Vince McMahon Reached Out to Concussion Activist Chris Nowinski

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Chris Nowinski, the Harvard guy and former World Wrestling Entertainment performer who now heads the Sports Legacy Institute, yesterday told WEEI radio in Boston that Vince McMahon called him last week and said WWE wanted to offer full support to SLI’s research on brain trauma in sports.

This is the same WWE that had a public dust-up with Nowinski after his former tag-team partner in developmental, Lance Cade, died of heart failure in August at age 29. Nowinski said Linda McMahon was “kicking dirt on his grave” when she suggested that Cade was just a drug addict whom she “might have met once.” WWE basically called Nowinski a liar for claiming that Cade told him about steroid use (which Cade had also said in a radio interview), and for Nowinski’s remembering his own WWE experience when he participated in a program of matches in which he was thrown through a table every night.

Wrestling Observer’s Dave Meltzer commented that even though Vince McMahon’s call to Nowinski was “clearly transparent, that is probably the best move the company could have done for a number of reasons.”

The audio of the Nowinski interview on WEEI is at http://audio.weei.com/m/34709441/chris-nowinski-former-wwe-wrestler.htm#q=Nowinski. I highly recommend giving it a listen.

 

Irv Muchnick

3 Comments

  1. Adam says:

    The circumstances aren’t the best, but at least they’re offering for help.

    This is a step in the right direction.

  2. JR says:

    Vince has publicly admitted in the past that he makes move like this purely for PR purposes, and that he doesn’t regard the performers’ well-being as his responsibility. Nonetheless this is a welcome development

  3. Mighty Vastardikai says:

    And while he did this, he just released Matt Hardy, who was acting strangely as of late.

Concussion Inc. - Author Irvin Muchnick