"And then he said..."

Monday was the first anniversary of the death by heart failure of the wrestler Eddie Guerrero - and, to judge from the fresh set of comments that have appeared on YouTube tribute videos, his memory has lost none of its power to affect people.

On one level, pro wrestling is undoubtedly rather silly - but on another it's a form of storytelling and, like all stories, when it's told well by a skilled practitioner it has the power to touch people's hearts. Eddie had that skill.

Back when he died, I created a graphic captioned 'gone to soon', with Eddie's photo and those of four other people who left before they ought to have - Kirsty MacColl, Screaming Lord Sutch, Glenn Quinn and Stuart Adamson. According to my referrer stats, it gets hit again and again from Google image searches, and most of the people are looking for Eddie.

Nor is it just online that you can see evidence of how he connected with people. From time to time I wear my tribute t-shirt, the one sold by the WWE to raise money for Eddie's widow Vickie, and more often than not someone comments on it. They didn't yesterday, as it happened, but then I hardly spoke to anyone during the day.

I wore it while delivering leaflets during May's council elections and on three occasions found myself deep in conversation about his legacy and his greatest matches - twice with the sort of groups of teenage boys that usually give me the wiggins, once with a pleasant young man who I met in the street outside a friend's house and who turned out to be a fellow candidate.

Then there was the time down the gym, when I was talking to a fitness instructor and he literally faltered to a stop mid-sentence as he read the “1967 - 2005″ caption - his eyes bulged in appalled surprise and he blurted out “Eddie Guerrero's dead?” I had to tell him the whole sad story as he shook his head in disbelief.

But most bizarre of all was at the check-out in Tesco one lunchtime, when the woman behind the till broke off without warning from swiping my shopping to start talking about how terrible his death was and how she and her daughter had been such fans of his - just launched into it as if we'd been chatting away every day for weeks. As unlikely a wrestling fan as you could imagine, but that was Eddie for you - he touched everyone who saw him.

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David Sutch | Eddie Guerrero | Kirsty MacColl | Stuart Adamson | Glenn Quinn

The downside of being away for a while and largely out of contact with the world is that you miss the things that happen in your absence.

In this case, the awful news of the death of Eddie Guerrero from heart failure at the age of 38 on November 13th.

The Sun's wrestling columnists put it best:

People who don't know wrestling, won't know what Eddie meant to us. But this is our Princess Diana and John F Kennedy moment rolled into one.

Eddie was - until late in his career - an underappreciated overachiever, a skilled showman who finally got the recognition he deserved from management when they could no longer ignore the level of support he got from the crowds (this is an excellent retrospective of his life.).

At one stage in his career he suffered from drink problems and became addicted to the prescription pain-killers he was taking to allow him to work through a series of nagging injuries, but by the time he died he had overcome these demons and was days away from celebrating his fourth anniversary of being “clean”. With horrible irony, it appears that on the died he died he was due to tape a bout that would have ended with him winning a world title for the second time in his career.

Following Wrestlemania XX, where he successfully defended his first title in a match that was at times thrilling, at times dramatic and at times hysterically funny, I pretty much stopped watching wrestling. After watching that show's end, where Guerrero and his long-time friend and colleague Chris Benoit celebrated with their championship belts in the centre of the ring as tickertape and streamers rained down on them, I figured nothing would ever be that good again.

Seems I was right.