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I really hated Cactus Jack's main event match with Sting on TNA's Lockdown pay-per-view show on Sunday. It wasn't just that it was a bad match. I've seen worse too many times, and the truth is, you can't fault the effort.

I think it's that effort, particularly from Cactus Jack, that I hated so much. He did everything he could to make that match worth the thirty bucks fans paid to see it. He knew what he could do, and he knew what he couldn't, and he laid out a match with Sting that was designed to get the most of everything the two could do in a six-sided ring.

There was a time when I loved Cactus Jack for that attitude. Almost twenty years ago, Jack was a mid-card act for a World Championship Wrestling that didn't always feature the hardest working wrestlers. Jack, though, was always willing to bust his ass to make the show, whether the cameras were on or off. In a business where innovation is imitation, no one to this day regularly does what became Jack's signature move – a run down the ring apron into an elbow to his opponent on the floor. One night in Greensboro he did that to "Beautiful" Bobby Eaton and the splat was so loud you swore the concrete shook.

Not that much longer, we're sitting back ten or fifteen rows from the ring at a WCW pay-per-view, and again, right outside the ring, Paul Orndorff pitched Cactus Jack over his head so high that this time, I swear, Jack's splat made that bare arena floor tremble.

It's no exaggeration to say that Cactus Jack was a revolutionary performer in pro wrestling. More than anyone in the modern era, "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, Shawn Michaels, The Rock, the NWO - any wrestlers with the exception of Hulk Hogan and The Road Warriors - Cactus Jack changed what it could mean to be a pro wrestler. He opened the door for a type of performer never before seen in not only this sport's history, but any other.

Jack's Splat signaled a sea change in what it meant to be tough. It used to be the best way to draw money was by kicking ass (Stan Hansen, Steve Austin, Mike Tyson) and that's still true. After Jack, though, a whole new generation of wrestlers proved how tough they were by taking full-fledged chairshots and getting crushed like Jack did (pretty much everyone who came through the original ECW).

Traditionalists like Ric Flair or Bret Hart may have thought that the art of pro wrestling was drawing fans into the violent action while doing a minimum of damage to your opponent and yourself, but the truth is professional wrestling (like any other revenue drawing sport or entertainment) is about what works, and for years Jack's Splat worked.

Cactus Jack, like most innovators, brought a lot more to the act than his imitators did. He was smart, and smart about the business. He learned how to get more important acts over, getting his own more over in the process. He made Triple H an accepted main eventer. Cactus Jack was a great wrestler. His alter ego Mick Foley wrote best-sellers and became such an original, expressive writer he won the respect of literary heavyweights like Richard Price.

Then Cactus Jack fell off a cage and became a legend.

Nine years ago he retired from full-time professional wrestling. He retired a lot younger than most wrestlers do. He didn't do it because none of the big companies wanted him. They still do. Cactus Jack retired because he paid a horrific physical price for his innovative work style. It's easy to forget in a time when wrestlers are celebrated publicly by their promoters for returning from rehabilitation quickly, and a young wrestler's death isn't really shocking, but just because Cactus Jack, or Steve Austin, looks pretty much the same on television doesn't mean they have recovered physically from what they did in the ring.

That's why this time when Cactus Jack went splat Sunday night with Sting, who figured out years ago how to give what he really had in the ring and no more, it didn't make the match, it made the match awful. When Jack won the TNA Title by tripping over the cage and falling painfully to the ring floor one last time, I wasn't celebrating. All I could think about was the agony his already crippled body would feel in the months and years to come – agony he endured for money he didn't need, and for a company that will always be what it always has been.

Watching Cactus Jack go splat in 2009 is just awful.

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