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Pro Wrestler Benjamin Satterley, Aka The Bastard Pac, Dies At 40

News RoomBy 8 Mins Read
Pro Wrestler Benjamin Satterley, Aka The Bastard Pac, Dies At 40

Pro wrestler Benjaman Satterley, aka Pac, aka the (our) Bastard, died on Sunday. He was 40.

It’s hard for me to understand this. I am, compared to most of my wrestling-watching peers, still quite new to the sport. I started watching in 2020, and have only ever watched AEW, so I have no concept of the history of wrestling or who all the old guys they keep trotting out are. I feel bad when a legendary, senior wrestler dies, sure, but I have no personal attachment to it, because I wasn’t watching them in their prime in the ’80s or ’90s or whenever. My heroes, the guys and gals I watch flipping themselves and each other over and over again on a weekly basis, are still too young for such things. They have years ahead of them. They aren’t going anywhere.

So to go from watching Pac kick ass in a normal match in a Saturday PPV to him just being gone the next day is unthinkable. What happened? How? He was 40. Five years older than me. And so recently after we lost Andy Williams, known as The Butcher, at age 48. Terrifying and muscly as Pac looks, we are essentially peers, at least in age. We don’t know what got him—any one of us could be hit by a bus at any moment, sure—but such things should not be possible. He still had feuds ahead of him. Belt wins and losses. I wanted to see him go for the World Championship one day.

Pac was instrumental to my formation as a lover of pro wrestling. Because of my newness to the craft, my first encounter with Pac was when he was part of something called Death Triangle, which as a newcomer to wrestling I thought was an unbelievably stupid (non-derogatory, very funny) name for a team. He was paired with the Lucha Brothers, Penta and Rey Fenix, and my initial feeling was that this was a weird fit. Two high-flying luchadors in terrifying masks and then this muscle guy with a scraggly beard who looked like he was being held together, kept from bursting, with a bunch of strips of black elastic. He looked, at first brush, like every other generic muscle wrestler I’d ever seen, and I almost dismissed him out of hand:

This would have been a huge mistake. The second I saw him and his trios partners in action, I was hooked. What a team!

The three did some fantastic work together, and it’s a shame that various untimely injuries, and the Lucha Bros. ultimately departing AEW, meant they couldn’t stick together longer. They were trios champions for 126 days, winning the vacated title against the Best Friends and losing it to The Elite.

Pac was never my personal favorite wrestler, and yet he was a cornerstone in so many ways to the foundation of what I loved about pro wrestling. He foiled and challenged so many of my faves, made them look good and cool while he himself looked good and cool, too. The best example of this was his ongoing feud with my absolute favorite wrestler, Orange Cassidy. Again, Pac’s magic for me was just in constantly subverting my expectations, in making me rethink my initial impressions of wrestling and wrestlers. Orange is a goofy sort of wrestler whose whole deal is being chill and unbothered until it really counts, and Pac’s was that he was always mega-serious and super pissed-off all the time, something I normally bristle against but in his case grew to love. His hair looks perpetually wet. He lets out horrid angry howls of fury every so often. When he gets on mic, he rips into whoever he’s talking shit on. The two made great rivals, with Orange’s seeming indifference toward matches deeply infuriating Pac:

Man, those two had some incredible matches. In all of them, I was never cheering for Pac. I love the goofy heroes, not the angsty bad guys. And he was a heel most of the time. I was booing him. And yet. If I knew he was going to be fighting Orange, or Darby Allin, or Eddie Kingston, I was thrilled. I knew it was going to be a hell of a match. Everything was better if Pac was fighting.

Also, Pac had a hell of an RPG villain battle theme:

For several years Pac was in and out, admittedly sometimes due to injuries, but it also felt to me like AEW didn’t always seem to know what to do with him alone, narratively, outside of Death Triangle and that Orange feud. He joined the Death Riders, and I think in some ways got a bit swallowed up in whatever they were doing, shining a bit less than he had in a smaller faction. But he also showed up often to challenge a lot of folks in all sorts of contexts, and ended up in some fantastic matches over the years. He fought Kazuchika Okada; he fought Will Ospreay; he fought Swerve Strickland. One of my favorite earlier storylines of his was when Malakai Black sprayed his freaky black poison mist into Pac’s face and Pac showed up to his next match blindfolded, did some sick moves with it on, then ripped it off to prove the poison mist hadn’t done anything to him and went apeshit on Malakai Black:

Pac’s final match was just this past Saturday, against Andrade El Idolo, and I wish I had watched it more closely. I was in the kitchen making snacks, and unfortunately not paying much attention, because I didn’t think there was a chance in hell that I’d never see Pac wrestle live again after that day. I wish I had been watching. I would have liked to see Pac flipping Andrade into the barricade, or doing his signature twisty flippy-doo off the turnstyle (okay, fine, it’s called Black Arrow) live:

It’s normal for one’s peers to post tributes when one dies, and for everyone to be very nice and loving in them. But, I dunno. Reading these, it seems like Pac was a pretty solid dude outside the ring, too. A lot of folks seem to have loved him, and loved working with him. I believe that. It’s funny to see photos of him in street clothes, outside of his wrestling persona. Smiling, which he never did in the ring except in dark glee at the destruction of a foe. But really smiling. That little reminder that wrestlers are just people, just humans, often a far cry from their in-ring characters, and mortal like the rest of us.

 

I did not want to learn, this soon, what it felt like to be sad about losing a beloved wrestling icon. I’m not prepared for the coming tributes (who is?) and the matches that will continue on in his honor, because obviously he would have wanted everyone else to keep wrestling their damn best whether he was there or not.

Did I ever get a chance to chant it at him? I’m not sure. Well, damn it, he’s my bastard too.

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