// KOTAKU — GAMING
I Am Not Ready To Start Losing My Generation Of Pro Wrestling Icons
Pro wrestler Benjaman Satterley, aka Pac, aka the (our) Bastard, died on Sunday. He was 40.
All Elite Wrestling is saddened to announce the passing of Benjamin Satterley, aka Pac. A native of Newcastle upon Tyne, England, Satterley began his wrestling career in 2004 and went on to perform for wrestling organizations all over the world, captivating fans with innovative… pic.twitter.com/uqzO371t2V
It’s hard for me to understand this. I am, compared to most of my wrestling-watching peers, still quite new to the sport. I started watching in 2020, and have only ever watched AEW, so I have no concept of the history of wrestling or who all the old guys they keep trotting out are. I feel bad when a legendary, senior wrestler dies, sure, but I have no personal attachment to it, because I wasn’t watching them in their prime in the ’80s or ’90s or whenever. My heroes, the guys and gals I watch flipping themselves and each other over and over again on a weekly basis, are still too young for such things. They have years ahead of them. They aren’t going anywhere.
So to go from watching Pac kick ass in a normal match in a Saturday PPV to him just being gone the next day is unthinkable. What happened? How? He was 40. Five years older than me. And so recently after we lost Andy Williams, known as The Butcher, at age 48. Terrifying and muscly as Pac looks, we are essentially peers, at least in age. We don’t know what got him—any one of us could be hit by a bus at any moment, sure—but such things should not be possible. He still had feuds ahead of him. Belt wins and losses. I wanted to see him go for the World Championship one day.
Pac was instrumental to my formation as a lover of pro wrestling. Because of my newness to the craft, my first encounter with Pac was when he was part of something called Death Triangle, which as a newcomer to wrestling I thought was an unbelievably stupid (non-derogatory, very funny) name for a team. He was paired with the Lucha Brothers, Penta and Rey Fenix, and my initial feeling was that this was a weird fit. Two high-flying luchadors in terrifying masks and then this muscle guy with a scraggly beard who looked like he was being held together, kept from bursting, with a bunch of strips of black elastic. He looked, at first brush, like every other generic muscle wrestler I’d ever seen, and I almost dismissed him out of hand:
This would have been a huge mistake. The second I saw him and his trios partners in action, I was hooked. What a team!
The three did some fantastic work together, and it’s a shame that various untimely injuries, and the Lucha Bros. ultimately departing AEW, meant they couldn’t stick together longer. They were trios champions for 126 days, winning the vacated title against the Best Friends and losing it to The Elite.
Pac was never my personal favorite wrestler, and yet he was a cornerstone in so many ways to the foundation of what I loved about pro wrestling. He foiled and challenged so many of my faves, made them look good and cool while he himself looked good and cool, too. The best example of this was his ongoing feud with my absolute favorite wrestler, Orange Cassidy. Again, Pac’s magic for me was just in constantly subverting my expectations, in making me rethink my initial impressions of wrestling and wrestlers. Orange is a goofy sort of wrestler whose whole deal is being chill and unbothered until it really counts, and Pac’s was that he was always mega-serious and super pissed-off all the time, something I normally bristle against but in his case grew to love. His hair looks perpetually wet. He lets out horrid angry howls of fury every so often. When he gets on mic, he rips into whoever he’s talking shit on. The two made great rivals, with Orange’s seeming indifference toward matches deeply infuriating Pac:
Man, those two had some incredible matches. In all of them, I was never cheering for Pac. I love the goofy heroes, not the angsty bad guys. And he was a heel most of the time.