We don’t write obituaries for comets. We don’t see stories about them in our local papers; our social media timelines aren’t flooded with “in memoriam” tributes to these eccentric celestial objects. They simply burn out or are ejected from our solar systems. A pencil-neck at NASA probably logs this event in a database, and we move on, looking up and admiring the same cosmos we always do, as if nothing ever happened.

It feels almost impossible to believe that Sabu, the homicidal, suicidal, genocidal, death–defying maniac who set the independent scene on fire in the nineties (and flamed out in one of the most awe-inspiring and controversial retirement matches of my lifetime), has been dead for almost a year. The passings of our most beloved wrestlers often put us nose-to-nose with our own mortality: if life can end for people as seemingly physically and culturally invincible as Hulk Hogan, Antonio Inoki, or Balls Mahoney, then surely it will one day come for us. But to imagine that Terry Brunk—a man who made his career courting death and/or paralysis with equal affection, a person known for supergluing the wounds he’d receive in barbed wire matches, a mortal being who started training to be a wrestler shortly after being shot in the face at a house party—was a mortal human being like the rest of us is particularly difficult for me to fathom. And that’s to say nothing about how difficult it is for me—someone who was lucky enough to be alive when ECW Hardcore TV was being broadcast at midnight on my regional cable broadcast channel, to articulate the mammoth influence Sabu had on the entirety of the culture, both inside the ring among wrestlers and outside the ring among spreadsheet nerds and tape traders. It’s such a daunting task to memorialize such an influential-yet-underappreciated performer that Dave Meltzer ultimately punted on his plans to write a “lengthy story in two or three weeks” for in favor of other wrestling coverage.

What I am saying here is that this is not an obituary for Sabu; it’s a review of his children’s book, Sabu vs. The Three Little Pigs.

Sabu vs. The Three Little Pigs is the third installment of WOHW Publishing’s “Bledtime Stories,” a serialized retelling of fairy tales and fables where the protagonists are replaced by professional wrestlers. These titles are ostensibly meant for children, which is somewhat troubling on its surface: regaling a child with a version of “Jack & The Beanstalk” where the protagonist is someone who made a career out of getting hit in the head with a steel chair seems somewhere between “misguided” and “neglectful”. But nostalgia is quite the cottage industry, I guess. And if there’s anyone worth exploiting for this type of mental deficiency, it’s probably wrestling fans like me: 40 years old, transsexual, and categorically childless.

The plot should feel familiar: Sabu—who is depicted in this story as a “crazy camel”—has pulled his Oasis camper into a rest stop as he makes his towns to fall asleep. He wakes to a loud THUMP, and when he looks out his window, he sees three “bacon-wrapped bandits” running off to the woods with the tires to his trailer (worth noting that these tires are adorned with spinning rims). Sabu then chases them into a trailer park only to realize the culprits are three of his previous opponents: The Pig Show, Bam Bam Pigelow, and Spaz The Human Porkchop Machine.

While he’s able to Pigelow and Spazz home with a springboard moonsault and an Arabian Facebuster between cigarettes, he cannot escape being chokeslammed by Pig Show. While incapacitated, several other swine from the trailer park—including Pig Heyman, Pig Boss Man, and The Sand-Ham—run to the scene to participate in the beatdown. Most distressing about this is that even in his wildest fantasies, Sabu cannot escape an overbooked run-in: a harrowing indictment of the psychological damage Heyman has inflicted on his former talent.

When he comes to, Sabu realizes he’s been beaten unconscious and hog-tied and being dragged off to “certain doom,” which is incredibly alarming considering New Jack has yet to make an appearance in this book. But just when he’s given up hope, Sabu hears squeaking and splashing coming from “the lake”: it’s his old friend Rob Van Dolphin.

RVD then “jumps on the dock” and uses his big tail to knock most of the pigs into the water with one giant swoop. The physics of this are lost on me entirely. But no matter: the last remaining swine foe is The Big Show, and RVD quickly disposes of him with his patented finishing move, “Splashing Thunder.” After thanking Rob Van Dolphin for his help, the duo realizes that it is 4:20 PM EST, which leads us to the strangest ending to a (supposed) children’s book that I’ve ever seen:

If memory serves me correctly, the original fable paints the three little pigs as the protagonists and ends with the big, bad wolf falling into a pot of water and running away, leaving the pigs to live safe and sound in the big brick home. But in Sabu’s version, the pigs are the villains, compromising his material conditions and pushing him to take collective action to maintain his agency and dignity. While Sabu had never been one to get overtly political, it’s hard for me to divorce his narrative from the left’s long history of painting agents of the state as swine: in this story, he is the victim of illegal seizure and he must confront his tormentors with violence to be free of their oppression. From here, it’s one battle after another.

Another curious thing about this book is that it encourages nicotine and marijuana use. While I am indeed a person with her own vices, I have not come across many pieces of media that do not outright condemn pubescent and prepubescent smoking. It’s a bold authorial choice and not one that comes entirely out of nowhere. But it is at least worth noting for any parent considering adding this to their children’s library.

When I was writing this piece, my father was in the process of scheduling surgery to fix an aortic aneurysm. Between finishing it and it being posted, he passed away, quietly and in his sleep. As I worked on his eulogy from my childhood bedroom, which is littered with youth basketball trophies I won while my dad was coaching my teams and Starting Lineup figures he would go from store-to-store to purchase, I am thinking about the impossibility of boiling down an important figure’s life into a few simple sentences and paragraphs. How do we memorialize the ones that matter to us when their impact cannot be measured in words but in the silent, incongruous ways we move throughout the universe? How can we pay tribute to them when their impact on us is so large that it transcends how we understand our own lives?

I think that’s what has fascinated me most about Sabu since he’s passed. It must be hard for someone who grew up in the digital age to imagine a universe where every filmed wrestling match wasn’t as easy to access as it is today, and many of the millennials who have memories of Sabu were introduced to him via the photos of his bloody matches in FMV that would so often appear in magazines like Pro Wrestling Illustrated. Fans my age were able to live through his rise in ECW via tape trading & ECW PPVs, and fans younger than me were able to watch his late career runs in TNA and WWE, where he was still able to occasionally capture the magic he had when he was fighting with Terry Funk and Taz over the ECW Title in the 90s. But it is still impossible to define the legacy this strange man, who once regalled me with a story of watching Tommy Dreamer pluck a used condom out of a river and lick it, had on the industry of pro wrestling. He lived an impossible life, one of such gargantuan influence that can be seen in every table spot and springboard manunever on every wrestling show in every corner of the world.

And that’s why I’m glad we have artifacts like this children’s book. It speaks to the fascinating mind of one of the most unique individuals who has ever lived.