9 Wrestling Personalities Killed Off In Mainstream Wrestling Storylines
Whatcha gonna do when the Grim Reaper runs wild on you?
Professional wrestling offers a pretty unique kind of serialized television experience. Part sporting event, part melodrama, part gratuitous violence, pro wrestling is unlike anything else on TV. Still, it's at times pretty obvious that people like Vince McMahon desperately want viewers to think of it like any other serials, even begging for comparisons to soap operas.
Wrestling's uniqueness can also be its biggest challenge, and that's proven every time the writers attempt to incorporate death into a storyline. Which, rather curiously, isn't very often.
Gimmicks are killed, names are changed, and wrestlers are written off, but rarely does anyone actually die within the context of a storyline. In fact, when it actually does happen, there seems to be an unnatural amount of outrage hurled at an industry that is literally built upon scripting the most ridiculous stories you could possibly imagine.
Maybe it's because real-life tragedy has always been inextricably linked to the business, and when a wrestler actually dies outside the ring, it makes the idea of using death to propel a plot feel reprehensible.
With that said, prepare to cringe your way through the few occasions that fictionalized death found its way into a storyline.
9. Al Wilson
There has been no shortage of angles that featured perverted old men shacking up with mind-bogglingly hot younger women. Vince McMahon himself has been front-and-center for no fewer than twelve thousand of these storylines. But WWE went a little darker with this one.
Al Wilson was the father of Torrie Wilson, a Ruthless Aggression-era Diva who entered the WWE as part of the Invasion storyline and spent most of her career in slightly lesbianic dalliances with other Divas.
Her first encounter was with former ECW "darling" Dawn Marie, who was so enamored with Torrie that she used her father as a bargaining chip in her sexual mind games. If Torrie agreed to spend the night with her, she'd leave her dad alone. If not, she was going to marry Al and spend the rest of her life antagonizing Torrie as her stepmom.
Dawn Marie supposedly developed genuine feelings for Al in the storyline, culminating in a live wedding on Raw. Oh, they also got married in their underwear because...well, because WWE is sometimes just too damn strange for its own good.
During their honeymoon, the bajillion-years-old Al died of a heart attack, caused by too much rigorous lovemaking. This kicked the feud between Dawn Marie and Torrie into high gear, but none of it was worth the mental image of Al Wilson in his underwear.