WRESTLING BABYLON News

I thank Rich Tate of GeorgiaWrestlingHistory.com for the sketchy info on these additional pro wrestler deaths under age 50 this year:

MARCH 18
Juan Manuel Zuniga (“Angel Azteca”), 43. Campeche, Mexico. “Heart attack.”

MARCH 26
Steven “The Mighty Axis” Ranton, 22. Scranton, Pennsylvania. Suicide.

APRIL 11
Darren “Dynamite D” McMillan, 37. California. Cancer.

MAY 5
Omar Antonio Perez Barreto (“Mephisto LePhanto”), 31. Caguas, Puerto Rico, in the ring. “Heart attack.”

AUGUST 7
Scott Dumas, 44.

SEPTEMBER 9
Monty Black, 45. Winnepeg, Manitoba.

SEPTEMBER 14
John Radocaj, 43. Interlake, Manitoba. Murdered by blunt force trauma.

OCTOBER 2
Sean “Shocker” Evans, 36. Pittsburgh, Pennylvania. Lung cancer.

OCTOBER 9
Isak Rain, 22. Norway. Auto accident.

DECEMBER 17
Boyd Rowell (”The Avenger,” “The Nasty Critter”), 42.

I’m getting immediate feedback with additions to my just-posted list of 11 names. I’ll be following up shortly.

Irv Muchnick

I’ll go out on a limb here and predict that no more pro wrestlers under age 50 will die in the last three days of 2007. If so, the number will hold at 11. The appendix of my book Wrestling Babylon listed 89 other performers from 1985 through 2006 who didn’t make it to their 50^th birthdays. That study was far from complete, but it occurs to me that our little corner of wrestling necrology has now counted an even 100.

Here’s the roll call for this year:

JANUARY 19

Scott “Bam Bam” Bigelow, 45. Hudson, Florida. Cocaine, painkillers, etc.

 FEBRUARY 17

Michael “Mike Awesome” Alfonso, 42. Tampa, Florida. Suicide by hanging.

JUNE 15

Sherri Russell (“Sherri Martel”), 49. Birmingham, Alabama. Painkillers.

JUNE 24

Shayne “Biff Wellington” Bower, 44. Lloydminster, Alberta. “Heart attack.”

Around JUNE 22

Nancy “Woman” Benoit, 43. Fayette County, Georgia. Strangled to death with a cord by her husband, Chris Benoit.

Around JUNE 24

Chris Benoit, 40. Fayette County, Georgia. Suicide by hanging.

JULY 4

Nathan “Moondog Nathan” Randolph, 37. Athens, Alabama. “Heart attack.”

Around JULY 12

James “Devil Bhukakan” Fawcett, 31. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Suicide by hanging.

JULY 18

George “John Kronus” Caiazzo, 38. Laconia, New Hampshire. “Heart failure.”

AUGUST 13

Brian “Crush” Adams, 40. Tampa, Florida. Painkillers, antidepressants, etc.

DECEMBER 23

Greg “Mr. Gillis” Gillies, 44. British Columbia. “Heart attack.”

[originally published at SLAM! Wrestling

under the headline 

“Looks like wrestling will dodge 

Congress’ steroid bullet,” 

http://slam.canoe.ca/Slam/Wrestling/GuestColumn/2007/12/24/4739273.html]

On July 6, Congressman Cliff Stearns, Republican of Florida, issued a press release and began a round of cable news appearances calling for an investigation of steroids in pro wrestling. This was 12 days after the bodies of Chris, Nancy and Daniel Benoit were discovered.

Four months later Congressman Bobby Rush, Democrat of Illinois (chair of the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection, of which Stearns was ranking minority member), told the Baltimore Sun, “Given recent developments — the impending Mitchell report and reports of widespread abuse in professional wrestling — I believe it’s time we get a formal update on what progress is being made to eradicate steroids from all sports and sports entertainment.”

In between, both the Rush Subcommittee and the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee (chaired by Henry Waxman of California) requested background information from WWE and, to a certain extent, from TNA and other promotions as well.

