My friend Jonathan Balofsky wanted to comment on something re: the internet and WWE, and it ties into a longer post I’ve been wanting to write, so take it away, Jon:
Recently, New York Post sportswriter Phil Mushnick once again took aim at the WWE and Vince McMahon over the large number of wrestlers to have died before the age of 45, in an attack on the organization on the eve of RAW 1000. Mushnick has argued in various articles that even though some performers died after leaving WWE, WWE was a large contributor to their deaths (calling the company a death mill), citing among others, Brian Pillman.
Certainly some of the names on the list are valid criticisms. Test and Lance Cade both died directly as a result of drug use that began and was probably unofficially condoned by the WWE. Owen Hart’s death is obviously their fault. Chris Benoit’s concussions are now widely considered to have contributed to the potential dementia which may have contributed to his murder/suicide and the work environment probably didn’t help his depression, but the WWE has taken steps to try and help its performers avoid getting concussions and to make sure they get the emotional help they need. Eddie Guerrerro’s death similarly led the WWE to take steps to make sure its workers stay clean and don’t abuse steroids, supplements and painkillers.
But the WWE can’t be given full or even partial blame for most of the names on the list. Bam Bam Bigelow hadn’t wrestled in the WWF for twelve years when he died and most of his legendary (and injury-causing) hardcore matches weren’t fought there.Johnny Grunge worked all of two months for the WWE; Bertha Faye/Rhonda Sing was there for only one year, Terry Gordy for only a few months, Rad Radford/Louis Spicolli six months, Mike Awesome one year. Giant Gonzales died 17 years after working for the company – of complications from his diabetes. John Tenta died of bladder cancer, which similarly is hardly the WWE’s fault. Crash Holly committed suicide. Chris Candido died from a blood clot due to complications from surgery. The WWE tried to get both Yokozuna and Umaga to go to rehab for their illnesses/addictions and only released them after those men refused, and subsequently they died of them.
Mr. Perfect, Rick Rude, the British Bulldog, Brian Pillman and Crush all did steroids (and painkillers and other drugs) while in the WWE and certainly an argument can be made that the WWE is partially responsible for all of their deaths, but all wrestled extensively elsewhere (and Pillman was an undersized football player with a heart condition to boot); all used drugs elsewhere as well, and in each case they began using drugs before the WWE hired them. (Bulldog in particular got addicted to painkillers after a stupid accident in WCW towards the end of his career.)
This took me ten minutes on Google to research with some assistance from the commenters at wrestlinginc. Maybe it’s time for journalists to do more serious research before they make disrespectful accusations.
Saying that a sportswriter is a hack is kind of a truism: most sportswriters are hacks, after all, and the list1 is in many ways stupid and frivolous, as demonstrated above. However, the list is a bit self-serving.
I don’t buy the “partially responsible” argument with respect to steroid deaths like Curt Hennig or Davey Boy Smith, though, by saying “well, they wrestled other places too!”2. Here is the simple truth: Vince McMahon is a bodybuilder. He always has been, and he wants his wrestlers to be muscular guys, which is why for decades he turned a blind eye to drug use by practically everybody’s admission (and, depending on who you believe, did far more than turn a blind eye). Before the WWF’s rise to prominence, professional wrestlers were not nearly so muscular, ripped and toned – and then they were everywhere because Vince set the national standard and the matching set of expectations as to what wrestlers were supposed to look like. (Eddie Guerrero went from being a slim, muscular man in WCW to a ripped, much bigger man in the WWF.) There is just no way that Vince (and by extension the WWE) does not bear some ethical and moral responsibility for that. Even if they have gone a long way to try and make amends for it by putting together a more coherent testing regime – well, there’s a reason you make amends in the first place.
But the real reason Vince bears responsibility for all those deaths is simple: Vince McMahon has always, always been controlling of the wrestlers he employs, and never missed a chance to exploit them. This recent interview says it more simply than I ever could:
MCMAHON: Our talent is taught not to be prima donnas, to be on time and know their lines. And quite frankly, people in Hollywood, once they see what we do, they are amazed. Our talent doesn’t demand the biggest trailer or a certain amount of grape juice or whatever the hell it is. Our talent is extremely flexible and knows how to act, so it’s a logical extension for them.
Vince McMahon: always willing to explain why it’s a good thing when your employees – whose effort and, yes, pain you have spent a lifetime profiting from – know not to get uppity.
