WRESTLING BABYLON News

Sun-tzu, the great Chinese military theorist, is credited with a piece of advice that remains solid two and a half millennia later: “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” As Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Entertainment draws heat from two Congressional committees, which are contemplating hearings on the scandal-plagued pro wrestling industry, the principle is well illustrated by the strange relationship between WWE and the moralistic senator from its home state, Joe Lieberman of Connecticut.

In an earlier post, “WWE Lobbying: How SmackDown Does SuckUp,” http://muchnick.net/babylon/2007/10/26/wwe-lobbying-how-smackdown-does-suckup/, I took a peek at public documents disclosing WWE’s history of Capitol Hill representation and spending. Turning to the campaign contributions of Vince and Linda McMahon and associates, I focus on their support of Lieberman. It sticks out like The Undertaker at a police lineup of pygmies.

Lieberman is one of the Senate’s most outspoken voices deploring violence and sex in pop culture content directed at young people. Lieberman was on the advisory board of the Parents Television Council, a group whose mission is “to promote and restore responsibility and decency to the entertainment industry in answer to America’s demand for positive, family-oriented television programming.” PTC issues studies from its bully pulpit and is behind advertiser boycotts and others forms of pressure on targeted programmers.

In 2000, WWE sued PTC and its founder Brent Bozell over a PTC campaign claiming that WWE programming was responsible for four children’s deaths. In 2002, PTC settled the suit by paying WWE $3.5 million and issuing a public apology.

During his failed 2004 presidential campaign, Lieberman took a leave of absence from the PTC advisory board. He appears never to have returned.

Meanwhile, Lieberman and WWE seemingly made amends. The campaign contribution database maintained by the Center for Responsive Politics (http://crp.org) shows that Linda McMahon (Vince’s wife and the CEO of WWE) last year made two separate $1,000 donations to Lieberman’s campaign fund. Another WWE board member, Michael Solomon, gave Lieberman $1,000.

Big-money players commonly hedge their bets by spreading contributions across a range of candidates who might possibly win. But it’s worth noting that the McMahon family – whose overall donations skew strongly Republican – has never given to the campaigns of Connecticut’s other long-time senator, Democrat Chris Dodd. (Nor has Solomon, a private equity fund owner who has donated mostly to Republicans but also to some Democrats, such as Bill Clinton and Senator Charles Schumer of New York.) Lieberman, a conservative Democrat, was reelected to his Senate seat as an independent after losing the 2006 Democratic primary to antiwar candidate Ned Lamont.

For the record, I do not share the schoolmarm positions of PTC and Lieberman. And I really dislike the former’s thuggish tactics. I protect my own children from whatever inappropriate programming is out there in a different way – by not subscribing to cable and by not permitting much over-the-air TV to play in our house.

I’m struck, however, by the evolving relationship between Vince McMahon – whose current net worth approaches $1 billion and who for a time made the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans – and Joe Lieberman, the family-values-happy politician. Now that other elected officials are taking what I consider an overdue look at the real WWE scandal – the preposterously high number of wrestler deaths – has McMahon neutralized one of his highest-profile critics?

I contacted Senator Lieberman by email, fax, and phone, inviting comment on this item. His office has not yet responded.

Irv Muchnick

In the current issue of the authoritative Wrestling Observer Newsletter, Dave Meltzer notes that “there still appears to be no explanation that makes any sense as to why Randy Orton wasn’t suspended.” Meltzer is referring to the revelation over the summer that Orton had received packages of banned substances from Internet gray-market dealer Signature Pharmacy as recently as February of this year. Yet there were no consequences.

Meltzer’s remark provides a useful context for revisiting the report here of Orton’s 2006 suicide attempt. I continue to call on Orton and WWE to come clean about it. There are connections that I believe anyone not firmly planted in deny-all quicksand would acknowledge.

