2005-11-17 - 6:54 p.m.

Rock stars have all the luck. Keith Richards injects heroin into his bell-end for breakfast while Eddie Guerrero dies in a hotel room in Minnesota. I should be used to wrestlers dying by now, but this one hits hard. He was 38 years old and had finally got clean. How ironic that a business so often derided as fake can cause so much pain.

Let's turn back the hands of time to the mid nineties wilderness. I was a failed teenager buying wrestling videos from an underground trader. ECW was the upstart promotion that exposed the Big Two for the hokey lumps of stale cheese that they'd become. Eddie Guerrero's feud with Dean Malenko - the Classic - was an oasis of technical wrestling, a flawless masterclass in the blood-stained bingo hall. These matches were so good that the last ever one elicited a chant of "Please Don't Go" from the crazed Philly fans. Grown men wept. I experienced the emotion and the excitement from my living room at 4am. This was why I watched wrestling. These guys gave their all for 1000 hardcore fans and it was with fondest wishes that they moved on to earn some real money.

Proving that there is some justice in life, the 5'7" El Paso native got over with the fans on the big stage, proving to Vince McMahon that wrestling fans aren't as obsessed with men's physiques as he seems to be. Eddie had that most important quality for a wreslter: charisma. That he also had fantastic execution, aerial skills, timing and stamina was a wonderful bonus. Hell, he even made Bradshaw look good. Not much made me happier as a wrestling fan than seeing Eddie Guerrero and Chris Benoit celebrating together at the end of Wrestlemania XX: the cream had risen to the top and it made all those years of Hogan seem worth it. He was funny too. Depsite being lumbered with a horrendous mullet and a retrograde racist gimmick, Eddie made lying, cheating and stealing somthing to be proud of. If you think wrestlers are bad actors then I refer you to the time when Latino Heat made a convincing job of being besotted with freakazoid she-male Chyna. The only thing stronger than his frog splash was his thirst for booze and drugs.

In 1994 Eddie teamed with Love Machine Art Barr in Mexcio as Los Gringos Locos - the despicable Americans were the hottest heels on the planet. Watching them headline When Worlds Collide, I thought the roof was going to blow off the Los Angeles Sports Arena - La Pareja del Terror played the crowd like fiddles and put on a helluva match before the rabid mass of Lucha lovers. Now both men are dead - victims of a business of which they were its finest ambassadors.

Adios, champ.

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