Terry Michael Brunk, better known to wrestling fans as Sabu, died on Sunday at age 60. No cause of death has been announced. The headline writers will call him “The Suicidal, Homicidal, Genocidal, Death‑Defying Maniac” one last time, but that kind of shorthand barely covers a career that stretched from his uncle Ed “The [Original] Sheik” Farhat’s barn in Williamston, Michigan, to the Tokyo Dome, the ECW Arena, and every bingo hall, flea market, and burned‑out armory in between.
Along the way, Sabu spent 40 years connecting wrestling’s bloody past with his own hardcore present as he hurled himself into plywood, barbed wire, and concrete—then patched the wounds with whatever was handy. “I had a cut on my arm,” he recalled of the first time he used the superglue in his memoir Scars, Silence, & Superglue, “Someone there had some crazy glue at a desk, I picked it up and put a glob over the cut. It quickly stopped the bleeding.” He would bleed plenty, but never for long—his highlight-reel career left him little time for that.
Sabu’s ferocity in the ring was no accident—it was his birthright. Born in 1964 and raised in Lansing, Michigan, Terrance Michael Brunk grew up under the flabby, battle-scarred wing of the Sheik, who was one of wrestling’s legendary villains, a WWE Hall of Famer renowned for throwing fireballs and using sharp objects to draw blood all across the world. While he was wrapping up his career as a 5-foot-8, 153-pound offensive guard at Sexton High School in Lansing—and after surviving being shot in the mouth during a mass shooting incident—Sabu was training himself and other wrestlers while under the supervision of his hardcore relative.
Of these times, Sabu would later recount, “I was training this guy [with] my uncle… My uncle made me do all the heavy lifting while he stood outside the ring and told me what to do.” Under the Sheik’s strict tutelage, the young Brunk learned the fundamentals of wrestling—and also inherited his uncle’s obsession with protecting the Lebanese American family’s mystique.
At a stock-car racetrack in Toledo, the Sheik introduced Terry Brunk to the wrestling world with a new identity: “Sabu, the Elephant Boy.” Wrapping an ornate Indian turban around his nephew’s head, Farhat gave his nephew his gimmick, one inspired by a 1937 adventure film that had enchanted him as a child. That night, the 20-year-old Brunk won his debut match. Even though he scrapped “the elephant boy” part, the persona of Sabu, presented as a mute madman from a far-off land, would stick for the rest of his career. It was a direct homage to the Sheik’s gimmick, and the family resemblance was intentional. Fans quickly learned that Sabu was the Sheik’s legitimate nephew, and Farhat—aging, increasingly immobile, and eager to extend his run as a gate attraction as long as he possibly could—was eager to capitalize on that.
Throughout the remainder of the 1980s, Sabu wrestled primarily on small independent shows, often under his uncle’s watchful eye. In those days, the Sheik insisted on a “conservative” wrestling style, emphasizing holds and basic moves—a sharp contrast to the mayhem that would later define Sabu’s matches. But behind closed doors, the young Sabu was experimenting in the practice ring on the Sheik’s farm. “I learned that style kind of on my own ... when [my uncle] wasn’t looking, me and [fellow trainee] Rob Szatkowski [who would later be known as Rob Van Dam] would do some crazy stuff, and when he’d come out, we’d stop and get back in line,” Sabu admitted.
In 1991, the ailing Sheik’s career got an unlikely second wind in Japan—and he took Sabu along for the ride. Lured by a lucrative offer from Frontier Martial-Arts Wrestling (FMW) promoter Atsushi Onita, the 65-year-old Sheik agreed to a tour of Japan on one condition: his nephew Sabu would come with him. On the flight to Tokyo for their first FMW tour, the veteran had a change of heart about his protégé’s style. Recognizing that the Japanese fans craved spectacle, Farhat told Sabu to unleash the full extent of his abilities. After years of reining him in, the Sheik encouraged his nephew to “let out all the stops” and show the world the daredevil he could be. It was the permission Sabu had been waiting for. “Needless to say, it was music to Sabu’s ears,” author Brian R. Solomon observed in Blood and Fire, his biography of the Sheik.
Teaming with his aging uncle in an FMW tag team tournament, the 26-year-old Sabu impressed the Osaka crowd with aerial attacks and risk-taking quite unlike anything that followers of the promotion had seen before. While the diminished Sheik prowled the apron with his trademark foreign object, Sabu provided the fireworks. “Sabu’s breathtaking new style certainly made up for his uncle’s clear limitations,” recalled FMW photographer Jimmy Suzuki in Blood and Fire. Japanese fans, who remembered the Sheik from his bloody 1970s tours, instantly embraced the nephew. “Sabu was accepted by Japanese fans right away because this is the Sheik’s legitimate nephew,” FMW ring announcer Hideki Saito said.
Over the next two years, Sabu played a major part in Japan’s exciting deathmatch scene. In FMW and other promotions, he participated in gruesome spectacles alongside the likes of Onita, Tiger Jeet Singh, and his uncle. During one infamous FMW match in 1992, a fire engulfed the ring—nearly burning the Sheik alive. The very next day, with the Sheik hospitalized with severe burns, Sabu returned to the ring for a barbed-wire deathmatch in Tokyo, winning an FMW tag team title in his uncle’s absence. Night after night, he set a new standard for the industry, and set a precedent for his subsequent decades, absorbing punishment that would fell a lesser man.
