The Resurrection of a Tower

The Resurrection of a Tower

by Christian McHausenstern

NY, NY

All ready poured over and looked at by hundreds of writers and analysts across the world, the events of Friday night's Wrestlefestania are still resonant. In Topeka, Kansas, a teenage boy was severely burned throwing a memorial poster in the garbage and lighting it on fire. The memorial poster in question bearing the face of one Samuel Adams, former member of Team USA one half of the tag team The Twin Towers. "For many his death was as emotional event as any other, eclipsed for some only by that singular day on September 11th 2001."
Read without context the above quote could be potentially offensive, as it was when David Brooks wrote it just a few days ago. Brooks' point was not that the return of Sam Adam's has the emotional or geo political impact of that fateful day. Instead, he was pointing to the emotional resonance that Team USA had to the fans at the EWF. When the towers fell many fans put their weight on the stalwarts of America. I myself, a younger reporter, marveled at the first tag match The Twin Towers fought following 9/11. Their opponent is forgotten to me, lost in the echoes of ovation and adulation. It is lost in the images of desperate crying eyes rooting for their heroes to win. Win they did, and though they had stopped being a consistent tag team at that point Team USA seemed destined to continue forever in some fashion. It was therefore all the more horrible, all the more destructive, all the more disturbing when a box containing the head of Sam Adams arrived in Captain America's lap. Somewhere deep inside of all of us something stirred. The fall of one beloved tower reflecting and reminding us deeply of another.
I stand today at the edge of a gaping pit. Construction workers seem to mill about but nothing grows here. As the city has waited for something anything to rise from the ashes, perhaps somewhere inside Captain America, Don Edwards, all of us had been waiting for a similar resurrection. And so it was delivered, and so we are deceived. Sometimes things broken and fallen serve as their own best witnesses. Sometimes resurrecting great things from the past only helps them serve as ghosts. Sam Adams did not die, it seems. Sam Adams has been long alive. Did he see our sorrow? Did he see Andrew Jackson's? Did he see Don Edwards'? If we stand at the edge of a new beginning for Samuel Adams here in the EWF what will we see? There have been deeper betrayals in our sport, but few reek of such unanswered and unforgivable questions. It is at this time that I wish my best to Captain America, who oversaw and so beautifully spoke the memorial services for his friend Samuel Adams; now resurrected.