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Boston Globe

Terry Brunk, professional wrestler known as Sabu, dies

Known for using tables and chairs in the ring, Mr. Brunk rose to national prominence with Extreme Championship Wrestling, a smaller and grittier circuit compared with the more mainstream World Wrestling Federation and World Championship Wrestling companies. 'Sabu became a national star as part of ECW, where he was a pioneer of hardcore wrestling, leaping from chairs and driving his opponents through tables and even barbed wire,' WWE said in its statement. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Mr. Brunk later joined the WWE in 2006, with which he performed for a year, including at WrestleMania 23 in Detroit, Mr. Brunk's hometown. Advertisement As recently as last month, Mr. Brunk was slinging chairs around a barbed-wire ring, returning once again as Sabu in an event with wrestler Joey Janela that was billed as Sabu's retirement match. Although widely remembered for his use of props and tables in the ring, Sabu was wary of professional wrestling's spectacle. He would go on to criticize the larger-than-life stunts that would come to define later iterations of the WWE and other wrestling promotion companies. 'In an Olympic match, you cannot stack a couple tables and then climb something and jump off. That's a stunt,' Mr. Brunk told an interviewer with Covalent TV at Wrestlecade in 2024. 'I'm not a stuntman or an actor.' Advertisement Terrance Michael Brunk was born on Staten Island, N.Y. He was trained by his uncle Edward George Farhart, a WWE Hall of Fame wrestler known as 'The Sheikh.' 'I went over all the basics every day,' Mr. Brunk recalled in his Covalent TV interview. His uncle, he said, made him set up and tear down the training ring for months before ever giving him a chance inside it. For many fans, Mr. Brunk represented an era of professional wrestling when storytelling took priority over spectacle. Mr. Brunk said in his 2024 interview that even his use of a single table could keep an audience engaged — there was a narrative arc, a setup, a tease. Not so in modern professional wrestling, he said. 'When they break a table,' Mr. Brunk said, 'they're just doing it for the crash.' This article originally appeared in