Benjamin Satterley

You wake up on a Monday morning. You do the routine that you do every day. It is Monday morning, so that routine is more laboured because you don’t like Mondays. You’ve made your toast and you sit down, scrolling through your phone, and you see something that can’t be real.

All Elite Wrestling announced in a tweet at 2:06am BST that Benjamin Satterley, better known to fans as PAC, had passed away. I had just seen him wrestle twenty four hours before. I had an opinion on that match. He seemed fine. No cause of death was reported in the tweet. A couple of hours after I read that tweet, a google search didn’t give anything to what could have caused this passing. Nothing makes sense right now.

Someone on a discord server I’m on asked why wrestlers die earlier in their lives than in many professions. But it doesn’t feel like it was in the 90s, when you read with regular consistency that someone that was on your television had died. That is what made the news that PAC had died so shocking and so upsetting. There was no preparation for bad news, no demons that were obvious to even the most naive of fans.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. But yet it did.

Everyone has a story about PAC the wrestler. Social media may reflect our collective worst attitudes and instincts – but on days like the last few, it showed that it can also reflect our best. The stories told by people who were lucky to have encountered Benjamin in their lives brought a little bit of comfort and community to a horrible day.

Reading about PAC meeting a young fan and asking him to “stand with him in battle” when posing for a picture; PAC offering to translate when a fan wanted to tell Masato Yoshino that he was his favourite wrestler and then turning to Yoshino and shouting at him in broken English, “YOU. HIM. FAVOURITE WRESTLER”, leading to Yoshino being very appreciative and shaking the fan’s hand; to how he told Nick Wayne that “you’re gonna be better than me someday.” All of these anecdotes stitched together created a patchwork picture of the type of man that Benjamin Satterley was – a man who was so kind to his peers and represented the best of us. They also provided comfort to people on a day that felt so raw.

It also helped seeing videos of PAC in the ring. The nights before he was a bastard, the nights before he was Neville. He was the best of his kind. I remember seeing him for the first time on a DVD of 1PW’s “Know Your Enemy Night 2”. Big names such as Christian Cage, AJ Styles, Christopher Daniels and Takeshi Morishima had been flown in to Doncaster for the event at the arena hall in the Dome Leisure Centre. The opening contest saw six young British wrestlers in an elimination match that lasted twelve minutes with five eliminations. It was as frantic and frenzied as you expect, and when a young guy called PAC won the match, it felt like the right decision. He was the standout of the bunch. It felt like if someone was to be a name for the future coming out of the match, it was going to be PAC.

He would be in the last of his teenage years on this night but he had three years of experience already (even if it was unofficial experience in the backyard wrestling scene of Newcastle and Middlesbrough). At 18, Benjamin would go to “pretty much the only wrestling school in the area” in Gateshead, Tyne and Wear, where he was trained by Mark Sloan. It was at Eric Scarboro’s Independent Wrestling Federation where the name PAC would be first announced, where he wrestled someone with the name Assassin. The name PAC came from the ‘Six-Pack’ nickname that his dad gave to him.

The next few years saw PAC work in the North East and the south coast at FWA’s academy shows in Portsmouth, with not much in between the north and south coast of England according to records we have.

IPW:UK would start booking PAC in 2006, with his first shot at the promotion being in the main event of their April show in Orpington, Kent. It was a world title match against then-champion Martin Stone and Leroy Kincaide in a three-way. He would go on that year to later win the Flyweight Title in the FWA before debuting for 1PW in the aforementioned elimination match at the Doncaster Dome.

© 1PW

By the end of 2006, it was obvious that the main independent companies in the UK thought PAC was the future. In 1PW, he wrestled a great match against A.J Styles, before being crowned the inaugural Openweight Champion for the company after he won a battle royale. His Openweight Title defences saw PAC face all-comers from outside the UK (with his opponents often being one of the few imports on the shows by that time as the promotion’s finances dwindled).

I remember seeing PAC in the Irish Centre, Birmingham, against Spud and Dan Ryder in 2007. The Digbeth building had a ceiling so low that you would think it would limit PAC and what he could do. It didn’t.

By the time PAC lost the 1PW Openweight Title to James Wallace in July 2007 he was making it onto shows from some of the top independent companies in the world. He worked four-ways against Jonny Storm, Jody Fleisch and Spud on TNA shows in Portugal, but an insane match against Trent Acid was the sign that PAC was going to be the next leg to carry the baton for British wrestling from its then standard bearer, Nigel McGuinness.

He would also be part of the second edition of the annual “16 Carat Gold Tournament” put on by wXw and would make the flight to the US to be part of PWG’s “Battle of Los Angeles” tournament. It would be there that he first encountered Claudio Castagnoli, in a belting match-up during a run that saw PAC booked to go to the third round before losing to CIMA, the eventual winner of the tournament. This would, however, open the door for the Geordie to wrestle in Japan.

CIMA was the biggest star in Dragongate (formerly Dragon Gate), a company that was quickly gaining a claim to being a top tier promotion in Japan. He would be a partner of PAC’s as he began to make more frequent trips to the country. The Englishman would join CIMA’s faction, Typhoon, as a replacement for Matt Sydal, who was WWE-bound.

PAC would win many titles in the promotion. Winning the tag (Open The Twin Gate), trios (Open The Triangle Gate) and its lighter weight title (Open The Brave Gate) belts. He would almost have just as many factions to his name as titles, as once Typhoon was disbanded after a Three-Way Nine Man Tag Team Elimination Losing Team Must Split match in which Dragon Kid, Ryo Saito & Susumu Yokosuka lost to WORLD-1 (BxB Hulk, mcKZ and Naoki Tanizaki) and Real Hazard (Gamma, Genki Horiguchi and Yasushi Kanda), he joined WORLD-1. After two years, PAC, teaming with Yokosuka and BxB Hulk, would lose to the Blood Warriors trio of CIMA, Ricochet and Dragon Kid in a Loser Must Disband match (I blame Yokosuka).

