According to ESPN, Mitsuharu Misawa is to Japanese pro wrestling what The Rock and Hulk Hogan are to the American version. Misawa rose to fame in the 1980s as Tiger Mask, a character who … wore a tiger-themed mask. He was so popular that when he unmasked in 1990, his fame only increased. In 2009, Misawa was a 46-year-old veteran who had been named professional wrestler of the year three times, and was the owner and founder of the Pro Wrestling NOAH federation. He also still competed in the ring himself. 

Cage Side Seats describes the tragic match that cut Misawa’s stellar career short. He and Go Shiozaki were teaming against Saito and Bison Smith at an event in Hiroshima on June 13, 2009. Saito gave Misawa a back suplex — a fairly common move that both men must have been extremely familiar with. However, what happened next shows that nothing in wrestling is truly routine, and even the most basic moves can turn into tragedies. Misawa didn’t move after the impact.

Misawa was declared dead at a hospital, though he was likely already lifeless before he was moved away from the ring. According to Cage Side Seats, his cause of death was heart failure.

Mal “King Kong” Kirk was a well-known British monster heel, and a frequent tag team partner of the even more massive Giant Haystacks. According to the BBC, the former rugby player did not use a gimmick: His 350-pound frame was more than enough to intimidate his opponents. 

On August 23, 1987, Kirk worked with Shirley “Big Daddy” Crabtree, who said Kirk had the strength of three people. Kirk and Big Daddy faced each other at the Hippodrome of Great Yarmouth. The match proceeded exactly as planned right up until the end, when Big Daddy gave Kirk his finishing move — a big splash that saw him jumping on his prone opponent. Kirk never kicked out from that finisher. The 50-year-old powerhouse was left lying in the ring, but it wasn’t the finishing move that killed him. An inquest of the incident discovered that Kirk died of a pre-existing heart condition. Big Daddy was cleared of all responsibility, and even King Kong Kirk’s widow said she held no bad feelings against her deceased husband’s final opponent.

According to the New York Times, Japanese wrestler Plum Mariko died in the ring after her opponent power bombed her in 1997. Quebrada recounts that the match in question was a tag team event where Mariko and Command Bolshoi faced Mayami Ozaki and Rieko Amano. The match ended when Mariko took a punishing Ligerbomb from Ozaki and was knocked out cold. It wasn’t until after the match that Ozaki and the others realized Mariko still hadn’t moved, and was now snoring — which was a sign that her brain was bleeding. Quebrada reports that Mariko was rushed to hospital but even surgery couldn’t save her. The 29-year-old died of brain damage. 

Mariko had accumulated a collection of nasty injuries over the years, including multiple concussions and an undiagnosed brain abscess. Doctors believe she died because of the combined effects of these injuries, rather than a single one from the Ligerbomb. They also said that if she had been examined earlier she likely would have lived because no doctor would have let her wrestle in her condition. 

Plum Mariko’s was the first in-ring wrestling death in Japan. What makes her fate even more tragic is that the signs of brain damage were there. She had complained to her fellow wrestlers about headaches and had become forgetful in the ring. Instead of reacting appropriately to the problem, the promoters had just refused to push her to a higher status due to her sloppy work. 

Dan “Spider” Quirk was a kid that seemingly everyone liked. Adam Dolan of Pro Wrestling Insider describes him as a talented, passionate up-and-coming indy wrestler who worked with various promotions and was part of the close-knit Coastal Championship Wrestling community. Apart from wrestling, he did a ton of work behind the scenes and even ran the CCW website. He had a number of close friends in the industry. And then, on May 28, 2005, tragedy struck. According to Mandatory, Quirk had a match at a Universal Championship Wrestling event in Taunton, Massachusetts, when he missed a moonsault and crashed head-first onto the floor outside the ring. Quirk was only 22 when he died. 

