the last book I ever read (David Shoemaker's The Squared Circle, excerpt fourteen)

from The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling by David Shoemaker:

Brian Pillman was born in 1962 under one of those bad moons that people talk about. His dad died of a heart condition when he was only two months old. When Brian was two, he was diagnosed with throat cancer, and his childhood was riddled with throat surgeries thereafter; he underwent more than forty when all was said and done. When something like that doesn’t kill you, a personal determination often takes hold: The high school football coaches said he was too small to play, but he ended up the team’s standout; he wasn’t heavily recruited but ended up making the Miami (Ohio) squad, where he was a two-time All-American playing as a relatively minuscule defensive tackle; told he was too small to make the pros, he still had a stint with his hometown Bengals, then almost caught on with the Bills, and finally played for the Calgary Stampeders of the CFL until a leg injury forced him out of the game. But that didn’t deter him, and that’s one of a few phrases that appears over and over again when you start reading about Brian Pillman, “The Leg Injury Didn’t Deter Him,” along with “Increasingly Unhinged” and “Before His Time.”