Entertainers in Sports Are Grappling With Reality
By SELENA ROBERTS
Sports of The Times
July 8, 2007
The Samoan Bulldozer recently launched into an end-zone dance of sorts with a W.W.E. title belt of gaudy gold clenched in his teeth like a chew toy as he preened and flexed in the ring. With a quick glance of the crowd, you could see fans gyrate and mug along with him.
“We’re entertainers,” Vince McMahon, World Wrestling Entertainment’s chairman, said on the “Today” show last week. “We entertain people all over the world and we put smiles on faces.”
San Diego’s Shawne Merriman celebrates clenching a quarterback by flipping a tattoo of a light switch on his muscular forearm as he shimmies and shakes on the field in a sack dance called Lights Out, a reference to his nickname. In a quick search of YouTube, you’ll find Merriman’s moves mimicked in videos of drunks, a child and one cat.
“I think of myself as an entertainer," Merriman has often said.
Barry Bonds is followed by the sports paparazzi to catch his every sigh, stumble or swat. He once dismissed baseball’s issue of steroid cheating by saying: “We’re entertainers. Let us entertain."
How do you distinguish sports from entertainment, fakery from reality, when the two are so inseparable? What prods Congress into an obsession over steroids in baseball and concussions in football while ignoring the same issues that have fed a death march in professional wrestling?
McMahon, for one, is relieved by the slight. Usually, he is as much a Vegas-styled poser as his wrestlers, with a bulked-up body that renders his head the size of a hood ornament on a Winnebago. McMahon’s outsized persona has seemed smaller in mourning.
He was in defense mode on “Today” — attempting to separate W.W.E. from Chris Benoit, the Canadian Crippler, who the police say murdered his wife and 7-year-old son before hanging himself from a weight machine in his Georgia home last month.
A Bible was found next to each victim, and a cocktail of prescription drugs and anabolic steroids was discovered in the house. Toxicology reports are still out, but out of reflex, you wonder what prompted Benoit’s undoing: drug withdrawal or ’roid rage or brain trauma from too many head butts and canvas crashes?
Pratfalls can be lethal, too. In 2004, USA Today reported that 65 wrestlers younger than 45 died over a seven-year period in a profession where the mortality rate is seven times higher than the national average. But the choreographed nature of W.W.E. makes it easy for serious-minded politicians to dismiss the deaths of wrestlers like Mike (Crash Holly) Lockwood and Mike (Road Warrior Hawk) Hegstrand.
Pro wrestling is not a sport, lawmakers can rationalize. After all, it’s not part of ESPN’s programming, like, say, Nathan’s Famous hot-dog-eating competition. To be sure, if contestants had been devouring Ball Park franks, which suspiciously plump when you cook ’em, Congressional hearings would have been scheduled on the spot.
•
It is increasingly impossible for any Beltway inhabitant to marginalize W.W.E. as a farce when farce is braided with sports in so many ways:
¶W.W.E. is pure fiction, but so was the home-run chase between Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire during what now seems like a 1998 plot by baseball to seduce fans who dug the long ball.
¶Pro wrestling is only theatrical smack talk, but N.F.L. players once spouted the same reasoning when the slashing motion was in vogue as an on-field taunt.
¶W.W.E. events are scripted to the last letter, but wasn’t that also true of the profane T-shirt A-Rod’s wife wore to Yankee Stadium after the couple’s recent made-for-tabloid escapades?
¶Pro wrestlers appeal to niche devotees of fakery, and yet baseball fans, and perhaps a few Giants employees, just rushed the ballot boxes to place Bonds in the All-Star Game.
Athletes are athletes, masked or unmasked. Benoit leaned on medical assistance like a lot of competitors. Authorities say Benoit’s doctor prescribed excessive amounts of antidepressants and painkillers and steroid dosages when they indicted Phil Astin, a physician, last week.
Was Astin a wrestling fan who would do anything for the Canadian Crippler?
Access to athletic fame can skew Hippocratic oaths in any arena. A year ago, James Shortt was sent to prison after he supplied several members of the Carolina Panthers’ 2004 Super Bowl team with miracle potions, from steroids to human growth hormone.
There is no differentiating sports and entertainment in the mosh pit of anything-goes competition.
It was Merriman, as flamboyant as any overblown wrestler this side of Ric Flair, who had his Lights Out routine shut down for four games last season after he tested positive for a banned substance under the N.F.L.’s antidoping policy.
•
It is Bonds, as electric as any love-hate draw on the W.W.E. scene, who has been dogged by federal agents panting to link him to any Balco sins.
It is McMahon, a serial performer willing to stage his own death, who is left to lamely defend W.W.E. against steroid suspicions amid a backdrop involving another dead wrestler.
They’re entertainers, each man will claim. But who is real, who is unreal? It is impossible to tell.
