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3 concussions on 1 ROH show, 2 wrestlers back next night


Bix

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And it's too easy to trot out the Benoit thing as a possible fate for all concussed wrestlers. We've been wrecking our boxers and football players for decades and most of them don't go out and kill their families. We're really talking about these guys killing themselves. That's bad enough, but I think Benoit has become a bit of a red herring in these arguments.

 

I just wanted to isolate this because I would hate for this to become an accepted viewpoint at any level. The Benoit situation combined with similar stories of sudden violence towards families (including children) from oft-concussed NFL and NHL players has brought attention to the fact that repeated concussions (from not letting the brain heal properly) are nothing to fuck with.

 

Athletes with brain injuries often find themselves working on autopilot doing what they were trained to do when their mind fails. That could be an NHL enforcer squaring off for a fight with his 4 year old daughter, the former boxer that was in the nursing home my mom worked at cold-cocking nurses, or a pro wrestler killing his son with his finishing move. These may be extreme examples, and certainly not the fate of everyone that gets a concussion, but too many have the "that won't happen to me" mindset that needs to be shaken up.

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Most wrestling fans could give a shit about the guys health. I wish I was joking but you know i'm not. And ROH isn't even the only company that is to blame for this. Look at last weeks TNA show with Awesome Kong. How many unprotected chair shots did she take?

So they don't care. That's understood. That said, Mick Foley got a huge reaction for falling off the top of the cage and then getting chokeslammed through it. WWE was smart enough to never do it again (without gimmicking). WWE is far more successful than ROH or TNA, and they've done it by creating characters people care about. With effort, any indy could accomplish the same thing if they really wanted to.

 

And it should be noted, that second fall was accidental and shouldn't have occurred in that fashion.

 

That was planned. Foley just lies about that.

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This new "wrestlers are stupid, wrestling is silly, why sacrifice your health for wrestling" trend is getting a little embarrassing. Everybody who's spewing their outrage belongs to a message board called Pro Wrestling *Only*. Most of the people spewing their outrage are simultaneously discussing a project in which they'd watch hundreds of *pro wrestling* matches, featuring legendary concussers like Vader and Hansen and the Steiners, not to mention Benoit. Wrestlers' self-mutilation has clearly succeeded in entertaining you; if you actually thought wrestling was stupid, you wouldn't be here.

 

ROH fucked up bigtime, and it was a scummy move by Gabe to let Danielson wrestle (sounds like Rocky didn't bump in his match), but this "how dare they" stuff is tiresome. Wrestlers and wrestling companies have always done stuff like this, and all of us have always loved it. And within the next couple months, all of you will watch a match with a potential concussion-causing move or two in it, and you'll still like the match. As any worker will tell you, concussions are caused by back bumps more often than any other type of move. Are you all now planning to watch only back-bump-free wrestling?

 

Wrestling is a dirty business -- as hardcore fans, all of our hands are dirty. Expressing contempt towards the business and all of its practitioners doesn't make you clean; it just makes you dirty and graceless.

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So they don't care. That's understood. That said, Mick Foley got a huge reaction for falling off the top of the cage and then getting chokeslammed through it. WWE was smart enough to never do it again (without gimmicking). WWE is far more successful than ROH or TNA, and they've done it by creating characters people care about. With effort, any indy could accomplish the same thing if they really wanted to.

And it should be noted, that second fall was accidental and shouldn't have occurred in that fashion.

I never for a moment have believed that the second fall was accidental, anymore than what happened with Rock and the Chairshots went any different from planned. Just Foley bullshitting people.

 

Foley was suppose to go through the cage. Pretty clear from how they set up the chokeslam. The "shouldn't have occured in that fashion" more accurately could be described as "Foley stupidly thought he could control the bump through the cage more effectively". He was just a dumbfuck in thinking that.

 

 

John

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This new "wrestlers are stupid, wrestling is silly, why sacrifice your health for wrestling" trend is getting a little embarrassing. Everybody who's spewing their outrage belongs to a message board called Pro Wrestling *Only*. Most of the people spewing their outrage are simultaneously discussing a project in which they'd watch hundreds of *pro wrestling* matches, featuring legendary concussers like Vader and Hansen and the Steiners, not to mention Benoit. Wrestlers' self-mutilation has clearly succeeded in entertaining you; if you actually thought wrestling was stupid, you wouldn't be here.

