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John Cena, World Wrestling Entertainment’s top star, suffered a torn pectoral (chest) muscle this week and is scheduled for surgery.

BENOIT: Wrestling With the Horror That Destroyed a Family and Crippled a Sport, by Steven Johnson, Heath McCoy, Irvin Muchnick, and Greg Oliver, continues to show strong pre-sales at a level unseen for independently published books about pro wrestling.

Irvin Muchnick, one of the authors of BENOIT: Wrestling with the Horror That Destroyed a Family and Crippled a Sport, discusses the Chris Benoit double-murder-suicide, and the prospect of Congressional investigations of the pro wrestling industry’s pandemic of drugs and death, in an interview this morning on WOC Talkradio 1420 AM in Davenport, Iowa.

An extraordinary article in the Canadian magazine Macleans, “The Concussion Time Bomb,” discusses in depth the possibility, recently raised by Chris Benoit’s father Michael and former wrestler Chris Nowinski’s Sports Legacy Institute, that mental impairment caused by brain trauma might explain Chris Benoit’s homicidal and suicidal rampage in June.

Former wrestler Larry Pfohl (”Lex Luger”) is recovering at Stanford University Medical Center in California from what was either a heart attack or a stroke.

I observe that almost everyone – including Steve, Heath, Greg, and our publisher, ECW Press – tiptoes around the subject of our book rather more gingerly than necessary.

A guy named Mike Jenkinson wrote a review of Benoit in which he states, “If there is one glaring omission …, it is that the book does not raise the possibility that Benoit had been suffering from brain damage.” I sent him a note gently pointing out that the book does just that in one passage.

(First published October 24 in Beyond Chron, http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/Byrd_Flies_With_Sports_Newest_Scam_Hormone_Replacement_Therapy__5034.html)

Hearings on drugs and death in pro wrestling loom from either of two committees of the House of Representatives. Let’s take a look at one area in which World Wrestling Entertainment, a billion-dollar corporation, is certain to be investing resources: lobbying.