AEW Star Brodie Lee Dead At 41

Chris Jericho, AJ Styles, Sheamus, Others React to Death of Brodie Lee

i don't talk a lot about pro-wrestling on this blog, but it's legitimately one of my absolute favorite creative mediums, and for the past ten or so years, Jon Huber, whether under the personas of Brodie Lee or Luke Harper (his WWE handle, where he was the "lieutenant" of perennial bright spot Bray Wyatt's doomsday swamp populist faction), has been at the very top of personal PWI 500.

with a presence both monstrous and cerebral, Huber occupied one of wrestling's most enduring and captivating Jungian archetypes; the rampaging human Kaiju, and brought to it the kind of sinister intelligence and cagey pathos not seen since the days of Bruiser Brody and Abdullah the Butcher, not to mention the comic book athleticism of fast moving joint manipulators like Taka Michonoku and Minoru Suzuki.

from Chikara to AEW, i can't say i've ever seen Huber deliver a bad match, even when being stifled by the micro-managing constraints of the WWE Mechanism. i can't help but call this passing unfair, given that Huber was finally getting his just due in the white-hot AEW, where he turned what could've been a pale echo of past wrestling cult leaders (Kevin Sullivan, Raven, Don Callis' "Jackal" persona) and morphed it into a blissfully choleric splicing of Reddit board incel recruiters and his previous employer, one Vincent Kennedy McMahon, raising the profile of the one-time punch line stable that was the Dark Order into one of the program's most compelling angles.