 

ROH fucked up bigtime, and it was a scummy move by Gabe to let Danielson wrestle (sounds like Rocky didn't bump in his match), but this "how dare they" stuff is tiresome. Wrestlers and wrestling companies have always done stuff like this, and all of us have always loved it. And within the next couple months, all of you will watch a match with a potential concussion-causing move or two in it, and you'll still like the match. As any worker will tell you, concussions are caused by back bumps more often than any other type of move. Are you all now planning to watch only back-bump-free wrestling?

 

Wrestling is a dirty business -- as hardcore fans, all of our hands are dirty. Expressing contempt towards the business and all of its practitioners doesn't make you clean; it just makes you dirty and graceless.

The "it's wrestling, it's always been this way" argument is a cop-out, and it seems to be a favorites of the OMG MOAR HEADDROPS~! variety of fan who doesn't want to see things change. I think the Benoit thing really called to light the effect of numerous concussions in particular, and health concerns in general, for a lot of people. I, for one, just watched Vader vs Flair from Starrcade and found myself reevaluating Vader as a worker, seeing him more as an unsafe fat load who just stiffed the shit out of people instead of actually working. Yes, wrestling is scummy and we're all guilty of enjoying the geekshow element of STIFFNESS~!~!~! at one time or another in the past, but maybe some of us are reevaluating things. Wrestling turned into a work for a reason.

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This new "wrestlers are stupid, wrestling is silly, why sacrifice your health for wrestling" trend is getting a little embarrassing. Everybody who's spewing their outrage belongs to a message board called Pro Wrestling *Only*. Most of the people spewing their outrage are simultaneously discussing a project in which they'd watch hundreds of *pro wrestling* matches, featuring legendary concussers like Vader and Hansen and the Steiners, not to mention Benoit. Wrestlers' self-mutilation has clearly succeeded in entertaining you; if you actually thought wrestling was stupid, you wouldn't be here.

 

ROH fucked up bigtime, and it was a scummy move by Gabe to let Danielson wrestle (sounds like Rocky didn't bump in his match), but this "how dare they" stuff is tiresome. Wrestlers and wrestling companies have always done stuff like this, and all of us have always loved it. And within the next couple months, all of you will watch a match with a potential concussion-causing move or two in it, and you'll still like the match. As any worker will tell you, concussions are caused by back bumps more often than any other type of move. Are you all now planning to watch only back-bump-free wrestling?

 

Wrestling is a dirty business -- as hardcore fans, all of our hands are dirty. Expressing contempt towards the business and all of its practitioners doesn't make you clean; it just makes you dirty and graceless.

I don't think wrestling as a form of entertainment is stupid at all. In fact, quite the opposite -- I wish it would police itself so being a fan could go back to being about the good things -- promos that make you want to see a match, great buildup and payoffs, dorky "better worker" arguments that I love so much and freaking out about huge crowds on big shows. The only thing that's even keeping me remotely interested at this point is that so much great stuff happened in the past, enough in fact that if wrestling shut its doors tomorrow, we'd still have a lifetime of stuff to watch.

 

But wrestling won't police itself, and this is just the latest example. And I can understand it not being government-regulated, especially since doing so would be funded by tax dollars and there are far more important things to worry about in the world at the moment. But, if wrestling can't police itself and it can't be regulated, then it should be banned. And call it a freak, isolated thing all you want, but it's hard to watch any wrestling since June and not be thinking about Chris Benoit killing his wife and son because it has shaped so much about current wrestling. You hear about a wrestler getting a concussion and you think back to the results of Benoit's brain examination. You see Chris Jericho main eventing, and you think about how he positioned himself on cable news networks in the weeks after to ensure a main event run upon his return. You see Kennedy on television, and think about what a bold-faced liar he was and how much he exposed pretty much the entire business. You see anyone else on TV and you notice they're way smaller than they were six months ago. It seems really sort of impossible to get away from.

 

I think everyone wants to move on, even the people who keep bringing it up. But the truth is that it has only been six months, and it's the biggest story in the history of wrestling. It's going to shape how people watch for a long time, that's just unavoidable. There's nothing more relevant or worth talking about these days.

 

Like it or not, anytime anyone gets a concussion and then wrestles the next day, the first thing people are going to think is, "Wow, just like Chris Benoit." At least for a while.

 

I do think it's possible to discuss the ugly side of wrestilng on one hand and the great things about it on the other. I also think it's possible to be a fan of something and still acknowledge its flaws. Great music has been made by drug addicts, murderers and degenerates, the worst of our nature. The same thing could probably be said of artists, actors, athletes and even human rights activists. So in that sense, I guess it's nothing new and I can see the boredom in going over it again and again, but it's only been six months.

