The story goes that on July 4, 2000, Bigelow had just returned from Japan and was driving home when he saw a house on fire. Acting on instinct, Bigelow quickly got out of his car to see what he could do to help.

“I heard kids crying,” Bigelow said in a 2007 interview with Electric City. “I went through the door, and the whole upstairs was on fire. I had to run through a wall in the house. I ran through a built wall—two-by-fours and everything—so I could get to the back way to get up the stairs. I landed right in a ball of fire. It was the best move I made. When I finally made it upstairs, I grabbed the three kids and came back through the same fire, and now I was on fire.”

While the children were taken to safety, given the level of risk involved, Bigelow did not emerge from the house unscathed. He would go on to spend a lengthy amount of time in the hospital to tend to the second-degree burns that covered over 40% of his body. Reports vary on how long Bigelow was in the hospital, with some saying that he was only there for 10 days, while others claim Bigelow was in the hospital for around two months after the incident.

Regardless of how long he was in the hospital, Bigelow had gone above and beyond to save the lives of three children, and for a man who had fire on his ring gear and flames literally tattooed on his head, he fought fire with fire on that July night. Bigelow would go on to make a full recovery and return to the ring on the November 1, 2000 episode of “WCW Thunder” where he would make light work of Crowbar. After WCW closed its doors, Bigelow would continue to wrestle on the independent scene until 2006, before tragically passing away on January 13, 2007, at the age of 45 due to a combination of an accidental drug overdose and an artery disease known as atherosclerosis