The pre-holiday weekend got off to a sad start Friday as the news began to hit te paper and the Internet that Mike "Mad Dog" Bell had died. Bell, 37, was found dead while staying at a rehab center in Costa Mesa, California. (At this time, a cause of death has still not been determined.) Bell had been a professional wrestler, but "Mad Dog" wasn't a handle that he concocted just to wear in the ring; as audiences learned from Bigger, Faster, Stronger*, the documentary made by his younger brother Chris, it was a childhood nickname that stuck, just as his and Chris's brother, Mark has been fated to go through life known to one and all as Stinky. Bell's movie, which played in theaters this past summer, and which stands out as one of the more fascinating specimens of the recent vogue for personal, semi-professional documentary filmmaking, explored his and his brothers' lifelong obsession with physical strength and size, an obsession that, as the boys grew older and continued to work as weightlifters and personal trainers, inevitably involved the use of steroids. (Paul Clark wrote about the movie at this site last week in his "Reviews by Request" column.)
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