did on Nitro in Minneapolis, were the most fitting tributes to him even though that was hardly the idea in either case. It's not unfortunate because of the evolutionary path the angle (and the influence of ECW and Japan shoot angles) have taken the industry, but unfortunate because if there is a lasting contribution Pillman has made to pro wrestling it should be, as in other similar situations, in the lessons learned from his death.

There is the simple version of that lesson, and the more complicated one. The simple version is that the problem with pain pills, despite how comedic or entertaining some might find people's behavior when loaded, is no laughing matter. Mixing somas with alcohol, which is a part of day-to-day living for so many in the industry on almost a daily basis, can be a Russian Roulette cocktail. The more complicated version is real life. Being passive in this situation is easier then being confrontational, but it enables the situation to continue. And when it comes to these problems, confrontational usually doesn't work either. It isn't as if, internally within the business, the problems are a secret or the potential end result and repercussions to them wasn't perhaps the single greatest fear of those in charge of the respective companies. So live, on a PPV, Vince McMahon had to go on with the show moments after one of his greatest fears had become reality, a major star dying on his watch, so to speak, possibly from drugs. After the scare on the airplane where Road Warrior Hawk passed out, combined with the warning article at about the same time in these pages, there was no secret within the WWF that something could happen and wrestlers were told that drug tests would be re-implemented based on suspicion. McMahon taped a short cut-in which aired during the pre-game show, and a few times during the broadcast, mentioned the death again, in most somber tones. He brought up, which was the presumption at the time it was from an overdose. As the owner of a company that has had a long and storied history of drug problems and repercussions, had to be as great a living nightmare as could be possible and it was almost as if while talking about abuse of drugs being a problem in both sports and entertainment, he was asking for mercy himself.

Whatever nightmare he and the company was going through while trying to entertain an audience was minuscule compared to the nightmare of the family left behind. He had a family with five children, with another on the way, which, making the tragedy even more pronounced, his wife found out just a few days before his death and had yet to tell him about. His wife Melanie had two daughters from a prior marriage, he had two daughters from previous relationships and they had a four-year-old son named Brian, with a knack for jumping off tables and counters and telling people, "Look, I'm Flyin Brian." Pillman had an eight-year-old daughter named Brittany from a previous relationship whose mother, his girlfriend from years back, had killed herself two years earlier. She was just beginning to recover from that shock when she learned about her father dying, and she let out a horrific scream for 15 minutes straight like a wounded animal. Pillman took his ex-girlfriend's suicide very hard. After a life destroyed from drug problems herself, it appeared she wanted to shoot herself in the head while on the phone with him for the most dramatic ending. Unfortunately, Pillman was on the road when she decided to make her grand exit, and after a lengthy conversation with Melanie, trying to counsel her out of it, she then called up her mother, who Pillman thought the world of, and while on the phone with her, blew her brains out. Whether rightly or wrongly, many close to her blamed her downfall on losing a very bitter child-custody fight with Brian over Brittany, a fight that left everyone involved with very bitter internal scars. Her family's reaction after the death to Pillman was yet another in a very long line of internal hardships life dealt him.

That was just another of what in many ways was a lifetime of tragedies, defying odds, athletic accomplishments, wild times and occasional lunacy that told the story of his life.

Brian Pillman was born May 22, 1962, growing up in Norwood, OH, a working-class suburb of Cincinnati, where the Cincinnati Gardens is located. He was raised mainly by his mother since his father died fairly young, who worked as a waitress. He was born with throat cancer and underwent 31 different operations before the age of three, leaving him with a raspy voice that he was teased about incessantly in childhood. The voice became his trademark when he began to make his mark in pro wrestling. He wound up being a local high school football hero, but because of his size, wasn't thought to have any potential to play in college. He went to Miami of Ohio as a walk-on, and not only made the team, but wound up by his senior year in 1983 as a second-team all-American noseguard. As a 5-9 defensive lineman, a combination of weight training and heavy use of steroids bulked him up to nearly 250 pounds, and he was bench pressing close to 450 and squatting more than 600 pounds. Still, there wasn't much demand in the NFL for 5-9 defensive linemen and he went undrafted. He went to the Cincinnati Bengals as a free agent, and made the team in 1984, being converted to linebacker but mainly playing on the special teams. Although he was not a star, he had a lot of local popularity for being a local product who defied the odds and gained a reputation for being one of the physically and mentally toughest players on the team. As a rookie, he was voted the winner of the Ed Bloch Courage award. He ended up being traded to the Buffalo Bills prior to the 1985 season, but was cut in training camp.

