Hits Keep Coming From WWE – Where They Don’t Do Chair Shots to the Head Except When They Do

[posted 4/6/11 to http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]


A new Cageside Seats piece by David Bixenspan has chilling additions to the reporting here on World Wrestling Entertainment’s ugly history of indefensible cranial chair shots, accompanied by lies about the termination of these practices.

See “WWE fines Undertaker and Triple H for chairshot, but does that matter?”, http://www.cagesideseats.com/2011/4/6/2095199/wwe-fines-undertaker-and-triple-h-for-chairshot-but-does-that-matter.

Bixenspan notes that in 2007, when the since-deceased Eddie “Umaga” Fatu had to serve a suspension upon being exposed as a customer of Internet steroid dealer Signature Pharmacy, Vince McMahon staged an “angle” on Raw to write Umaga out of the TV story. Umaga was put on the receiving end of a series of sick chairs to the head by the one and only Triple H, Vince’s son-in-law. The Cageside story links to the YouTube clips of the incident.

But there’s more. The WWE website followed up the Raw angle with a retrospective headlined “Chair Classic Moments.” That story was almost immediately taken down from the site because it wound up coinciding with the Sports Legacy Institute’s release of the Chris Benoit brain study, with the finding that Benoit had chronic traumatic encephalopathy. See Cageside’s link to where this charming WWE document got preserved at another fan site, The Other Arena.

In an email, Bixenspan’s Cageside Seats colleague, Keith Harris, told me that my blog post earlier today, a chronology of WWE head chair shots subsequent to McMahon’s 2007 public statements that they were being discontinued, was incomplete.

“The Hell in the Cell main events at Survivor Series 2007 (just days after Vince’s CNN interview) and SummerSlam 2008 both featured chair shots to the head,” Harris said.


Irv Muchnick