ARCHIVE 11/15/07: EXCLUSIVE: My Memo to Congressmen Waxman, Davis, Rush, and Stearns

EXCLUSIVE: My Memo to Congressmen Waxman, Davis, Rush, and Stearns

Thursday, November 15th, 2007

TO: Congressman Henry Waxman, Congressman Tom Davis, Congressman Bobby Rush, Congressman Cliff Stearns

FROM: Irvin Muchnick

RE: CNN’s “Death Grip: Inside Pro Wrestling”

I address this to you in your respective capacities as chair (Mr. Waxman) and ranking minority member (Mr. Davis) of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and chair (Mr. Rush) and ranking minority member (Mr. Stearns) of the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection. Both of your committees have corresponded with World Wrestling Entertainment about the pandemic of drugs and death in the professional wrestling industry with a view toward conducting hearings on the matter.

I am sure, therefore, that your staffs screened last week’s piece by CNN’s Special Investigations Unit, Death Grip: Inside Pro Wrestling. Allow me to offer one observer’s rundown of how the principals fared.

CNN / Time Warner

As any hour-long report on such a complex subject would have, CNN’s contained trivial errors of fact and interpretation. For example, it confused the monitoring stage of the WWE Wellness Policy (drug-testing) with a “first strike.” And it suggested that a guy called C.M. Punk, who is on WWE’s third-tier brand, was on the cusp of becoming the hottest thing since Australopithecus Africanus did boffo box office at Olduvai Gorge.

More seriously, CNN quoted WWE’s top star, John Cena, out of context in his response to the question of whether he had ever done steroids. Cena gave two answers. One was “Absolutely not.” The second was “This is a crazy question…. My answer to that question, have you ever used steroids, is the only thing I can say: I can’t tell you that I haven’t, but you’ll never be able to prove that I have.” In the first airings of Death Grip, CNN showed only Cena’s second answer. After WWE, at its website, broadcast the entire footage of the Cena interview (which WWE had independently taped with a hidden camera), CNN edited the piece to include Cena’s first answer as well.

According to the reputable newsletter Pro Wrestling Torch, CNN also allowed the subject of its investigation to dictate one of the important terms of its coverage. CNN had arranged to interview Dave Meltzer, publisher of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, the industry’s Bible, but canceled the interview after WWE chair Vince McMahon threatened not to accede to CNN’s request to interview McMahon himself, or have access to other WWE personnel, if Meltzer appeared on the same program.

Perhaps most inexplicably of all, CNN interviewed me for two hours and used only ten seconds. My wife will swear on a stack of Wrestling Observer Newsletters that I have never, ever allowed anything less than a pearl of wisdom to escape my lips.

Bottom line: Just another day at the “infotainment” office. As Mark Knopfler might put it, CNN is the monkey and WWE is the organ grinder. Go ahead and “punish the monkey.” Now about the organ grinder …

WWE

In April, wrestler Chris Benoit passed his drug test under the WWE Talent Wellness Policy. On a weekend in late June, Benoit strangled his wife to death with a telephone cord. Then he gave their seven-year-old son a high dose of his own sedatives, presumably so that the son wouldn’t feel a thing while Benoit proceeded to strangle him to death. Then Benoit hanged himself from a pulley on gym equipment.in the basement of their home. The postmortem toxicology report showed that Benoit’s system contained – depending on interpretation – between five and ten times the normal level of testosterone. Evidence accrued by the federal government in the indictment of Benoit’s physician, Dr. Phil Astin, shows that Benoit was being prescribed a ten-month supply of steroids every three to four weeks.

On CNN, reporter Drew Griffin asked Vince McMahon if Benoit had come up clean in his April drug test, or if he had drugs that had been excused by a doctor’s prescription. (The latter is the main loophole of the Wellness Policy, which was ably exposed by the entire report.) Here is McMahon’s response:

You’ve have to ask Dr. [David] Black [administrator of the Wellness Policy] that. If he were on some prescriptions prescribed by a legitimate physician, then surely, that would be an exception. If he had an infection or whatever it may be, I have no idea… I can’t speak for the doctor. All I can tell you is from a general standpoint our drug program adviser found or did not find in his last test, and from a standpoint of the criteria established for Chris Benoit and everyone else. Benoit tested negative.

At another point McMahon said: “Well, let me ask you a question. If you have a prescription, and it’s a legitimate prescription from your personal physician, then why wouldn’t it pass? Vince’s wife Linda McMahon, the CEO of WWE, said: “Our policy is not a ‘gotcha’ policy. We have a wellness program. We’re not looking to just say, ‘gotcha.’ We want to protect the health and well-being of the men and women who are part of World Wrestling Entertainment. That’s why prescriptions from legitimate doctors, from your treating physician, are acceptable if judged to be so by our medical review officer and [Black].”

At yet another point, Griffin asked McMahon about the suspension of ten WWE wrestlers who showed up on the customer list of a gray-market Internet pharmacy under investigation by the district attorney in Albany, New York. McMahon said, “So we took action immediately. Same day.” In fact, WWE took action weeks after receiving the information, after your two House committees had publicly raised the prospect of hearings. Further, as the CNN reporter pointed out, “They weren’t actually caught by the WWE’s drug policy. They were caught by some local prosecutor.”

In conclusion, I believe the CNN program further highlights the need for additional investigation by your committees, including public hearings. Within this industry, it has been well known that a cocktail of drugs – some of them implicitly encouraged by management – combined with unsafe working conditions are the proximate cause of the early deaths of literally hundreds of performers over the last generation. It is a death rate astronomically higher than that of, say, football players or rock stars (to use one obvious sports and one obvious entertainment analogy). Like many other fans and non-fans alike, I hope you pursue this issue to its source: the need for the return of a sensible measure of oversight to a currently unregulated industry.

Thank you for your attention.