 

It's just going to take a while for things to get back to normal, if in fact they ever do. The best thing wrestling could do to help speed it up is to not allow things like this to happen, and even better, to come up with some great angle that makes everyone forget about this for a while.

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So they don't care. That's understood. That said, Mick Foley got a huge reaction for falling off the top of the cage and then getting chokeslammed through it. WWE was smart enough to never do it again (without gimmicking). WWE is far more successful than ROH or TNA, and they've done it by creating characters people care about. With effort, any indy could accomplish the same thing if they really wanted to.

And it should be noted, that second fall was accidental and shouldn't have occurred in that fashion.

I never for a moment have believed that the second fall was accidental, anymore than what happened with Rock and the Chairshots went any different from planned. Just Foley bullshitting people.

 

Foley was suppose to go through the cage. Pretty clear from how they set up the chokeslam. The "shouldn't have occured in that fashion" more accurately could be described as "Foley stupidly thought he could control the bump through the cage more effectively". He was just a dumbfuck in thinking that.

 

 

John

 

That's what I mean to say. Of course the through the cage spot was set up. It just occurred far more violently than the participants anticipated.
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On Loss's point, I grew up a WWF fan in the northeast, where of course they draw frequent criticism from smart fans for their half-speed, watered down product. I watch matches from Madison Square Garden in the 1970s and '80s, and you'd be at a loss to find the unsafe spots they use in a match. Even Slaughter/Sheik, the most brutal match the WWF produced in that era, is just two good bladejobs. You can make an exciting gimmick match without taking a lot of risks. Of course they had other problems in that era, namely recreational drug use stemming from working guys eight times a week for months on end. That's become better.

 

I don't have a hard time watching the current product. Then again I don't watch much outside of WWE, so I don't see Ring of Honor and those type shows. The stuff with McGuinness and Danielson hearkens back to the days of Tommy Dreamer killing himself for ECW. Of course the irony of that is that Dreamer ended up with a cushier job than some of the workers who fled for big money in WCW. That's a side issue. I always felt that Benoit was a domestic issue first and foremost and that wrestling was circumstance. I AM more concerned with workers running a high-risk style that may leave them in constant pain or crippled later in life. (I was going to cite Harley Race, but he had vehicular crashes unrelated to wrestling.)

 

I don't have a problem enjoying wrestling as long as the stupid behavior is cut out. Ladder matches for example, I think a good wrestling company should put them on the shelf for awhile. For a time they've been done every three months or more. That is too much, and workers are hurting themselves trying to top the last one and get over. Fans are not going to react to it anymore. Work looser. Fans know it's fake, you're not going to disappoint them if something doesn't look exactly right.

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. Even Slaughter/Sheik, the most brutal match the WWF produced in that era, is just two good bladejobs.

Watch it again.It's Slaughter and Iron Sheik competing to see who can take the nuttiest bump. Sheik wins by alot.

 

I AM more concerned with workers running a high-risk style that may leave them in constant pain or crippled later in life.

All of my dads friends who played high level high school football have destroyed knees and are in constant pain. Hogan who worked a relatively safe wrestling style has a busted up knee and hip (if memory serves)... I imagine Abby has more physical pain and wear and tear than most men his age. Wrestling has always been on some level a ritualized performative act of physical self destruction. Theres nothing really wrong with that. My guess is the objections here are to level of destruction and brain trauma.

 

 

The ROH needs road agents talking point is silly one. ROH has had Devito, Steamboat,Cornette, etc in the past. Veteran guys working backstage to put show together. No reason to believe that they don't have anyone in that role now. They don't do it as controlled and tightly as WWF or TNA but its done. Plus the idea that veteran wrestlers will somehow have magically different value systems than todays wrestlers is silly. So you prop Billington up against a locker room wall and have him go over everyones match before they step into the ring. Is he really going to tell someone "eeh that spot, not worth it"? Kevin Steen was trained by Jaques Rogeau, Roderick Strong trained by Neidhart. Do you imagine either of those veterans stepping up and telling those guys "Hey take less risks"? Or is it morre likely that they'd encourage them?

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So they don't care. That's understood. That said, Mick Foley got a huge reaction for falling off the top of the cage and then getting chokeslammed through it. WWE was smart enough to never do it again (without gimmicking). WWE is far more successful than ROH or TNA, and they've done it by creating characters people care about. With effort, any indy could accomplish the same thing if they really wanted to.

