Congressman Cliff Stearns, Republican of Florida, has called on the House Energy & Commerce Committee “to investigate allegations of rampant steroid use in professional wrestling.”
Stearns’ July 6 news release about this can be viewed at http://www.house.gov/stearns/PressReleases/PR2007Releases/pr-070706-Steroids.html. The Baltimore Sun was among the newspapers reporting this development; see http://www.baltimoresun.com/sports/bal-sp.wrestling10jul10,0,1661477.story?coll=bal-sports-more. (As noted earlier on the blog, there have been calls by journalists for such an investigation; see http://muchnick.net/babylon/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=77.)
Though this has not been confirmed, it appears that Congressman Stearns is relying at least in part on information in the appendix of Irvin Muchnick’s book WRESTLING BABYLON: Piledriving Tales of Drugs, Sex, Death, and Scandal. Stearns is quoted as saying, “Between 1985 and 2006, 89 wrestlers have died before the age of 50.” That is roughly the number, and is exactly the chronological scope and age parameter, of the WRESTLING BABYLON appendix.