Guy Lombardo
On November 5, 1977, Lombardo suffered a fatal heart attack. Another source says he died "of a lung ailment." His wife was at his bedside when he died in Houston Methodist Hospital.
Lou Albano
More importantly, the involvement of Lauper, a celebrity completely unrelated to wrestling, in the pro wrestling world was unprecedented. MTV's decision to broadcast the Brawl to End it All tremendously increased the WWF's public profile, especially in the coveted young adult demographic. This led directly to the 1980s professional wrestling boom. Wrestling Observer's Dave Meltzer wrote, "Without Albano, wrestling history would have been monumentally different because if you take Lauper's involvement out of the equation, the early losses on expanding nationally and buying so much television time were on the verge of putting the company under... Without her, there would have been no MTV special, no national media publicity, and it's highly unlikely without it that the first WrestleMania would have been a success. If you take Albano's participation out of the equation, there is a good chance the McMahon expansion would have hit an iceberg and died in early 1985... the attention garnered by the Rock & Wrestling Connection, stemming from that chance meeting on an airplane between Lauper and Albano less than two years earlier, led NBC to make the decision to air pro wrestling several times per year in the "Saturday Night Live" time slot."