Please stop destroying my childhood - An open letter to The Undertaker before RAW after WWE Super Showdown

Disclaimer: the views expressed in the article are those of the writer and not necessarily those of Sportskeeda.

I apologize for taking the liberty to use ‘dear’ instead of something like ‘respected’. You are very dear to me, which is why I used it instead of anything else.

Back in 2001, I flew to from the United Arab Emirates – the country of my birth – to my motherland Bangladesh for vacation. That was the first time I got a taste of WWE because back in UAE, the TV had only one Arabic channel.

My cousins absolutely loved and adored you and hyped you up for me. They would wear towels over their head to imitate your bandanna and would make weird Harley Davidson noises when you came to the ring.

It was 2001, you were, at the time, the American Badass. When I watched you on the TV for the first time, the 9-year-old me was amazed by the ‘coolness’ you oozed.

I was only in Bangladesh for a few months before I went back to the UAE. Internet wasn’t prevalent at the time and I lost touch with WWE once again. However, the interest for wrestling was instilled in me.

I returned to Bangladesh in 2005, and by then, you were the Deadman again. Once again, I only got a glimpse of it for a few months before I went back to the UAE. In the meantime, I started to look for WWE news whenever I could access to the internet.

I tried to keep up as much as I could with you and it was at this time I understood what you were all about – a man so feared that opponents shrieked at the sight of him.

At the time, I didn’t know that WWE was scripted and I really thought that you had magical powers, that you could return from the dead a million times, that you were simply unbeatable.

Then in 2009, I came to Bangladesh for good and started following the product on TV on a weekly basis. By now, Jeff Hardy and Shawn Michaels were my absolute favorites.

And you know what happened? Jeff Hardy left WWE a few months later and then you retired Shawn Michaels at WrestleMania 26 a few months after that. I was devastated. I absolutely despised you and CM Punk because I thought you both were responsible for them leaving the company.

Obviously, when I came to know better, that all of it was pre-determined, the despise in my heart left and I once again allowed myself to enjoy the experience that you provided in the years after that.

Until your streak ended at the hands of Brock Lesnar. Even though I knew that Mark Calaway is only a human, The Undertaker always remained a Phenom to me, a supernatural being with superhuman abilities.

But that night, a bit of that aura left. Maybe, The Undertaker was also a mortal after all.

It was at that moment that I hoped you’d stop. I didn’t want you to continue because I could see the weariness in the ring after you beat CM Punk at WrestleMania.

In my eyes, that was your last epic encounter. After that, in every match of yours, I questioned your immortality.

So when WWE announced that you were set to take on Goldberg at Super ShowDown, my mind knew that it was a wrong move, but the child in me was happy.

It was 3.30 in the morning by the time the main event between you and Goldberg arrived. After Goldberg arrived in the ring and when his theme music stopped, I could hear my heart pounding.

My eyes were glued to the screen and then it happened. Gong… gong… the bell tolls… gong… and then you rose slowly…

I am 27 years of age now, and I am not ashamed to admit that I felt every hair on my body stand up. My heart was beating much faster and I could feel the blood moving rapidly through my spine.

At that moment, you were not a 54-year-old man sending goosebumps to someone exactly half your age – you were the peak Deadman, and I was a child. For those few minutes, I was taken back to the world where you were an unstoppable dark force of nature.

For those few minutes, I lived my childhood again.

Honestly, if I wasn’t excited about the match before that, I surely was now. You made me convince that we would see you at your best and that I would be able to live my childhood for a few more minutes.

But in the end, the rational mind won as your legacy was further tarnished in Saudi Arabia. I wish I had never seen what I saw in the squared circle when you and Goldberg pitted against each other.

I wish my childhood wasn’t destroyed that night.

It would be safe of me to assume that you love WWE a lot more than your health because even at 54, you endangered yourself in a match against someone who has been criticized for being unsafe to work with.

So, I will not plead you to think about your health and stop. I will, however, beg you to think about me and the rest of us who idolized you and were enamored by you in our respective childhoods.

I don’t know how childhood treated the others but I can surely say that your darkness was a shining light for all of us in our days of innocence. You made us believe that someone made of flesh and bones can also be an immortal.

And while a bit of that dies every time you take to the ring now, there is still some of it left and I beseech you let us live with it, to let us not see our hero so fragile in the ring and be shown of how nobody is above Father Time – we already have a lot of things in this world that constantly remind us of that.

And so, I urge you to not be one of those things.

Please don’t destroy our childhood anymore, Deadman – be the beacon of hope that you always were, and rest in peace.

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