Steve Irwin’s Death is Irony Personified: A Different Kind of Crocodile Hunter Tribute
I want to stress that my intension here is not to make light of Steve Irwin’s passing, and that I wholly believe that there are two camps, factions if you will, when it comes to looking at this horrific incident. The first faction consists of true Irwin fans, the people who felt genuinely sad when they heard the news that he had been killed. The second group is made of all the jerks who are looking at this as a platform for jokes, or who are just so self-diluted that they can only recognize his death as some kind of weird pop culture event which, in a way, it is, but that type of sentiment misses the bigger point all together. I am of the former faction.
Steve Irwin was a great person, first and foremost. I never met the man, but it’s kind of hard to think otherwise. Like many people, I was a huge fan of the show when it first came on. I was in college and though I liked to watch it while smoking pot or drinking beer and got a huge laugh out of Irwin’s supersized personality, the show was about wildlife conservation, first and foremost. There have been a million parodies involving Steve Irwin’s Crocodile Hunter character, some funny, some tasteless and some both, but just because this image of the Crocodile Hunter was outrageous and kind of silly, didn’t mean that Steve Irwin, the person, wasn’t an intelligent, kind and loving man.
Look, Steve Irwin may have been the world’s biggest jerk, off camera. He may have beaten his wife, cheated on his taxes and pushed old ladies down twelve flights of stairs after one two many Fosters. Okay, that last one was totally unreasonable, but you get the point. He could have been a real asshole, but do you really believe that? I can watch a million interviews with say, oh I don’t know, people like Matt Damon. And he comes off like an okay guy, but I (or anybody else for that matter) wouldn’t be surprised at all if, in reality, he was actually a soul-sucking loser. Can you really say the same about the Crocodile Hunter? I can’t.
Because the best thing about Steve Irwin WAS his Crocodile Hunter character, which, let’s face it, probably wasn’t much of a character at all; I got the feeling that he acted like that ALL the time. You could flip on one of his several shows on Animal Planet or Discovery Channel and it would just make you smile. At least it made me smile. “Now there is a guy who is enthusiastic about his job,” I thought to myself.
This is why his cause of death is so unfathomably cruel, terribly unjust and ridiculously ironic. A stingray? A fucking stingray? The possum of the sea takes down the guy who made a living out of taming one of earth’s fiercest creatures? Steve Irwin would still be alive if that sneaky bastard had plunged his barb an inch or two to the right or the left, but no- that sucker got him right in his heart. Experts seem to agree that it was a one in a bazillion incidentâÂ?¦there isn’t one know case of this EVER happening before.
So that’s how the Crocodile Hunter died. It wasn’t in the jaws of a croc, or by a heart attack at 82, or a wayward bus, but a stingray. I don’t want to get into his prospective state funeral or the potential release of his death video. No, that shit is too sad. Rather, I’ll end this with a quote from the Crocodile Hunter’s manager; a quote that I thought was stupid when I first heard it on the news, but that I now feel sums up Steve Irwin quite nicely. John Stainton told the media, tearfully, that Irwin would have said, “crocs rule.”
Crocs rule indeed sweet prince, crocs rule indeed.
