ARCHIVE 2/28/08: Author Muchnick To Discuss Congress and Pro Wrestling in Radio Interview
May 13, 2009ARCHIVE 2/29/08: Muchnick to Orlando Sentinel: Here’s the Real WrestleMania Story
May 13, 2009
Mark Kriegel, FoxSports.com: ‘Nothing Fake About Wrestling’s Juicing Problem’
Friday, February 29th, 2008
Mark Kriegel of FoxSports.com has a terrific column up this morning about WWE chair Vince McMahon’s no-show at Congressional hearings. See “Nothing fake about wrestling’s juicing problem,” http://msn.foxsports.com/mlb/story/7855250/Nothing-fake-about-wrestling’s-juicing-problem.
Kriegel notes that it is eight months since the double murder/suicide of Chris Benoit:
Benoit … was receiving a 10-month supply of injectable steroids every three to four weeks, according to a DEA agent’s affidavit. The case brought some mainstream media scrutiny, albeit briefly, on the wrestling business.
Among these pieces was a column I wrote citing the work of Irvin Muchnick, author of Wrestling Babylon. Muchnick had compiled a roster – “staggeringly incomplete,” by his own admission – of wrestlers who died before the age of 50. Between 1985 and 2006, there were at least 89 such deaths. A Florida congressman seized on these figures (unattributed, of course) to call for an investigation of steroids in wrestling.
But now Muchnick’s 2007 tally is in. He stopped counting dead wrestlers when the number hit 21.