Ugly Things

I've been paying loose attention Linda McMahon's Senate Campaign.  Loose attention, because as the late, great Dr. Hunter S. Thompson once said, "politics is a rotten business and a habit worse than heroin."  Amen, Doc. I'm trying to kick the habit, but her candidacy is fascinating on many, many levels to me as an amateur news junkie and veteran wrestling fan.

McMahon is running largely on her business acumen as former WWE Chairman and no one can dispute the WWE's success, but as the bodies of former wrestlers, or 'talent' in the current corporate and campaign vernacular, continue to pile up she finds herself painted into a serious corner because you cannot constantly tout your success as chief executive of a company and then say it's out of bounds, or irrelevant, when said company's former employees turn up dead at an appalling and alarming rate.  These events have compelled journalists to start probing further into the often ugly scenes behind the curtains of the wrestling business and they're uncovering some unsettling stuff.

TPM has an excellent post/report up today titled "Does Linda McMahon Have a Dead Wrestler Problem?" that compiles all of the recent bad news/premature wrestling deaths/and subsequently clumsy, cold and costly McMahon campaign responses.  It's full of interesting stuff and I highly recommend reading it and all of the links embedded within it.
One of things that jumped off the page, to me, was a frightening must read article from the North-Central Connecticut Journal Inquirer involving the WWE's use of "Death Clauses."   The company inserts this clause into contracts to remove any liability they would incur in the case of serious injury and/or death.  According to the paper, the clause reads something like this:

“WRESTLER, on behalf of himself or his heirs, successors, assigned and personal representatives, hereby releases, waives, and discharges PROMOTER from all liability to WRESTLER and covenants not to sue PROMOTER for any and all loss or damage on account of injury to any person or property resulting in serious or permanent injury to WRESTLER or WRESTLER’s death, whether caused by the negligence of the PROMOTER, other wrestlers, or otherwise,”

If that weren't interesting enough, the Journal Inquirer reports that Linda McMahon personally signed the late Owen Hart's booking contract, which included a 'death clause.'  Owen fell hideously to his death during an ill-conceived stunt where he was supposed to be lowered into the ring from the rafters of the Kemper Arena in Kansas City.  In reaction to this revelation, the campaign pointed to the fact that they settled with Owen's family despite the clause, quoting from a deposition given by Vince McMahon during the ensuing trial where he states that:

“That means ultimately someone who puts on this show, someone is responsible in some way, whether it be legal or moral, and I felt responsibility,” 

But, Chris Benoit's father, Michael Benoit is quoted, in direct contravention of this specific attempt by the McMahon's at damage control, as saying:

“As I am sure you are aware, WWE matches are scripted, and Stephanie McMahon Levesque testified before a congressional committee back in late 2007 that all stunts — an example of that would be a chair shot to the head — must be pre-approved by Vince McMahon,” he said, referring to the candidate’s daughter and husband. “This type of scripted match, I believe, is the underlying cause of all the early deaths in this industry.

“This extreme behavior in a wrestling ring would never have been allowed under the rules of the wrestling and boxing commissions,” he added. “Linda McMahon claims one of her greatest accomplishments while working at WWE was getting their industry deregulated. They now operate with absolutely no oversight. History will show that the early death rate of wrestlers started shortly after the regulation was stopped."

Benoit's mention of the deregulation angle and aspect of the WWE's, at the time unprecedented, shift from the traditional kayfabe paradigm to the acknowledgment that wrestling was, indeed, scripted and their haste to re-label it "Sports Entertainment," and the supposition/theory that this maneuver was undertaken to free the company from regulation by state athletics commissions is something that was also touched on by Deadspin's awesome Masked Man in a recent column wherein he quotes the New York Times:

"In the '80s, the McMahons did a remarkable thing: They dispensed with the pretense of reality and admitted that wrestling was staged. The WWF started using the term "Sports Entertainment" to classify its peculiar endeavor. But lest you think this was a gesture of honesty or evolution, realize this had a very direct impact on the company's bottom line. As The New York Times put it recently, this move helped free the WWF from 'a thicket of regulations from various state athletic commissions, requiring things like physical exams of wrestlers weeks before they would appear, and the stationing of state-approved doctors ringside during matches.'"

I'd never looked at it in this manner.  I'd always just naively thought that they adopted the 'Sports Entertainment' label to appear more mainstream and marketable and to be able to appeal to a mass audience without being burdened with the stigma of the "rasslin'" label.  The deregulation aspect of this decison was something I hadn't considered, but now as I look back it makes perfect sense.  I actually remember old AWA matches where the ring announcers would reference, often by name, the state's presiding and sometimes present athletic commission official (especially when they were in Las Vegas's Showboat Sports Pavilion). Of course, the legendary Ric Flair/Lex Lugar title match which the Maryland athletic commission actually 'stopped' because of excessive bleeding comes to mind as well.  I'm sure that match was a work, but it was a work made possible by the existing framework of kayfabe and the importance the pretense of athletic commission oversight and the resultant veneer of legitimacy and plausibility that oversight provided said framework.

The other side of this is Mr. Benoit's argument that since there is no oversight "history will show that the early death rate of wrestlers started shortly after the regulation was stopped."  Does he have a point??
I think he does.  If you take a look back, premature wrestling deaths on this scale never riddled the territorial areas in the same manner.  And it's not like wrestlers had lighter schedules then.  Ric Flair has stated many times that in the early 80's he wrestled over 300 nights a year.  There were dangerous, albeit rare, matches back then as well, such as chain matches, even barbed-wire and scaffold matches. 
It's definitely something to think about and it's amazing that a political campaign for the United States Senate, no less, is what's bringing things like this to light.

Another, less serious, thing the TPM report brought to my attention is that Vince gave an interview to the Associated Press in early August where he laments the fact that all this criticism the WWE, and by extension Linda's campaign, is receiving fails to take into account the "soap opera elements" of the business and storylines.  As the Masked Man noted in his column, this response is a standard fallback for the McMahons when asked tough questions about the WWE.  But here is where it turns ridiculous and absurd, the interviewer asked Vince about the infamous necrophilia skit and Vince said:

"If you knew the story line behind it, what have you, you might even consider that black humor, you know, dark humor, which is what it was designed to be."

I'm a Vinny Mac fan, and I don't consider myself a prude, but this answer is complete and utter bullshit.  I did watch that angle and story-line unfold and it was the absolute nadir of a life-time of pro-wrestling fandom.  Period.  It was so bad we were actually stunned when it was over.  There was nothing funny, dark or otherwise, about it.  It was garbage, and, honestly, if Triple H loves the business as much Jim Ross and others endlessly state, he should have refused to participate in it.  In fact, when I first read that Linda was running for Senate I immediately remembered this skit and thought "She could be OK until someone digs that up." I'm not even sure how many of the opposition researchers working for her opponents and the political reporters covering this race realize that the star of the necrophilia skit is actually Linda McMahon's son-in-law.

I actually saw a clip earlier this year of some McMahon campaign function or other and Triple H was brought onstage briefly.  So, again, they cannot have it both ways.  You can't trade on someone's fame and then act like questions about the same person's, a family member at that, participation in a skit about necrophilia are out of context, or out of bounds.

McMahon is behind by an average of 10 points heading into the November election and would most likely just be an oddity/human interest story at this point, thanks to her wrestling connections, even with her considerable fortune behind her, if her opponent Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal hadn't misspoke about and/or outright fabricated details about his military service.

There is definitely a lot to think about in TPM's piece.

R.I.P. Luna Vachon.