Cattle Mutilation
Superstar
Sabu was Sabu until the very end
Three weeks before his death Sunday, the 60-year-old hardcore wrestling legend pulled off a swan song worthy of the homicidal, genocidal, death–defying maniac.
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.’
"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.”
“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.”
Then he took nasty bumps, ref said to stop the match, and they restarted he match...
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.