Jeff Hardy has been suspended for 60 days by WWE for a second strike under the wellness policy.
In the wake of last year’s fiasco with the guys caught in the Signature Pharmacy dragnet, WWE started publicizing the names of suspended wrestlers. But this one small step for transparency wasn’t exactly one giant leap for mankind, as we soon saw with the announcement of the suspension of Harry Smith (son of the late Davey Boy Smith); they didn’t disclose the fact that Smith’s failed test was actually months old. So the old suspicion that suspensions are manipulated punishments of carefully selected scapegoats continues.
The only way to allay that suspicion would be to announce, along with the suspension, both the date of the failed test and the drug. In Hardy’s case, the drug test almost certainly was in the last week or so, according to sources. As for the drug? Who knows? The media reports carry the tacit assumption that it was steroids, but maybe it was actually marijuana.
Hardy would be a higher-profile sacrificial lamb than Harry Smith — but Hardy still ain’t exactly John Cena. A case can be made that WWE needs to keep rolling out a suspension every once in a while for “credibility,” and perhaps especially so in the wake of the renewed heat on Capitol Hill. Until there’s true transparency, such perfectly reasonable speculation will not stop.