I’ve been harsh on the outcome of the Congressional investigation of pro wrestling’s death pandemic. That criticism is deserved in the sense that it is a heaving elephant of 1,000 pages, bringing forth a mouse. Obsessive fans will pore over the documentation accompanying Congressman Henry Waxman’s booming punt to the Office of National Drug Policy Control, and World Wrestling Entertainment couldn’t care less. Thanks to the decision to have Vince McMahon interviewed by staff behind closed doors, rather than to pull the trigger on a public hearing, business as usual proceeds.
However, I have to agree that the record created by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is impressive. If son-of-Benoit happens next week or next year, at least investigators won’t be starting from scratch.
I’d like to focus on a question not likely to be asked by the usual commentators: How does corporate enabling and denial of death happen? Even if we assume McMahon is uniquely evil (and I don’t share that assumption), then how does he enlist an entire superstructure of professional enablers and deniers? The Waxman file has some clues in the interviews of David Black (the drug-testing guru), Dr. Tracy Ray (the medical review officer who was charged with making recommendations on “therapeutic use exemptions” for wrestlers found to be taking steroids), and Dr. Frederick Feuerbach (the cardiologist who was brought in to add a new dimension to the Wellness Program).
Black, Ray, and Feuerbach all did and do believe they are performing valuable services. Black is keeping people more honest than they otherwise would be. Ray is vetting wrestlers’ excuses to weed out the most extreme examples of medical quackery in their prescriptions for anabolics. And Feuerbach is checking their tickers. None is under the illusion that they are making the situation ideal, or even necessarily good. They are just making it less bad.
Their roles are severely circumscribed by the terms of their WWE contracts. That means that they don’t meaningfully interact or come up with global diagnoses or actions. They report. Nor are the wrestlers their “patients,” as the term is usually understood. Any action emerging from the doctors’ reports are undertaken by their corporate client.
As a result, there is no locus of responsibility. In his interview, Dr. Ray concedes that he doesn’t conduct independent follow-through or investigation of appeals for exemptions so much as he does the best he can with limited information, and hopes to contain the damage. There was “shadiness in almost every case,” he said.
Similarly, Dr. Feuerbach does work-ups to determine if a wrestler has a healthy enough heart to perform, but he does not address lifestyle or working conditions that put this population at risk. That’s not his job. It could be his — or somebody’s — job. But it is not.
The problem with the WWE Wellness Program isn’t that no one is ever going to get busted for steroids, or that every single therapeutic use exemption is going to get rubber-stamped, or that no wrestler with a congenital heart conditon will ever get caught by a safety net. The problem is that the program serves the ant colony. It does not serve the ants.
Irv Muchnick