The Past Is Not Finished With Jimmy "Superfly" Snuka, Or Wrestling

Here's what's beyond dispute. In 1983, WWF legend Jimmy "Superfly" Snuka placed a call to an ambulance; he needed emergency services to pick up his girlfriend, Nancy Argentino. She was injured on a motel bed, "gasping for air", as a Morning Call article put it.

The autopsy report concluded that she died of traumatic brain injuries and that she was covered with scrapes and cuts of the type associated with the worst domestic abuse. Within hours, Argentino would be dead. Snuka would continue as he had: employed by the WWF, an upper-midcarder of burgeoning stature in the immediate pre-Hulkamania era.

Snuka was, against all rational sense, never charged but the case remained open—until Tuesday, when Snuka was indicted for third degree murder, 32 years after the fact.

The story of Jimmy Snuka and Argentino's alleged murder has long been one of the seediest, saddest stories in pro wrestling. It has all the ingredients of what we think of as a "bad" wrestling story: a not-too-bright star living like a wild 1980s stereotype, violence of an extreme nature, the suitably dreary setting of a shitty motel after a grueling TV taping, and the lurking presence of Vince McMahon.

Here's what people say, but what we don't completely know. Vince McMahon was cooperative with the district attorney's investigation. He did all the talking in the immediate aftermath of the violent incident, with Snuka relegated to the role of silent partner. McMahon dealt with the cops and dealt with the DA. The last bit we know to be true: Snuka walked.

Snuka's a somewhat forgotten figure today, but he was a giant in the early days of the WWF's big '80s run, and ECW's first champion. Even if you don't recognize him, you've almost certainly seen his iconic dive off the top of a cage onto Don Muraco, an athletic feat which inspired the likes of Mick Foley to similar semi-suicidal endeavors. He was the foil for Roddy Piper in one of his most famous moments, when the Hot Rod smashed a coconut into Snuka's head. Snuka was not a top tier player in terms of fictional prestige, but an omnipresent figure in wrestling's golden age.

So once again, we've got a figure who looms large in the wrestling consciousness brought low, either by his own vicious deeds or an untimely death. And we're left, again, asking why? Why does it keep ending this way, with murder and drugs and abuse? What does it say about us that we looked the other way while Snuka was hired and rehired when it is clear that something went deeply wrong in that motel room?

Wrestling fans will tell you all manner of speculative things about Vince McMahon's involvement in the case. It's known that McMahon and Snuka met with law enforcement five days after Argentino's death, but no one at that meeting recalls the specifics. In his autobiography, Snuka wrote, "All I remember is [McMahon] had a briefcase with him. I don't know what happened." All of the speculation is, finally, speculation; it is unprovable, unknowable, at least besides the fact that the wrestling community is and has always been so small, with promoters obsessively watching their talent, that any conspiracy lies within the realm of believable fiction.

Snuka's not in wrestling anymore; he lives in New Jersey, is in his seventies, and is fighting stomach cancer. McMahon, though, is still in the game. More than that, he dominates it. And McMahon is a living chain between today's clean, corporate façade of Cenation and McMahon-family Senate runs and the tumultuous, drug-fueled, bloody birth of modern pro wrestling. The Snuka case is awful, an extreme but not an outlier. Bruiser Brody could tell you about the showers of Puerto Rico, but he was murdered in one. Elizabeth Hulette could tell you about the drugs, but she died one night, choking on them. Dino Bravo could tell you about the Montreal mob, but they shot him 10 times.

McMahon, even if he knew about Snuka—and the steroids and cocaine and concussions—is no better or worse than five dozen other promoters or wrestlers. What makes McMahon different, and makes him special is that he survived. He's the last one left, the sole remaining carny, the only one with Italian suits and stock options. This is no excuse, but I'm confident that had it been Jim Crockett or Verne Gagne or Bill Watts that Snuka had called that night, things would not have turned out much differently. But they are not in the game anymore, and Snuka didn't call any of them.

The past is always present in wrestling, a non-stop spectacle that plays out atop a foundation made from equal parts sterling memory and the bones of those the industry devoured. As much as we want to look the other way, we can't. Wrestling won't let us, not when Sting is on Raw referencing Bruno Sammartino and Andre the Giant. Not when the ghosts of wrestling past draw the loudest pops when they're brought out at any event. Not when those names are brought out, over and over.

This is the cloud that hangs over both this sport and those who love it, myself very much included—there is just no way to come out of it unstained, not with all this blood everywhere. This isn't like a sport with a draft, where you can reset every few years with a new pick. Andrew Luck owes nothing to Peyton Manning. But here, in wrestling, Jimmy Snuka helped drum up the money for Vince McMahon to lure Hogan to the WWF. The empire Hogan built eventually led to the Attitude Era. And that led to the stock market, the PG era, to John Cena and CM Punk and hundreds of thousands of pay-per-view orders. Everything comes from everything else.

These are words about wrestling. I'm not even sure I know what they mean, at least as a cohesive narrative. I love wrestling, for reasons that live in and issue from my gut. I'm sure many pro wrestling fans feel the same way. But there is still, always, a black hole of unreason and senselessness at the heart of some of it, this sense that what we love most—this decades long meta-narrative, so baroque and so violent—is also perhaps the ugliest part of the entire thing.

So perhaps some words about Nancy Argentino, since all of wrestling pales in the shadow of even a single murder. If this is the step towards finally seeing justice in whatever terrible thing happened in that motel room in 1983, that matters more than anything else. Whatever comes next will hopefully see the case closed, give her loved ones some rest and some justice, and close one more sordid chapter of wrestling's past. That troublesome past, which is never finished, and whose darkest moments are only ever pushed into the realm of things never contemplated, because they would spoil the show.