One Year Gone

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Photo Credit: WWE.com

One year ago today, the wrestling world lost one of its few iconic figures in the "Macho Man" Randy Savage, who had a heart attack while driving, lost control of his vehicle and crashed into a tree. Thankfully, his wife did not die. In the week that followed, we were all thrown into a deep funk, because the Macho Man died, and we all loved him. Since then though, his death really hasn't resonated with me at least. It's not that I don't miss him. I do. That being said, the situation hasn't really changed.

As I've pointed out for Fair to Flair in the wake of his death, Savage did what many in the industry could never do. He let go. Because of that, we spent the last several years missing him as if he had died. The difference was that he could pop up from time to time in other media to let us appreciate him, to pay off on missing him. Well, the other difference was that when he was alive, we could hope for him to make his reconciliation with Vince McMahon and appear one more time on WWE television.

Obviously, that's off the table now, but nothing really changed with his passing in our every day lives. With Larry Sweeney, there was the impact on everyone in Chikara as well as the chance that maybe he'd turn his life around and become a comeback story. With Eddie Guerrero, he was arguably close enough to his prime that he still had so much to give WWE. With Chris Benoit, it wasn't so much that we would miss him, but that we would miss the false sense of innocence that we had regarding the type of wrestling that ultimately killed him. Savage's story has been told, and it was largely put to bed. In fact, I'm not even sure that he was mentioned as much as he has been in the last few months.

Again, it's not like his death wasn't sad. I was bummed. But the reason why it's different is in the finality that Savage's career had. Sure, it's never good at all to see someone that young die (and don't tell yourself otherwise, 58 is way too young these days), and having Savage being a living monument to wrestling would've been great. That being said, mourning him was just the next step in remembering him. The heart attack and car accident robbed us of him coming back for one last curtain call, but he was already gone before he died.

That being said, even with the year having passed, I still miss him, as do we all, and I hope he is resting in peace.