Although Pillman himself may have never been aware of this, the Bills staff had already decided Pillman made the team. But shortly before the final cuts, an assistant Coach found his steroids at camp and the team realized he was a little guy all juiced up and during the final cut it was enough to sway the decision. He wound up signing with the Calgary Stampeders of the Canadian Football League in 1986, and after playing the first three games of the season, broke his ankle, the same ankle that eventually was destroyed in the humvee wreck, which ended his football career.

Kim Wood, who was and still is the strength coach with the Bengals and has had a long-time knowledge of the inner-working of pro wrestling, recommended to Pillman, who had watched some of The Sheik's pro wrestling as a kid in Cincinnati, that he hook up with the Hart Family and try to break into pro wrestling. After making contact, Bruce Hart, the Stampede wrestling booker, Hart used Pillman's stature as a former Stampede, however limited his actual tenure with the team was because of his wild personality at the time, he was very popular with most of the players, to jump-start his pro wrestling training and rush him into the ring. It wasn't long before he was an instructor rather than a student at the camp. He started his career with Stampede Wrestling after doing an angle the previous week, in the main event of a November 5, 1986 show at the Calgary Stampede Pavilion. With numerous Stampeders in the babyface corner rooting him on, Pillman teamed with Owen & Keith Hart to beat Makhan Singh & Great Gama & Vladimir Krupov. At the time Stampede Wrestling was developing some of what would turn out to be the biggest stars in the world including the likes of Owen Hart, Chris Benoit, Jushin Liger and Hiroshi Hase. Another almost unknown piece of wrestling trivia was that during his early Stampede stay, an angle was done where heels attacked his supposed sister Teresa to build to a big match the next week. Teresa, real name Teresa Hays, resurfaced many years later as ECW's Beulah McGillicuddy. Bruce Hart & Pillman as the tag team called "Bad Company," clad in sunglasses and leather jackets in the final and most memorable run of Bruce's career, were the territory's top babyface tag team for most of the next two years. He was the 1987 Rookie of the Year in the Wrestling Observer poll. He survived the craziness of Calgary wrestling, including suffering a severe shoulder injury that nearly ended his career, and a tricep tear in a backstage fight where he was ambushed by a much larger Brick Bronsky, then after being knocked to the deck, got up and tore him to shreds. Although he remained good friends with Bruce and Owen Hart, that fight was a wake-up call to him that it was time to leave Stampede Wrestling. Largely through making a contact with Jim Ross, he was brought into World Championship Wrestling in the spring of 1989. He was supposed to start a few months earlier, with the original idea for him to be a heel managed by Paul E. Dangerously and team with Dennis Condrey as a new version of the Midnight Express. However, his job was nixed when new booker George Scott didn't want to bring in a wrestler that he had never heard of. Shortly after Scott was let go, Pillman's name resurfaced and he was brought in as a babyface with numerous musical videos. Pillman wrestled several television dark matches, but was very nervous and didn't perform well, and gained a reputation immediately for being far more green and inexperienced than he really was. But it probably worked in his favor, because once the butterflies wore off and he got his confidence back up, he started having good matches, and the belief was that he was improving at an amazing rate. His first major match with the company would have been at the 1989 Halloween Havoc PPV show from Philadelphia, where he had one of the best matches on the card, more impressive since it was with Lex Luger, which surprised most since the feeling going into the match was that Luger was going to have a hard time carrying Pillman in his first major match.