But seriously, the WWE’s attitude towards its employees has gotten better only insofar as Vince is willing to avoid having them die young. Which is not to say he is an inhuman monster who revels in his wrestlers’ suffering, because that would be stupid; I am quite sure that Vince genuinely wishes his employees to be as happy and healthy as possible. But the key word here is “possible,” and the WWE’s well-wishing doesn’t extend to actually employing the wrestlers directly (since that would increase the company’s liability) or directly providing them with health insurance (too expensive). It’s quite true that most wrestlers will say quite willingly that Vince always treated them well and the WWE was a great place to work, and I would imagine most of them are being honest about that – but then again, how would we know? Because every wrestler who doesn’t want to burn bridges with the largest employer in wrestling isn’t going to trash-talk them.3 The WWE hires wrestlers long-term, gives older and semi-retired wrestlers jobs as trainers, road agents, producers – and there are of course the “legends contracts” where retired wrestlers are effectively paid to be retired wrestlers. They all know what happened to the wrestlers who did burn bridges; every few years there’s another cautionary tale, and most of them don’t end up on their feet like Jesse Ventura did.
People who know me know that I generally tend to side with labour when it comes to labour/management disputes, and nowhere else is this more the case than in pro sports, where the labour is the entire reason the product exists even moreso than anywhere else. Pro wrestling isn’t quite as pure in this regard because of its scripted nature, but even so: it is quite obviously the case that the wrestlers drive the product. Regardless of how much credit you want to give Vince for the success of the WWE4 the fact remains that nobody is gonna pay money just to watch the McMahon family soap opera without there being wrestling to drive the product.
Vince’s attitude, though, isn’t unique to him (unfortunately). It’s another example of what Dave Lartigue recently discussed in his excellent post yesterday: management wins when the argument that labour has no inherent worth is conceded. Of course Vince is going to celebrate that his talent isn’t “prima donnas” who don’t want to be treated specially like other actors: anything that diminishes the value of labour and accepts, as a given, that workers aren’t going to assert their equality of value to management is going to be celebrated in management culture. And that’s a problem, because the Vince-as-god belief system has become inherent to wrestling (with people mostly forgetting the 1993-1995 period when the company was at least within the danger zone of going under), and so long as the management/labour relationship is that unbalanced, there’s always going to be problems no matter how beneficient a dictator the manager may be.
At least nowadays the problems mostly aren’t people dying, and that’s certainly a good thing. But it’s setting an awfully low bar to pass, isn’t it?
- Which appears to be a compilation of wrestler deaths that Mushnick has complained about over the years, and which I won’t bother reproducing or linking – go find a dirtsheet site if you like. [↩]
- Which is one Vince McMahon has made a few times in an attempt to mitigate PR damage. [↩]
- At least, not anywhere it will get reported back. [↩]
- And he deserves credit – despite the failure of the World Bodybuilding Federation. And ICOPRO. And the XFL. And his various attempts to build separate wrestling brands. I suspect we’ll add Tout to this list in a few years. [↩]
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“Pro wrestling isn’t quite as pure in this regard because of its scripted nature, but even so: it is quite obviously the case that the wrestlers drive the product. (…) nobody is gonna pay money just to watch the McMahon family soap opera without there being wrestling to drive the product.” (ellipsis added)
I freely admit to being very noob-ish when it comes to pro wrestling, but I always considered them the “boy bands” of the talent pool. Sure, they aren’t NOT talented, but the value is added by the markteting folks who have made a machine to promote the activity. Essentially, there are enough prettyboy or dumb-buff fame-whores out there in the world that finding ones who can stay in character while they kinda sing or kinda wrestle is not the bottleneck. No scarcity.
A counter-example: I follow jui-jitsu and there is a sport that is held back by the non-athlete part of things. The refereeing and running of tournaments is so irregular that it can’t even START to get considered as an Olympic sport. And the athletes seem quite talented to me!
Sure, they aren’t NOT talented, but the value is added by the markteting folks who have made a machine to promote the activity.
Some value is added by that machine (and MOST of those folks are labor, rather than management too), but you still need good wrestlers to make that work. It’s why Steve Austin as Champ made Vince a billionaire and Diesel almost bankrupted him*.
* Yes, yes, it’s a lot more complicated than just “Austin good; Nash bad”, but in general the talent pool was a lot stronger in 1999 than 1995.
So Vince McMahon isn’t a wonderful human being? Not to suggest that this isn’t a good article, but that’s not exactly “Man Bites Dog” territory. 🙂
This is, however, a very good article about the specific ways he’s not a good human being, and the costs his employees pay for it.
Hennig was a cocaine death
as for bodybuilders and the WWF/E, Superstar Billy Graham was a WWWF champ abd bodybuilder when Vince’s father was in charge, Hulk Hogan’s look got him into wrestling and Hulk-a-mania was actually born in the AWA.
I’d say that if there’s any incentive for McMahon to give his wrestlers health care (not better health care, ANY health care), it would be the rise of organizations like Ring of Honor, Chikara and TNA. I’m not saying any of those wrestling companies offer health care, but if they do, McMahon should at least match it-and if they don’t, he should start so he can hang that as an advantage. I understand it would raise costs, but it would also make it easier to bring in new talent by pointing out they wouldn’t pay out of pocket if a move goes wrong.
TNA definitely does not provide health insurance. WWE generally does pay for in-ring injury related issues, afaik, but they don’t have provide actual health insurance. TNA has been accused more than once of not even doing that.
