RIP Vader, the Big Man of Big Men

The first time I saw Big Van Vader, who died last week at the age of 63, I was on the outs with pro wrestling. I was 13-ish and abruptly too cool for the weird circus I’d fallen in love with when I was younger. I’d drift in some Saturdays and catch up, but it was infrequent and done with a hush, as if one of the girls or cool kids I was suddenly so acutely aware of might find out.

One night, I flipped on TBS and there was this monster on my screen. He was an unholy union of fat and muscle, dressed in red and black and bellowing as he made his way to the ring. He had some sort of contraption, a black mask and shoulderpads fused with pipes and spikes, which he’d wear to the ring. He’d take it off, do a ritual over it on the floor, and steam would fly out of it.

In the ring, he was amazing. Vader was everything big guys weren’t at the time. There was the obvious fact that he flew, doing moonsaults and jumping like a guy half his size. But there was the less than obvious, too: big guy wrestlers looked slightly off a lot of the time because they were so obviously pulling their punches just a bit so as to not hurt the smaller (which is relative, bear in mind) wrestlers. Not Vader, and more importantly, famously not Vader, who just leveled the poor men in the ring with him.

I was enthralled by Vader (he dropped the Big Van), which helped me discover that, even if I wasn’t to into wrestl-ing at the time, I was very much still into specific wrestl-ers. How could you not be hypnotized by this giant, flying mastodon made of flesh and violence? It was the sideshow principle of pro wrestling, the stuff that gets the casual fans hooked in the first place: come see a person you can’t believe exists doing things they shouldn’t.

At the time of his WCW run, which saw him win several world championships in the promotion, pro wrestling was in a weird spot. It was increasingly cartoony. The WWF’s post-steroid trial era of pastels and gimmicks had altered the style of WCW, the former blood and guts Southern style Jim Crockett Promotions. Everything became increasingly cartoony. This was the age of Surfer Sting and Robocop, of the Shockmaster and the Dynamic Dudes.

There’s nothing wrong with cartoony, except that most people aren’t cartoons. What made Vader so compelling in a sea of dross was that he did seem to be a cartoon, a violent adult anime imported from Japan to do battle with tamer, Saturday morning fare. And because he was so delightfully off-kilter from the mean, when he lost, it made huge waves. Ron Simmons became the first African-American world champion by beating Vader. Ric Flair officially moved into the second phase of his career as a legend who could never fully shed the babyface pops by beating Vader.

WCW wasn’t even where he reached legendary status. In the 1980s, Vader made his name as a rough gaijin in New Japan, where he won three IWGP Heavyweight championships; his first reign was the first time a non-Japanese wrestler had won the prize. In the course of his NJPW run—which was surprisingly brief, given how much success he had there—Vader had his most infamous match.

At the risk of distilling Vader down to one match, when he was so much more, he showed one of the rawest moments of sheer physical badassery in pro wrestling history. Stan Hansen and Vader built their careers on being stiff, so when they clashed in 1990, things were bound to get messy. Hansen accidentally broke Vader’s nose before the match had even properly started, then halfway through the bruising bout, an errant strike from Hansen popped Vader’s right eyeball out of its socket. Vader backed off for a second, put it back where it belonged, and finished the match; he had to have a metal plate inserted into his skull to repair the damage.

It was a marker of just how seriously he took pro wrestling, something which got him into trouble sometimes, as when he got into hot water in Kuwait. An interviewer asked him and The Undertaker questions about the reality of pro wrestling; Undertaker sat stoically by while Vader grabbed the man and asked him if it felt “fucking fake.”

The incident became a minor sensation at the time, and certainly more so in Kuwait. Pro wrestling was transitioning: Vince McMahon would announce the death of kayfabe not soon after and the days of ambiguity about whether pro wrestling was “real” or not became passé, replaced by examination of pro wrestling as performance. Because, really, how could a man who put his eye back into its socket not bristle at a question of whether his profession is real or not?

Vader’s love of pro wrestling in all is messy glory wasn’t just a source of friction, of course. His last in-ring appearance for WWE was magic. In 2012, on the 1,000th episode of RAW, Vader squashed Heath Slater, who was doing a gimmick of getting beaten up by past legends. After the requisite preamble by Slater, Vader came out and promptly squashed the much younger man.

He still had it, at that time in his late 50s. He could still fly. He could still hit. And when it was over, and the crowd was roaring his name, you could see it in his eyes that he loved it. Then the smile crept in, just as the camera cut away.

Vader was part of a cohort of wrestlers in the late 1980s and early 1990s who came through the United States wrestling scene and changed how we thought of big men. It was no accident that he worked so well with men like Bam Bam Bigelow and The Undertaker: they were cut from the same cloth, straddling an old world and the new, and all nimble, fast, strong, and (again, forcefully) big. And he was maybe the best of all of them, the best big man of all time in a world which always favored them. It’s a testament to that fact that he could be so unique yet still set a standard to strive for.