History Repeats Itself?: How Wrestling Regards Its Performers
By Bryan Alvarez
Of the many reasons that various pro-wrestling companies have gone out of business over the last 100 years, one that stands out, particularly over the last two decades, is an ability to learn from past mistakes.
"Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it." Most everyone living has heard that phrase at one time or another, which makes it even more astounding to see wrestling companies repeatedly learning nothing from past failures, and even in some cases learning nothing from past successes. One of the biggest problems with TNA right now, the "number two" national prime time wrestling company in America (largely because there is no number three), is that they are stuck in the 90s; many of the performers were stars in the 90s, the storylines are either recreations or based off things that happened in the 90s (or even the 80s!), and it often bears a striking resemblance to the mid-90s World Championship Wrestling — which went out of business in March of 2001 after losing over $60 million in a single year.
On Tuesday, August 17th, an article was published in the New York Times talking about head injuries, and how there is a possibility that Lou Gherig never even had the disease that was named after him; he may have died due to brain injuries suffered on the field during his long career. Gehrig suffered several reported concussions and most likely several that were never reported, and he was renowned for never taking time off. In fact, he finished games after suffering blows to the head. While the theory about Gherig is brand new, you’d almost literally have to have been living in a cave to not be aware of the studies being done on concussions over the last four or five years.
Even if you don’t follow sports, it’s impossible as a wrestling fan to be unaware of this given the the biggest wrestling story of this generation, Chris Benoit’s brutal double murder/homicide over the June 24, 2007 weekend in which he killed his wife and young child and then hung himself with the cables on the lat pulldown machine in his home gym. An autopsy found an astoundingly badly-damaged brain, chock full of the tau proteins signaling a severe case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy. The years of diving headbutts, chairshots, and working through concussions with no time off had left Benoit with the brain of an 85-year-old man. What role his brain damage played in his crime will never be known, but it almost without question exacerbated whatever psychological problems he had going in.
Chris Nowinski serves as president of the Sports Legacy Institute, dedicating much of his free time to examining the role repeated concussions play in brain functioning. Nowinski is also a former WWE star whose career ended after suffering multiple concussions. He has since written a book on the subject, Head Games, and has been interviewed on the subject by news and television outlets worldwide.
In plain English, it is no mystery, particularly in wrestling, that head injuries are bad news. Which is why it is very disconcerting to watch the vicious chairshot that Rob Terry takes in the accompanying video. What is most disturbing about it, other than the fact that it happened in the first place, is that it didn’t happen in the mid-90s during the Raw vs. Nitro war, or in the early-to-mid 00s before Chris Benoit went on his murderous rampage. It didn’t happen before the NFL started investigating the situation and it didn’t happen before Chris Nowinski wrote this book and talked to every major media outlet that would listen to him. No, it happened on April 5th, 2010.
It’s one thing to bury your head in the sand and not realize that Hulk Hogan in his late 50s isn’t going to be the kind of draw that he was in his mid-30s, or even mid-40s. It’s one thing to hire a bunch of former superstars who weren’t drawing at the end of WCW and try to push them as stars again ten years later when they’re ten years older. It’s even one thing to hire pretty much everybody responsible for the Death of WCW, from the writers to the production people to the wrestlers on top, and think something different will happen this time around. Those are all examples of not learning from history, but at least they are examples that involve things like money, ratings, and PPV buyrates.
To not learn or seemingly be aware of the dangers of concussions, and to allow a guy to go out there and take a full-force chairshot to the head, and to care so little that you don’t suspend either guy or even edit the chairshot off the television show (it was taped two days before the program aired) shows a lack of regard for the safety of the performers that borders on criminal. Wrestling often comes across like a Road Runner cartoon, where guys get beaten up and come back two hours later without a scratch on them, or even, as happened once in WCW, supposedly fall off the roof of Cobo Hall and still come out for a main event that same evening. But the wrestlers aren’t cartoon characters. They’re real people, they have families, they get hurt and all too often they die. And to see a wrestling company in 2010 allow something that is so obviously unsafe is reason enough for some people to just stop watching all together.
I’d like to conclude by adding that as appalled as I am about this chairshot, and about some of the things that still occur in wrestling today, I don’t want to vilify the business as a whole. TNA is rife with incompetence, but to lump everyone in the company together would be ridiculous. There are many good, hardworking people who perform there every day both in front of and behind the cameras, and I know that many of them were as appalled as most everyone else was about what happened. WWE is also far from perfect, and to say that nobody there is on performence-enhancing drugs or that there are no problems would be a lie. But they have made some very noticeable and positive changes since Benoit’s death that have made the business as a whole a better place to work in. Again, it’s far from perfect, but as a whole, being a major league professional wrestler in 2010 is significantly better in terms of safety than it was even ten years ago. Unfortunately, as the accompanying clip illustrates, there is a still a long way to go.
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