WWE and WCW star Sean O’Haire has died, according to reports from former colleague Scotty Riggs (via Twitter) and several wrestling websites. O’Haire and his partner Chuck Palumbo were one of the premier tag teams during the latter days of WCW.
When Vince McMahon bought out the brand in 2001, he was impressed enough with the pair to keep them on and place them in a high profile feud with the APA (John Bradshaw Layfield, Farooq aka Ron Simmons). The cause of death for Sean O’Haire is currently unknown.
According to Cageside Seats , O’Haire trained at WCW’s Power Plant training facility before getting the call up to the big time in 2000. After a brief period of prominence at the WWE, O’Haire was relegated to the mid-card.
He did, however, have one memorable turn playing a heel who acted as a sort of the Devil on your left shoulder, always encouraging you to do the wrong thing.
It was one of the better angles that the WWE came up with during the post-Monday Night War time period. Sean O’Haire also played well with former star and legend “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, who sort of took O’Haire under his wing.
Once Piper left the company for good, it was the beginning of the end for his protege. In 2004, the WWE released Sean O’Haire, who would head to Japan and eventually cross-over into the world of mixed martial arts.
As a mixed martial artist, his career quickly got off to a rocky start with a knockout loss to Eric “Butterbean” Esch, who’d previously knocked out another WWE wrestler, Bart Gunn.
O’Haire would eventually log a couple of wins, but his career mostly floundered on the fight cards of lesser MMA promotions. He’d kept a low profile since 2007 in both wrestling and MMA. Here’s O’Haire in his glory days wrestling with WWE (then WWF).
Inevitably, you should expect the news media to start blaming the death of Sean O’Haire on WWE and Vince McMahon — thank you, Nancy Grace — but O’Haire has been out of the business long enough that those conclusions should be disregarded.
In other sad wrestling news, legendary Jake “The Snake” Roberts recently had a bout of double pneumonia. While he did recover from that, he found out simultaneously that his cancer had returned.
Do you remember Sean O’Haire’s work inside the squared circle? And do you think the media needs to cool it with all the “wrestlers die young” criticism they direct toward WWE?
[Image Via shitloadsofwrestling.tumblr.com and super-sayan85.blog.jeuxvideo.com]
