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Time to wake up, clean up wrestling
Government all over baseball for steroids, but pro wrestling unnoticed
By Mike Celizic
MSNBC contributor
Updated: 9:16 p.m. ET June 26, 2007
It’s time for those in Congress who have been piling up brownie points with the voters by ranting at Bud Selig about steroids in baseball to get out of the grandstand, get down on the field and actually do something useful.
We’ve got another dead wrestler on our hands, Chris Benoit, who spent a quiet weekend at his Georgia home murdering his wife and seven-year-old son and then hanging himself on a weight machine. Anabolic steroids were found in the home.
The gruesome killings are a surprise; the steroids aren’t. Professional wrestling — "wrestling entertainment" as the WWE’s Vince McMahon calls it — is filthy with them and has been for decades. It’s too early to tell if Benoit’s actions were driven by roid rage or other psychopathologies induced by the drugs — it’s always possible he wasn’t ever wound too tightly and just went over the edge. But there are plenty of other dead wrestlers around whose demises have been linked to the drugs. You don’t need a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows in that alleged sport.
But has anybody in Congress ever said anything about it? Has anyone ever dragooned the estimable McMahon, who had to cancel his own faked death to go to Benoit’s funeral, before a subcommittee and demanded to know why he’s providing such a horrible example for America’s impressionable youth?
As far as that goes, how many of you reading this spend the afternoon grumbling about Barry Bonds and his alleged steroid use and then turn on Monday Night RAW to cheer for your favorite freak?
With baseball, it’s all about the kids and the example that’s being set for them. It’s all about the purity of the sport. It’s all about mom, apple pie and family values.
Fine. If it gets you votes, go for it. But Congress can’t go on grandstanding about steroids. It’s got to do something beyond making Sammy Sosa forget how to speak English.
And if it’s the impressionable kiddies our lawmakers are worried about, then wrestling is a great place to start cleaning things up. I’d wager that a lot more kids watch wrestling on television than baseball. And a lot of them think that the choreographed matches and scripted screaming isn’t an act, but a real competition.
Wrestlers are heroes to a lot of kids, who then naturally want to be like them. And the way to do that is by taking steroids — just like their heroes.
You look at a baseball or football player in uniform and you can’t really see how he's built except in a general way. You look at a wrestler in his little grape-smuggler panties doing muscle poses, and you know exactly the look you’re after. A kid would start out by going to a gym, but after lifting for months and finding he still doesn’t look like Hulk Hogan, he’ll start asking other lifters with bigger pipes what the secret is.
Does anyone in Congress care? I won’t bother answering that because it’s obvious that they don’t. There aren’t any votes in cleaning up wrestling. In fact, the legislator who takes on wrestling may well lose votes. That’s how popular the charade is.
Doing roids didn’t hurt Jesse "The Body" Ventura. He got elected governor of Minnesota. And they didn’t hurt Arnold Schwarzenegger, who rode his muscles into the California statehouse. Okay, Arnold wasn’t a wrestler, just a bodybuilder, but he made his name with artificially enhanced muscles, the same as the guys on the pay-per-view show, the same as Benoit, who portrayed himself in the ring as a god-fearing man of towering family values — and bulging biceps.
Schwarzenegger has said he’s sorry he did roids, but he’s never said he’s sorry he made tens of millions of dollars and won the governorship of the nation’s most populous state. He’s a smart guy, and may have gotten there anyway. But the reality is that his career was founded on drugs.
He’s in position to declare a war on steroids in his home state, where beautiful bodies are highly valued. But I haven’t seen federal agents descending on gyms. I haven’t seen undercover agents from the DEA hanging around weight rooms busting guys for a vial of stanozol the way they hang out around slacker kids busting them for a nickel bag of marijuana.
One federal prosecutor in Albany has actually launched an independent steroids investigation. In San Francisco, another brought down BALCO. But while DEA agents hang around border crossings with drug-sniffing dogs, people are waltzing across the southern borders with steroids picked up in Mexico.
Congress says it cares, but it’s done nothing except slap Bud Selig around and threaten to impose testing on baseball. The game took the hint and instituted a serious testing program. You’d have thought that the protectors of the republic would then have continued the fight.
But they haven’t. There still is virtually no testing in high schools, where athletes hoping for that Division I scholarship are blithely jabbing themselves with needles. There has been no national DEA offensive against the drugs that infest gyms. Wrestlers keep dropping like flies, and no one has even bothered to ask McMahon what he’s doing about it.
So another wrestler is dead, and his wife and seven-year-old son with him.
As far as our leaders in Washington are concerned, it’s none of their business.
I can’t wait to hear them holler when Bonds hits No. 756.
Mike Celizic is a contributor to MSNBC.com and a free-lance writer based in New York.
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