The Death of Big Van Vader
Big Van Vader is dead. He has been dead for several weeks, and I have wanted to write this article for roughly as much time, but I have been working and the world has been turning and well, quite frankly, I’m sure you know the deal. It would be impossible for me to say that he went too soon, because he was a 450 pound man who spent his life crammed on international flights, touring the roads of the United States in rental cars that most assuredly could not house his gargantuan frame, and, for fleeting moments that must have seemed eternal to him, portraying professional wrestling’s greatest bully. He will undoubtedly be missed by his family, none of whom I know, most of whom saw him very little, and he will also be missed by the legion of dedicants who gorged on the precious moments that his family lost.
I grew up in a smallish town in suburban Massachusetts, long before the complicated interwoven histories of pro wrestling canon joined the digital archive. The onus of creating continuity fell on my kindergarten shoulders, and I would watch and watch and re-watch Yankee Video’s selection of wrestling tapes (“Please remember to tell them that Wrestlemania 4 has two tapes,” I would remind my mom, so that I could conclude my afternoon with the ascension of Macho Man Randy Savage instead of a hobbled Andre the Giant battling Hulk Hogan to an unimpressive draw). I was too young to stay up for Monday Night Raw’s primetime slot, so I subsisted on rentals and Saturday daytime wrestling.
Wrestling fans have finely tuned bullshit detectors. Despite my immense hatred for Mr. Perfect and Shawn Michaels, I begrudgingly admired their athleticism and dedication to their craft. I knew, I knew that Lex Luger was smoke and mirrors, a bleached blonde Tin Man with 14 abs and two backwards left feet. I was terrified of the surreal, arcane horrors like Papa Shango and the Undertaker, but steadfast, resolute that they would be conquered by super heroes with painted faces.
I was terrified of Vader because he was mean. He was really, really mean. There were villainous wrestlers, sure , but the spray-painted fur that adorned Giant González’ lanky frame and Rick Martell’s “Yes, I am a model” button imposed low ceilings on genuine fear inducement. But in his full-time WCW debut, Vader did what throngs of bad guys had failed to do for 6 years.
He beat the shit out of Sting.
For Christ’s sake, look at this:
He’s just punching Sting! Like, really hard! And with his patented Vader Bomb, for which he would ascend to the middle rope and deploy all of his 450 pounds (with tremendous hangtime, I may add), he crushed Sting’s ribcage and ruptured his spleen. For real.
Vader occupied a confusing space in the wrestling canon I built as a child. Why did this horrible man hate Sting so much? (He didn't. He just liked to beat people up. He was tremendous at it.) Why did he enter the arena clad in a gas-spewing mask in some VHS tapes, while in others he just iteratively barked “Who’s the man?!?!” at any fan who dared to even glance at him? Vader was sadism and raw athleticism in a gravity-defying mass of bulbous hatred. He was terrifyingly good at pretending to fight people because his performative act was rooted in brutal realism. I owned a VHS copy of Starrcade ’93, an event in which Ric Flair would put his career on the line to challenge Vader for the WCW World Heavyweight Championship. Despite the fact that I had watched it countless times, despite the fact that I knew Ric Flair would triumph as the white plastic tape spindles neared their apex, and despite the fact that I loathed him for all of his transgressions against Sting, I was genuinely afraid for Flair’s well-being every time. There was no other villain in wrestling who created that palpable sense of danger.
Big Van Vader’s legend extends far beyond the mythos of my childhood. In the late 1990’s, wrestling tape traders frenzied over a Vader vs. Stan Hansen match from New Japan Pro Wrestling in which Vader’s motherfucking eye popped out and he pushed it back in so he could continue to perform. He could do a moonsault! He even had the comedic range to play a metafictitious version of himself on two episodes of Boy Meets World. In a business defined by its cadre of larger-than-life characters, Vader was unequivocally and exceedingly larger-than-larger-than-life.
Wrestling fans mourn the death of their heroes and villains with an admirably pathetic intensity. To the public at large it has a veil of nostalgia, of the desperation of grown-ups who cannot leave behind a world of super heroes whose moral code is guided by colorful prints and rippling physiques. In reality, wrestling fans mourn their heroes so deeply because they quite literally give their lives to entertain us. The cocktails of drugs that killed so many were borne of the desperation of life on the road, of a back and leg and neck and spirit-breaking profession that partitions chunks of a performer’s family time and deposits it fractionally in the continuum of the ring. Every fall narrows the spinal column. Every flip, every tumble, carries a risk of paralysis. Although many performers escape the snapping jaw of wrestling’s injurious law of large numbers, none of them will escape that of death itself, however prematurely it may come. We live in a world that is increasingly full of awful, cartoonish real-life villains; we just lost a tremendous fictional one.