The 1992 Royal Rumble is best remembered as the “Fair to Flair” Rumble, when Ric Flair, in the highlight of his short-lived first tenure in what was then known as the WWF, entered at no. 3 and persevered to win the match and the WWF Championship that was at stake. But the inflection point in the match—the point when wrestling history turned—was just before Flair won. Hulk Hogan, the longtime face of the WWF, nearly eliminated Flair, only to be tossed out over the top rope himself by his erstwhile friend Sid Justice. Despite being primed to boo Sid—this was a clear act of betrayal—the fans cheered. When Hogan retaliated by pulling Sid out of the ring, the crowd booed. They thought for a moment that they were seeing a passing of the torch, but instead they saw another monster being fed to the Hogan machine. According to Sid, Hogan was apoplectic backstage after the event, claiming that Vince McMahon had planned all along for Hogan to get booed.
You had to be there—that’s the thing we say about moments like this. You can’t understand the feeling if you weren’t there. But in this case, it’s not just figurative. You really had to be there, or at least watching it at home on pay-per-view, because when the clip was replayed on WWF Superstars the following week, the crowd noise was edited to make it sound like they were cheering Hogan and booing Sid. There’s some real sliding doors stuff here. Sid should have been Hogan’s replacement (he was brought into the WWF playing against type as a good guy) and was instead cast as Hogan fodder. The two feuded through early 1992 before Sid left the company in April. Hogan limped along until he too left the following year for WCW, where he reinvented himself as a villain.
From his earliest days in the pro wrestling business, Sid Eudy—who died this week at 63 after a yearslong struggle with cancer—was almost impossible to hate. He was a heel, sure, but he was such an awesome one that the boos didn’t have any gusto. Perhaps no wrestler has more literally looked like a work of Greek statuary brought to life, and there’s some stiff competition. At 6-foot-9 and 317 pounds—with a ruggedly handsome face and head of blond curls that any 6-foot babyface would have killed for—Sid looked more like a professional wrestler than maybe anyone who had walked the planet before him. Everyone around him saw it, too. After starting his career in Tennessee (where he briefly wrestled as Mad Max knockoff Lord Humongous), he got his most famous ring name, Sid Vicious, after the Sex Pistols bassist, during a run in Texas. That’s the name he used in WCW, where he showed up next as part of the Skyscrapers tag team alongside Dan Spivey, but that pairing was short-lived. Eudy broke a rib in a match with the Steiner Brothers the same year he debuted, and he was replaced in the team by Mark Calaway, who would later be known as the Undertaker. It was just as well—Sid was too electric for a tag team to hold him. When he came back in May 1990, it was as a member of the prestigious Four Horsemen stable, where guys like Sid could be groomed for the main event under the wing of Ric Flair. He was announced as being from “wherever he damn well pleases.” Which, in relatively short order, was not in WCW.
A year after his Horsemen debut, Sid turned up in the WWF, now known as Sid Justice. The name deserves a second here. Obviously, there was the branding aspect of it—the WWF was still using performers who had preexisting identities in the pro wrestling world, but the company was also creating new characters from existing stock, like it did with the Undertaker, who debuted in 1990. But Sid was immutable, too much of a real-time icon to change his gimmick, so the company tweaked his name. At times in his career, he was variously called the Master and Ruler of the World and the Millennium Man, but no moniker seemed to improve upon “Sid.” And there was obviously an IP issue here, since that other Sid Vicious predated (and was more famous than) this wrestler. But the new name, schlocky as it was, was a wink at “Sid Vicious” and a nod to Eudy’s tenuous heroism. He would be positioned as a hero, but with an almost accidental postmodern wink: He was too cool to be a heel, but too menacing to be a babyface, and everyone was going to have to be OK with that.
After the run with Hogan, a brief feud against the Ultimate Warrior, and his subsequent departure from the WWF, Sid went back to WCW and got a plum role at the top of the card until a night in Blackburn, England, when the roster was on a European tour. Sid got into it in the hotel bar with his former Horsemen stablemate Arn Anderson, and later that night Sid went to Anderson’s hotel room and attacked him with a chair leg. Anderson got his hands on a pair of scissors, but he took the worst of the exchange—Sid was stabbed four times, Anderson 20. Arn barely survived. Eudy was fired.
Sid went back to Memphis in 1994 before making his way back to the WWF in 1995 in what was unsurprisingly a rather controversial roster move. Not so much to fans—for the most part we were unaware of Sid’s record—but for the other wrestlers, who knew what had happened. But even to the uninitiated fan, this is when Sid’s legacy starts to really take hold. He wasn’t the next Hogan, or the next Flair for that matter, but he was the last of a dying breed, the itinerant monster from the territorial days who flits from outpost to outpost to draw a crowd, terrorize the competition, cash a few checks, and disappear into the night. (It should also be noted that Sid’s notorious unreliability coincided with his love for the game of softball, to the point where rumors of him feigning injuries to play softball had to be dispelled.) That mantle—the monster of the territory days—was an archetype that predated Sid, and one that Sid fell only accidentally into, but for fans of my generation, it played on our haunted memories.
