Meltzer Handles Steamboat Story Ably in New Wrestling Observer

More expansive and less cryptic than in his daily website updates, Dave Meltzer does a decent job with the Ricky Steamboat story in the July 12 issue of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter.

Even though World Wrestling Entertainment stated that the doctors believe there is no link between Steamboat’s life-threatening “burst capillary” (at first called a brain aneurysm) and the televised beatdown he took a week ago Monday, Meltzer notes that “the timing of everything is going to make people suspicious.” He adds:

The WWE’s benefit of the doubt on something like this is not high, perhaps even non- existent, given company statements after the deaths of Chris Benoit and Eddy Guerrero. The company over and over proclaimed Benoit to have not been using steroids due to their testing and his having passed a test, when subsequent drug investigations and medical records of his doctor revealed the opposite. It later came out Benoit had failed three of his four steroid tests as well, but had an exemption due to endocrine damage. At the time of his death, the amount of testosterone in his system was more than all but two athletes in history who had failed California State Athletic Commission steroid tests. They also floated a story almost immediately that Benoit and his wife were arguing about raising their son, who was suffering from Fragile X disease. There is no evidence that Daniel Benoit had the disease, which was denied by his parents and several family friends, as well as his school was never alerted to it. In Guerrero’s case, the company had Vickie Guerrero claim within days, before results of the autopsy came in, that Eddy’s drug use years earlier during his WCW days, even though later it came out that his own best friends alerted Jim Ross to his problems and Ross forced Guerrero into rehab while working in WWE. Later investigations of his Phoenix doctor showed Guerrero was using steroids and Growth Hormone up until the time of his death.

Irv Muchnick