Rest In Peace Ray Traylor

Wow.... unlike a lot of the deaths of the past year and a half, this one seemed to come out of nowhere. Didn't seem to associate Big Boss Man in the same class of drug users as Hercules, Hawk and so on. And hopefully, that's not even the case at all. From everything I had read about it, he seemed to be a good family man, active in his community and charity work (wasn't he the guy who started off the WWE auctions? I think he was.)

I wasn't a HUGE Bossman fan, though I admit, I had one of his T-Shirts (it was a really cheesy one, with his logo across a jail cell door. I really did think he'd be Intercontinental champion one day, especially around 1991 when he was chasing Curt Hennig's belt. He was certainly over enough to warrant holding that title at the time. Prior to that, I thought his feuds with both Hulk Hogan and Ted DiBiase were pretty damn good.

I remember his screwed-up debut in WCW (compared to... oh, pretty much everyone else there) where Bobby Heenan quipped "Wow, he looks like a big boss, man!" so that even the dumbest of fans out there could say "Oh, THAT'S who he is!". The series of names he went through there -- The Boss, The Guardian Angel, Big Bubba; I'm sure I'm missing a few as well -- just never fit him because he was Big Boss Man. Period. The character fit him to a T.

His promos during his Corporation run were pretty good, too, in a morbid kind of way, especially the stuff with Al Snow and Big Show. I remember watching them and thinking "Now, THAT'S a heel for you."

Anyways, it is really sad to lose another wrestling star. Rest in peace, and serve up some hard time in heaven, punk.