Nothing sticks in your head more than a song you can’t finish, and in the same way, our storybook wrestling memories are clogged—choked by the incomplete stories of the villains who lost a match and disappeared forever into the abyss. More accurately, they disappeared into their minivan and down the highway to the next big town and next big paycheck, but we didn’t know that. We spent months wondering where they went, why they weren’t even mentioned anymore, and if we were lucky, we’d catch them on another show, maybe in the WWF, and somehow string together the imaginary logic that led them from one point to the next. Sid was this kind of figure, too unstable to be contained by a singular job or boss or any notion of work-life balance. He was a mercenary on-screen and in reality, paid to come in as a last resort when the locker room needed reinforcements. He was not part of your favorite promotion—he was from wherever he damn well pleased.
In late 1995, Sid badly injured his neck and temporarily retired—he never told McMahon because the checks kept coming—only to be lured back into action in July 1996 to replace the departing Ultimate Warrior, a onetime Hogan replacement even more popular and undependable than Eudy. They called him Sycho Sid now, and it was another silly name, but it rang true. Just watch Sid as he makes his way to the ring: the gravity, the implied depravity. This is a perp walk in reverse, the assailant on the way to the scene of the crime.
By the end of 1996, Sid was back in the main event, this time against another erstwhile friend, WWF champion Shawn Michaels. This was Sid’s finest match—Sid was never very good in the ring, but he could be absolutely electric for a few minutes. The 1996 Survivor Series main event was a 20-minute master class in making a guy like Sid look not just competitive, but compelling. Again, however, Sid was cast as the heel, and again, the crowd wasn’t having it. At one point, Sid grabs a TV camera from a cameraman and threatens to hit Michaels with it. Sid was harangued by Michaels’s mentor, José Lothario—himself a former WWF wrestler, but to kids of my generation, he was an old fogy that didn’t make any sense next to the Heartbreak Kid. I think the idea was to humanize Michaels and make him more honorable, but that sort of defeats the point. This was the start of the Attitude Era, the start of the modern age of pro wrestling, and fans were experimenting with defiance, rooting for whoever they thought was coolest, not nicest.
Anyway, Lothario interjected himself. Sid hit Lothario with the camera and knocked him off the ring apron onto the floor. The crowd looked at this devilish act and cheered loudly. When Michaels went to check on Lothario, Sid attacked him, hit him with the camera, and won the match and the WWF Championship. He carried the belt through the Royal Rumble, when he lost it back to Michaels, and then won it again from Bret Hart on a February 1997 episode of Raw. He held onto it through WrestleMania, when he lost it to the Undertaker, with an assist from Hart. And then Sid disappeared again.
He was injured again, supposedly, but he regained his form by 1999 when he turned up in ECW and then again in WCW. He found an entirely different WCW than he’d left—the nWo had changed the face of the industry—and one that would soon be flailing in the shadow of the monster it’d built. In WCW’s dying days, Sid was a relative stalwart—it felt rather like a postapocalyptic landscape, and the onetime Lord Humongous was somehow fitting as a standard-bearer of this new reality. Or, to put it another way, he was the former star brought back into action for a last big show at the fairground to try to save the local promotion. It didn’t work, nor did the various reclamation projects that followed. When he was brought out of another layoff in late 2000, he challenged again for the world title, but in early 2001, he jumped off the second rope in a four-man title match and broke his leg in a gruesome, 90-degree fracture live on pay-per-view. I won’t link to the video, but I recognize that no words will do, ahem, Justice to the horror of the moment.
For more than a decade, Sid’s unpredictability had made him seem more real, more dangerous than his contemporaries. Now, the unpredictability of reality had turned on him. The man who had turned the powerbomb into a work of art, a statement of purpose, had been felled by a simple move that thousands of men had done a million times before. Sid has since said he didn’t want to do the move and had been talked into it. It was a real tragedy, but in an era that was too full of them and in a company that seemed to be courting disaster in so many ways, Sid’s injury fell by the wayside. He disappeared again, and there was some reassurance in that.
He regained the full use of his leg, despite some prognostications, and wrestled again, in Canada, in Memphis, for Juggalo Championship Wrestling. He wrestled around the world. In his later years, he was known as a white whale on the autograph circuit, because he often failed to show up for signings that he had agreed to attend. Any time that Sid damn well pleased to show up, it felt like a blessing, just like when he was on TV, any time the place he damn well pleased to be was on the show that we were watching. You couldn’t look away—figuratively, sure, but also because you didn’t know when you would get to see him again. He wrestled a last match for WWE on the June 25, 2012, episode of Raw, and even though he looked older and thinner, if you squinted, he still looked like he could be world champion. He was just there for one night, though, which felt about right. For that one night, that was where he damn well pleased to be.
