euron Dove, writing on the website of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, says: “Congress and the media outlets that have the power to push people to probe into the sport have long given up on taking wrestling seriously and could care less about the high death rate ...”
In my view, Mr. Dove has things exactly backwards.
Four years after Eddie Guerrero, two and a half years after Chris Benoit, and three days after Eddie “Umaga” Fatu, it is no longer tenable for pro wrestling fans to whine sentimentally about the serial demise of TV heroes they don’t even know, while blaming the human reality fallout on everyone else.
The fact of the matter is that the mainstream media and Congress do show up, in their own way, when the story is about death by the bushel, rather than about mere kitschy bad taste by the YouTube kilobyte. Maybe, just maybe, the root problem isn’t that the general public doesn’t take wrestling seriously enough. Maybe the problem is that when the media and Congress show up, they don’t get a heck of a lot of support from the people who pay the bills.
Again, Jeuron Dove: “I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m quite conflicted at times when it comes to being a fan. I love wrestling and always will and will likely watch it religiously every week until I die ...”
What I am explaining is the one and only conspiracy theory in CHRIS & NANCY: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death. In the Introduction, I write: “You bet there was[ a conspiracy]. It was a conspiracy between those who care too much about wrestling and those who care too little. The first group consists of the fans who enjoy the pageantry and the people who profit from them. The second group consists of those who can’t be bothered, except possibly to blow hard on cue whenever a comment, no matter how ill-informed, is deemed fashionable.”
Wrestling fans, and the media who feed them information and analysis, have their own form of self-serving denial: they place the highest value on mocking the second group, and they get plenty touchy themselves when anyone focuses on the first group. So at the end of a very long day in a society in which consumers vote with their wallets, exactly how do they get off calling the kettle black?
In the summer of 2007, the cable tabloid news shows, with all their large and easily parodied flaws, jumped into the Benoit fray with both feet. The wrestling media threw their weight behind things like ridiculing Nancy Grace’s lack of mastery of the history of the Four Horsemen, and preemptively dismissing as a “non-story” the Wikipedia hacker tale – which would later prove to provide a useful window on WWE’s lack of credibility for its version of what it knew about Benoit’s crimes and when it knew it.
Later in 2007 Congress got involved. Did any major wrestling organ do much with the opportunity, other than to gossip and speculate? Was there any concerted effort to mobilize readers and fans around applying real pressure on our elected representatives to bring about reforms of health and safety standards? Not really. There was more interest in determining whether Congressman Bobby Rush knew how to say “Benoit” with the proper French pronunciation.
In February 2008 the police records in the Benoit investigation were released. The wrestling media cherry-picked the telephonic evidence for titillation. But did they help expose what a thorough analysis would reveal: the quick willingness of the authorities to airbrush the record to WWE’s advantage? From where I sat, the wrestling media turned an equally blind eye at key junctures. The big wrestling story of the season was Ric Flair’s WrestleMania retirement match. Which, of course, didn’t even turn out to be a real retirement match: Flair, now 60 years old, just finished bumping away and carving up his forehead for Hulk Hogan in Australia, and Flair will probably be joining Hogan at TNA.
Some fans – not all of them, nor even necessarily a majority – believe that my goal is to pick a feud with Dave Meltzer, who has dozens of times as many readers on his worst day as I have on my best day. These people are mistaken. I just detest wholesale and preventable death in what is supposed to be entertainment, as well as flabby thinking and selfish posturing on what to do about it. As a long-time reader of the Wrestling Observer, I know that it produces plenty of flabby thinking and selfish posturing every week – as well as oodles of excellent reporting. The fact that Meltzer is intermittently, or even often or most of the time, capable of better highlights how much more he and his newsletter, and others like it, could be doing for the betterment of the industry.
Irv Muchnick
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment