Long time professional wrestling star Sabu died on May 11 at age 61, just a few weeks after his last match of 2025. Officially known as Sabu, the local Lansing native rose to fame in the 1990s as a member of the Extreme Championship Wrestling.
Long before ‘Sabu’ — there was Terry Michael Brunk — a kid from Lansing whose dream was to become a professional wrestler like his uncle, Eddie Farhat — known in the ring as the Original Sheik.
“He never had the guts to ask his uncle to get him until he got hit in the face at point bank range when he was 19 years old,” Sabu’s former ringside manager for shows in the Midwest, Shafee Abraham, told Stateside. “So he had his mother call her brother and said, Terry would like to be a pro wrestler, and he came over and picked Sabu up and took him to what was called ‘camp.'"
The Sheik ended up taking Sabu under his wing, training him day and night for the big World Wrestling entertainment stage which included baptizing him with his stage name “Sabu."
Sabu was a tribute to the Indian American actor Sabu Dastagir, known for classics like the Thief of Bagdad and The Jungle Book.
No matter what Sabu did on the ring, whether it was beating up the most popular wrestler or wrestling matches in ways no one had seen before, the audience remained by his side, loving whatever Sabu did.
“He told me once, ‘I guess, I can’t be a bad guy. No matter what I do, they cheer for me,” Abraham said. “Everything he did in front of an audience was for a reason, and he really connected with them.”
On the ring, Sabu’s wrestling style involved breaking furniture while performing dangerous aerial moves like the “Air Sabu,” a flying attack often a heel kick to a cornered opponent assisted by a steel chair or for dives off chairs or the Arabian Facebuster/Skullcrusher, a jumping diving or somersault leg drop using a steel chair to impact the face or back of the opponent's head.
“Anytime he showed up to a show, the anticipation was so high, we just knew that this Tasmanian devil of a man was going to come out and throw chairs all over the place and get the crowd riled up,” Khalil AlHajal, deputy opinion editor at the Detroit Free Press, told Stateside.
Following in the footsteps of his uncle Sabu, he donned genie pants and an Arabian headdress as part of his wrestling persona. The difference between them was that Sabu did not play an anti-American character in the ring.
For AlHajal, watching Sabu on the World Wrestling Entertainment stage helped shift his long-held belief that Arab Americans like himself could only be seen as violent terrorists.
“The crowd adored him and by that point I was a fan of his but I never imagined that he was getting mainstream love from fans,” he said. “Sabu had overcome these barriers of ugliness and he was able to, following in his uncle’s footsteps, make use of stereotypes [of Arab Americans] and make the best of it and in time helping things to change.”
In his final match, Sabu defeated Joey Janela on April 18 in Game Changer Wrestling.