Pillman's seven-year WCW tenure, largely as a mid-card babyface who was generally considered among the best athletic workers in the company, saw several different rebirths. He was "Flyin Brian," the heartthrob pretty boy babyface with Tom Zenk, a role he was never comfortable with. He was the personal protege of Ric Flair, including a famous match on WCW Saturday Night that drew what is still to this day the largest audience ever to watch that program in early 1990. He was the high flying lightheavyweight champion having the best matches in the country against Jushin Liger highlighted by a Christmas week house show run in 1991, and a match-of-the-year candidate on the February 29, 1992 SuperBrawl PPV show in Milwaukee. Based on the Liger matches and his performances as champion, he signed a three-year $225,000 per base with numerous incentive bonuses contract with Kip Frey, who was at the time running WCW. When Bill Watts came aboard, Pillman's contract, unusually high for his position given the industry standards at that time, particularly as a lightheavyweight, caused an immediate dispute. Just before that time, Pillman's potential really began to show for the first time as he turned heel, which was his true calling. Watts gave Pillman an ultimatum, either re-sign a lower priced contract, or be jobbed out, Pillman refused. After a short period of being jobbed in the opener nearly every night despite being among the company's hottest workers at the time, with lots of internal pressure on him to cave in to Watts, he stood firm claiming he was going to become the highest paid opening match jobber in pro wrestling history until the situation of his jobbing and the reasons for it became an embarrassment for the company and both sides settled their problems in a solution that was largely face saving for both sides. In the wake of all the problems, Watts decided to drop the lightheavyweight division. Pillman's career was back in limbo until he was put together as The Hollywood Blonds tag team with Steve Austin in 1993. Ironically, Austin complained against the idea at the time, not wanting to be a tag team wrestler, but the two ended up becoming good friends and even better partners, and were voted in the Observer poll, tag team of the year for that year. At the time people thought they could become the great tag team of this decade. The two captured the WCW tag belts from Ricky Steamboat & Shane Douglas on March 3, 1993 in Macon, GA. However, business went into the toilet during that summer, and when Ric Flair was signed back into WCW after leaving the WWF, a feud was put together with Pillman & Austin as the obnoxious young heels against Flair & Arn Anderson, building up to Flair's first match in WCW on a Clash of the Champions. When that Clash drew only a 2.6 rating, still the lowest Clash rating in history, the booking committee put the blame on Pillman & Austin being a failure as a heel team, a conclusion that almost nobody watching at the time would agree with, and broke them up, with Pillman being put back in a babyface role sans any push. By this point, Pillman suffered a serious back injury and did very little wrestling for months.

Outside the ring, his personal life, which he largely kept quiet about, had major ups and downs. He had a reputation, well deserved, of being a wildman with an apparently endless supply of beautiful women. He had one girlfriend of many years, Rochelle, who he knew from Cincinnati and lived with in Atlanta who was viciously stabbed in a break-in while he was on the road. Their break-up years later wound up in one tragedy after another. The two of them had a daughter, and he also had another daughter from another woman. Rochelle developed a major drug problem and Pillman was far from perfect himself which turned into a child custody battle that turned his and his new family's life into a one-year-long nightmare. By this time Pillman had married a former Penthouse Pet, Melanie, who ironically had her own background around wrestling as being the one-time girlfriend in a stormy relationship with Jim Hellwig when he was riding high as one of the two biggest stars in the WWF. After a whirlwind romance, Pillman proposed to her at the Grand Canyon. It was typical Pillman apparent insanity, as he saw her photo in a magazine and immediately decided this was the woman he was going to marry. In 1993, in the middle of the child custody fight, Rochelle was supposed to pick up Brittany and never showed up. She had disappeared, and nobody, not her family nor friends could find her. While this was going on, Pillman was literally scared to death feeling he was about to become the white O.J. as he became the obvious lead suspect. Pillman, drinking heavily based on fear he was about to be arrested for something he didn't do, decided to play amateur detective to clear himself and went traveling in the worst section of Cincinnati, carrying a photo of her and talking to the corner drug dealers. While he was there, the police were riding by and saw a fairly well-known local celebrity hanging with drug dealers in the worst part of town. They thought he had swallowed something and arrested him. As it turned out, he had one or two pain killers, without carrying the prescription, on him. He ended up plea bargaining down to a drunk driving offense once he proved he had a prescription for the pills on him and no other drugs were found. He was still under suspicion in his girlfriend's disappearance, until a few weeks later she was found in Florida, totally messed up, when the car she and a few men she was with was pulled over.

