TMZ is reporting that former WWF World Champion “Macho Man” Randy Savage is dead. Savage, real name Randall Mario Poffo, suffered a heart attack while he was behind the wheel of his car at around 10 AM this morning and lost control of his vehicle. TMZ got the news from Savage’s brother Lanny, and this is officially the first thing The Genius has ever said that made me sad.

The importance of Savage as a performer can’t be overstated. He was simply one of the greatest and most memorable pro wrestlers in the history of the industry. His career began in 1973 and took him through the two biggest boom periods in pro wrestling popularity, first in the “Rock n’ Wrestling” WWF of the 1980s and then as a part of World Championship Wrestling and the nWo in the 1990s. He was in cartoons, wrestled Peter Parker, held a heavyweight championship wherever he went and participated in the consensus choice for the greatest match of all time against Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat in front of every imaginable wrestling fan at Wrestlemania III.

You can’t just toss a guy like this into a recap paragraph. Savage is a pillar of nearly all of our wrestling memories, be it on Saturday mornings or Monday nights or in pillow form. Slim Jims, neon hats, raspy voices, marriage proposals … they are all indelibly marked by the Macho Man. Heaven saw somebody corpsing and sent for The Man.

Rest in peace, Macho.

Kenyan Olympic marathon champion Sammy Wanjiru is dead, having jumped from a balcony after a domestic dispute with his wife and another woman. National police spokesmen are saying it was a “fact of the matter” suicide, but his agent says it wasn’t. Here’s a quick recap from a local official.

“Wanjiru came home with another woman friend at around 11:30 p.m. and then when his wife came home and found them she inquired who the lady was,” area police chief Jasper Ombati said. “They got into an argument. His wife locked them in the bedroom and ran off.

“He then jumped from the bedroom balcony. He is not here to tell us what he thinking when he jumped. We do not suspect foul play. In our estimation we think he wanted to stop his wife from leaving the compound.”

The interesting thing about THAT (besides the fact that a Kenyan Olympic champion killed himself after being caught cheating on his wife, I mean) is that the balcony is being described as “13 to 19 feet high.” I’m not an Olympian, but I’m fairly certain I could survive a 13 foot drop. There’s an entire thing in The Dark Knight where Eric Roberts is all, “a fall from this height won’t kill me!” and Batman is counting on that and throws him off the fire escape. And that brings up further questions, such as “why did he think doing this would stop his wife from leaving the compound,” and, “how did his wife lock them in the bedroom, or maybe I don’t understand how Kenyan houses work.”

Regardless, a promising, gifted young athlete is dead for an absolutely ridiculous reason, and that’s a shame. People always say “it doesn’t make sense” when somebody dies, and for once, they’re really right.

[NESN]

Yeah, I can’t come up with a funny picture for this one. ESPN’s college football rumors page is using a player’s death to talk about the Alabama Crimson Tide’s depth chart. In a site grab that has just started spreading around Twitter (with a tip of the hat to a rightfully outraged Jimmy Traina … although you really don’t want somebody tipping a hat in your direction over this), Albert Lin shows you how much of a f**king joke you can be and still get a mainstream blogging job by trivializing Aaron Douglas’ death to the point of absurdity.

The best part is where he uses the phrase “although it’s far from the most important result of this development” as a sort of “I’m not racist, but” safeguard against criticism, completely missing out on the fact that his “shocker” is ONLY about this result of the development. I keep wanting to type “what the hell is wrong with you,” but even that doesn’t seem to touch it. I’m not the worldwide leader in sports or anything, but I wouldn’t think this is the kind of thing you’d want to pay somebody to write.

Rest in peace, Aaron. Sorry about some of the people you left behind.

Update: The offending post has been removed (and now reads “XX”). Hopefully more than the post itself will be removed.

[H/T to Jimmy Traina, photo credit to Sean Kennedy]

There’s nothing worse in life than seeing a young person go down with an untimely death, and unfortunately three of them have happened quite recently. We like to glorify gladiator-like athletes as they lay it all on the line to entertain the masses with rippling muscles and extreme athleticism, but at times the journey to fan adulation can end in horrific tragedy.

On Friday a sophomore pole vaulter at Grinnell College, a tiny Division III school situated somewhere in Iowa, was attempting a practice vault when his attempt went horribly awry. Robert Zhongjie Yin died yesterday because of it.

One of his coaches Peggy Brooks gave this play-by-play of the accident: “When he was vaulting he went up, didn’t go up the pole well and went off to the side…he just went up and went past the bar, and went to the side and missed the mat.” -Frat House Sports

Hopefully better safety precautions will be used all over the United States because of this incident, because it’s heartbreaking to think that there’s even a chance that someone could be severely injured while pole vaulting, which is such a controlled environment. At least he got to go out doing something he (presumably) loved.

Michael Kirkham, a 6’9″ 190 pound amateur fighter with a career record of 3-3, made his professional MMA debut Saturday night. Things turned fatal when his frail frame was no match for his thicker built opponent and he was unable to stop the deadly blows that rained down upon his skull. MMA, which has long been maligned for being too gruesome, suffered their second casualty ever that night. Read the rest of this entry »