WHEN HE WAS FIVE years old, legendary wrestler Eddie Guerrero would climb the ropes of a ring his father had built in their backyard in El Paso, Texas. He would watch his older brothers fighting on the mat. The slaps across the chest, the staggering as if they were hurt, the echoes of their bodies getting slammed.
«You’re doing it wrong,» his father Gory would yell out. Eddie was captivated. Even before he knew what he wanted, he wanted to be in the ring. He wanted to live the life his brothers were living. He wanted Gory yelling out at him. He wanted to be a wrestler.
«We lived on Huerta Street,» his sister Maria says. She takes a sip of coffee inside a restaurant a 10-minute drive north of the U.S.-Mexico border. As she tells me about her family’s past, she searches inside a manila folder. Depending on what memory she pulls from her mind or from the folder, her expression changes between smiling eyes and a straight face.
She’s the last of the Guerreros in the city synonymous with their name, talking of where they all once lived. That single-story brick house in the Buena Vista neighborhood was a God-fearing home. It was three blocks from the border separating El Paso, Texas, and Juárez, Mexico, and a five-minute drive from the El Paso County Coliseum where the family spent most of their time. «We came to El Paso in 1962,» Maria explains. Her father Gory, the patriarch of her legendary family, started wrestling at 16. When the fighting part of his career declined with age, he brought his family here. «My father liked that it was both Mexican and American,» she says.
Wrestling had been a staple of El Paso entertainment since the 1920s. Those shows with masked men would eventually birth the Mexican style of wrestling called lucha libre. Then a growing city, El Paso relied on the so-called five C’s — copper, cotton, cattle, climate and clothing — to power its economy. Gory had always focused on the business side of wrestling. Monday night shows at the county coliseum, other nights in surrounding areas that would have them. From making sure wrestlers had whatever they needed — like sports tape to hide razor blades affixed to their wrists — to making popcorn for concessions, everyone in the Guerrero family had a job. Never far from being inside the ring, Gory also passed what he knew to his sons. «We had a wrestling ring in the backyard,» Maria says. «That’s where my father trained my brothers.»
Her voice fills with pride when talking of how Eddie carried the Guerrero name as high as it could go and how people still remember him though he has been gone for 20 years this month. «He would have been 58 right now,» Maria says of Eddie. On the morning of a show in Minneapolis, Eddie died of a heart attack while brushing his teeth in a hotel bathroom. «He was about to retire,» Maria continues.
A moment of quiet as we sit across from each other with pieces of the past in front of us. «He’s still very present,» Maria says. A sip of coffee and another search. She then slides Eddie’s funeral program halfway across the table.
«THAT’S GORY’S SON,» my grandmother told me the first time I saw Eddie.
I was around 7, the age when a stranger’s presence can bury itself into a malleable mind. Until then, I didn’t know who Eddie was. But I knew Gory because during my summers spent with my grandmother in Juárez, she’d tell me stories about him.
She’d talk about lucha libre, explaining how its characters could be good or bad, the babyfaces or heels. That some of the masked men carried on the names of those long before them. How Gory helped popularize lucha libre across Mexico as its most famous non-masked wrestler. That, when she was a little girl, he was the tag team partner of El Santo, one of the most famous grapplers of them all. She told me Gory was so great as a heel he needed a police escort to protect him from fans who wanted to hurt him.
Her love of wrestling made her scream obscenities at the heels inside Gimnasio Municipal Josué Neri Santos. The gym with faulty plumbing and bad lighting was in downtown Juárez, a half mile south of the border. Years later, Konnan, Eddie’s former tag team partner, remembers the gym also lacked security. «I turned heel, against Eddie of all people, and the fans were super pissed,» he says. «They threw everything from dirty diapers to battery acid at me,» he adds. «It was just a very rabid fan base, which is what you want.»
Inside that gym is where I spent a lot of my time during the summers, when my parents were working an eight-hour drive north in Colorado. I still remember how my mother cried the first time we moved there. She tried to console us, but especially herself, by telling us to enjoy the state’s natural beauty. Green and cold, it was the opposite of the desert we came from.
From the moment I saw him, I knew Eddie was different. Some of the other wrestlers were older with receding hairlines that couldn’t hide the scars on their foreheads from having been sliced by razor blades. They carried the hurt from the countless times they got body-slammed. They looked unbalanced whenever they limped to the ring’s top rope. Unlike them, Eddie’s body and skin weren’t scarred. At 19 years old, he moved with the confidence of youth. Athletic and acrobatic, whenever he climbed to the top rope, he’d stand there gracefully for everyone to see.
video she found on YouTube as part of her search. It’s an hour and 48 minutes long and it’s just Eddie. Not the man who looked larger than life on television. It’s just Kaylie’s father speaking honestly about his struggles, his family and wrestling. «It’s like he left it as a time capsule for me,» Kaylie says of the interview she’ll watch as often as needed.