In late 1995, knowing his contract had only a few months remaining and with him still not receiving much of a push and fear, which was totally well founded at the time, that his high price tag would be cut, he decided to take his career into his own hands. In Wood's kitchen, the two devised one of more unique approaches in wrestling history largely as an attempt to emulate the late Bruiser Brody and make his own break into superstardom. He became, both in the ring and often out of the ring as well, the "loose cannon." Someone who could and would do anything at any given time. He became a reactionary right-winger on a Cincinnati radio station to get the gimmick over. He continually would do things and say things on live Nitro to seemingly put his position in jeopardy, and his behavior outside the ring around the wrestlers was all part of his work in convincing everyone that he had lost his mind. He had seriously talked with friends, most notably Terry Funk who became something of a secret mentor to him, about doing a publicity stunt where he'd run on the field chain himself to the goal posts during the 1996 Super Bowl game.

Within the company, only Eric Bischoff and Kevin Sullivan were aware that what he was doing on Nitro and outside the ring with the boys was a work, which is why he stayed on television even though Bischoff continually threatened to both publicly and privately say he was on loose ice and on the verge of being fired. The work continued to the point that Pillman had an on-air confrontation with Sullivan, the booker, which they worked to look like a match had gotten out of control. The angle was so well done that people believed Sullivan was attempting to rip out Pillman's eye in a fake shoot angle, however Sullivan blew the credibility of the shoot part of the angle, much to Pillman's chagrin who wanted to fool everyone all the time, the next week on television by using the incident as part of his interview to build up a rematch on a PPV.

So Pillman took his fantasy reality one step farther, in what was billed as a "respect" match on February 11, 1996 in St. Petersburg, where the loser would have to say he respected the winner, against Sullivan, Pillman took a few shots, sarcastically said the famous line "I respect you, booker man," and walked out of the ring, out of the building and out of the promotion. But where Bischoff and Sullivan, who thought they devised the angle with Pillman, thought the angle ended, it really had only begun. Pillman had talked them into actually firing him, to work everyone in the company and the business, getting TBS to send out the termination notice and everything. At the same time they had worked out a deal with ECW, which was supposed to be the renegade independent group, to slide Pillman over (Pillman largely worked out the deal himself with Paul Heyman and WCW approved it) and his appearing on ECW would theoretically give credibility to the fact Pillman really was fired from WCW for whenever his surprise return would take place. Although he never wrestled one match for ECW, nearly every angle and video he did during his brief tenure was memorable. At the same time, Pillman had to undergo another throat operation which would keep him out of action a few weeks. Desperate for ratings in the Monday Night war, WCW ordered Pillman to show up in the audience just a few weeks later, and Hulk Hogan, seeing the pop Pillman got, attempted to get Pillman booked onto the heel team in an infamous 2-on-8 match on the Uncensored PPV show on March 24, 1996 in Tupelo, MS. Due to Pillman's throat surgery, his doctor sent a note to WCW saying that he couldn't perform that soon. Pillman probably shouldn't have wrestled, but under normal circumstances, he probably would have, balking more because his not-so-amazing clairvoyant powers told him the match, which included Tom "Zeus" Lister as Ze Gangsta and the late Jeep Swenson, would near the top of every list of the worst matches in the history of the industry, and he didn't want to be a part of it. WCW continued to advertise Pillman and pressure him to perform and even during the pre-game show were saying he was going to be there even though he had firmly told them several days earlier he wouldn't.

