Whether people want to admit it or not, the death toll in professional wrestling is staggeringly high. The number of wrestlers who have died before the age of 50 is almost hard to believe and only seems to be growing with each passing year. If any other professional sport like the NFL or NBA had a death toll this high, there would be a Congressional investigation and heads would roll. But, since this is a "fake" sport, no one seems to care too much. The life of a wrestler, especially during the territory days, was not a normal existence. Between traveling hundreds of miles a day, destroying your body in the ring on a nightly basis, and trying to stay away from "demons", wrestlers don't live a lifestyle that is conducive to living a long time. With all of these deaths, it's inevitable that the business of professional wrestling would be blamed for these worker's untimely demises. Wrestling is an unforgiving, brutal business where wrestlers are ridden like racing horses: Workers are run into the ground with touring and wrestling until they are either too injured or too burnt out to continue. Then they are cast aside (or back to the independents) to rot and try to scrounge a living selling insurance or something similar. The following ten wrestlers were those who either died extraordinarily young or had an accident in the ring that caused their deaths. We will examine whether wrestling was to blame for their premature death and what could have been done to prevent it.
