No one seems to know where Perry Saturn is. Some of his closest friends actually believe he's not alive, but no one has proof one way or the other. At the funeral of Killer Kowalski, the whereabouts of Perry Saturn was the number one topic of conversation with a number of his friends saying they didn't believe he was still alive. Every few months or so, his friends ask Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer to do a missing persons search on him, but it always turns up with nothing.
The last time I heard anything about him was in the summer of 2005, when he was supposed to reunite with Kronus at one of Shane Douglas's Hardcore Homecoming shows, at the ECW Arena. Due to the incident where he was shot three times in the neck, he had to take an epidural, due to the pain. As a result, he missed the show. But nothing was heard from him when Eddy Guerrero died. Same with Kronus and Chris Benoit. Now, with his absence at Kowalski's funeral, this seems even more alarming.
When I think back to 1995, when I first saw The Eliminators, I was in awe. I was sure that they would be the second coming of The Road Warriors (who had been my favorite tag team until then). Initially, they were just brought in to wrestle The Steiner Brothers. However, they remained and dominated the tag team scene in ECW from 1995-1997. They won the ECW World Tag Team Title, three times, and were widely regarded as the best tag team in the world.
I was 15 years old when The Eliminators won their first ECW World Tag Team Title. There were two men in that company that legitimately intimidated me; Taz and Perry Saturn. To me, Saturn was one of the toughest guys I'd ever seen. This has been proven in and out of the ring. He tore his ACL and then returned in a few months. He no-sold three bullets to the neck. Yet what in the world has happened to him?
Perry Saturn had it all, I thought. Watching him in ECW, one was exposed to his versatility in the ring. He could wrestle, brawl, fly through the air... Maybe, he wasn't some comedian when it came to the promos, yet that never mattered to me. He was intense and got his point across, which is all that should matter. Much like Chris Benoit, I saw great things in his future. I expected The Eliminators to create a legacy similar to The Road Warriors and to become one of the most legendary tag teams in the history of pro wrestling. Once the team split up and Saturn left for WCW, I was sure that he would find great success as a singles wrestler. The singles matches that he had in ECW were impressive enough, against the likes of Sabu and Pit Bull II.
In WCW, Saturn got off to a good start by winning the WCW World TV Title, and aligning himself with Raven. When he jobbed the title off, a month later, my best friend and I were outraged. He, eventually, got a WCW World Tag Team Title run with Raven, though it seemed about a year late.
Along with Raven, Benoit, Malenko, Guerrero and Jericho (Among many others), Saturn never seemed to get the recognition he deserved as one of the work horses of WCW. He never got a push deserving of someone of his calibre, but it could have been worse. In WWF, he was turned into a joke. It's a real shame how his career turned out. To this day, I can't understand why he never received the proper credit. Why did such a great wrestler never quite make it?
While his career was already in a slump, the worst came in 2004 when he intervened in an attempted rape and took a few shots to the neck. Since then, it would seem, things haven't been the same. It would appear that nice guys finish last, in this world.
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