WRESTLING BABYLON News

Author Irvin Muchnick will discuss Wednesday’s Congressional hearing on steroids in sports — and especially the significance of World Wrestling Entertainment chair’s Vince McMahon’s failure to show up for the hearing — in an interview with Dan Kennedy on WOC Radio in Davenport, Iowa, Friday, February 29, at around 9:00 a.m. Central time.

WOC, 1420 AM, also streams live at http://www.woc1420.com.

Muchnick is author of Wrestling Babylon, co-author of Benoit: Wrestling With the Horror That Destroyed a Family and Crippled a Sport, and at work on the forthcoming Chris and Nancy: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death. Website: http://wrestlingbabylon.com. Blog: http://muchnick.net/babylon.

I commend the complete coverage of the steroids-in-sports hearing of the House Energy, Commerce and Consumer Protection Subcommitee at both Jason Powell’s PROWRESTLING.net (http://prowrestling.net) and Wade Keller’s Pro Wrestling Torch (http://pwtorch.com).

One significant quote missed by me yesterday was from Congressman John Dingell, the Michigan Democrat who is chair of the entire House Committee on Energy and Commerce (of which Congressman Bobby Rush’s subcommittee is just one part). Dingell said:

“Sometimes the outcome is incomprehensively tragic, such as the tragic event last summer when World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) wrestler Chris Benoit killed his wife and 7 year old son, and then committed suicide. Shortly thereafter, WWE suspended 10 WWE performers tied to an alleged steroid ring. This has to stop.”

This tells me two things. The reference to Benoit echoes Rush’s, which shows that the committee leadership’s education level and persistence on a now eight-month-old media story is higher than we could have assumed.

Also, it looks like Rush has key support for reporting out of House Energy, to the full House floor, legislation requiring sports (and sports entertainment?) to elevate their drug-testing protocols to Olympic standards of independence and transparency.

Irv Muchnick

Irvin Muchnick’s analysis of today’s hearing of the House Commerce, Energy and Consumer Protection Subcommittee is the lead story at Canada’s SLAM! Wrestling site. The headline is “McMahon botches his spot, and Congress is back.” The link is http://slam.canoe.ca/Slam/Wrestling/GuestColumn/2008/02/27/4880571.html. The text will be posted here after it cycles off SLAM!’s main page.

[originally published in Beyond Chron under the headline, “Congress Clemens Probers Wrestle Irony — Irony Wins by KO,” http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/Congress_Clemens_Probers_Wrestle_Irony_Irony_Wins_by_KO_5374.html]

If Jake “The Snake” Roberts, Ron “Doom” Simmons, and Scott “Razor Ramon” Hall managed to follow the coverage of Wednesday’s sensational House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing – in which baseball’s Roger Clemens denied that he ever used anabolic steroids or human growth hormone – those three worthies would have had to do so from the rec room of an Atlanta-area rehab facility where they are attempting to kick drug addictions. (Check out Jake the Snake’s message on his MySpace page.)

The rehab tabs of Roberts, Simmons, and Hall are being footed by World Wrestling Entertainment. This is part of the fallout of WWE’s finding itself in the crosshairs of two Congressional committees following the June 2007 double-murder-suicide of star wrestler Chris Benoit, his wife Nancy, and their son Daniel.

Over the last decade “an inordinate number of wrestlers have passed away,” said a September letter to all former talent from WWE honcho Vince McMahon, a 62-year-old slab of beefcake himself, who is not otherwise known for understatement. (In late December I started counting pro wrestler deaths under age 50 in 2007, and stopped at 21. Dave Meltzer, publisher of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, toted up 62 young deaths of wrestlers on the rosters of “major league” organizations in the ’97-’07 period.)

As part of a WWE campaign to keep Congress from lowering the investigative boom, McMahon offered to pay for any former company wrestler’s substance-abuse program. Out of the goodness of his heart, of course.

A fourth wrestler has also taken McMahon up on it: Sean Waltman. This week, from rehab, Waltman denied a report in a radio interview by another wrestler, Juventud Guerrera, that Waltman recently attempted suicide. Au contraire, the erstwhile “1-2-3 Kid” and “X-Pac”said; he just had a bad reaction from mixing alcohol with antidepressants. “I wasn’t doing any hard drug or anything like that,” Waltman told James Caldwell of Pro Wrestling Torch.

Last year your correspondent got clotheslined for bad taste, or worse, in much of the fan blogosphere for reporting a rumor that one of WWE’s current top stars, Randy Orton, had attempted suicide in 2006. The incident is relevant because it sheds light on the company’s Wellness Policy – “sports entertainment”-speak for drug testing.

The policy itself couldn’t be said to be all that healthy after Chris Benoit was found to have strangled his wife with a cord, killed their seven-year-old son with a version of his “Crippler Crossface” hold, and suspended himself by the neck from a home-gym pulley. Two months earlier Benoit had passed his Wellness Policy test at a time when, we now know, a doctor to the stars by the name of Phil Astin, now under federal indictment, was prescribing him a ten-month supply of steroids every three to four weeks.

My Orton report was as accurate as, or more so than, Guerrera’s on Waltman, for I had the both the name of the suburban St. Louis hospital where Orton had been rushed and the information that WWE had been concerned enough about the episode at the time to conduct its own investigation. That WWE apparently concluded that Orton only accidentally almost killed himself should be taken with a few thimblefuls of sodium chloride, inasmuch as Orton (along with Benoit, numerous other WWE performers, and some baseball and football names) would turn up in records of orders of banned substances from the Internet gray-market dealer Signature Pharmacy. But Orton, curiously, was not disciplined, while fellow wrestlers in the dragnet of the district attorney in Albany, New York, got thrown under the proverbial autobus.

The lesson for the Roger Clemens-Brian McNamee showdown is a tenet of postmodernism; and that tenet, in turn, is one of the engines of late-empire America. You can’t legislate irony. In polite company, it will always be more respectable to discuss whether Clemens set fake records in a real sport than to ponder a pandemic of avoidable real deaths in a fake sport.

I’m glad Roberts, Simmons, Hall, and Waltman are trying to clean themselves up with the help of WWE (a publicly traded company, which just reported profits of $21.5 million, on gross revenues of $132.6 million, for the fourth quarter of last year). However, I haven’t given up on the possibility that Congressman Henry Waxman and his committee will return their focus to the unregulated, out-of-control industry that showed the way for Roger Clemens and the Mitchell Report generation. Call it the audacity of hope.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s flagship investigative documentary program, “the fifth estate,” last night premiered “A Fight to the Death,” reported and narrated by host Bob McKeown. The piece examines and jumps off from last year’s double-murder-suicide of star pro wrestler Chris Benoit.

Irvin Muchnick is interviewed by McKeown about the transformation of the wrestling industry and its recent pandemic of drugs and death. Muchnick is author of Wrestling Babylon: Piledriving Tales of Drugs, Sex, Death, and Scandal. He also is a co-author of Benoit: Wrestling with the Tragedy That Destroyed a Family and Crippled a Sport and is working on the forthcoming Chris and Nancy: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death (all ECW Press).

Video of the documentary (minus high definition, music, and graphics) can be streamed at http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/. Muchnick appears on camera beginning at about the 15:50 mark.