I still have no reason not to believe the Orton suicide story in its essence. That something grave happened to Orton at his home in St. Louis shortly after WrestleMania 22 is not in serious doubt. At the time WWE executive John Laurinaitis was moved to investigate the suicide rumor, and though he ultimately discounted it, one person close to all the parties told me that may well have been because that was what he and others at WWE wanted to believe. A couple of sources in different places who have not talked to each other about it told me the same story and named the same area hospital. In response to a query, the public relations manager of the hospital said patient privacy laws prevented being able to confirm or deny my information, adding: “When we, on occasion, have celebrity patients, they generally request to be blacked out of our patient registry, in which case we cannot even acknowledge they are patients while they are currently at our facility, much less after they leave.”

Meltzer’s reminder of Orton’s non-suspension last month is part of the newsletter’s review of WWE’s patently fallacious responses to troubling questions about its drug practices after Chris Benoit killed his wife and son and himself. Meltzer writes, “It’s another black eye for the WWE Wellness policy to have accepted greatly over-prescribed steroids and greatly elevated testosterone levels in Benoit…. It’s also notable that [Wellness coordinator David] Black and WWE have yet to answer any significant questions regarding how many wrestlers were given exemptions.” And: “The company constantly touted Benoit as being steroid free when they knew full well he wasn’t from the prescriptions Black had to have discussed with [Dr. Phil] Astin. The company from day one pushed the idea that steroids couldn’t have been involved.”

Meltzer points out that, even after the Benoit toxicology test, WWE took the line that his “testosterone” levels did not mean that he had “steroids” in his system. Ridiculous. Vince McMahon is setting himself up at upcoming Congressional hearings to come off like those infamous tobacco executives who, one by one, deadpanned that there was no proven link between cigarette smoking and cancer.

Which brings us back to Orton. I have no idea why Orton wasn’t suspended. Specifically, I don’t have evidence, nor am I asserting, that he wasn’t suspended because WWE was afraid to discipline him in the wake of a suicide attempt. On the contrary, I think the likeliest explanation of the non-suspension is simply that the company was giving Orton a pass in order to avoid further thinning the ranks of main event stars. Did they throw a bunch of other wrestlers under the bus, because they felt they had to, but at a certain point decide to let the wheels roll over the wellness policy itself?

It seems to me that there are only two possible explanations. One is that WWE is saying Orton was not guilty of the same violation – procuring drugs online – as the others. The other explanation is that WWE is relying on a so-far-unarticulated factual loophole so convoluted that it simply reinforces the argument for outside regulation of the wrestling industry. Secretive, begrudging, half-truthful, WWE is failing miserably to make the opposite case.

I believe that whatever happened with Randy Orton in April 2006 is still relevant today. It is relevant because the credibility of WWE’s wellness policy is on the line, and a new question about the application of the wellness policy to Orton is right out there, front and center. And it is relevant, more fundamentally, because there is no statute of limitations on reflecting on matters of life and death post-Benoit – whether wrestling fans want to face up to the facts or not.

Irv Muchnick

Hearings on drugs and death in pro wrestling loom from either of two committees of the House of Representatives. Let’s take a look at one area in which World Wrestling Entertainment, a billion-dollar corporation, is certain to be investing resources: lobbying.

This is democracy in action, 21^st century America style, and it’s nothing new for Vince McMahon either. In a chapter of WRESTLING BABYLON (originally published as a 1988 article in The Washington Monthly), I describe how Titan Sports, parent company of then-World Wrestling Federation, sicced lobbyists on state legislators to help nudge the nascent deregulation of pro wrestling over the top rope. One of those lobbyists was Rick Santorum, a young lawyer at WWF/WWE’s long-time Pittsburgh-based main outside law firm, which now has the name Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Preston Gates Ellis. Santorum went on to two terms as Pennsylvania’s junior (and right-wing) United States senator.

Much as I’d like to represent that the information below comes from painstaking enterprise reporting, the truth is that an excellent public-interest group, the Center for Responsive Politics (http://crp.org or http://opensecrets.org), maintains a cross-referenced database of the Congressional filings mandated by the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995. The interface there is so friendly that even I can figure it out. (I also thank CRP’s communications director, Massie Ritsch, for helping me interpret the data.)

