Strange how the world can change without our knowing it. On 15 February 2008, I was traveling with a group of colleagues to a conference near Nashville, Tennessee. Sometime during that day, some few hundred miles away, one of my childhood heroes, Johnny Weaver, died. And I didn't know it until today. I did a search on YouTube, looking for any new Weaver videos that might have been posted recently, and a memorial video came up.
I never met Weaver, of course, but I hold so many pictures of him in my mind. Pictures from the wrestling matches on TV through the late '60s, the '70s and the early '80s. Pictures of him wrestling live in high school gyms near where I grew up.
Weaver was my grandfather's favorite wrestler, and possibly for that reason he was mine as well.
