There Should Have Been More: PAC

My chest is tight and it’s difficult to breathe. Despite my best efforts, tears are welling up in my eyes.

He was forty years old. Forty.

I’m 38. My 38 is undoubtedly worse off than PAC’s 40. I’m not the Man That Gravity Forgot. I promise you gravity remembers me. It remembers my knees every morning when I get out of bed. Yet here I am and he’s gone.

As I process the news, I finish putting my niece to bed. I hug her tight and tell her goodnight and that I love her. Let the people you love know it.

Professional wrestling has always been a business that gives you far too many reminders about the fleeting and fragile nature of life, but this is too much.

Literally as Andy Williams’ Celebration of Life was taking place in Buffalo, news broke that PAC was dead.

Andy has been gone for barely three weeks. Now PAC.

Forty years old. I don’t know what to do with this.

All I ever say on this site is that I don’t think I’m a particularly good writer. I don’t know why people read what I write. Not sure why anyone lets me publish it.

I do it because writing usually makes me feel better. It lets me take whatever is bouncing around in my head and put it somewhere else for a while. And when somebody who entertained me dies, writing about them feels both therapeutic and also somewhat important. Like the least I can do is stop and explain why they mattered.

This doesn’t feel good. This feels hopeless.

I keep scrolling for updates, but I don’t even know what I’m looking for. What further information could make this feel any less jarring? Is there something I could read on twitter that would fix the pit in my stomach?

PAC didn’t even really start making a name for himself in America until I was old enough to vote. How can he already be gone? How am I supposed to talk about wrestling?

I can’t give you a year by year breakdown of PAC’s life or his wrestling career. Not only am I ill equipped, but it just currently hurts too much. I can tell you what I’m thinking about PAC’s career and why it mattered.

Before The Bastard, before Neville, before The Man That Gravity Forgot, before there was even PAC, there was Benjamin Satterley. Ben started wrestling in 2004. He was 18 years old.

And PAC was unbelievable. Not unbelievable in the way some use the word, when every third match is unbelievable and everybody who can do a springboard move is somehow one of the greatest wrestlers who ever lived. Actually unbelievable. You watched him and wondered how the fuck a human being did that.

PAC emerged from the British scene and started turning up everywhere that mattered if you were the kind of wrestling fan tape trading, posting on message boards, or reading dirtsheets.

PWG.

ROH.

Chikara.

Dragon Gate.

DGUSA.

2CW.

He was the kind of wrestler that you had to see to believe. Once you saw him wrestle you instantly understood the appeal. You understood why all these small American wrestling companies were flying over this small kid from Newcastle.

The nickname WWE would eventually give him, The Man That Gravity Forgot, was corny as hell. It was also basically accurate. PAC could jump in a way that made normal wrestling physics look optional. He honestly ruined the game for a lot of lesser high flyers. He’s on a short list of the great high flyers of his generation: Amazing Red, Jack Evans, Ricochet, and PAC. That’s honestly the list off the top of my head.

There have been hundreds of great high flyers. PAC made flying look violent. That’s different. Everything had a snap, an urgency, a weight to it.

The Black Arrow wasn’t beautiful in the way a perfectly executed dive can be beautiful. It looked fucking dangerous. It looked like it hurt. Which seems like it should be a given in pro wrestling, but it isn’t, at all.

PAC could rotate through the air with impossible control and somehow make you believe that the purpose wasn’t to show you what he could do. The purpose was to hurt the person underneath him.

Dragon Gate was probably the perfect place for him to become PAC.

The promotion’s mixture of speed, athleticism, wild multi-man matches played directly to everything he could do.

PAC covered himself in glory in Dragon Gate, winnign almost every title imaginable, and then years later, after leaving WWE, he’d return and win the Open the Dream Gate Championship. The big one.

WWE signed him in 2012. Because this was WWE, PAC became Adrian Neville. The name didn’t matter. It took about ten seconds to figure out who he was. PAC’s wrestling spoke for itself.

Neville became one of the wrestlers who built the version of NXT that people now remember so fondly.

He became one half of the inaugural NXT Tag Team Champions with Oliver Grey, later won the belts again with Corey Graves and then defeated Bo Dallas in 2014 to become NXT Champion. PAC was the first wrestler to hold both the NXT Championship and NXT Tag Team Championship. He held the NXT title for nearly a year.

PAC was the champion. But he was also the guy WWE could trust to put across from somebody when they wanted to establish that person.

There is no better example of this than Sami Zayn.

Sami is an all time talent, but PAC was invaluable at getting Sami over to the WWE audience.

That’s one of those talents that isn’t really quantifiable. Some wrestlers get themselves over. PAC got the match over and anyone within spitting distance over. He made the thing happening feel important. Sami Zayn’s eventual NXT Championship victory is remembered as one of the defining moments of that era. It should be. Somebody had to be standing on the other side of the ring. Sami needed a mountain to climb.

PAC was really fucking good at being the mountain.

The main roster run was a bit more…complicated.

Neville debuted on Raw in 2015 and immediately looked like a wrestler WWE should know exactly what to do with. They didn’t. That isn’t exactly breaking news, it’s WWE.

For a while he was a spectacular babyface. He’d come out, do impossible things, and the crowd would react. You would think that was what a wrestling company would want, but again, it’s WWE.

He was too good to disappear, but not important enough(in their eyes) to become what he probably should have become.

Then WWE brought back the Cruiserweight division. PAC turned heel, and he grew out the beard, and something changed. Somehow this absurdly athletic man from Newcastle transformed himself into an angry gargoyle who had been forced to spend eternity defending a silly purple championship belt.

And, it was great. He was the King of the Cruiserweights. Was WWE Cruiserweight Champion twice and established what was then the longest reign in that version of the championship’s history. He carried that division that WWE had no plans for and made it matter, made it must see TV.

From Austin Aries and Akira Tozawa all the way to Enzo Amore, whoever they put in front of him, PAC treated the match like a blood feud and elevated it.

PAC was wrestling on 205 Live, a show that WWE occasionally appeared to forget even existed and convinced the world that that his fucking purple Cruiserweight Championship was the Ten Pounds of Gold.

That’s what he did. He made things matter.

Then he left. PAC walked away from WWE in 2017, remained under contract for months and was finally free in 2018. He set at home and waited for his chance to wrestle how he wanted to wrestle.

Then the contract expired, Adrian Neville vanished, and PAC came back.

As mentioned earlier returned to Dragon Gate, he joined R.E.D., he beat Masato Yoshino for the Open the Dream Gate Championship.

Something about him had changed. Whatever remaining desire he had to be likable seemed to have been surgically removed. Whatever bit of “WWE superstar” was ever in him was gone.

He became The Bastard. He was somehow even more muscular, even angrier, and perpetually even wetter, so wet.

AEW announced PAC as one of its earliest major signings in 2019.

He once again he became one of those wrestlers who helped establish what a promotion was supposed to feel like. Early AEW needed credibility. .

PAC gave them that. He was a staple of the early Dynamites. He helped define what AEW was early on.

I’m stealing this point for either a Steph tweet or a Steph Discord post but, in Sami Zayn and Orange Cassidy, PAC is partly responsible for getting over two of the most important and over babyfaces in modern wrestling.

PAC looked at Orange Cassidy exactly the way half the wrestling audience looked at Orange Cassidy.

This is stupid. This guy isn’t serious. Then Cassidy started wrestling. PAC’s annoyance turned to confusion. Confusion became anger. Anger eventually became something close to panic. Then eventually it all became begrudging respect.

He got Orange Cassidy over. Not by standing there and allowing Cassidy to do his bits. By being PAC. That’s the trick.

Death Triangle worked for the same reason.

PAC. Penta. Rey Fénix.

It looked like a faction assembled by asking a 9 year-old boy to pick the three coolest wrestlers looking wrestlers on the AEW roster and shoving them together. Masks. Abs. Flips. Catch phrases. Everybody looking cool as hell.

PAC became the inaugural AEW All-Atlantic Champion and later won the AEW World Trios Championship with Penta and Fénix. He eventually won the Trios Championship again alongside Claudio Castagnoli and Wheeler Yuta.

Through it all PAC was PAC. Names changed. Promotions changed. Partners changed. Opponents changed. Wrestling itself changed around him.

PAC remained PAC.

Going over his career now I keep coming back to what made him so special. It wasn’t the Black Arrow. It wasn’t the physique. Not his ability to do moves that most professional wrestlers probably shouldn’t even attempt on a trampoline with a crash pad. It was conviction. PAC never looked embarrassed to be a professional wrestler. He’d stand at a press conference in full gear like it was normal.

He never seemed to be winking at you. He didn’t behave like he and the audience had an agreement that this was all a little silly. Even at times when what was happening was incredibly silly. Actually maybe especially then.

If PAC was angry about something, it mattered. When he wanted a championship, that championship mattered. If PAC hated somebody, you believed he fucking hated them. When PAC was wrestling in a six-man tag in the middle of a card, congratulations, while that six-man tag was in the ring it was the most important match on the show.

That’s professional wrestling. That’s the whole trick. Everybody knows what they’re watching. The bell isn’t really going to decide someone’s livelihood. The championship isn’t actually governed by an athletic commission.

Orange Cassidy didn’t really ruin PAC’s life by putting his hands in his pockets. The wrestler’s job is to make you forget all of that.

PAC could, better than almost anyone else. .

And now he’s gone. Forty years old.

I keep typing that because my brain keeps rejecting it. Forty. Four Zero. Far, far too young.

He wrestled for more than twenty years and somehow still feels like somebody whose career wasn’t finished. Because it wasn’t. Hell, he just wrestled Saturday and looked amazing as always.

There should have been more.

More PAC matches.

More time.

That’s the part wrestling never prepares you for. For all the death this business has seen, I never actually get better at dealing with this.

Brodie. Andy. Now PAC. In AEW’s brief history there’s already been so much pain.

And every time it happens, for a little while, wrestling stops being wrestling. The matches don’t matter. The star ratings don’t matter. The booking doesn’t matter. The stupid arguments we spend an embarrassing percentage of our lives having don’t matter.

There’s just the person who existed yesterday who doesn’t exist today. And all the stuff they left behind.

Tonight, professional wrestling doesn’t feel particularly important to me.

Benjamin Satterley does.

Forty years old.

I don’t know what else to say.

I really wish I did.

If you’re reading this, I love you. There is always someone to talk to, and there is always someone willing to help, even when it feels like there isn’t.