ROH and Chikara are both extremely small and have significantly better grounds to call their talent “independent contractors” than the WWE did, and I would be shocked if they offer any health benefits whatsoever.
@highlyverbal:
This is a valid point but somewhat exaggerated. Pro wrestlers in general are not scarce, but pro wrestlers talented enough to sell out arenas and move merchandise are harder to cultivate. Finding the next Hulk Hogan isn’t as easy as recruiting a bunch of prettyboys or muscle-men; the industry has tried to do just that on numerous occasions, and only a handful have approached Hogan’s level of success. (And they did so by being rather unlike Hogan, but that’s neither here nor there.) Having a major promotion like WWE backing you up helps a lot, but it’s not always a foolproof model for superstardom; the wrestler is often as important as the management.
One of WWE’s problems over the past decade is the softness of business now that almost all of their top stars from late ’90s/early 2000s have retired. The company has done a poor job of late recruiting new talent and building them up as the next top stars; most of the success stories in WWE over the last eight years have been fortunate accidents rather than signs of a keen eye for talent.
That having been said, WWE’s business is doing well, if only from the inertia of their IPO and the collapse of all meaningful competitors. And I think it’s interesting that WWE almost seems to prefer the current not-so-hot product to the wild successes of the last boom period. The McMahons seem to encourage a certain homogeny among the wrestlers, where they’re all encouraged to have similar looks and styles and none of them get too many victories over each other. If I didn’t know better, I would think they actively avoid creating a “prima donna” like Hulk Hogan or Steve Austin, the better to emphasize that the WWE brand, and not any one performer, is the real selling point of the product. This may hurt them in terms of attendance and sales, but it helps management keep the labor force in its place.
Tangent-Given the amount of “shoot” interviews available online, I’d say that there aren’t quite as many “shook” current/former WWE wrestlers as you think. Scott Steiner has spent the last two months on Twitter in a flat out race to the bottom re: employability in any mainstream company, yet his viability as a talent will always open doors…
“At least nowadays the problems mostly aren’t people dying, and that’s certainly a good thing. But it’s setting an awfully low bar to pass, isn’t it?”
Agreed. At the end of the day, you’ve got guys who are putting on a stage show, but one that requires multiple, unavoidably concussive falls, every single night for over 300 days out of the year (not sure what the actual schedule is at this point – likely more days).
What I see here is Vince playing on both sides of the field. On the one hand, you’ve got a guy desperately (sometimes laughably so…alright, MANY times laughably so) trying to separate himself from the ever-present stigma of pro wrestling being territory-driven, dingy redneck fare. I don’t think anyone could objectively state that he hasn’t done that.
On the other hand, he’s conveniently subscribing to philosophies borne of that era. In the old days, when promotions relied on building/showcasing regional talent, the thinking upon receiving an injury wasn’t “Alright, where do I turn in my workman’s comp claim,” it was “Holy sh*t, I’ve got to get back in the damn ring or I’ll get fired/phased out.” This led to wrestlers cutting off casts, wrestling with muscle tears, etc. It wasn’t so much an indication of callousness on the part of management as it was the reality of the time. If you wanted to ply your craft, and a promoter thought you’d be an asset, you were hired. If you were injured or otherwise sidelined, the promoter had to rush to find someone to jump into your spot. The smaller, regional territories couldn’t afford to NOT be that way.
However, Vince’s WWE ain’t that. He has a diverse roster, a fully-operational and generally successful marketing machine, international distribution, obscene merch revenue, etc. I’d say he could pay for a surgery/basic health plan without seeing his bottom line dip much, if at all.
Considering these guys absolutely destroy their bodies doing what they do, with a fraction of the benefits that SAG or Actors’ Equity members get, I’d say they deserve a bit more of a break in that regard.
“Essentially, there are enough prettyboy or dumb-buff fame-whores out there in the world that finding ones who can stay in character while they kinda sing or kinda wrestle is not the bottleneck. No scarcity.”
Well, sure. You see this in most forms of entertainment. But in pro wrestling, you live and die on your ability to make the audience give a sh*t about what you’re doing.
Now there’s definitely some truth to the whole “anyone who fits the body type can do this” thing. Hell, that’s originally how The Rock started. But if you don’t have “it,” you’re marginalized at best and out of a job at worst.
“If I didn’t know better, I would think they actively avoid creating a “prima donna” like Hulk Hogan or Steve Austin, the better to emphasize that the WWE brand, and not any one performer, is the real selling point of the product. This may hurt them in terms of attendance and sales, but it helps management keep the labor force in its place.”
They’ve homogenized it to one-camera sitcom levels, IMO. Occasionally you’ll see a breakout character here or there, but it doesn’t feel like they’re RELYING on finding a breakout character. They’re more focused on the overall show.
Then again, with all the social media shoehorning, the “top star” can switch as often as Twitter trends shift.