Saturday, January 15, 2011

‘Jerry McDevitt vs. Mike Benoit’ Is Not as Important as ‘WWE Lobbyists vs. the Regulators’

[posted 1/10/11 to http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]


A few days ago Cageside Seats’ Keith Harris broke down Dave Meltzer’s Part 2 of his World Wrestling Entertainment lawyer Jerry McDevitt-induced walkback of the suggestion that WWE might have sought to coordinate with the Benoit survivors a narrative of the order of Nancy and Daniel Benoit’s deaths.

See “Jerry McDevitt and Mike Benoit continue their feud in Dave Meltzer’s Wrestling Observer Newsletter,” http://www.cagesideseats.com/2011/1/6/1919843/jerry-mcdevitt-and-mike-benoit-continue-their-feud-in-dave-meltzers.

Overall, the credibility of Chris Benoit’s father is much, much higher than WWE’s. That simple truth gets lost in the thickets of Meltzer’s legalistic review of a sideshow story.

I hope Meltzer eventually comes through with an analysis of similar length and complexity on the inner workings of the various Congressional committees and government agencies, federal and state, that could constructively recast the pro wrestling industry after Linda McMahon’s failed Senate bid in Connecticut. So far Meltzer has mostly given us variations on how unlikely such interventions are because nobody cares about wrestling. (Always left unclear is whether Meltzer includes himself among the nobodies.)

What I concede to be a very interesting story from Jerry McDevitt’s recent paper dump on me is how both Meltzer and I missed, for nearly three years, the finding of an enlarged heart in Chris Benoit’s autopsy. It doesn’t change the paradigm of a “cocktail of death,” but it is a material unreported fact. I’ll get to that one in due course.


Irv Muchnick

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