E-mail: selenasports@nytimes.com
Sports of The Times
July 8, 2007
The Samoan Bulldozer recently launched into an end-zone dance of sorts with a W.W.E. title belt of gaudy gold clenched in his teeth like a chew toy as he preened and flexed in the ring. With a quick glance of the crowd, you could see fans gyrate and mug along with him.
“We’re entertainers,” Vince McMahon, World Wrestling Entertainment’s chairman, said on the “Today” show last week. “We entertain people all over the world and we put smiles on faces.”
San Diego’s Shawne Merriman celebrates clenching a quarterback by flipping a tattoo of a light switch on his muscular forearm as he shimmies and shakes on the field in a sack dance called Lights Out, a reference to his nickname. In a quick search of YouTube, you’ll find Merriman’s moves mimicked in videos of drunks, a child and one cat.
“I think of myself as an entertainer," Merriman has often said.
Barry Bonds is followed by the sports paparazzi to catch his every sigh, stumble or swat. He once dismissed baseball’s issue of steroid cheating by saying: “We’re entertainers. Let us entertain."
How do you distinguish sports from entertainment, fakery from reality, when the two are so inseparable? What prods Congress into an obsession over steroids in baseball and concussions in football while ignoring the same issues that have fed a death march in professional wrestling?
McMahon, for one, is relieved by the slight. Usually, he is as much a Vegas-styled poser as his wrestlers, with a bulked-up body that renders his head the size of a hood ornament on a Winnebago. McMahon’s outsized persona has seemed smaller in mourning.
He was in defense mode on “Today” — attempting to separate W.W.E. from Chris Benoit, the Canadian Crippler, who the police say murdered his wife and 7-year-old son before hanging himself from a weight machine in his Georgia home last month.
A Bible was found next to each victim, and a cocktail of prescription drugs and anabolic steroids was discovered in the house. Toxicology reports are still out, but out of reflex, you wonder what prompted Benoit’s undoing: drug withdrawal or ’roid rage or brain trauma from too many head butts and canvas crashes?
Pratfalls can be lethal, too. In 2004, USA Today reported that 65 wrestlers younger than 45 died over a seven-year period in a profession where the mortality rate is seven times higher than the national average. But the choreographed nature of W.W.E. makes it easy for serious-minded politicians to dismiss the deaths of wrestlers like Mike (Crash Holly) Lockwood and Mike (Road Warrior Hawk) Hegstrand.
Pro wrestling is not a sport, lawmakers can rationalize. After all, it’s not part of ESPN’s programming, like, say, Nathan’s Famous hot-dog-eating competition. To be sure, if contestants had been devouring Ball Park franks, which suspiciously plump when you cook ’em, Congressional hearings would have been scheduled on the spot.
•
It is increasingly impossible for any Beltway inhabitant to marginalize W.W.E. as a farce when farce is braided with sports in so many ways:
¶W.W.E. is pure fiction, but so was the home-run chase between Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire during what now seems like a 1998 plot by baseball to seduce fans who dug the long ball.
¶Pro wrestling is only theatrical smack talk, but N.F.L. players once spouted the same reasoning when the slashing motion was in vogue as an on-field taunt.
¶W.W.E. events are scripted to the last letter, but wasn’t that also true of the profane T-shirt A-Rod’s wife wore to Yankee Stadium after the couple’s recent made-for-tabloid escapades?
¶Pro wrestlers appeal to niche devotees of fakery, and yet baseball fans, and perhaps a few Giants employees, just rushed the ballot boxes to place Bonds in the All-Star Game.
Athletes are athletes, masked or unmasked. Benoit leaned on medical assistance like a lot of competitors. Authorities say Benoit’s doctor prescribed excessive amounts of antidepressants and painkillers and steroid dosages when they indicted Phil Astin, a physician, last week.
Was Astin a wrestling fan who would do anything for the Canadian Crippler?
Access to athletic fame can skew Hippocratic oaths in any arena. A year ago, James Shortt was sent to prison after he supplied several members of the Carolina Panthers’ 2004 Super Bowl team with miracle potions, from steroids to human growth hormone.
There is no differentiating sports and entertainment in the mosh pit of anything-goes competition.
It was Merriman, as flamboyant as any overblown wrestler this side of Ric Flair, who had his Lights Out routine shut down for four games last season after he tested positive for a banned substance under the N.F.L.’s antidoping policy.
•
It is Bonds, as electric as any love-hate draw on the W.W.E. scene, who has been dogged by federal agents panting to link him to any Balco sins.
It is McMahon, a serial performer willing to stage his own death, who is left to lamely defend W.W.E. against steroid suspicions amid a backdrop involving another dead wrestler.
They’re entertainers, each man will claim. But who is real, who is unreal? It is impossible to tell.
E-mail: selenasports@nytimes.com
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