List of premature professional wrestling deaths
people associated with professional wrestling who died before age 65
A 2014 study by Eastern Michigan University of professional wrestlers who were active between 1985 and 2011, found that mortality rates for professional wrestlers are up to 2.9 times greater than the rate for men in the wider United States population, with cardiovascular-related deaths being 15.1 times higher than the general population, drug overdose-related deaths being 122.7 times greater than the general population, and cancer deaths being 6.4 times higher than the general population. A 2014 report by John Moriarty of the University of Manchester and Benjamin Morris of FiveThirtyEight also found that the mortality rate for professional wrestlers was significantly higher than that of athletes in other sports.
Experts suggest that a combination of the physical nature of the business, no off-season, and potentially high work load, with some wrestlers fighting more than 100 and even 200 matches per year, along with the drug culture in wrestling in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s contributes to high mortality rates among wrestlers. Another 2014 study ascribes the higher death rate largely to higher rates of cardiovascular disease compared to the general population, with morbidly obese wrestlers being especially at risk.
Many promotions employ performers as "independent contractors" and do not offer company-sponsored group health insurance coverage in most instances. This is said to have a causal connection to their longevity, morbidity, and mortality. WWE performers' status as independent contractors was spotlighted by John Oliver on an episode of his show Last Week Tonight with John Oliver in March 2019, with Oliver calling on WWE fans to protest at WrestleMania 35. The WWE denied Oliver's critique.
The concept of the untimely deaths of professional wrestlers was a frequent topic of discussion on the Opie & Anthony show. After Scott Hall's death in 2022, Bret Hart and Kevin Nash talked about the premature death of several wrestlers, mentioning the mental and body damage as possible causes.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “List of premature professional wrestling deaths” is people associated with professional wrestling who died before age 65. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through List, premature and professional, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q29915489. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2014, 1985, 2011 and 2019.
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This entry incorporates text from “List of premature professional wrestling deaths” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.