I have not yet investigated whether WWE’s Securities and Exchange Commission filings include more specific data in this area. I suspect not, but if so I will discuss in a future blog post.

Here’s what we find:

·                    Last month Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Preston Gates Ellis registered as a lobbyist for WWE. The firm’s listed “government relations specialists” are  Scott Aliferis, George Koch, Roger Morse, and Dennis Potter. According to the firm’s website, Aliferis is an experienced lobbyist and a former “principle [sic! sic!] policy advisor” to Congressman Fred Upton of Michigan. Koch’s resume includes a stint as CEO of the Grocery Manufacturers of America, a trade association. Morse was a legislative director for disgraced former House Majority Leader Tom Delay. I don’t have any further info on Potter.

·                    Lobbyist filings are semi-annual. We therefore won’t know the range of Kirkpatrick & Lockhart’s spending on Capitol Hill on behalf of WWE until next February. Under “LOBBYING ISSUES” the entry reads, “Representation relative to Congressional investigation of use of performance enhancing substances in professional wrestling.”

·                    In three different years WWE has been represented by APCO Worldwide, a spinoff of Arnold & Porter, the powerful Washington law firm that was co-founded by Abe Fortas, a member of President Lyndon Johnson’s circle who went on to become a Supreme Court justice. APCO spent at least $120,000 on WWE’s behalf in 2001, and between $0 and $120,000 both last year and in the first half of this year. In 2002 another big lobbyist, Blank Rome, reported spending at least $120,000 on WWE interests. In 1999 (at least $20,000) and 2000 (at least $400,000) the old WWF got services from the Carmen Group, the firm of David Carmen, former advisor to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Then there are campaign contributions by the McMahon family. More on that in a future post.

Irv Muchnick

(First published October 24 in Beyond Chron, http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/Byrd_Flies_With_Sports_Newest_Scam_Hormone_Replacement_Therapy__5034.html)

With the Indians losing to the Red Sox and the World Series beginning tonight, it might be easy to forget the revelations about Cleveland’s Paul Byrd. But Byrd’s use of human growth hormone – supplied in part by an Internet gray-market dealer and prescribed in part by a dentist – offers important clues to the decadence of contemporary sports, and not just because Byrd became the first accused athlete to merge damage control with a Christian book hustle. (What’s next – branded syringes with “What Would Jesus Do” markings of acceptable dosage levels? At least Lance Armstrong has the good grace just to lawyer himself up.)

A guy named Mike Jenkinson wrote a review of Benoit in which he states, “If there is one glaring omission …, it is that the book does not raise the possibility that Benoit had been suffering from brain damage.”

I sent him a note gently pointing out that the book does just that in one passage.

On his blog, writing with all the grace of a sledgehammer pounding a feather into a pneumatic tube, Jenkinson huffs and puffs. This “hardly changes … my opinion” that the book is deficient in dealing with concussions, he says. The only problem is that the sentence, as published, wasn’t an opinion that the book was deficient in this area; it was a flat, and inaccurate, statement that the book “does not raise the possibility.”

Clearly this is an individual who treats the act of reading as an imposition.

Irv Muchnick

[cross-posted to the CHRIS AND NANCY Blog, http://benoitbook.blogspot.com]

BENOIT: Wrestling with the Horror That Destroyed a Family and Crippled a Sport is, unsurprisingly, a hot-selling book immediately upon release. Among wrestling titles in the U.S., only Chris Jericho’s well-written memoir and the latest WWE spinoff product, with Batista’s name on the cover, are doing better out of the gate. At Amazon Canada – where BENOIT has hovered inside or near the list of 100 bestsellers among all books – only Jericho’s and the long-anticipated blockbuster by Bret Hart are moving more briskly.

Your humble blogger, one of four BENOIT co-authors, thanks Steven Johnson, Heath McCoy, and Greg Oliver for carrying me better than Adrian Adonis covered for Jesse “The Body” Ventura in tag-team matches.