And it should be noted, that second fall was accidental and shouldn't have occurred in that fashion.
I never for a moment have believed that the second fall was accidental, anymore than what happened with Rock and the Chairshots went any different from planned. Just Foley bullshitting people.

 

Foley was suppose to go through the cage. Pretty clear from how they set up the chokeslam. The "shouldn't have occured in that fashion" more accurately could be described as "Foley stupidly thought he could control the bump through the cage more effectively". He was just a dumbfuck in thinking that.

 

 

John

That's what I mean to say. Of course the through the cage spot was set up. It just occurred far more violently than the participants anticipated.
I can't remember where I read this, but I recall an explanation saying that the theory was that the gimmicked cage roof wasn't supposed to just snap open like that, it was supposed to be a more gradual breakage and Foley would've sort of rolled down it diagonally and into the ring. Not sure if that's necessarily the true version, but it makes sense. I don't think even Mick is so dumbly masochistic that he'd willingly take a straight-down back bump from that height, because it would practically guarantee some serious harm. It would be like being in a scaffold match and intentionally falling off onto your back. If he had done it that way intentionally, then it was easily the dumbest and most dangerous thing he's ever done without question, and that covers a LOT of ground.

 

 

I do agree that wrestling certainly has a mountain of problems, but I do sometimes roll my eyes a bit at the "all wrestlers are CRAZY, really clinically insane" talking. Just an awfully hyperbolic way of Chicken Littling the message and almost guaranteeing that other people who don't agree with you won't even try to listen to your points.

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Wrestling is a dirty business

I think only the naive don't know that.

 

 

-- as hardcore fans, all of our hands are dirty.

Too narrow. Even regular, non-hardcore fans have dirty hands. They pop for the same shit.

 

 

Expressing contempt towards the business and all of its practitioners doesn't make you clean; it just makes you dirty and graceless.

I don't think having contempt for something that you're a fan of makes you dirty and graceless. No more than it makes one a saint or "clean".

 

I have a great deal of contempt for the MLB Players Association for how they handled the performance enhancers issue over the years. I otherwise admire the hell out of the MLBPA, and support much of what they've done over the years. It doesn't make me dirty and graceless to be critical of them on one aspect while being strongly supportive of them on others. It also doesn't make me "clean" for copping to their short comings. It's simply dealing with reality.

 

But even that has shades and colors. While I have contempt for the PA for how they handled it over the decades, I also understand why it was a difficult issue for them, and why it wasn't easy for them to roll out a solution.

 

Their membership was using, and lying about it. Even players who mouthed "we need to clean things up" were likely taking performance enhancers be it juice, HGH or uppers. The membership really, really, really didn't want anything done about it.

 

In addition, the relationship between the PA and Ownership was dogshit after collusion and the 1994 strike. Ownership, along with the Commissioners Office, didn't have a good track record of working with the Union, even on the drug issues. Ubberhoff tried to get unilateral, which is a similar thing we saw out of Bud when this started breaking.

 

The PA was caught between a Rock (membership not really wanting it cleaned up) and a Hard Place (Ownership that has a long and current track record of not working with the Union as partners in the Game). And it made a rather shitty spot for the Union Leadership to be in. They didn't handle it well at all.

 

Understanding *that* doesn't make me any "cleaner" in my contempt for how the MLBPA handled the issue. It's simply taking time to look at things from different angles to see how things got to where they were.

 

The issue of injuries, risks, drugs and the like in pro wrestling is similar. It isn't a wonderfully black-and-white, right-wrong thing. There are a lot of shades, colors and angles to the issues. A lot of it makes one pissed off. A lot of it makes one a bit embarassed at time for your role in it.

 

I suspect most here get that there is no silver bullet that will make it all go away.

 

 

John

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This new "wrestlers are stupid, wrestling is silly, why sacrifice your health for wrestling" trend is getting a little embarrassing. Everybody who's spewing their outrage belongs to a message board called Pro Wrestling *Only*. Most of the people spewing their outrage are simultaneously discussing a project in which they'd watch hundreds of *pro wrestling* matches, featuring legendary concussers like Vader and Hansen and the Steiners, not to mention Benoit. Wrestlers' self-mutilation has clearly succeeded in entertaining you; if you actually thought wrestling was stupid, you wouldn't be here.