Pillman was technically fired from WCW, a worked firing with only Sullivan and Bischoff in on it although by this time the fact it had almost all been an angle (about the only "memorable" thing during that run that was truly a shoot was when Pillman was grabbing Bobby Heenan during a Clash match against Eddie Guerrero, and Heenan freaked out because he was afraid Pillman was going to accidentally hurt his bad neck, swore on the air and walked off) was pretty well established. This made him the most talked about wrestler on the inside of the business, and a free agent at the same time. He began negotiating with Vince McMahon, who initially was leery of dealing with him because Pillman, acting completely out of his mind, approached McMahon at the NATPE convention in Las Vegas. After assuring McMahon that everything he'd done was a work, and after Ross and Jim Cornette went to bat for Pillman since McMahon and everyone in wrestling had reservations about him because he was living his gimmick to a scary degree, McMahon decided to start serious negotiations. The original plan was to use the WWF, which at the time wasn't offering guaranteed money, to up his price to Bischoff, figuring Bischoff and Sullivan didn't want to lose the character they helped create. At the same time, there was the consideration, with him just weeks away from his 34th birthday, that this next contract signing would be the prime years of his career for business and he knew the top of the mountain at WCW was blocked with the Hogan clique and with Kevin Nash and Scott Hall arriving, while the field in WWF was more wide-open. The basic WCW plan was for him to form his own Four Horseman with Chris Benoit and two others, and feud with Flair and Anderson once again. It was a good spot, but at that point, he was looking for a shot at the top spot. With a babyface Shawn Michaels being groomed to be the long-term WWF champion, size wasn't going to be a major issue in being the top heel in that company.

McMahon offered a guaranteed deal, believed to be only the third or fourth time in history he'd done such a thing (although it soon become commonplace given the realities of the wrestling war), which caused Bischoff, who had low-balled earlier negotiations, to up his offer to the $400,000 range. While Pillman was in the catbird seat, just a few days from becoming a real-life hot commodity free agent in the midst of a competitive Monday Night wrestling war, he was still going out of his mind, staying up all night, calling everyone and doing everything at all hours trying to get advice on how to play the game to make the most money. Soon after purchasing a humvee, he apparently fell asleep at the wheel on 4/15, went off the road, and got thrown 40 feet into a field where he was lying in a pool of his own blood. His face was so swollen that his friends who visited him in the hospital really couldn't even recognize him. By the end of the week, after surgery which included taking bone from his hip to reconstruct his ankle, he was released from the hospital. Since Pillman had been orchestrating works on the entire world to keep himself the most talked about name inside the industry, many within wrestling thought this was simply the latest chapter of a bizarre work. But this was real. Even though the future of his career in the ring looked questionable, neither Bischoff nor McMahon let up on the offer. Pillman claimed he'd been told he'd recover 100% from the injuries in a few months, although secretly he feared the worst. Eventually Pillman chose McMahon's offer largely because internally he thought there was no choice in the matter since Bischoff wouldn't eliminate the 90-day termination cycles from the contract, and Pillman, fearing the possibility of not being able to return to the ring, didn't want to risk his family's future on what was he believed could have turned into a short-term deal.

