Per Bleacher Report, Savage was driving with his wife Lynn, whom he married the previous year, when he lost consciousness. He already felt unwell that day but insisted on getting behind the wheel of his jeep. Before turning down a Florida road, he suddenly uttered, “I think I’m going to pass out.” Sitting in the passenger seat, Lynn steered the vehicle out of the path of traffic as best she could, and the couple careened into a tree. While “the impact was so slight that the airbags didn’t activate,” Savage died.

The medical examiner listed Savage’s cause of death as “an enlarged heart with severe atherosclerosis of his coronary arteries,” not the car accident itself. Cageside Seats reports that, according to Savage’s brother, Lanny Poffo, Macho Man suffered a “heart attack” induced by ventricular fibrillation (Vfib). Given the wrestling industry’s well-known history of substance abuse issues and premature deaths, it was impossible not to wonder if those issues contributed to Savage’s death. Cageside Seats implicated the wrestler’s history of steroid use as a contributing factor. It’s impossible to know whether steroids played a role, but what is certain is that far too many wrestlers have died entirely too early.