In 1992, Onita even booked the legendary Sheik—with Sabu as his second—in a barbed-wire cage match in which the Sheik won the FMW world title and symbolically crowned Farhat as a champion one final time. But age and injuries soon finished the Sheik. After one last tour in mid-1993, the 67-year-old Farhat withdrew from active competition, leaving Sabu to carry the family mantle alone. Sabu did just that, headlining FMW cards on his own and proving himself enough of a draw to warrant a WWF dark match in 1993 and eventually end up booked in New Japan and All Japan.
Sabu’s exploits in Japan caught the attention of Extreme Championship Wrestling, a renegade promotion where bloody brawls and high-risk stunts had become the norm. ECW promoter Paul Heyman brought Sabu in at the end of 1993, knowing that American wrestling fans were hungry for the kind of boundary-pushing action Sabu specialized in. He made an immediate impact in ECW, literally arriving on a hospital gurney—“Paul said, ‘We’ll wheel you in like Hannibal Lecter—tear out of the straps on cue,’” Sabu wrote in his autobiography. Though standing under 6 feet tall and weighing around 220 pounds, Sabu wrestled with a manic intensity that made him seem larger than life. In ECW’s bingo hall arena, he would sprint up the ropes to perform somersault planchas into the crowd and springboard moonsaults off chairs, often at the expense of his own health. As one writer for WWE.com later quipped, “each one of Sabu’s matches belonged on a ‘best of’ DVD.”
Throughout the mid-1990s, Sabu was one of the primary scarred-up faces of hardcore wrestling. He became synonymous with tables, ladders, and chairs—well before those objects became staples of WWF’s Attitude Era. In fact, Sabu is widely credited with popularizing the use of tables as weapons; night after night in ECW, he sent opponents (and himself) crashing through wood. Long before WWE mainstreamed the tables, ladders, and chairs (TLC) match concept, Sabu and his partners were innovating creative carnage. A tag team showdown he and Rob Van Dam had against the Eliminators in February 1997 is considered by WWE as a direct precursor to the famous WWE TLC matches that followed.
In the absence of compelling promos, anything-goes matches and bloody feuds served as Sabu’s calling cards. In 1994, he engaged in a wild series with Cactus Jack (Mick Foley), including a crazed brawl at Hostile City Showdown that year which fans still recall for its sheer mayhem. He formed an alliance with future hated rival the Tasmaniac (Taz), and the duo’s “Double Tables” match against the Public Enemy in 1995 was another early ECW classic. By 1996, Sabu was locked in an intense rivalry with Van Dam, his old training partner. The two pushed each other to new heights of athleticism in bouts like their 30-minute time-limit draw at Hardcore Heaven ’96, mixing martial-arts kicks with chair-flipping acrobatics. Though initially opponents, Sabu and RVD eventually forged a top tag team under manager Bill Alfonso. With Alfonso’s whistle incessantly chirping, Sabu and RVD captured the ECW Tag Team titles and set a standard for innovation—executing “Air Sabu” dives off chairs and tandem maneuvers.
Perhaps Sabu’s most defining feud was with Taz, the squatty suplex machine from Brooklyn. In a yearlong slow-burn angle, Taz publicly called out Sabu throughout 1996 while Sabu remained (in story line) silent and elusive. The tension built until ECW’s first pay-per-view, Barely Legal, in April 1997, when the two finally squared off in what was billed as the most anticipated match in ECW history. That showdown ended with Taz victorious, but Sabu refused to stay down: moments after the bell, he attacked Taz and even stole Taz’s manager, Alfonso.
Amid the carnage, Sabu accumulated championship gold, as well. He was a two-time ECW World Heavyweight Champion and held the ECW World Television Championship once. He also notched three ECW Tag Team title reigns (once with Taz, twice with Van Dam). But statistics hardly tell the story of Sabu’s ECW tenure. More than titles or win-loss records, it was the wild moments that defined him—the moments that made even hardened fans gasp. In a 1997 no-rope barbed wire match against Terry Funk (at the aptly named Born to be Wired event), Sabu’s biceps was torn wide open by the barbed wire’s jagged barbs. Blood poured down his arm. “Sabu asked his ringside manager Bill Alfonso for some tape, wrapped up the arm and went back to the match,” Terry Funk wrote in his autobiography. “At that moment, I had no doubt I was in there with a rare breed of cat.” That gruesome contest, which resulted in Sabu receiving 100 stitches, was so extreme that ECW never attempted another barbed wire match on live showings; it remains one of the most brutal matches in wrestling lore.
Earlier, in 1994, Sabu had also suffered a broken neck in the ring at the hands of Chris Benoit—a botched throw that earned Benoit his “Crippler” nickname and could easily have ended Sabu’s career. Astonishingly, Sabu returned to action just months later, wearing a neck brace but still executing his high-flying offense. Such resilience only added to his almost mythical status. Fans truly believed Sabu would rather break his body than break character, and for good reason—he was willing to do whatever it took to keep wrestling. “My golden rule: self‑medicate at all costs,” he wrote in his autobiography.
