I have been writing about wrestling for nearly seven years. It all started with a column about how there were too many non-wrestling women in the WWF (kind of ironic how history is repeating itself, huh?). I followed that with a piece about how I felt that superstar tag teams were killing tag team wrestling (anyone say Cena & Michaels?). During that time, it has always bothered me how others who write about wrestling (notice that I am not calling them columnists or journalists?), with a few exceptions, ever tackle the tough stories.
In those last seven years, I have written about the Al Snow Doll being pulled from Wal-Mart shelves in the Atlanta area, the potential for death in a wrestling ring, Bill Goldberg receiving 48 stitches to close a gash in his arm and having the Globe newspaper refer to it as a wrestling tragedy, professional wrestling’s substance abuse problem, violence against women, Lionel Tate, The Parent’s Television Council and their war against professional wrestling, backyard wrestling, John Gonzalez and the wrestling related murder of a 3-year old and wrestling’s role in youth violence. Through all of this, I get tons of letters asking why I don’t talk more about story lines and who I think will win at Backlash. The reason for this is simple…because everyone else does.
This tirade is not to put myself over as a serious journalist or to demean any other writer because I respect anyone who puts in the work to represent the sport of professional wrestling with their words. I just have a problem with the lack of time that is spent addressing the stories that the mainstream press latches onto because all we ever hear in professional wrestling is that there is a lack of mainstream press. Understand this, mainstream press is not going to glorify professional wrestling or professional wrestlers, nor will they trumpet the fact that Wrestlemania is a few days away. Only music columns talk about Britney Spears or Bobby Brown’s new CD’s, but the rest of the mainstream press touches on their shortcomings, so it seems that professional wrestling should actually be honored that they get the same treatment as Bobby Brown. Remember, wrestling media will talk about the good in wrestling and the New York Post or Sports Illustrated will discuss the bad. It is the same for any entertainment medium.
I said all of that to say that this tirade comes to you courtesy of the SI (dot) com piece about steroids in professional wrestling. The SI story hit the Internet on March 19, 2006, and since that time, other than publishing the involved wrestlers’ takes on the story and their explanations for using and buying steroids, there has only been ONE editorial about the story and its ramifications to the sport, and that one piece was written tongue-in-cheek with a premise that we should not be surprised by this and that it is not news because we knew about this all along. My outrage stems from the fact that there have been no other takes on the story from any other writers and in the world of professional wrestling, with all that steroids have meant to the sport, this is a huge story.
In 1994, Vince McMahon stood trial for steroid distribution, and though acquitted, many of the biggest (figuratively and literally) wrestlers in the business were swallowed up in the web of the acquisitions. The dramatic changes to the physical appearances of guys like Hulk Hogan and the Ultimate Warrior made it clear that those who had been using were no longer using and the entire sport of professional wrestling got smaller with guys like Bret Hart & Shawn Michaels ascending to the top of the WWF. Today, there is another steroid scandal in professional wrestling and it bears a striking resemblance to the one in professional baseball.
Those of us wrestling fans that also follow Major League Baseball are aware of the steroid scandal in that sport. The Federal Government is investigating baseball in the hopes of finding a connection between steroids and many of the top players in the game, particularly Barry Bonds. Arguably the top player in baseball over the last 15 or so years, Bonds’ physical appearance and increased power numbers have suggested that he might be chemically enhanced and the Federal Government in hot on his trail, though they have not been able to gather any concrete evidence against Bonds. The only players that the government has been able to gather proof on is the some third-string catcher for some minor league club or some retired player who only had one or two good years anyway and those were the years that he was using steroids.
In professional wrestling, it would be as if Triple H was implicated in the SI story, but that was not the case. However, the names that were listed were not the minor leaguer or the retired journeyman. The names listed included probably the best all-around performer in the game, the two top heels in WWE, one of the top two or three best pure athletes in the business, and the longest reigning champion in the last seven years. The net of the steroid scandal was not able to grab Triple H, someone who, like Bonds, has seen his physical appearance dramatically change over the years, but the implication of Kurt Angle, Edge, Randy Orton & Rey Mysterio in the story is as bad for professional wrestling as it would be for baseball if Albert Pujols, Manny Ramirez, Ryan Howard and Derek Jeter failed steroid tests. They are not the biggest names in the game, but they represent the next tier of stars in baseball just like Angle, Mysterio, Edge and Orton do in wrestling.
There would be a national outrage among baseball fans if any of the names that I mentioned were implicated in a steroid scandal because it would mean that the fans’ suspicions about the sport were correct and true fans of Major League Baseball would have a difficult time accepting what they probably suspected to be true for many years. As the writer of the one piece that I read inferred in his article, we all know that it is there, so we have no real reason to be surprised. But we are surprised because as professional wrestling is seemingly getting bigger and bigger with champions like Batista & Bobby Lashley ruling two of the three WWE brands, these men were not included in the article either. We are surprised because looking at Edge, Randy Orton & Gregory Helms; we do not see the typical steroid bodies. We see lean, athletic men. Though each of these men have said that they were prescribed the drugs by a physician to help them to recover from injury, the fact remains that their names are being linked to an illegal steroid distribution ring and it will be very difficult to explain this away, no matter how genuine the explanations sound.
As wrestling fans and as people who accepted the responsibility of writing about the sport of professional wrestling, we cannot only comment on the outcomes of matches and the story line conclusions on PPV’s. We have to address the hard stories just like the mainstream press that we are so critical of does. As I said, when Nirvana released a new CD, it was usually covered by entertainment-based press, but when Kurt Cobain shot himself, it was covered by the rest of mainstream media because it is always big news when a public figure commits suicide. What we fail to realize is that in the reporting of the Cobain suicide, the newscasters and the newspaper reporters had to give some background on Cobain and the nature of his celebrity, both for themselves and for their audiences, who were probably not very familiar with Cobain or his work. The same goes for professional wrestling news.
The mainstream press is only going to cover the big stories, so it is the responsibility of those of us who cover wrestling regularly to cover all of the news, and that includes the big stories. Besides, it should be much easier for us to cover these types of stories because for our audiences, we do not have to give as much background. We can just report the news and give a more accurate assessment of the story because we know and understand the business better than some writer for Sports Illustrated who never watches wrestling (because if he did, he would not still be calling Helms “Hurricane” when he stopped using that name after a match in November of 2005 and the SI piece was from an investigation in February of 2007). Or we can continue to just write about the matches and the story lines and complain about the coverage that our sport gets outside of itself.
Send comments, complaints or questions to me @ ericej@netzero.net
Eric E. Jenkins is an author who has written a semi-biographical book covering the last 30 years in professional wrestling through the eyes of a fan entitled “Reflections of a Professional Wrestling Fan: My 30 Years ‘In’ the Business”. He is currently writing “Dead Too Soon”, a book chronicling the careers of and paying tribute to many of the wrestling stars who passed away very young.
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