No, the bread and butter of the deadpooler is terminal illness. Many of them have Google News Alerts set up for certain terms: “pancreatic cancer”, “stage IV metastasized”, “hospice care”, “glioblastoma multiforme”. Someones a major celebrity will be kind enough to do their dying in the private eye. This year, the majority of top teams in the internet’s most prestigious deadpool, the DerbyDeadPool, were based around a carefully composed spine of Robin Gibb, Etta James and Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. Three of the sweetest soul voices ever, there.
Where deadpoolers earn their stripes is with the less famous individuals. In the world of deadpooling, they become stars. Take Gary Carter, a baseball player who won the 1986 World Series with the New York Mets. But he was never more discussed among non-Americans than he was at the start of this year, gaining fame on deadpool message boards due to the fact that his daughter was kind enough to keep an online diary detailing his battle with stage IV brain cancer. He died on February 16th, aged 57, allowing the more conscientious deadpoolers an early lead in their leagues.
I know this myself because I picked him myself. I deadpool. I have those Google News Alerts, I scour Twitter, I keep my eyes peeled on any media I encounter for a slightest mention of an illness. I have a notepad with a list of over 150 people whose illness has been made apparent to me this year because, hey, how else am I going to grab that title? So former Senegalese national team manager Bruno Metsu? Honky tonk legend Ray Price? “Canada’s Chekhov” Alice Munro? My success in 2013 depends on you.
Start Here:
The internet’s most illustrious deadpool, mainly by dint of not being plagued by endless angry American teenagers. The rules are simple: pick 20 celebrities, the more that die the more points you get. The younger they die, the more points you get. It was originally believed that the 1,000th celebrity picked on the site to die was, impressively, Osama bin Laden. However, this was an admin error, he was the 1,001st. The 1,000th was, less impressively, snooker commentator “Whispering” Ted Lowe.
Originally founded as a student newsletter in 1986 in the aftermath of Cary Grant’s death to discuss who the next celebrity to die would be (it was Andrés Segovia), DeathList now functions as the #1 message board for the discussion of dying celebrities and deadpool tactics. For a long time it was the number one Google search result for “Clive Dunn”, leaving users worried as to who will replace Lance-Corporal Jones in the site’s affections.
Deadpooling American-style, and home of “The Lee Atwater Invitational Dead Pool”, named after the blues guitarist and race-baiting former chairman of the Republic Party who died of an astrocytoma in the early 1990s. Stands as the longest-running online deadpool and styles itself as “the home of death on the web since 1994”.
Words: Dom Passantino / Illustration: Fuchsia MacAree
