Insomnia by Media
July 12th, 2007Vince McMahon told the wrestling locker room, according to news reports, that they need to clean up their act, say no to drugs and speak to the WWE’s Grief Counselor about the Benoit situation or anything else going on in their lives. It’s a start, but McMahon will have to do far more than that to convince some of us that he wants to change the culture in wrestling, let alone that he wants to. The “Just Say No!” approach is just a band-aid. Wrestlers aren’t abusing drugs because they can’t say no — they’re abusing drugs because they have no off-season, work with injuries that would put a man on paid-leave in most businesses, and travel hundreds of miles every other night to put even more of a beating on their body.
Before I get to Nancy Grace, allow me to present background information on dead wrestler Johnny Grunge, good friend and neighbor of Chris Benoit. He was in ECW’s “Public Enemy,” and he was a fine wrestler with many friends in the business. He died of a sleep apnea, but Nancy Grace has been covering his story — if you recall, he died, after Eddie Guerrerro did, which left Benoit feeling friendless and miserable: it’s one of the things his friends point to as a cause of his madness — and saying that Grunge didn’t die of an apnea because you can’t die of an apnea.
I ask you, then, Dear Reader, to Google the term, “Sleep Apnea Deadly” and see what you get. Then tell me that you’re comfortable with the reporting that goes on in this country. If you can sleep well tonight, I salute you, and I salute you if you can sleep well, trusting the media, knowing that of their list of wrestlers who have died before they were fifty, they’ve got men like Owen Hart who fell off a scaffold; Bruiser Brody who was stabbed in Puerto Rico and poisoned by the bile in his own kidneys; Yokozuna, who died because he was Yokozuna, amongst other examples. (Google his image.)
On a Benoit note, Benoit’s Doctor — Doctor Astin — had Benoit’s chart with him when the first raid by the police started. The police think he was trying to tamper with it, presumably to cover up the ungodly amount, and mix, of drugs he was prescribing.