However, I observe that almost everyone – including Steve, Heath, Greg, and our publisher, ECW Press – tiptoes around the subject of our book rather more gingerly than necessary. Inevitably, the first posthumous book on Chris Benoit (as well as, in my biased prediction, what will ultimately go down as one of the best) has taken heat on the grounds of “taste.” But inevitability and legitimacy are not the same thing.

Here’s reviewer Mike Jenkinson on the fine Canadian website SLAM! Wrestling: “I’m leery of ‘rush job’ books that can be accused – rightly or wrongly – of trying to capitalize on sensational tragedies by being the first to market with an explanation of what happened.”

Let’s set aside the point that BENOIT most assuredly does not presume to have “an explanation of what happened.” (My own forthcoming book CHRIS AND NANCY: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death, which is still in the research stage, will indeed take baby steps toward such an assertion.) I’d like to focus on the qualifier “rightly or wrongly.” I think that’s a weasel phrase, characteristic of a disingenuous argument whose English translation is roughly the following: “I personally am OK with good reporting and good writing on a story millions of people are interested in. But I’m not so sure the rest of the world is ready to handle this.”

Well, blow me down, Gertrude. This is nanny criticism, and it’s time to so label it. Smart wrestling fans, like smart readers, shouldn’t need to clear their throats on an ascent to moral high ground.

(I should note here that the producer of SLAM! Wrestling, BENOIT co-author Oliver, recused himself from editing Jenkinson to avoid the appearance of mutual back-scratching – or what the old Spy magazine used to call “logrolling in our times.”)

ECW Press went to pains before publication to emphasize on its blog how sober and responsible the book was going to be, and designed a sedate, text-dominated cover. (At first I lobbied for something a little more direct; now I like the cover, not so much because it pulls punches but because it looks great and it gives our project crossover cachet.)

Which is all OK to a point. That point, I submit, is where no one will call out this phenomenon for what it is: garden-variety denial. Or its walk-loudly-and-carry-a-tiny-stick backlashers for what they are: pencil-neck geeks.

When Congress stops taking a long-overdue look at the wrestling industry as a result of the Benoit fallout … when the feds wrap up their prosecution of Phil Astin, the prescription-happy doctor for Benoit and many other wrestlers … when all the tangential, multimillion-dollar litigation has run its course … when the name “Christopher Michael Benoit” has exhausted all currency or historical import … well, that’s when I’ll begin apologizing for BENOIT and for CHRIS AND NANCY.

Until then, I’d like to ask those of you out there with different viewpoints a few questions.

·                    WWE promulgated the most tasteless angles imaginable to exploit the death of Benoit’s good friend Eddie Guerrero. Did Chris respond by either quitting or signing his paychecks over to charity?

·                    Raw aired a tribute show on Benoit at a moment when, we now know, those in charge already realized that the family tragedy was in fact a murder-suicide. Did viewers subsequently punish WWE or the USA cable network by switching their allegiance to Gossip Girl?

·                    Eventually WWE will resume marketing Benoit DVD’s, for time heals and there’s money to be made off them. Will the weasels organize a boycott? Or will they say that, “rightly or wrongly,” some people think it’s a bad idea (and of course be sure to acquire their own copies)?

Upon hearing that he had been elected to the Wrestling Observer Newsletter Hall of Fame, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson told Dave Meltzer, “I believe all the wrestlers and people who are in and close to the business all know how much I love the business, and realize that there was [sic] no more challenges or possibilities to grow. I should preface, the intelligent people understand that. The goofs, not so much.”

My sentiments exactly. With or without everyone else’s permission, I think I’ll just continue to commit journalism.

Irv Muchnick

Former wrestler Larry Pfohl (”Lex Luger”) is recovering at Stanford University Medical Center in California from what was either a heart attack or a stroke. He was in the Bay Area to appear at a wrestling show and fan convention in San Francisco.