WWF tried to make a big deal of Pillman's signing, rushing him onto television in a failed attempt to close the ratings gap. Although months from being able to wrestle, Pillman was running around the country constantly on airplanes trying to keep his gimmick strong while being unable to wrestle. Doing so caused his ankle to not heal properly, and a few months later they had to re-break the ankle, do another reconstructive surgery, and start the procedure from scratch, with the end result being an ankle fused into a walking position. WWF created an angle with its top heel at the time, Steve Austin, which positioned Pillman as strongly as possible to explain the injury and an absence while he truly rested and recovered this time, for his return. Just a few days after surgery, in a controversial desperate attempt to establish a new Raw time slot, the WWF did the infamous gun angle where Austin broke into Pillman's house where Pillman was with his "bereaved" wife, was held off by a shotgun, and the satellite lost transmission as they teased that shots had been fired. Pillman was largely kept home for the next several months, until resurfacing doing the announcing on Shotgun to build for his in-ring return after Wrestlemania.

His return as an active competitor is probably going to be the most criticized and second-guessed decision, hindsight being 20/20, stemming from this entire situation. Hindsight being 20/20, his death unfortunately may not have been a freak occurrence, but as a simple end result to an emotional mathematical problem, just as 1+1+1+1+1=5.

You had a person who spent his life doing things athletically people told him he couldn't do. He did them not only to stick it to those who doubted him, but to prove things to his toughest critic of all--himself. Although he did defy the odds and numerous medical authorities by even coming back, and his acting ability was likely to keep him in the forefront as a star for years, his physical limitations had to be mentally driving him crazy and the constant pain didn't help. Everyone goes through bad periods in life that leave certain scars, and he went through far more than most people and the scars were very deep. The fact he couldn't perform physically up to the level he could mentally, because he literally lived for nothing but his family and the wrestling business, took its toll on him. The fact was, unlike many who seem to take advantage of injuries while on a guaranteed contract, Pillman had guilt feelings that he wasn't earning his money during the entire period he was out and felt he had to do whatever the company wanted to feel in his own mind that he was earning his big contract. WWF officials and some of his business associates were extremely worried about his behavior. Wrestlers who liked him were afraid to travel with him. There was an argument while he was on an airplane telephone where he was shouting and cursing loudly out of control which further fueled the worrying of both WWF road agents and other wrestlers. About five weeks before his death, Ross, who had remained close friends with him and had been counseling him several times per week regarding his problems, ordered him to undergo a drug test. He was furious about being singled out, since he had never gone on television so loaded he couldn't perform in or out of the ring as it is believed another top star had done one or two times in the recent weeks. Melanie was also worried about the level of pain medication he'd been taking and her own knowledge of being close to and around wrestlers on-and-off for ten years that the wrestlers shared their prescription drugs back-and-forth and wanted him to undergo rehab, but he had a saying that he even wore on a t-shirt that rehab was for losers. He refused and blamed being singled out to take the drug test on wreaking havoc with his marriage, and felt that when a wrestling company affects his marriage that he had to get out of the wrestling company. He requested a release from the WWF, feeling he could go back to WCW and slide back into the final slot in the Four Horseman. His personal situation was rocky for a short period of time, which included him violating a restraining order and Melanie filing for a divorce. After a brief separation, he had returned home. He was pulled from the 10/3 house show in Winnipeg and from all Friday night house shows for the next few weeks because of a court-mandated Anger Management Class he had to take for violating the restraining order for four straight Saturday mornings, and went back on the road after the class for the matches in St. Paul for the final match of his career against Goldust. The drug test came back a few weeks ago showing nothing in his system except for the prescription pain medication it was well-known he was using, and also showed a small amount of decadurabolin, an anabolic steroid that was very popular among bodybuilders and wrestlers in the 80s. Decadurabolin can stay in the system literally for several months and there have been medical cases of it showing up on a drug test even one year after use had stopped although cases like that are extremely rare. Pillman had apparently used it as almost a desperate attempt to speed up the healing process for his ankle before his return to the ring. Because it was a small amount and the drug has such a long half-life in the system, he wasn't suspended.

Pillman had suffered internal side effects many years ago from his steroid use from football and early in his wrestling career, not to mention suffering many muscle pulls and tears which he attributed to his use. This caused him to get off the drugs before it became a major issue in the industry, and actually he was fairly vocal about their potential problems and the effect they were having on the wrestling business. In fact, when Frey started doing anti-steroid public service announcements when the industry was under the steroid cloud, Pillman was the first to go on television, admit to use and warn others against it.

