"Ted was one of the most incredible men that ever walked on two feet," said Rush, Lipscomb's fiancée. "You don't hear this about a lot of people but the seven years we've been together, I never heard anybody say a bad word about him."
Lipscomb, a longtime wrestler who graduated from Cass High, died Thursday at age 54.
Rush, also a Cass alum, said his cause of death has yet to be confirmed, although a heart attack is suspected.
"His mother is just devastated," Rush said. "His sister (too). It's been horrible ever since Thursday.
"I just want to wake up from this nightmare."
Lipscomb, she said, loved his hometown more than anything and did well to represent it.
"Ted was a son of Cartersville," Rush added, "and he represented Cartersville well ... Cartersville should be proud."
Rush and Lipscomb lived in Powder Springs, a shorter commute to Marietta.
"He said, 'I love Cartersville, but I don't want her to have to drive to Marietta every day,'" she recalled of her fiance's selfless act.
"He was my protector."
Lipscomb, she said, would have been surprised at the fuss being made.
"Ted was such a humble man," Rush said. "He's probably saying, 'All this for me.'"
But his life influenced those around him. Rush said she often thinks of what her late fiance would do in many situations.
"They way I think now, I don't want to do anything that Ted Allen wouldn't be proud of me," she said. "Ted Allen was a man of reproach, and people don't believe there are people out there like that, but he was."
In addition to his wrestling career, Lipscomb also trained some big-name wrestlers like Arn Anderson, Ranger Ross and Big Boss Man, Rush said.
He also had begun to train a younger wrestler, Kyle Matthews, whom he treated like his own child, much like he did with Rush's daughter, Melissa.
"He loved her like his own children," Karen Rush said of Lipscomb, who had two children of his own, Cliff Lipscomb and Katie Schmanski.
"He also had an adopted wrestling son in Kyle Matthews," she continued. "Kyle's an up-and-coming wrestler that you're probably going to be hearing a lot about."
In one his final bouts, Rush said Lipscomb wrestled Matthews and told the crowd after that: "The old 'Nightmare' is not gonna be around much longer, but this is a good boy and I want y'all to get behind him.'"
It is in that spirit that many Cartersville residents will probably remember Lipscomb.
He'll definitely be remembered by his ring moniker as well as his trademark mask.
Rush said Lipscomb wore different colored masks and pants as a wrestler, but his most noticeable was a white one with a black star over his eye.
Rush plans to have one of those trademark masks for Lipscomb's funeral Monday. (For full obituary, see page 2A.)
However, she had to find one to replace the one she said she turned pink while doing laundry.
"I said, 'I can't bury him with a pink mask,'" Rush laughed.
So she got Juanita Timbs, who made Lipscomb's masks during his career, to make a final mask for Ted.