Originally posted: June 9, 2006 @ 10:38pm PST

Pictured: Earthquake (left) and Typhoon

I realize this is neither horror nor tokusatsu-oriented, but I wanted to mention it. I was saddened today to find out that one of my favorite wrestlers passed away recently. John Tenta, a man known more commonly in the United States as Earthquake, Golga, Avalanche or Shark, lost his long-time battle with stomach cancer. He was a great man, and will definitely be missed.

Looking back, I can vaguely remember when he was first introduced on the shows. He was brought in as back-up for Dino Bravo and was known, at first, as "The Canadian Earthquake". Of course, being partners with Dino Bravo didn’t help at that year’s Royal Rumble. When he was in the ring, almost everyone in the ring, good guy or bad, teamed up to get him tossed out. Dino rushed to his rescue, but he accidentally added the momentum to eliminate Quake from the match. That’s not all, though, there was more to come for Earthquake…

As he continued in the WWE, he had a big feud with Jake "The Snake" Roberts, which led to the "squashing" of Damien (Jake’s pet snake) and Earthquake’s giving away Quakeburgers on the next Prime Time Wrestling. Antics like that led to him winning the Most Hated Wrestler award in 1990. He went on to have a major feud with Hulk Hogan, as well, even turning Hogan’s best friend Tugboat against him to become Typhoon. Earthquake and Typhoon went on to form the team known as the Natural Disasters. Shortly after this, they became good guys.

Shortly after THAT, they left for WCW. I didn’t see much, if any, of his WCW tenure. I know that, because of the WWF owning the rights to the Earthquake name, he went by Avalanche there and then later, the Shark, when he joined the Dungeon of Doom. After that, he returned to the WWF as a good guy again, facing Yokozuna in a sumo match. He left the WWF shortly after that and years later he returned under the name Golga as a member of the Oddities group. I had fun watching him as Golga, it looked like all the members of the Oddities group had fun with their gimmicks. The last time I saw him in action was at Wrestlemania X-7, in the gimmick battle royale, which was one of my favorite events in a long time.

In addition to his wrestling career, he also was good friends with Randy Baer, aka RD Reynolds of the website WrestleCrap, even writing the foreword for RD’s first book. He also ran a wrestling school in Florida, where he lived until his passing. My biggest regret is that I never sent a get-well message of my own to him over the WrestleCrap forum, where he was a frequent poster. I wish now that I had overcome my shyness and at least sent him a message.

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Tags: celebrity, death, In Memory..., wrestling

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 17th, 2008 at 5:19 pm and is filed under Do You Remember...?, In Memory.... You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.