A Good Man Is Hard To Find: In Remembrance Of Pac | Opinion

Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be. 

I first learned that PAC had passed away from a friend who was, in the cruelest irony I can remember, at Andy Williams’ memorial in Buffalo, NY. I shot up in bed so fast that my wife gasped. I read the news, then I read it again, hoping it would change. He touched so many lives in so many ways. Everyone seems to have a story about him. This is mine and it’s also his: Benjamin Satterley, the man we will never forget.

He’s the reason I came back to wrestling. I had drifted away from something I loved. WWE’s product was bleak, full of some of the worst wrestling television imaginable, and I wanted more than it provided. I found my way to the Northeast U.S. independents and like most others, I found my way online. I started buying Ring of Honor and PWG DVDs, and that’s where I found him and a host of his peers. My whole worldview opened up. 

What I saw on these discs turned out to be the future: a window into the revolution of professional wrestling. Modern wrestling would not look the way it does without him. There is no Richochet without PAC, no Will Ospreay, and quite possibly no AEW. He was a bridge between the 2000s era of independent wrestling and the landscape we have now, and when you go back to his old matches, you can see it all taking shape. The athleticism is still startling as it always was. The coiled power released all at once with enough force you could feel through the screen. Those glimmers became something special.  

As his body and style evolved, he became much more than just an athlete. Early on, he pushed at the limits of what was possible. Later, he refined it. He could do anything in a ring. Everything was available to him, but what set him apart was his restraint. He had such a feel for what not to do. Doing what he could do physically and still getting a crowd to boo him is about as hard as this business gets. But just like everything else he did, he made it look effortless.

When he signed with WWE, I couldn’t wait to tell my friends. The guy I’d only ever seen on these discs or grainy YouTube footage was coming to WWE, and we were going to get to watch him all the time. It didn’t quite work out that way, but there were remarkable highs: his 2014 NXT match with Sami Zayn, his near World title win against Seth Rollins, and perhaps most notably, his transition into The King of the Cruiserweights.

In 2017, when WWE offered him a path that was, to be generous, creatively unfulfilling, he went home. He didn’t say a word and he didn’t go after the company in public. He just left. Standing up for your creative convictions against a billion-dollar monolith when it’s the only real game in town takes more nerve than most people show in multiple lifetimes. 

He returned in 2018 as The Bastard and became a different kind of star. He was Dragon Gate’s Open The Dream Gate champion for over 200 days, a two-time AEW Trios Champion and the first All-Atlantic Champion, but his value transcended title reigns and positions on a marquee. In Death Triangle with Penta and Fenix, and later in the Death Riders, he was the connective tissue. He held matches together; he made everyone around him better – both in and out of the ring.

Very few wrestlers with his ability and resume would have been content in that role. We never heard about him complaining about his standing on the card, nor even a hint of ego. He made it look like the job he wanted his whole life. Probably because it was. 

The outpouring since Sunday night has come from everywhere: AEW, WWE, New Japan, Dragon Gate, CMLL, RevPro, and people who knew him from both the independents twenty years ago, and people who only crossed his path once. That tells you who he was. People don’t talk this way about someone who was only good at their job. He was beloved as a performer and by every account, even more as a person. We should all be so lucky to leave a legacy like that.

The grief that his family and the people who worked beside him are carrying is unimaginable. My heart aches for all of them, but Daniel Garcia in particular who only weeks ago lost a man he called a big brother. Now he’s lost PAC, who stood beside him in the Death Riders. No one should have to carry that twice in so short a time. 

I didn’t know him and I don’t have a right to the kind of grief his loved ones and friends are carrying. This has hit hard. I couldn’t tell you one thing I did on the day I wrote this. When someone who shaped so much of how you see something is suddenly gone, that tends to happen. Your mind doesn’t have a place to put it yet. I keep reaching for words to articulate the feeling and they don’t exist. They all feel incomplete. An absence isn’t something you feel all at once. You feel it the first time you look for someone, and they aren’t there.  

There is no one to fill the space he leaves. He wrestled his final match at All Out on Saturday, September 26, 2026, challenging Andrade El Idolo for the AEW National Championship. He was 40 years old. He was the man gravity forgot, he was special, he was deeply loved, and, in the words of fellow Death Rider Marina Shafir, he was the light. He called himself The Bastard, but I have yet to read a single word from anyone who knew him who agreed.