Fuck this business.
June 26th, 2007 | by Scott Jennings |Chris Benoit murdered his wife one day, his son the next day, and then hung himself a day after that. He was my favorite wrestler.
I was a huge wrestling fan when I was a kid, and then again in college and for a few years after. When my discernment was inevitably challenged, I defended professional wrestling as an artform at its purest: a modern morality play, an athletic exhibition, an ageless physical drama. Certainly there were no shortage of counterexamples to that romanticized ideal, but Chris Benoit was a technician and an athlete and an artist, and he was my favorite.
I ignored the filthiness of the wrestling business, and I ignored my complicity in buying tickets and pay-per-views and sometimes t-shirts. It is a sport without an off-season to heal, a sport where the athletes are independent contractors with no health insurance or union or collective bargaining, a sport where you have to perform and risk your injured body or risk your spot on the card. Wrestlers are dependent on steroids to provide the look that people expect and can’t be obtained naturally, especially when you’re always on the road. Wrestlers are dependent on painkillers to get them through their matches and help them work hurt. And I can go on about the misogyny and the stupidity and the exploitation of young athletes and their dream and the writing and the race for the lowest common denominator, but the steroids and the painkillers were what they found in Chris Benoit’s house, so let’s save the rest for another time.
It’s a filthy business, a destructive and dangerous carnival, and I’m ashamed that I’m confronting it for myself only after a double-homicide-suicide. We shined the light on baseball and football and said we would not support steroid abuse, and the threat of government action and lifting antitrust exemptions has resulted in a demonstrably cleaner sport where the subject is taken seriously and players can stay drug-free and be more confident that their opponent is, too. It’s a collective action problem; no player would want to unilaterally lose their advantage from steroids, so an agreement must be made and sanctions must be enforced and the light must always be on. In the unscripted sports, these agreements are negotiated through unions, and you’re not going to find a whole lot of reasonable people who think the major players’ associations aren’t up to this challenge, especially now that we’re all clear we’re not treating this with a wink and a nudge.
Professional wrestlers would benefit from unionization; individually, they can’t stop taking steroids or break their painkiller habit or negotiate regular time to heal or health coverage or anything else that you would assume a multi-million dollar empire would offer to its talent. But unionization will never happen, because at the end of the day, at least 95% of the WWE roster is completely expendable and replaceable. There are thousands and thousands of athletes who dream to perform in a wrestling ring, knowing the risks, and willing to practically guarantee being dead or crippled by 50. State athletic commissions will probably come down much harder on wrestling, maybe Congress will hold hearings, maybe a McMahon or two could face indictment again. But at the end of the day, there are thousands of wrestlers and the dream and the willingness to give their lives and their souls and their families to the romanticized ideal of this artform. (Kurt Angle will be next.)
I had stopped watching wrestling a couple years ago because the storylines stopped being compelling and I lost interest by and large. My glory days of wrestling were still fond memories, and the little boy that I mostly am still daydreamed about flying high and working the crowd and getting over as a monster heel. But today, I am no longer a wrestling fan — I won’t support it in any way or watch it at all on any level. Not until there’s unionization, not until there’s a way to protect the wrestlers, not until the business cleans up. I’m not holding my breath.