She’ll watch to see his mannerisms and similarities between their faces. To see his smile and hear him say, «Follow your heart» when asked to give advice.
Every time she sees it, Kaylie feels as if her father is talking directly to her.
WHEN YOUR FIRST sports hero dies at an early age, it alters your perception of time. Because no matter how old you get, some part of you returns to childhood whenever you think of them. Until one day you’re as old as they were when they took their last breath. That’s when you feel that relationship change.
What began as a childhood wonder with masked men who looked like they could fly around the ring, evolved into a focus on Eddie. During a time when I lived in what felt like different worlds, he reminded me of home.
I don’t remember when I started to wonder more about Eddie as a person and less about him as a wrestler, but it was long after then. Probably when I outgrew making heroes out of athletes.
Searching for the Eddie that wasn’t on television, I looked in old yearbooks with broken spines inside his old high school and in the scraps of things once important. I walked into the memories and dreams of those who loved him. I searched where everything began. Driving down Huerta Street with the car windows down and radio off, I listened to see if the echoes of the Wrestling Guerreros were still there.
And what I found, as someone now seven years older than when Eddie died, was the realization of how young he was and how fast it goes. When yesterday I was a 7-year-old in an unfamiliar world, today I’m a father, trying to instill a confidence I lost when arriving in this strange place north of the border. And because Eddie represented much more than a wrestler, I now introduce him to my daughter.
We watch videos of Eddie wrestling in front of what feels like the entire world chanting his name. I show her videos of him talking in English and Spanish so she can hear that familiar accent of someone who lives between two places. We watch so my daughter can see how someone from here, a place that isn’t growing anymore, made it there.
«Eddie was one of us,» I tell her.
«THIS IS HIS place,» Linda Guerrero Rodriguez says as we stand where Eddie rests.
It’s a cemetery in Scottsdale, Arizona, not too far from where she lives and where Eddie spent some of his final years. The dry heat eased the chronic pain he felt from an 18-year career and nearly 1,500 matches.
«How often do you visit?» I ask.
«At least three times a year; his birthday, Christmas and usually in the spring,» Linda says. «And there’s always something here.»
Today, around a marker that reads Eduardo Gory Guerrero, there’s a replica of a WWE Universal Championship belt, a small sombrero, a toy lowrider car and a Mexican decorative skull left by those who remember the dead. Sometimes there are cards and letters where people write of how much Eddie meant to them. When he first passed, Linda and her mom would visit and read those letters.
Out of all the siblings, Linda and Eddie were especially close. They were the youngest, and when the oldest Guerreros moved out — Chavo Sr., Mando and Hector to pursue their wrestling careers and Maria to become a teacher — only Eddie and Linda were left.
With that bond, Linda could tell Eddie the painful truths. That he was like a different person when he drank and abused painkillers. When he once stopped breathing and had to be rushed to the hospital, Linda was the one who yelled at Eddie from his bedside even when she was unsure if he could hear. The one who wanted to talk about his problems even when he didn’t. In the grip of addiction he overdosed three times, went bankrupt, but more than anything, lost a decade’s worth of time.
Conversely, Eddie talked with Linda about things he couldn’t tell others. The pressure he felt carrying the Guerrero name. How he wondered if their father would be proud of who he had become. When his 12th attempt at rehab worked, Eddie told Linda he wanted to be open with fans about his problems.
«He had just gotten his four-year sobriety chip when he passed a month later,» Linda says with a look of hurt in her eyes that turns to love. «His last four years were beautiful. He transformed back to my little brother.»
«Our family was never the same,» Linda says of Eddie’s passing.
Linda holds a quilt as she speaks. Her friend made it from Linda’s old wrestling shirts with Eddie’s face on them that she just couldn’t wear. She works as a flight attendant, and every few months someone at the airport or on a plane will wear a similar shirt. Sometimes she’ll tell them Eddie was her brother, and then they’ll ask if she can take a picture with them.
«Why do you think so many fans still remember Eddie?» I ask.
«Because he was so honest with his crowd,» she says.
From a lifetime around wrestling, she knows that has always been the most important thing. That none of this works if it’s too removed from reality. It just looks foolish if you can’t feel what’s inside the ring. And that ability to honestly portray what isn’t real is what Eddie did better than anyone else.
Linda goes quiet, staring at what’s left — even if Eddie’s presence remains in photos, dreams and memories. She’s the one who tries to keep his daughters close to her family even when it’s complicated.
The one who apologizes as she cries when two decades ago still feels like yesterday.