In 1995, Sabu briefly left ECW—reportedly fired by Heyman after choosing to honor a booking in Japan over an ECW event. He signed with WCW and appeared on WCW Nitro in late 1995, but the stint was short-lived; Sabu’s anarchic style and refusal to cut scripted promos made him an awkward fit in the corporate WCW environment. By early 1996, he was gone from WCW and back in ECW’s embrace.
By the late 1990s, his severe injuries had mounted: broken bones, dislocations, burned flesh, and countless deep cuts. Outside the ring, he coped with chronic pain through any means necessary. “Sabu had a lot of issues from ... the painkillers from what he did,” observed wrestling journalist Dave Meltzer (Sabu, like other wrestlers of his era, referred to wrestling without painkillers as “working without a net”). On one occasion, Sabu even reset a dislocated jaw with ice and glue after a match. “I was holding my jaw in place, but with every step, I felt it move,” he wrote of the injury in his autobiography. “There were pieces of bone and jaw moving around in there. I grabbed a handful of ice out of a beer cooler and took a blood shower. Once the swelling was down and after I spat out as much blood as I possibly could without needing a transfusion, I took to the mirror. I turned my lower lip inside out and saw the jagged line where my teeth went through the puffy flesh. Rob [Van Dam] came by just in time to see me supergluing the gash closed in my mouth.”
Even as his body faltered, the lure of the ring remained strong. Promoters around the world still saw Sabu as a special attraction—an icon of extreme wrestling whose name on a card guaranteed a certain segment of fans would show up to see the legend one more time. Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, he wrestled sporadically on independent shows and in nostalgia tours of Japan; in the mid-2000s, he returned to televised wrestling with TNA/Impact Wrestling. In 2006, WWE brought Sabu in for the relaunch of the ECW brand, giving him a brief moment on a bigger stage. He had his share of highlights, including a chaotic match with Rey Mysterio that ended when both men crashed through a table at One Night Stand 2006. Sabu appeared at WrestleMania 23 in 2007, competing in front of over 75,000 fans in Detroit (the Sheik’s old home territory) as part of an ECW Originals vs. New Breed story line. It was a career pinnacle of sorts—the outlaw rebel finally performing at WrestleMania, and winning. But the mainstream run was short-lived: Sabu was released by WWE just a month later, reportedly for disciplinary issues.
In May 2023, Sabu made a surprise cameo on live TV with AEW, appearing (appropriately) as an equalizer in a wild brawl on AEW Dynamite. Even at 58 years old and visibly slowed by age, he managed to dive off a chair to deliver his signature flying attack, giving younger viewers a glimpse of his old magic. It was clear, however, that the end was near. Fittingly, Sabu’s final match took place not in a WWE ring or a cushy legends ceremony, but in a grimy hardcore showcase during WrestleMania weekend this year. On April 18, 2025—just three weeks before his death—Sabu stepped into a ring surrounded by barbed wire instead of ropes, for a no-rope barbed wire deathmatch against wrestler Joey Janela in Las Vegas. Billed as Sabu’s retirement match, the bout—hard bumps and all—was a bloody throwback to his heyday.
The 60-year-old Sabu won the match, defeating Janela in what would be his swan song. “It was an honor and a pleasure to work with Sabu one last time and give him the sendoff he deserved,” said GCW owner Brett Lauderdale, who organized the event. “His final match was 100 percent authentic Sabu. ... He is and was a legend, and his legacy will live for generations to come.”
Sabu’s legacy in professional wrestling is secured, even if he was never a household name to casual fans. In the niche of hardcore wrestling, he is revered as a pioneer who redefined what was possible (and permissible) inside a wrestling ring. “One of a kind, absolute legend, and a true game changer for professional wrestling,” is how current WWE star Sami Zayn described Sabu upon hearing of his death. Indeed, many of today’s stars who push the envelope—from daredevils like Jeff Hardy and Darby Allin to hardcore brawlers like Mance Warner and Hoodfoot on the independent scene—owe a debt to Sabu’s innovations in the 1990s.
Beyond the spectacular stunts, Sabu carried forward the spirit of the Sheik’s era into a new generation. He was the link between the old outlaw territorial days and the modern extreme style. Just as the Sheik shocked audiences in the ’60s and ’70s with his pencil stabbing and fire-throwing, Sabu awed the ’90s fans with his barbed wire wounds and fearless leaps. And like his uncle, Sabu maintained an aura of unpredictability—you never knew what he might do, only that it would likely involve broken furniture and broken bones.
Fans will remember the image of Sabu standing atop a chair, pointing skyward before leaping into the abyss, as his personal salute to the heavens and perhaps to his beloved uncle watching from above. “I remember like very early on, you know, they go like, how come you don’t put more padding on? He goes, ‘Because then people will say, oh, it’s not that tough.’ He wanted it to be tough,” remembered Meltzer. Tough it was, and tougher still to say goodbye to a hardcore pioneer whose legend, written in blood, will not soon be forgotten.