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Sun-tzu, the great Chinese military theorist, is credited with a piece of advice that remains solid two and a half millennia later: “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” As Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Entertainment draws heat from two Congressional committees, which are contemplating hearings on the scandal-plagued pro wrestling industry, the principle is well illustrated by the strange relationship between WWE and the moralistic senator from its home state, Joe Lieberman of Connecticut.

In the current issue of the authoritative Wrestling Observer Newsletter, Dave Meltzer notes that “there still appears to be no explanation that makes any sense as to why Randy Orton wasn’t suspended.”

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.