Just try and not watch.

I worked out in the ring last night with one student and one of my co-wrestlers. We kept the garage doors down and the windows closed. It wasn’t comfortable, because it shouldn’t be. Wrestling should be both hard work and hard earned. And I came home feeling pretty good about wrestling. And well, I should have never turned on the TV.

Mr. McMahon “died” yesterday. I didn’t see it on Raw. But I watched the replay and I heard the announcers speak in the same “this is real” hushed tones that they used when we all sat helplessly and watched Owen Hart be carried lifeless from the ring. I have no problem with the storyline death of a character. But then, it happened.

A ten bell salute.

I’ve been wrestling almost 12 years. Met a lot of people, good and bad. But no matter where I was, that ten bell always sent a chill into me, because it meant that someone would never grace us again with his gifts. That they were gone, forever and ever, amen.

I really don’t have the words to tell you how insulted I was. Or how insulted you should be. I live my whole life thinking that I have a very short time on this earth to accomplish the goals that I have set for myself. So I take death very seriously and with plenty of respect. And to hear that clank of the ring bell ten times for no good reason other than to get over an angle…after the last few years of people I grew up watching dying almost weekly…it was just all too much.

It’d be easy to say it’s all such a joke. But where I come from, jokes tend to be funny.