Later that year, the CCW promotion gave Quirk the indy wrestler’s equivalent of a Viking funeral when they dedicated their WrestleJam 2 event to his memory. Before the show, they held a ceremony where the entire CCW roster came out to the ring and remembered their fallen friend, sharing their favorite stories with the audience. They even had some serious star power among them: Wrestling superstar Matt Hardy was a guest at the event, and respectfully stood by Quirk’s friends and comrades for the entire ceremony. After some speeches and a highlight reel, the lights went back up. The promoter told the audience that the show would start soon, and it would be all right to laugh and have fun. After all, Spider would have wanted the show to go on.

According to Wrestling Scout, Luther Lindsay died while performing his finisher … and still won the match. However, that’s just a small sliver of the man’s story. Last Word on Pro Wrestling describes Lindsay as a notorious trailblazer for African-American wrestlers. A college athlete in the heavily segregated 1940s, he knew what to expect when he started working the National Wrestling Alliance territories in the 1950s. Of course, it didn’t hurt that Lindsay was a strong and highly technical grappler who was trained by the legendary Stu Hart. Hart’s granddaughter, WWE Superstar Natalya, says Hart always carried a photo of Lindsay in his wallet … because Lindsay was the only man who had ever made him tap out. 

In the late 1950s, Lindsay became the first African-American to face a white man in the wrestling ring in the South. A riot seemed imminent, but Lindsay was so awesome that the crowd in Tennessee was on his side. Industry legend Lou Thesz openly admired Lindsay, and Hart continued to push him well after other African-American wrestlers started emerging and hogging his limelight. And although Lindsay did eventually die in the ring, he went like he had lived: as a winner. On February 21, 1972, Lindsay won his match against Bobby Paul by pinning the man with a diving belly flop. A quick three-count later, it was discovered that Lindsay was dead of a massive heart attack. 

Lindsay has since been posthumously inducted into the Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame and the WWE Hall of Fame.

As David Shoemaker’s The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling tells us, wrestler Gary Albright died in the ring during a wrestling show in Pennsylvania. Reportedly, Albright was on the receiving end of a bulldog, a move that involves a wrestler grabbing his opponent’s head and jumping forward, thus slamming their head into the mat. 

While that’s certainly true, it should be mentioned that the full story is significantly more complicated. According to Brian D’Ambrosio’s book Montana Entertainers: Famous and Almost Forgotten, Albright was a former amateur wrestling state champion who transitioned to pro wrestling in 1988. He largely plied his trade in Japan, where his wrestling accolades allowed him to specialize in unscripted, realistic shoot wrestling. Unfortunately, life took a toll on his health. 

On January 7, 2000, Albright was making a rare US appearance in a match against Lucifer Grimm and was left lying in the ring after a bulldog maneuver. However, it was not the move that killed Albright. The wrestler’s heart was in a pretty awful shape — it was enlarged, and he had multiple blocked coronary arteries. He also suffered from diabetes. As a result, Albright suffered a fatal heart attack as he took the move, and officials could do little more than pronounce him dead after removing him from the ring. The wrestler was only 38.  

Jesús Javier Hernández Silva, who was better known as Oro, was only 21 years old when he died. As Kyle Dunning of E Wrestling News tells us, the wrestler met his fate in 1993, when he took part in a six-man tag team match in Mexico City. It’s said that he had told the other wrestlers that he was planning a “Kobashi bump,” a complicated way of taking a move and hitting the mat headfirst.   

Exactly how Oro died is subject to some controversy. Reportedly, he oversold a clothesline move with an enthusiastic spin that landed him on his head. His opponent, a wrestler called Kazoz, immediately tried to pick him up, but Oro collapsed on the mat and died on a stretcher before they could get him in an ambulance. The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling also tells this version of the story. However, Dunning states that the footage of the event doesn’t seem to support this. Instead, he says that while Oro did land hard on his head, he managed to stay on his feet for some time, though he wasn’t able to land any offensive moves anymore. He eventually collapsed outside the ring.

 Still, regardless of the precise course of events, everyone can probably agree that Oro’s death was extremely tragic and that he left us far too young.