Sean O'Haire
I just saw the name on the side of my screen, where Facebook runs trending "news" stories, and knew he was dead.
O'Haire was a pro wrestler with some success, but ultimately had nothing to make him stand out. He debuted during the Monday Night Wars when there was more than twenty hours of TV wrestling per week, and looked like just another long-haired bodybuilder. He did briefly have a sort of "mastermind" or jimminy-cricket-in-reverse gimmick, but he just didn't have the charisma to pull it off, and WWE at the time was discontinuing gimmicks and storylines after a month or two:
O'Haire even got some screen time with Roddy Piper, but Piper's star had long since faded, and so nothing rubbed off.
He left wrestling to try fighting for real, and like many wrestlers, found gigs in the "freak show" precincts of MMA and kickboxing. That he made his MMA debut six months after leaving WWE should tell you about how well prepared he was for real combat sports. Here he is losing to an aging and Butterbean in two minutes:
He did better in MMA (4-2) than he did in kickboxing (0-4) but his only victory over a fighter worthy of even a Wikipedia entry was this match against Shungo Oyama:
Sean O Haire vs Shungo Oyama by abbott1
(Go to 6:40 for the action. If you can call it that–O'Haire outweighs Oyama by fifty pounds or so, and Oyama is known more for his spirit than his victories.)
Professional wrestlers are often undisciplined athletes—they're kept "in shape" (i.e., awash in painkillers and fat-blasters and 'roids) by the constant touring. Here's a pic of O'Haire in the ring at one of his kickboxing matches, just a couple of years after leaving wrestling:
Despite the pudgy physique, he was probably healthier on some level than he was here, in WCW circa 2000:
And now he is dead at the age of 43. No known cause yet, but we pretty much know that the cause will either have been suicide, a "heart" problem caused by either painkiller or other drug abuse, or some tragic misadventure worthy of a noir novel.
Another terrible waste.
Update: source reporting suicide.
O'Haire was a pro wrestler with some success, but ultimately had nothing to make him stand out. He debuted during the Monday Night Wars when there was more than twenty hours of TV wrestling per week, and looked like just another long-haired bodybuilder. He did briefly have a sort of "mastermind" or jimminy-cricket-in-reverse gimmick, but he just didn't have the charisma to pull it off, and WWE at the time was discontinuing gimmicks and storylines after a month or two:
O'Haire even got some screen time with Roddy Piper, but Piper's star had long since faded, and so nothing rubbed off.
He left wrestling to try fighting for real, and like many wrestlers, found gigs in the "freak show" precincts of MMA and kickboxing. That he made his MMA debut six months after leaving WWE should tell you about how well prepared he was for real combat sports. Here he is losing to an aging and Butterbean in two minutes:
He did better in MMA (4-2) than he did in kickboxing (0-4) but his only victory over a fighter worthy of even a Wikipedia entry was this match against Shungo Oyama:
Sean O Haire vs Shungo Oyama by abbott1
(Go to 6:40 for the action. If you can call it that–O'Haire outweighs Oyama by fifty pounds or so, and Oyama is known more for his spirit than his victories.)
Professional wrestlers are often undisciplined athletes—they're kept "in shape" (i.e., awash in painkillers and fat-blasters and 'roids) by the constant touring. Here's a pic of O'Haire in the ring at one of his kickboxing matches, just a couple of years after leaving wrestling:
Despite the pudgy physique, he was probably healthier on some level than he was here, in WCW circa 2000:
And now he is dead at the age of 43. No known cause yet, but we pretty much know that the cause will either have been suicide, a "heart" problem caused by either painkiller or other drug abuse, or some tragic misadventure worthy of a noir novel.
Another terrible waste.
Update: source reporting suicide.
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