September 13 - Ballad of Bull Ramos

The problem with writing songs about old wrestlers is that, well, there are less of them than there should be. Lou Thesz made it to 86, Red Bastien made it to 81, Vern Gagne nearly hit 90, but they were outliers, with the averages dragged down by people who should have lived longer lives. Andre The Giant was dead by 46, Kerry Von Erich didn't even hit his mid thirties, it's Andy Williams' memorial episode of Dynamite tonight. So sometimes what you have to have to act the part of an old wrestler is someone like Bull Ramos, a monster of a man who was considered to be an old guy because he made it to 68 and was running a towing service in Houston before diabetes and an infection took him.

And when people like this go to their reward and the curtains close around their career we lose something. There are people who think wrestling was nothing until the 1980s. There are people who think nobody in history has ever been bigger than The Rock. Mick Foley has a story about working for WWF in 1998 and realising that it wasn't just that most of the audience didn't remember when he was Cactus Jack in WCW. They didn't remember when he debuted in WWF in 1996.

It's always now, but it was always then, and we need to keep then alive.