Half Life

W.W.F.-C.I.O.: Jonathan Last of the normally union-averse magazine The Weekly Standard thinks professional wrestlers should form a union. Four wrestlers, including Chris Benoit, have died this year, Last notes in his Philadelphia Inquirer column. “None was even 50.” He continues:

If you think back to the wrestlers from your childhood Saturday mornings, you’ll be chilled at the list of the dead: Crash Holly, Kerry Von Erich, Owen Hart, Adrian Adonis, Yokozuna, Brian Pillman, Davey Boy Smith, André the Giant, Rick Rude, Bruiser Brody, Miss Elizabeth, Big Boss Man, Earthquake, Curt Hennig, Junkyard Dog, Hercules, Big John Studd, Road Warrior Hawk.

And here’s the scary part: None of those wrestlers lived past 46.

Last says that “a striking number of the deaths were related to steroid or drug use.” He cites a USA Today study from 2004 that found that “wrestlers have death rates roughly seven times higher than the general population.” Last writes:

Pushed to achieve comic-book physiques, wrestlers must perform despite pain or lose their contracts. And unlike traditional athletes, they cannot rely on meritocracy to protect them, as in “as long as I excel, they can’t touch me”; they can’t precisely because the outcomes are scripted. Add that at the major-league level, professional wrestling has essentially become a monopoly. (A nascent promotion, Total Nonstop Action Wrestling, is beginning to establish roots in the wrestling world, but it is far from being a true competitor to the WWE.)

The management of WWE can hire and fire at will because they are less like the commissioners of a sports league and more like the owners of a theater.

Except that at this particular theater, the actors often die.

Professional wrestling, Last concludes, “has come to make 19th-century coal mining look like a cushy gig.”

Chris Suellentrop

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He’s No Churchill

Lynne Olson, the author of “Troublesome Young Men: The Rebels Who Brought Churchill to Power and Helped Save England,” has decided to give President Bush some interpretive advice while he reads her book. Olson writes in The Washington Post: “He hasn’t let me know what he thinks about it, but it’s a safe bet that he’s identifying with the book’s portrayal of Churchill, not Chamberlain. But I think Bush’s hero would be bemused, to say the least, by the president’s wrapping himself in the Churchillian cloak. Indeed, the more you understand the historical record, the more the parallels leap out — but they’re between Bush and Chamberlain, not Bush and Churchill.”

Among the similarities Olson sees between Bush and Chamberlain: “Like Bush and unlike Churchill, Chamberlain came to office with almost no understanding of foreign affairs or experience in dealing with international leaders”; “Chamberlain and his men saw little need to build up a strong coalition of European allies”; and “Chamberlain also laid claim to unprecedented executive authority, evading the checks and balances that are supposed to constrain the office of prime minister.”

Chris Suellentrop