Pfohl, 49, was a headliner in the 1980s for both World Championship Wrestling and the then-World Wrestling Federation. He has been destitute and on the verge of homelessness for several years. He has been candid about his drug-abusing past. He also has repeatedly and publicly expressed remorse over the role his lifestyle played in the death of Elizabeth (”The Lovely Elizabeth”) Hulette — ex-wife of Randy (”Macho Man Savage”) Poffo — in the Marietta, Georgia, home she and Pfohl were sharing. When Hulette, 42, collapsed and died on May 1, 2003, the two were mixing painkillers, anti-anxiety drugs, steroids, and alcohol.

[cross-posted to the CHRIS AND NANCY Blog, http://benoitbook.blogspot.com]

An extraordinary article in the Canadian magazine Macleans, “The Concussion Time Bomb,” discusses in depth the possibility, recently raised by Chris Benoit’s father Michael and former wrestler Chris Nowinski’s Sports Legacy Institute, that mental impairment caused by brain trauma might explain Chris Benoit’s homicidal and suicidal rampage in June. The story can be viewed at http://www.macleans.ca/article.jsp?content=20071022_110256_110256&source=srch&page=1.

What is most extraordinary about the Macleans piece is not the concussion research itself (which is formidable and, at a minimum, interesting), but writer Steve Maich’s ability to do something that few have accomplished: he made World Wrestling Entertainment lawyer Jerry McDevitt, ordinarily the smoothest of spin doctors, lose it.

McDevitt, a partner in the Pittsburgh law firm Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Preston Gates Ellis, tells Macleans that until the Nowinski group reveals more about the science behind the postmortem examination of Benoit’s brain, “we’re not going to dignify the crap they’re peddling.” This is a bit of a departure — one with tones of exasperation — from the statement WWE issued after ABC’s Nightline broke the story of Michael Benoit’s close consideration of the multiple-concussion-syndrome explanation for his son’s behavior.

McDevitt goes on to say in Macleans that “[t]he entire notion that the WWE could be sued because Chris Benoit garrotted his wife and killed his son is absurd in the extreme, legally and factually, whether he had concussions or whether he didn’t. People get concussions every day in sports, and nobody goes out and kills their wife and child. It’s no excuse for murder. Give me a break. Everybody knows it’s not a side effect of concussions that you commit murder, for Christ’s sake.”

The word from inside Titan Tower in Stamford, Connecticut, since the day after the Benoit murder-suicide, is that WWE has been groping for PR angles that would make Chris Benoit come off as more sympathetic. (The sloppily exploited revelation that his son Daniel had Fragile X Syndrome was one early example.) Why? The company, which has removed Benoit from DVD’s and other merchandise lines because of image concerns, would like to resume exploiting his impressive archive of classic wrestling matches.

But the latest McDevitt remarks indicate that WWE is now less concerned about that and more concerned about defending a possible lawsuit by Michael Benoit.

[cross-posted to the CHRIS AND NANCY Blog, http://benoitbook.blogspot.com]

Irvin Muchnick, one of the authors of BENOIT: Wrestling with the Horror That Destroyed a Family and Crippled a Sport, discusses the Chris Benoit double-murder-suicide, and the prospect of Congressional investigations of the pro wrestling industry’s pandemic of drugs and death, in an interview this morning on WOC Talkradio 1420 AM in Davenport, Iowa.

BENOIT – co-authored with Steven Johnson, Heath McCoy, and Greg Oliver, and published by ECW Press — is high on the list of “hot new releases” of all sports books at Amazon.com. It is also climbing the overall bestseller list at Amazon.ca.

The audio of Muchnick’s interview with WOC morning show host Jim Albracht can be accessed at http://www.woc1420.com/cc-common/podcast.html.

BENOIT: Wrestling With the Horror That Destroyed a Family and Crippled a Sport, by Steven Johnson, Heath McCoy, Irvin Muchnick, and Greg Oliver, continues to show strong pre-sales at a level unseen for independently published books about pro wrestling. A second shipment has gone out to the U.S. distributor this week, following last week’s initial shipment. These are in addition to the more than 5,000 advance orders placed in Canada in response to co-author Oliver’s two-part interview last week on the Canadian edition of Entertainment Tonight. The book, published by Toronto-based ECW Press, will be in stores very soon.