© Dragongate

PAC would be part of an alliance between the artists that were formerly in WORLD-1, Veteran-Gun and KAMIKAZE, to battle the Blood Warriors group that was dominating Dragongate, but the avengers that assembled to take down CIMA’s faction would lose the climatic match and disbanded after losing a Group Must Disband match nine months after formation.

By the end of 2007, PAC was a top ten wrestler in the world, after a year that saw he and El Generico have a series of belting matches. A couple of months before King of Europe, the pair had a sensational match at The Olympia that hosted the KofE tournament. The Van Nuys Armory building (that hosted PWG before Reseda became one of the crown jewels of worldwide indie wrestling) saw Generico and PAC hit a match of the year contender at All Star Weekend.

PAC would be one of a generation that made PWG – a promotion that was struggling to break out of the mid-pack of promotions in an indie scene that was swelling up – the hottest ticket in wrestling. He first met The Young Bucks in the ring at the 2008 All Star Weekend in a trios match, teaming with the Jacksons against Steenerico and his future stablemate at Dragongate, Yokosuka. PAC’s match the next night against Chris Hero would be the only other match to compete with it for match of the weekend. He was just that good.

While Dragongate was more or less PAC’s home, he would still come back to the UK and fans that had a ticket to see him would always catch a classic. One that goes under the radar is the match against Bryan Danielson on May 3rd, 2009, in the Swallows Leisure Centre in Sittingbourne in front of less than 200 people. It’s on YouTube and it bangs.

But as Dragongate had positioned itself as the the best wrestling promotion in the world with YAMATO, Masato Yoshino, Shingo Takagi and Naruki Doi were in the conversation to be WOTY in 2010, PAC was the best flyer in the company and maybe the world. Not many were better than him.

For the next few years, he, Ricochet and Kota Ibushi would be the three kings of the air, as no one could match them in suspending disbelief once the bell rang.

PAC would get a call from New Japan to compete in their Best of the Super Juniors tournament in 2012. Booked to win Block A, PAC would have great matches with Prince Devitt and Jushin Liger, the latter which was uploaded to New Japan World in tribute to PAC (no sub required), but Ryusuke Taguchi would win the final four contest on his way to winning the 19th edition of the tournament. Such a showing for an outsider would lead the more inquisitive of wrestling fans to think that maybe, just maybe, PAC was on course to join New Japan – but he had his “graduation ceremony” at Kobe Pro-Wrestling Festival, in which he was given the “bumps”, thrown in the air by his fellow wrestlers akin to how a manager of a soccer team is celebrated in title celebrations. The graduation, a ritual in Dragongate, turned out wasn’t for NJPW…but WWE.

© Trish

He would go on to spend 6 years in WWE, with his most notable feud occurring in NXT against Sami Zayn. Despite his incredible talents, the majority of these years were spent in 205 Live and NXT.

He had shining moments on these shows. When trusted with holding a title he shone, his runs with the NXT Championship and WWE Cruiserweight Title were standard bearers for the company he was contracted to.

But he never really broke through as Adrian Neville in WWE. He had the moves, and remained the man that gravity forgot, but 2012-2018 had glass ceilings for men in the cruiserweight division and PAC repeatedly bumped up against those limitations. Gravity might not keep him down, but bureaucracy and internal politics certainly did their best to do so.

© Dragongate

In October 2017, PAC was done. He did not want to continue working for WWE and feel devalued for his efforts. He walked out on the company, and then waited them out until they unfroze his contract and let him go back to the indies. Turns out the Fed messed with him by causing problems with his visa. Despite these unnecessary shenanigans, he rose above the chaos and showed up at the right place at the right time. After a sensational run back at Dragongate as the Open the Dream Gate Champion, the No.1 title in the company. He was one of the day one signees to AEW, going so far as to begin feuding with Adam Page on the day the company was first announced in Jacksonville. I remember from the first televised “Dynamite” my excitement as he was one of the wrestlers I recognized as someone I had enjoyed in my forays into “RAW”.

Watching PAC fly was a joy, and he was always fun to watch live. PAC had some delightful if random turns in AEW; his partnership with the Lucha Brothers as the third corner of Death Triangle was just fun to watch. As with everything in early to mid AEW, the plots ranged from the serious to the zany. PAC was adept at them all.

© AEW

In AEW, he may be best remembered for his best of three feud with Orange Cassidy. He understood there was more to the comic wrestler than the critics believed, and the two always brought out the best in each other. His character’s fury at OC’s antics always had a joie de vivre to it. It always felt special, and a must-watch. On Saturday night, PAC wrestled Andrade El Ídolo, a fight that had initially been meant to occur in those early Death Triangle days, where their alignments were reversed. He lost.

One day later, we fans lost him. PAC gave us all many memories, and I urge you all to go and watch your favorites amongst them. But even more important, he lived a life filled with love and compassion. The numerous and many notes and remembrances that have flooded the internet showed that who PAC was off screen was a person worthy of knowing and remembering.

There’s a concept that people are like stars in the sky. We see stars long after they have left the universe, and their memories are the light we see at night. Our memories of PAC can be the same. His amazing matches, from the British independent circuit to Dragongate, to WWE and finally ending at AEW will blaze brightly in our memories, along with the personal anecdotes and the effect his work had on our lives. May his star shine for sometime, and give those who look for it a comforting warmth.

Written by Peter Edge and Hillary