Sabu was Sabu until the very end

Yahoo

12-05-2025

'He was the one of The Sheik's many nephews, and he was badgering him to train him and to get him into the business. And The Sheik kept saying, 'No, no, no,' he didn't want to do it, he just didn't think it would be a good life. But Terry, he was getting in a lot of trouble with the law, falling in with the wrong people, and The Sheik thought, 'Well, maybe I could save him from this by getting him into the wrestling business.' - Brian Solomon, author of 'Blood and Fire: The Unbelievable Real-Life Story of Wrestling's Original Sheik.'
Wrestling was a special kind of saving grace for Terry Brunk, aka Sabu, who passed away Sunday at the age of 60. He traveled all over the world carving out a legendary career full of broken tables, wild bumps and blood. Sabu was a true independent spirit — he had short runs with both WCW and the WWF, but those stints never captured what made him special. To understand Sabu you needed to see him at an armory, rock club, high-school gym or bingo hall, or watch him on a fourth-generation video tape with distortion, passed around like a hand-me-down. He was a gateway, a key which unlocked a completely different world of professional wrestling to the fan seeing him for the first time. Wrestling today is full of athletically impressive, dangerous moves; in many ways Sabu was the originator of that crazy style, although unlike a lot of current wrestling, it wasn't effortless. Sabu always felt ragged, everything he did felt dangerous, because it felt like he might fail. It was always a tightrope walk over a pit of fire.
When he started his career, Sabu's uncle, pro-wrestling legend The Sheik, kept him bottled up, convinced that he needed to be conversant in the basics of the trade before unleashing him on the world. He wrestled as Terry SR — the SR was always a bit of a mystery, either standing for Sheik's Relative or Sheik's Revenge — working a stripped-down style which didn't resemble the whirling dervish theatrics that would eventually make him a legend. The shift came in 1991 when The Sheik was contacted by Atsushi Onita, the President and top star of the Frontier Martial Arts wrestling promotion in Japan, to come over for a tour. The Sheik was in his 60s and not very mobile, so he convinced FMW to let him bring over his nephew to take the bumps and do most of the work in the matches.
'They are on the plane over to Japan ... and he turns to Sabu,' Solomon told Uncrowned. '[The Sheik said to him,] 'I know all that crazy stuff you and Rob Van Dam did in training that I would never let you do. I want you to cut loose.' And that was the birth of Sabu.'
Sabu enters the arena during ECW at Madison Square Garden on September 11, 2006 in New York.
(WWE via Getty Images)
That and subsequent FMW tours put Sabu on the radar of independent promoters who saw the eccentric newcomer as an attraction, and Paul Heyman, who used Sabu as one of his top stars when he took over as booker of ECW. Sabu went on to headline ECW's first pay-per-view in 1997 and be a large part of the promotion's entire run — with a couple of traditional Sabu no-shows and promotional disagreements thrown in along the way. Truthfully, a large percentage of ECW wildest moments involved him. Sabu, in many ways, was the personification of the spirit of ECW. It was built on rebelling against the staid and stodgy mainstream wrestling in the U.S., and Sabu was the ultimate uncontrollable rebel, ungovernable and completely different then the big stars of WCW or the WWF. Post-ECW, Sabu continued to be a traveling independent attraction and a big part of the ECW revival in the WWE.
That heyday was 30 years ago, however. Sabu was 60 years old this past WrestleMania season, and not an easy 60 — years of wild bumps and wild nights had taken the expected toll on his body. So when GCW announced that Sabu would be main-eventing Joey Janela's Spring Break in a no-rope barbed-wire match in Las Vegas the day before WrestleMania 41 this past April, there was a natural skepticism among wrestling fans. Sabu had become famous for no-showing bookings, including his own induction in the GCW Independent Hall of Fame a couple years ago, and hadn't wrestled at all in several years.
'Of course [no-showing] was in the back of my mind,' GCW promoter Brent Lauderdale told Uncrowned shortly after the event, 'but I felt like Sabu was genuine. And one thing about Sabu I've come to learn over the years is, behind all of the drama and silliness, Sabu has a lot of pride — and not only did he want to do it, but he wanted to give his best effort.'
Sabu's best effort is as wild of a high-wire act as anyone in the history of professional wrestling, and it'd be hard to imagine that a 60-year-old Sabu could deliver that kind of spectacle.
Sabu was always larger than life.
'He was so revered in the business for just not giving a s*** about his body, and doing anything any night,' fellow ECW icon The Sandman said. 'He broke his jaw in a match with me. The barbed wire match with Terry Funk, he had his skin ripped open like an inch deep and he tells Fonzie (Sabu's manager Bill Alphonso) to go into the locker room and get some tape — and he just tapes up his arm. That's a beast'.
That was the impossible standard Sabu aspired to live up to, and Lauderdale was fully aware of what Sabu meant to the fans coming to the show. 'I talked to Sabu a couple of days before the match, and he was telling me, 'My knee hurts,' and this and that," Lauderdale said. 'And I said, 'Listen Sabu, everybody knows your hurting, you're 20-something years older than the last time you did this — people's expectations are realistic. No one is expecting this to be Born to Be Wired (his iconic no-rope barbed wire match with Terry Funk).' And he said to me, 'Good, because it is going to be better than that.''
