Pro Wrestling Chronicle

I was in the process of researching a story on WWE house show and TV ratings and the translation (or lack there of) to PPV buys domestically. Unfortunately, with a timely serious hard news issue regarding WWE wrestlers being exposed by SI this week, that article will have to wait a day or two. Today’s column focuses on steroids and HGH, the fallout, and why no one cares - not even the fans - if another WWE wrestler dies.

Apparently phony wrestlers should just shut up and die. That seems to be the sentiment from the national U.S. media in the wake of a Sports Illustrated story naming several top WWE wrestlers and their illegal prescription habits. Even re-branded (thank you Linda McMahon) as entertainers/athletes, or better thought of by the company as sports entertainers, the sentiment in the media (especially at ESPN, which has failed as a journalistic entity on all wrestling stories because of their own self-importance) seemed to be simplistic and mean spirited. That message was essentially - Ha, we caught you! We knew all along. You’re all jokes. We were right. End of conversation.

Except, wrestlers, whether they are UFC fighters in shoots or grapplers in worked matches, are still human beings. And the generation of wrestlers (no media outlet called them Sports Enter-whatever, Vince) that came before this has seen young death after young death of semi-retired or medically retired wrestlers. The WWE has “lucked out” in only having two high profile deaths for drugs on their own watch the last decade, but there have been countless more deaths that you wouldn’t know about if you weren’t paying attention.

What struck me most about this story isn’t that it happened (I expected that), or that it made major media outlets (it is a part of pop culture, regardless of how the mindless news readers feel, and there’s too much TV time to fill not to run with it for a day.) I wasn’t even surprised that past S.I., no one seemed to be factually correct or look any deeper into the story (they don’t care.) I was, however, shocked, surprised, and saddened by the attitudes of wrestling fans and those in the business itself, in that specific order.

Several wrestlers (those who weren’t pulled by the WWE from media appearances) gave typically logic-flawed outright lies or lies by omission to go with their usual denials of drug abuse. Those who didn’t work for WWE, even at advanced ages, kept to the “code”, no matter how foolish they sounded. After all, you never know when Vince might be calling.

It sad when you feel so defensive of your spot within your chosen profession and of that profession’s image that you’d rather facilitate unhealthy behavior and enable yourself and others rather then stand up for something right. Then again, wrestlers don’t have, and never will have, a union for a reason. Promoters were con men who historically could never agree on anything or trust each other for more then five minutes. NWA yearly conventions throughout the 50s, 60s, and 70s were legendary for stories like this. Now imagine the pimps allowing their whores to form a union, and the whores agreeing on anything? Sorry if that depiction strikes you as harsh. It came not from my own head, but from wrestlers who I’ve spoken to over the years.

Almost a year back I wrote a column that can be found on this site saying Eddie Guerrerro’s death may have actually saved Kurt Angle’s life. Sadly, I think it just helped WWE corporate to wash their hands should Angle ever go to sleep and not wake up. Fans who cried when Eddie died seem to have taken a different tone on this story though. Many of them don’t see it as a problem, or think that the WWE shouldn’t even address the situation. It’s almost like fans of the WWE would like this swept under the rug as much as the WWE would. But isn’t the WWE a stock traded company? Don’t its wrestlers have to work over 250 dates a year with a tougher in-ring work ethic and more big shows then the former generation did? And isn’t that former generation filled with deceased wrestlers like Rick Rude and Curt Hennig? What about pain killers and the problems we’ve seen inside the industry with them? Whatever happened to Brian Pillman? And didn’t steroids and HGH cause an enlarged heart in some famous wrester less then two years ago? I heard he die on my TV. They had a whole ratings grabbing tribute for him. I’m struggling to remember his name, even though it’s been used to make money by his former employer for over a year now. Oh wait its right here in that S.I. article. It was Eddie. Well, now I guess I don’t have to worry about it.

It’s naive to think that this isn’t a problem because prescriptions for drugs were written out and received two or three years ago. Nothing has changed, and as Bruce Mitchell of the Pro Wrestling Torch referred to it, getting caught or not caught when it comes to performance enhancing drugs is really what amounts to an “IQ test”. Adam Copeland came out on his Myspace page yesterday with a typical denial on the story. I know, I know, it wasn’t a denial, it was an explanation. At least he attempted to have it read more honest than a complete blanket denial like many other wrestlers who are used to lying for a living.

Copeland said he took HGH to rehab his broken neck years back, and I have no doubt he did. I’m just wondering how the results stayed on his frame until roughly Wrestlemania of last year, when it finally became evident he was becoming more natural. And for anyone who argues that there was no wellness policy back then, or that now that there is one the wrestling community is fine, haven’t we seen selected suspensions before? Over the last year several people have been caught and suspended for failing the “I.Q.” test, and in the end, they were allowed to keep working like the whores that they are. They just weren’t getting paid for thirty days, because Vince still needed them out there turning tricks.

This is a problem that should have been rectified in the early 1990s when the government flubbed a case that would have sent Vince McMahon to jail for several years. We should have seen stricter rules and a reconditioning of the viewing public over a decade ago. But the WWE became impatient, WCW had taken over as the leader of the industry, and drug testing was quietly dropped. I’m afraid more wrestlers are going to have to die in their forties and early fifties because of this “non-story” in Sports Illustrated this week. After all, the mainstream media has already done what they do best: treated these “fake wrestlers” like evil cartoons, bumbled through factual information, and basically sent the message the small minority of us were hoping wouldn’t come. The message is, “Vince and his circus are a joke, so we still don’t care if human beings die.” McMahon doesn’t care because he’s built up enough plausible deniability and fake rules to insulate himself. The wrestlers won’t die on his watch anyway, they’ll die five years after they’ve been used up. Wrestlers have reinforced their decision as a whole to lie for their profession because the media deemed this a joke and a non-story. It sad that no one IN the actual industry wants to clean up what really is, underneath it all, a beautiful art form of telling simple stories with the human body, much like dance.

Phil Mushnick might be a grumpy old man, but unfortunately he’s right about wrestling. And Page Falkenburg (DDP) can blame the fans all he wants. Sure, the viewing public was conditioned to perceive wrestlers as bodybuilders. It’s not their fault, and they’ll get over it if and when an attempt is made to change that perception. That perception was the rare occasion, not the rule, before Vince McMahon bought the WWE from his father and took in national in late 1983. If you’re looking for a reason why every wrestler from my father’s generation to mine has felt the pressure to use drugs for pain or to get bigger, look no further then Stamford, Conn. It begins and ends with a man who sets an example of work conditions by posing for Muscle and Fitness at 60 years old. Someone should test Vince. I guess one government investigation wasn’t enough.