Terry Brunk, a professional wrestler known to fans as Sabu who pioneered the so-called hardcore style that became a touchstone of wrestling in the 1990s and 2000s, has died, World Wrestling Entertainment said. He was 60.
It was not immediately clear when Mr. Brunk had died, and the company’s statement announcing his death did not give a cause. His family could not immediately be reached for comment.
Known for using tables and chairs in the ring, Mr. Brunk rose to national prominence with Extreme Championship Wrestling, a smaller and grittier circuit compared to the more mainstream World Wrestling Federation and World Championship Wrestling companies.
“Sabu became a national star as part of E.C.W., where he was a pioneer of hardcore wrestling, leaping from chairs and driving his opponents through tables and even barbed wire,” W.W.E. said in its statement.
Mr. Brunk later joined the W.W.E. in 2006, with which he performed for a year, including at WrestleMania 23 in Detroit, Mr. Brunk’s hometown.
As recently as last month, Mr. Brunk was slinging chairs around a barbed-wire ring, returning once again as Sabu in an event with the wrestler Joey Janela that was billed as Sabu’s retirement match.
Although widely remembered for his use of props and tables in the ring, Mr. Sabu was wary of professional wrestling’s spectacle. He would go on to criticize the larger-than-life stunts that would come to define later iterations of the W.W.E. and other wrestling promotion companies.
“In an Olympic match, you cannot stack a couple tables and then climb something and jump off. That’s a stunt,” Mr. Brunk told an interviewer with Covalent TV at Wrestlecade 2024. “I’m not a stuntman or an actor.”
Mr. Brunk was trained by his uncle, Edward George Farhart, a W.W.E. Hall of Fame wrestler known as “The Sheikh.”
”I went over all the basics every day,” Mr. Brunk recalled in his Covalent TV interview. His uncle, he said, made him set up and tear down the training ring for months before ever giving him a chance inside it.
For many fans, Mr. Brunk represented an era of professional wrestling when storytelling took priority over spectacle. Mr. Brunk said in his 2024 interview that even his use of a single table could keep an audience engaged — there was a narrative arc, a setup, a tease. Not so, he said, in modern professional wrestling.
“When they break a table,” Mr. Brunk said, “they’re just doing it for the crash.”
Ali Watkins covers international news and is based in London.
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