by Dave Meltzer
At this point, it is still one person’s word against another, but an investigation needs to be done to find out if there is validity to the story and if that’s the case, the whole story needs to be brought to light and all the parties involved can’t be part of UFC any longer.
31 – The Life and Death of Brian Pillman
OCTOBER 13
Even though this is the first thing you are reading, this is actually the last thing I’m writing. As you all know, a very good friend of mine passed away a few days ago. You all knew of him. Some of you knew him. This is not the first person that I’ve known fairly well in this business that died at a young age. Friend is a word that I’m not very liberal with, particularly when it comes to wrestling because in many cases it depends on the last word you’ve written about someone. But it is one that I’d use in this instance without reservation. The shock that I personally felt when Vince McMahon went on the free-for-all segment with that cut-in was like a knife going through me. But the shock was nothing compared to the sadness when the reality set in the next day. The sadness is largely for those who loved him and needed him in their daily lives and have to do without him. From a selfish standpoint, he was one of the funniest people I knew and someone, almost no matter how bad his or my situation was, he would find a way to be both humorous and entertaining. We had a lot of strange similarities, particularly when it comes to sense of humor and being students of the wrestling business and the insanity that surrounds it, yet in other ways we were complete opposites. His insanity reminded me of my high school days. We were at different ends of the business with different pressures. The business contributed to his craziness. Dealing with the craziness of this business forced me into the other direction. Whenever one of those weird things that somehow always happens in wrestling, and can only happen in wrestling, he’d say about how if we were in baseball, football or basketball, that none of this could ever happen and we’d never have all these entertaining stories to joke about. There are a lot of people who knew him and were very sad this weekend that had to perform, and a lot of decisions that had to be made under a lot of pressure. If things seemed strange or if people seemed distracted while performing, I hope everyone understands. I expect there will be a lot of criticism of several people and decisions that were made, and under other circumstances I’d probably agree with a lot of them and can’t say I disagree with them now. There will be a lot of people very critical of themselves and their own decisions. Usually in life if you make a mistake, you have the chance to rectify it. But sometimes mistakes have absolute results that can’t be rectified. Those are the ones hardest to deal with. I’ve been doing this for 15 years, and this was the hardest issue I’ve ever had to write.
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 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 book 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 lim
itations 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, that 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.