Predictably, the night of the April 18 show was chaotic. Nothing was going to be easy with Sabu. 'I was fairly confident that he was fine," Sabu's opponent, Joey Janela, told Uncrowned several days after the event. 'I was kept in contact with him and he has a team of people around him, guys this time. They were all saying he was ready to go, that he was going to the gym, that he was on a training program. I believed them until the day of the show. Then two hours before, I get a call: 'Sabu can't walk.'
I said, 'Listen Sabu, everybody knows your hurting, you're 20-something years older than the last time you did this — people's expectations are realistic. No one is expecting this to be Born to Be Wired.' And he said to me, 'Good, because it is going to be better than that.' Brent Lauderdale
"What do you mean Sabu can't walk? They said, 'Yeah, Sabu, something with his knee — they're locked up. He can't walk. And his feet are bleeding. He's not coming. Sabu's not coming.' I said, 'Sabu's f***ed.' So we talked to [indie wrestler] Matt Tremont, and Tremont is about to be the replacement for the match. And I feel like this is going to be the most embarrassing moment of my wrestling career. There's 2,000 people here. This is one of the biggest Spring Breaks ever. The biggest crowd 'Mania weekend, indie-wise. And I'm going to have to go out there and announce that Sabu, once again, no-showed. And no-showed his own retirement match.'
Lauderdale was less concerned. 'In the back of my mind, I knew Sabu was coming," he said. "I never once worried. If we didn't hear from Sabu then I would be worried, but the fact that he was communicating, I knew he was coming.'
'We are an hour into the show and I said, 'Just get Sabu here,'" Janela continued. "So they gave him something called Kratom. You can buy it at a smoke shop or something; it's like a legal opiate or something. They said, 'He's hopping on the bed, he's hopping off the bed, and we're going to get him to the show.' So he shows up two hours into the show. Sabu was on a different f***ing planet. Everyone in the backstage was like, 'What the f***? Is this match going to happen?' And my God, did it happen.'
Sabu never shied away from danger, even at the very end.
Moments into the match, Sabu went for a signature Air Sabu dive off of a chair, missed Janela and went chest-first into the barbed wire strands, with his head landing and sticking in a giant crate of barbed wire. It was an immediate sign to the audience that this wasn't going to be a nostalgia match — that Sabu was going to go out on his own terms. Then, minutes later, Sabu got whipped into a barbed-wire board, which was resting on the barbed-wire ropes, and flipped backward out of the ring, landing in a heap.
'He was definitely out cold. He was done," Janela said. "They were telling me there was no way. The refs were communicating to me that there's no way he's continuing this match.
'Like holy s***, that is the one time you want the barbed wire to stop you. He just blew right through it.
'And then [old ECW rival] The Sandman came out and that was all Sabu needed, then the resurrection happened. Jesus resurrected two days later, the anniversary … couldn't f***ing believe it, dude. He was ready to go again. I guess that concussion knocked him back into 1996 or something, I don't know.'
Sabu came back and they ran through several more sequences, including Janela taking some big bumps of his own, until he was finally pinned by Sabu.
Sabu beat Joey Janela in April for his farewell match.
'Just because how ridiculous it was, if you were one of the wresters or one of the staff in the locker that night, you knew the panic in my f***ing eyes," Janela said. "And to see that get pulled off and the crowd to be on their feet, I mean, it's like f***ing dancing through raindrops and not getting wet."
Is it very rare in professional wrestling, or in life to get the end you deserve. Most careers don't end with Kobe scoring 60 points, or Sting selling out the Greensboro Coliseum. Most times, the end is sad. Patrick Ewing averaging six points a game in an Orlando Magic jersey or Ric Flair nearly dying on the ring apron. Sabu's last match before this was in 2021 against someone named Mr. California in Stanton, California, for a promotion called Xtreme World Wrestling, in a garage front of maybe 100 people. That is normally how a legend goes out — with a whimper. But instead, for one last night, the most insane, iconic wrestler of his generation was Sabu again, with all that entails. The chaos, the danger, the disregard for humanity.
Sabu in his natural element. (Photo via Nick Karp)
'Everything that happened in that match, happened for a reason,' Janela told Uncrowned on Sunday. 'I'm just happy GCW gave him the platform in front of a sold-out house, to have that moment and be Sabu for one last time. He's one of the greatest wrestlers of all time, one of the greatest innovators of all time. I'm just glad we were able to get it off. Regardless of the circumstances and the conditions that that day, he just made it happen and I know he was happy, and I'm happy, the fans were happy, his friends were happy — and I'm just glad we gave him this one last chance to shine in the spotlight.'
It is always sad to lose someone, especially someone who meant so much to so many people. But in many ways it is a fitting elegy that the last memory people will have of Terry Brunk is him in all of his glory — the homicidal, suicidal, genocidal Sabu, untethered and insane, delivering one last ragged violent masterpiece.