Keith Harris of Cageside Seats With More on Lance Cade

[posted 8/19/10 to http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]


The ever-valuable Keith Harris of Cageside Seats put up a comment on the previous post about the late Lance Cade’s scripted destruction with chair shots on a 2008 edition of World Wrestling Entertainment’s Monday Night Raw. Especially important is Keith’s link to the primary-source video of the incident.

Not for the first time, I reproduce Keith’s comment as its own post:

I wrote about this incident over four months ago at Cageside Seats in a post entitled “Speaking of WWE’s shady callous nature, Lance Cade has been fired after successfully completing rehab”:

http://www.cagesideseats.com/2010/4/8/1412006/speaking-of-wwes-shady-callous

Within that post is a link to a YouTube video of the match where Shawn quickly destroyed Cade with a chair. It should be noted that only one of the chair shots was to the head, which I suppose was progress compared to the similar punishment angle Chris Kanyon had to endure over five years earlier where he was scripted to take multiple chair shots to the head. The concussion angle to this incident obviously still applies nonetheless. But there’s another angle worth exploring. Namely, scripting someone to take a large number of unnecessary, painful chair shots all over his body as punishment may have contributed to Cade shortly thereafter having a pain pill induced seizure on a plane.

On a side note, I’m bit peeved at the notion pushed by some in the wrestling media that WWE did everything they could to help Cade, which ignores WWE booking him in that punishment angle, WWE firing him instead of sending him straight to rehab after the incident where he had a drug induced seizure on a plane, and firing him again as soon as he successfully completed rehab in his second stint in the company. Clearly Cade needed rehab in October 2008, but by all accounts he wasn’t offered it then and had to wait over a year to get it. Personally that doesn’t strike me as WWE doing everything they could to help him, as quickly as they could.