Terry Brunk, known to professional wrestling fans as the "homicidal, suicidal, genocidal" hardcore legend, Sabu is one of the last old-school journeymen wrestlers, moving from promotion to promotion, never outstaying his welcome. Sabu is the nephew to the Original Sheik, a hardcore wrestling pioneer as well as the owner of the Michigan territory, Big Time Wrestling. The Sheik trained his nephew, but only after insisting he finished college first, training him the old-fashioned way of stretching hopeful wannabe wrestlers till they either quit or were considered serious enough to be taught how to work.
Sabu originated his own style of hardcore wrestling, incorporating weapons into his more aerial junior heavyweight move set. Sabu has carved himself a unique legacy in the world of professional wrestling, wrestling for almost every major company in the world, including WCW, WWE, ECW, New Japan, and AAA in Mexico as well as wrestling in the old NWA territories as well as the Indies, with AEW being the only major wrestling organization in the world that hasn't had Sabu appear for them. Without further ado, here are 10 things wrestling fans should know about the legend that is Sabu.
10 Best Friends With Rob Van Dam
It can be argued Sabu and RVD are each other's closest rivals, but they are also really close friends in real life. They wore both trained by Sabu's uncle, and that was when their friendship started.
They were early rivals, wrestling each other in Big Time Wrestling, a rivalry that continued and intensified later on in ECW. When Rob Van Dam was caught with marijuana, costing him his WWE and ECW titles, Sabu was in the car with him. In Sabu's later years, RVD and Sabu would feud in Impact wrestling, though more an exhibition than the intensity of their early years, the fans still popped for them.
9 Debuted As Sabu The Elephant Boy
Sabu debuted in Big Time Wrestling in 1985 as Sabu The Elephant Boy. Sheik chose not to use Sabu's real name, Terry Brunk, because of the similarity to former NWA champion Terry Funk. The Elephant Boy was soon dropped from the name. He did have a run as Terry SR (Sheiks Revenge), and in Hawaii, where he wrestled under his real name, but Sabu is the name he is known by across the world.
8 1995
For many wrestlers, if you were to say you would work for the top three promotions in America as well as New Japan, that would be considered a great career. In 1995, Sabu wrestled for three of the four companies in the same year.
He wrestled for ECW before being fired for no-showing an event in favor of a New Japan booking. From New Japan Sabu would make a brief stop in WCW before making a massive return to ECW in November.
7 Shot In The Face
After graduation, while attending a party, a gunman opened fire. Sabu chased the shooter, tackling him to the ground, but getting shot point blank in the face. Luckily for Sabu, the bullet missed the brain, and a shattered tooth and slight paralysis in the face are the only lasting damage done. Several years later, after breaking his neck in ECW, an x-ray revealed that there was still a fragment of the bullet lodged in his face.
6 Bombay Michigan
At the start of his ECW career, Sabu didn't talk and was presented as a mute, wild man hailed from Bombay, India, coming to the ring in a mask akin to Hannibal Lecter.
Sabu, like all wrestlers, had to communicate in the ring with his opponent, and the fact ECW fans knew who Sabu was, and who his uncle was led to him starting to be announced from Bombay, Michigan.
5 Barbed Wire
Sabu has made a name as a hardcore wrestler, but it is his work with barbed wire that really stands Sabu apart from his peers. It was in an ECW Barbed Wire Match, where the ropes are replaced with barbed wire when he tore open his arm wrestling Terry Funk, wrapping his arm in athletic tape before continuing.
In TNA he had the first Barbed Wire Match on American TV with Abyss and would participate in this stipulation multiple times in Japanese hardcore promotion, FMW. Despite these being Sabu's signature matches, in an interview with Chris Van Vliet, Sabu confessed they were his least favorite type of match.
4 ECW Triple Crown
Sabu is the second of only three men to win all three of ECW's titles, joining Taz and later, Mikey Whipwreck. However, Sabu is the only one to have won the ECW title in both its Extreme and Eastern Championship Wrestling phases. Sabu won his first ECW title from Shane Douglas in only his second match in the promotion and his second title in the barbed wire match with Terry Funk. Sabu won the Tag Team Titles on 3 occasions, once with Taz and twice more with RVD. Strangely, Sabu's single TV Title reign came from a tag match victory, with his ECW title also on the line, teaming with Road Warrior Hawk against Funk and King Kong Bundy.
3 NWA World Champion
The NWA title is one of the most prestigious titles in American wrestling, held by names such as Ric Flair, Harley Race, and Lou Thesz over the years. In 2000, Sabu added his name to the list of wrestlers who had won the '10 pounds of gold.'
Unfortunately, in 2000, the NWA was barely in existence with only a handful of small promotions as members, and his reign was exclusively on small independent shows in the Florida area.
2 Ring Of Fire
The now infamous match happened in FMW in 2000. Sabu teamed with his uncle to take on the team of Tarzan Goto and Atsushi Onita in the ill-fated Ring Of Fire match. The match started with treated material surrounding the ring ropes burning steadily, but within the first two minutes of the match, the wind in the outdoor arena caused the ring to catch fire, causing all the participants to fight on the floor as the ring burned down to give the crowd their money's worth. Sheik received 60% burn coverage on his body from the flames yet still continued to brawl in the crowd as the ring was consumed by flames.
1 Final Chapter
In 2019, Sabu released his autobiography, SABU: Scars Silence and Superglue, which has earned rave reviews from wrestling fans for his no-nonsense honesty. That honesty is never more evident than in the book's final chapter, F.U.Shout Outs, where in his own unique way tells a list of talent, including Jim Ross, Kurt Angle, and "Nature Boy" Ric Flair what he thinks of them in a very profanity-filled series of insults.