Quietly, Vince McMahon complied with the requests. He also sank new hundreds of thousands of dollars into lobbying operations coordinated by the company’s main outside law firm, Pittsburgh-based Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Preston Gates Ellis. How many hundreds of thousands we won’t know until public filings next year.

Loudly, in TV skits, Vince mocked the committees. Backstage his daughter Stephanie and son-in-law Paul “Triple H” Levesque bucked up the nervous talent by telling them that Vince was making defiant plans to show up at the Congressional hearing in a clown wig.

On December 13, baseball’s Mitchell report was released. But by then the legit sports story was no longer pulling the circus subplot in its shadow. Rather, it was downright overwhelming it. Wrestling had dodged another bullet — at least that’s how most insiders would sum up the deferring of the industry’s day of reckoning and reform for another day/month/year/decade, at a point when several/dozens/scores/hundreds more corpses will have piled up from drug overdoses, attacks of artificially enlarged hearts, exotic forms of cancer and homicidal-suicidal binges, all in the name of our uninterrupted junk entertainment.

Human physics, like wrestling politics, are an odd bird. The rise and fall of Congressional wrestling hearings combine elements of the discovery of the Gobbledygooker and the on-and-off last push for Ric Flair. It starts with Stearns, who two years earlier, as chairman of what is now the Rush Subcommittee, had introduced legislation that would have set a single steroid testing standard and uniform penalties for all sports. Stearns began his July press release and parallel soundbytes by noting, “Between 1985 and 2006, 89 wrestlers have died before the age of 50.”

His staff had pulled the stat from a column by FoxSports.com’s Mark Kriegel, headlined “Congress needs to get involved — now.” Kriegel, in turn, was quoting the appendix of my recently published book Wrestling Babylon. Stearns would proceed to cite that factoid, without attribution.

Though I consider my 1985-2006 death list conscientious, I’ve made no grandiose claims for its epidemiological rigor. My list is contextually superior to USA Today’s oft-quoted 65 deaths under age 45, 1987-94, and inferior to Dave Meltzer’s 62 deaths of “major league” wrestlers under age 50 in the last 10 years. I note Stearns’ non-citation without indulgence and for the sole purpose of illustrating what motivates “preliminary” Congressional investigations.

Soon Stearns was arranging a photo opportunity at Dory Funk’s training center, the Funking Conservatory, which is conveniently located in the Congressman’s district in Ocala, Florida. But even if Stearns really wanted to go to the mat and call hearings, he did not have that authority, which has rested with the Democratic majority that won control in the 2006 elections. As ranking minority member; Stearns needed the green light of Chairman Rush. By the end of the year, Stearns wasn’t even ranking minority member at Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection; he had given up that post for the same one on the Telecommunications and Internet Subcommittee.

Now that the immediate hearing prospect has played itself out, perhaps it’s not a bad thing that baseball and wrestling investigations aren’t conjoined. Their drug problems flow from opposite, and counterintuitive, sources. It’s the old existential conundrum fans love to bat around: The last generation’s baseball records have been fake, but wrestling’s avoidable and unacceptable mortality rate has been real. And you can’t legislate irony.

Another key difference is that baseball has a talent union, arguably the most effective labor organization in America, which in a span of four decades has driven its members’ average annual wages from something like $19,000 to more than $2,000,000. Steroids first reached untenable levels because it was in the owners’ interests to look the other way. Then, if they ever were interested in reining in the problem, they found that their employees were collectively strong enough to resist solutions.

Wrestling has no talent union, and for the good and simple reason that the owners not only build the playing fields, they make all the out-or-safe calls. Therefore, I see cleaning up wrestling as something more along the lines of the safety reforms imposed on the movie industry after actor Vic Morrow and two young children were killed in a 1982 accident on a action-film set.

But that doesn’t seem to be happening. I’m assuming that the Congressional committees don’t have a January swerve up their sleeve, or “Mr. Kennedy” isn’t on the verge of murdering Hornswoggle for cheating him out of his patrimony. In an Orwellian world where wellness policies are not well, the other shoe of life’s wrestling angle is not quite ready to drop, after all. At 100+ dead and counting, it’s still in the tease stage.