The PPV show went on, although not as scheduled. About 25 to 30 minutes of the show had been blocked off for Pillman matches with Dude Love and Goldust. With very little warning, the Mexican minis were rushed onto the show and did not have a good match. With the show running way short, an eight man tag was added, again with very little notice. It was a show that was under a dark cloud from the beginning, and the matches certainly reflected that. And then, seemingly oblivious to everything that had gone on, Shawn Michaels and Undertaker put on one of the greatest cage matches in the history of wrestling to save the show.

The next night, both WCW and WWF opened their Monday night live shows with mentions of Pillman's death. WCW had a brief graphic and it was never mentioned the rest of the show. WWF opened the show with virtually all the wrestlers in attendance coming out for a ten-bell salute. During the show they constantly promo'd an interview with Melanie Pillman, live from the family home in Walton, KY. During the show they showed large framed photos in the family den, a photo of Brian holding his baby son, a photo of Brian & Melanie together and a photo Pillman & Austin as WCW tag team champions as teases to build to Melanie's interview. Melanie Pillman had reservations about going on live, but eventually consented due to her own loyalty to the company that employed her husband. The only thing I'd like to say in defense of everyone involved, is that under the emotional state everyone was under, it would be cruel and heartless to be critical of the segment because it wasn't smooth flowing perfect television. But the segment left a lot of people very uneasy for many different reasons, not the least of which were all the teases and holding it off until late that made it come across as a way to build up ratings. She had a very heartfelt message, a warning for mainly those within the industry as to not let her husband's death, and for that matter similar deaths within the profession be in vain and use this as a lesson to be learned from everyone. She wanted her husband to best be remembered as the greatest father in the world and as a warm and compassionate person. We all knew abuse of pain killers among some wrestlers is out of control and the stories of erratic behavior that some find funny just aren't very funny today. It is impossible to have pro wrestling, or for that matter pro football, pro basketball or anything of the type as we know it today without some form of pain killers. But there comes a line that everyone has to draw, and that's when the pain killers take over the body and simply aren't medication to heal the body. This was going to happen to someone in the business, and whomever it would be, the odds were that it would be somebody's husband and somebody's father. As it turned out, it was Melanie Pillman's husband and the father of their five, soon to be six, children. And to them, and to his friends, the story doesn't end this week as the rest of the industry goes on to its next chapter.

[msc]

The sobering thing is that when I got into wrestling as a kid, the death of Brian Pillman was seen by the older kids who remembered him as this big exceptional thing. The wrestler who died, for lack of a friendlier way to put it. That they remembered watch on RAW, I mean.

Then Owen happened. Now I can think of countless wrestlers I've watched on live WWE PPV who aren't with us anymore. It's all very melancholic and rather gutwrenching, to say the least.

Pillman was the man. Great body of work. Also a young dad. Left far, far, far too soon.

[auph10imitated]

Pillman was in such a bad place though, his injuries had hampered him in such a way he wasn't able to work like he once could so even if he was alive today there is absolutely no way he would be still wrestling today.

[sfvega]

I think it's a little weird that Magnum TA gets all this talk of "he was gonna be the man if not for this accident" and Pillman doesn't. He was on the cutting edge of wrestling. His understanding of the business was phenomenal. His work prior to flipping his Hummer was amazing. He had all the tools. A 100% Pillman with his gimmick working with a white hot Austin with their chemistry and ability and backstory. It would've done huge business. As it was, it was still a pivotal part of Austin and the MNWs while Pillman was barely even f***ing mobile.

Such a legend. My first big wrestling death. Cannot believe it's been 20 years. RIP.

[auph10imitated]

If he had been alive I could easily have seen him in Mick Foley's role as Austin's first challenger in 1998