 

ROH fucked up bigtime, and it was a scummy move by Gabe to let Danielson wrestle (sounds like Rocky didn't bump in his match), but this "how dare they" stuff is tiresome. Wrestlers and wrestling companies have always done stuff like this, and all of us have always loved it. And within the next couple months, all of you will watch a match with a potential concussion-causing move or two in it, and you'll still like the match. As any worker will tell you, concussions are caused by back bumps more often than any other type of move. Are you all now planning to watch only back-bump-free wrestling?

 

Wrestling is a dirty business -- as hardcore fans, all of our hands are dirty. Expressing contempt towards the business and all of its practitioners doesn't make you clean; it just makes you dirty and graceless.

Like I said earlier, you have to consider the issue of desensitization. I'm inclined to think that if I knew then what I know now, I'd never have become a wrestling fan in the first place. But now, it's all too easy for me to separate my immediate enjoyment of something in wrestling from my understanding of it's long-term consequences. That doesn't mean I can't understand both. Certainly doesn't mean that being aware of a problem and ignoring/denying/understating it is somehow better than being honest about it.

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I'm not suggesting that people shouldn't be bothered by the Benoit murders and all of their consequences. Not even suggesting that people shouldn't be troubled by watching wrestling now... it's only natural. Just suggesting that some people should be honest about the actual risks these people take, without current Net fads getting in the way.

 

It's hip to hate on US indy wrestling -- to talk about the risks these guys take for no money. That misses the point and trivializes the issue. As tomk points out, Hogan's a mess physically. Fishman's a mess. Takayama got a severe brain injury and is wrestling again. Meanwhile, how many times has A.J. Styles been hurt? Who has he hurt? How many times has El Generico been hurt? Who has he hurt?

 

The point isn't that the US indy spot style is unnecessarily dangerous. The point is that *wrestling* is unnecessarily dangerous. Steve Austin almost paralyzed a guy, Owen Hart almost paralyzed a guy, D-Lo Brown and Marty Jannetty *did* paralyze guys. Luger and Snuka and Nash have concussed people. Inoki, who worked a safe style, got concussed so badly that the IWGP title's first champion was the wrong guy; Ricky Steamboat's career ended on a back bump. Matt Sydal does moonsaults to the floor and takes huge bumps every time out; by all accounts, he's fine.

 

This has nothing to do with newer guys taking stupid risks that older generations didn't take -- it's just simply that worked wrestling matches, especially ones in which the participants leave the ring (meaning 100% of them), involve movements that will eventually lead to unplanned injury. This ROH show is an example. Danielson got concussed because he and Morishima were working too stiff (incidentally, Morishima's been involved in about half of the reported concussions in wrestling this year), but Nigel got hurt bumping into the guardrail. That clearly *wasn't* a planned spot, from all reports... it was just a dive gone wrong. The tope suicida's been around for almost 30 years.

 

Things go wrong in wrestling. It's the nature of the beast. People wreck their bodies in ROH, but people wrecked their bodies in Mid-South and Crockett and Memphis and Portland and St. Louis and everywhere else there's ever been wrestling. And 120 years ago, when it was a shoot sport, they were wrecking their bodies then too, just like they are in MMA now.

 

I got no beef with fans wanting things to change, but worrying about the style on the American indies should be about 90th on the list of things that need to be fixed. If you want to hate ROH, go right ahead, but ROH is *not* what's wrong with wrestling. Wrestling's what's wrong with wrestling.

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Like I said earlier, you have to consider the issue of desensitization. I'm inclined to think that if I knew then what I know now, I'd never have become a wrestling fan in the first place.

Fair enough. I personally think I would have, just because it was clear pretty quickly how often these guys got hurt. Steamboat went out just a couple months after I got into WCW. You had Austin lying motionless at Summerslam, and doing spots within a month; you had Villano IV's neck breaking in a meaningless tag on Nitro a couple months later. Even if I hadn't been on the Net at the time, I would've realized how dangerous it all was.

 

Benoit wasn't the first name wrestler to commit murder. He wasn't the first name wrestler to kill someone he was in a relationship with. Certainly wasn't the first wrestler to commit suicide, and he was far from the first wrestler to have his crimes covered up by the company he worked for. We'd all known that there were a bunch of guys with a well-publicized list of concussions... I don't feel like I had any illusions about the implications of that on someone's health.

 

I get that this is different. The crime was horrible on an entirely new level, it was perpetrated by a guy we all loved watching, and it happened recently. And it was pretty creepy watching a publicly traded company sweep it all under the rug... I get not being okay with any of that. I'm not okay with it, either.

 

But if you're watching wrestling with new eyes now, I kinda have to wonder what you were watching before.

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