The latest AP story reports that the Albany (NY) County District Attorney’s Office is saying Chris Benoit “had previously received drug deliveries from a Florida business that sold steroids on the Internet” — of course, this is MedXLife.com, the subject of previous stories conneting wrestlers and other athletes to steroids and human growth hormone (HGH). SI.com, which broke the initial story months ago, has posted an update on Benoit’s ties to MedXLife.
In yet another unexpected twist to this story, Vancouver’s News Radio 1130 is reporting that a local woman, Pam Winthrope, had been in contact with Benoit a few years ago and that his “son had a genetic condition called Fragile X syndrome.” This inherited mental impairment that can be very difficult for parents to deal with. Details on Fragile X Syndrome can be found at Wikipedia.
Finally, in possibly the last item of the night, PWTorch.com’s Wade Keller has written something that I have been thinking all day, and that isn’t a new idea for an industry that sees way too much tragedy. Here is an excerpt from his latest blog entry:
The no. 1 change that has to happen in this industry – and I’ve been sounding this bell for over 15 years in print in the Torch Newsletter – is mandatory time off for wrestlers on a systematic basis. If every wrestler had six weeks off twice a year, their bodies would have time to recover from nagging injuries, they could develop full-fledged relationships with their spouces and children, they could hold off on feel-good shortcuts such as overusage of prescription pills because they know there is light at the end of the now-endless tunnel that is the WWE schedule, and they might have longer, more productive careers and better lives. The result: Cut their ample pay by the resulting 20 percent, and hire 20 percent more wrestlers to fill in the openings that would result from the systematic rotation of wrestlers at any given time. More wrestlers get work, everyone still makes good money working 9 months a year, and careers last longer, quality of life goes up, and deaths may be avoided for a long list of resulting benefits from this system. It should have been adapted as the schedule 15 years ago, 10 years ago, 5 years ago. And more so than ever – now.
I couldn’t agree more, and while I feel WWE has acted/reacted as best as could be expected to the crazy events of the past few days, hopefully the company is staying open-minded, ready and willing to implement a change to the industry even bolder than the Wellness Policy that was created in the wake of Eddie Guerrero’s death.