Greg Gillies, 44, a musclebound journeyman Canadian pro wrestler who was booked “Mr. Gillis,” has died of a heart attack at age 44. His is the 11th fatality of an under-50 wrestler this year. (We earlier listed Dave “Angel of Death” Sheldon, who died last month, but subsequently learned that Sheldon was 54.)

The answer to that question appears to be “yes.”

Last month, a day after baseball’s Barry Bonds was indicted, Congressman Bobby Rush told the Baltimore Sun that he expected the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection, which he chairs, to hold hearings in early 2008 on the drug-testing procedures of both baseball and pro wrestling. The exact quote was: ““Given recent developments — the impending Mitchell report [on Major League Baseball] and reports of widespread abuse in professional wrestling — I believe it’s time we get a formal update on what progress is being made to eradicate steroids from all sports and sports entertainment.”
But the reaction to the release of the Mitchell Report has made wrestling even less than an afterthought. Last week’s announcement of hearings on baseball by the Rush Subcommittee made no mention of wrestling. Neither the legislative director nor the press secretary for Rush responded to our query about wrestling.

Congressman Henry Waxman’s House Oversight and Government Reform Committee also will be holding hearings on baseball and had been making parallel preparations for possible wrestling hearings. A staffer had no comment on the latter.

In an upcoming post we’ll analyze what happened on the Congressional investigative front in the months since the June murder-suicide of Chris Benoit.

We earlier reported the November death in Texas, from undisclosed causes, of retired wrestler Dave “Angel of Death” Sheldon. Early obituaries listed Sheldon’s age as 43. However, an article about Sheldon’s life on the authoritative site SLAM! Wrestling now says that Sheldon was 54 years old. See http://slam.canoe.ca/Slam/Wrestling/2007/12/09/4715777.html.

Most lists of early wrestling fatalities, including ours, use a cutoff date of age 50. Sheldon should not be on such lists. The best information, therefore, is that there are still “only” ten early wrestler deaths in 2007.

BENOIT: Wrestling with the Horror That Destroyed a Family and Crippled a Sport, by Steven Johnson, Heath McCoy, Irvin Muchnick, and Greg Oliver, is reviewed in the December issue of the Canadian book publishing trade magazine Quill & Quire. Reviewer Shaun Smith concludes:

“Benoit paints a picture of a sport that has inverted itself. Where wrestling once scrupulously faked violence in public, while secretly working to ensure no one got injured, there now exists little pretense of reality in the public spectacle, as offstage, participants and organizers bend over backward to conceal the damage being done by steroid abuse.”

Because he has the trust of wrestlers and just lets them talk, Mike Mooneyham of the Charleston Post and Courier can be an indispensable primary source for their apparently straight-faced malarkey. Last week it was Batista, master of the torn triceps, decrying a “witch hunt” and making a comical and garbled defense of the WWE wellness policy. (See the November 25 posts on this blog.) This week it’s Ken Kennedy. See http://www.charleston.net/news/2007/dec/02/mr_kennedy_endures_pitfalls23762/.

Kennedy was all over the place in late June and early July, denouncing anyone — especially former wrestler Marc Mero — who dared take the position that Chris Benoit’s double-murder-suicide raised flags about the wellness policy. Kennedy said he personally had quit steroids long ago “because I knew that having a job with the WWE was way more important than the 10 pounds of extra muscle that the steroids gave me.”

Unfortunately for Kennedy and WWE, the Benoit toxicology report would show that, just two months after passing his wellness policy test, he had ten times the normal level of testosterones — which might have had something to do with the fact that Dr. Phil Astin was prescribing him a ten-month supply of steroids every three to four weeks.

And Kennedy himself would soon soon turn up on the Signature Pharmacy client list and lose his opportunity to be Vince McMahon’s storyline bastard. Instead, he got a 30-day suspension, and he and his erstwhile daddy got carbohydrates on their faces.

But Kennedy is undaunted. “How was I supposed to know my doctor’s a quack?” he says of his online steroid orders.