Thunder (1981-2016)

Thunder passed away on Thursday. His real name was Luke Fordward and he was 34*. He passed away after a battle from stomach cancer back in his home country of Australia.

Fordward started on local indies under both his real name and “Taipan”. He spent some time in Super Delfin’s Okinawa Pro wrestling in 2010 and 2011, usually facing “Kijimuna” – a friend from Australia who now wrestlers under the name Ryukyu-Dog Dingo. The two had been partners in Australia as the Croc Masters. Taipan returned to Australia and perhaps might have never left that area of the world for wrestling if not for a chance meeting. He met a vacationing Mexican named Daniela, they became romantically involved, and she convinced him to move back to Mexico with her and to train lucha libre under her father. Daniela’s father is the legendary Satanico – Daniela herself was an edecan for a time – and there are few better people to teach someone lucha libre.

Fordward debuted in CMLL at the start of 2013. He was first billed as Thunderbird, though quickly shortened to Thunder (perhaps because someone else had the name.) The masked Thunder was introduced in a series of vignettes, which was doubly strange at the time – CMLL never did vignettes and never brought in foreigners. It only started to make sense some months later when his relationship leaked out. Thunder began as a tecnico, and made sense as an idol on paper. He had uncommon height for Mexico, a bodybuilder’s physique and some surprising athleticism – his dive looked great, when they had enough people to safely catch him. It just never clicked for Thunder in the ring, as he looked slow and had trouble grasping the lucha libre style.

CMLL tried very hard with Thunder for about three years. They pushed him strong while protecting him from being exposed in singles matches. When he didn’t catch on as a tecnico, they took him out of the ring for a while and brought him back as a menacing rudo teamed with Ultimo Guerrero.  When that didn’t work, they had him feud with Ultimo Guerrero. When that didn’t work, CMLL seemed ready to cut their loses and get a mask match out of him, but even that didn’t work out. Thunder likely would’ve lost his mask at last year’s Anniversary show had Sombra not decided he was going to WWE. Thunder was announced to be defending (and likely losing) his mask this past Christmas, but the match was replaced by others.

Thunder publicly vented after having the mask match pulled for (at least) the second time, complaining about CMLL on Facebook. He disappeared for a short time, but returned and was wrestling as recently February. Thunder’s final match was teaming with Dragon Rojo & Polvora against Mr. Niebla, Niebla Roja and Euforia. It came after an odd week where Thunder had two singles matches – a win over Euforia and his first ever loss (by DQ) to Rush – which were as many as he had the rest of his CMLL career.

Thunder’s career was marked by periods where he’d just be inexplicably missing from lineups, and it’d be later explained that he had some sort of injury, usually with his knee. This was assumed to be the same situation, and he’d occasionally be mentioned on CMLL Informa as out with an injury or having had surgery. It’s being reported now that Thunder quit CMLL at that time. (My guess is he was told the mask match wasn’t happening at Dos Leyendas either and walked out, but I’m not sure.) Satanico also appears to have broken off ties with CMLL at some point over the last few months, as indicated by his appearance at the Lucha World Cup.

Thunder returned to Satanico & Daniela’s hometown of Guadalajara, and then eventually his own home in Australia as the cancer got worse. It’s unclear when he was diagnosed. Medical sites say stomach cancer is both a relatively rare cancer and one that’s tough to detect until it’s far along. News reports say the cancer developed in less than a year. It’s a possible it may have been something he may have been deal with for a while, back as far as when started wearing a strange black padding or belt around his stomach area that was never explained. Still, he seemed in normal condition as recently as five month ago and it’s incredible how much things have changed.

Word started to go around the Australian wrestling community of Taipan being in bad shape in the last month. No one from the Mexican side had worked out his previous identity, so it wasn’t until the last few days where it was the dots got connected and it was revealed how dire the situation was.

I mean no disrespect, by my favorite memory of Thunder is the time Rob trolled him into swearing at him at last year’s Anniversary. That’s really what I wanted out of that moment, and Thunder delivered. To us, on this side of the curtain, Thunder was an obstacle to the kind and quality of wrestling matches we were hoping to see. On the other side of curtain, his fellow luchadors remember just as a friend. Magnus recalled a moment where he was knocked out, and the only guy try to keep him awake was Thunder. Alexis remembered how nervous Thunder was when they were shooting those first vignettes and revealed Thunder was originally planned to be in this Gran Prix. Marco and Dark Angel and Shocker and Rush and Dragon Rojo and many others expressed their sadness at this sudden news. It’s a shock when someone this young dies from illness, especially when they seemed perfectly fine such a short time ago.

Thunder will be remembered at tonight’s show with a moment of applause.

(* – I had 35, but his birthday isn’t until October.)