Chris & Nancy (18 page)

Through it all, he continued to answer my questions, to preview a couple of my blog articles on his site, and to provide other indispensable support. So what we had here was a months-long clinic in the vagaries of “wrestling communication.”

It finally reached the point where I had to ask Meltzer directly why he had withheld or muted baseline information on the Benoit weekend: that the
Raw
tribute was contrived and, furthermore, a substantive opening on a host of
WWE
timeline discrepancies. I pointed out that in his published coverage, he had laboriously analyzed the on-camera behavior of everyone at the Corpus Christi shoot, and specifically noted the odd words and body language of Chavo Guerrero and William Regal. Most puzzlingly, Meltzer gave Vince McMahon credit for holding the crew together through that day's trauma. There was a basic disconnect between saying these things, no matter how correct each fact was in isolation, and not telling the rest of the story — that McMahon knew the score and was controlling the form and timing of how the Benoit news reached the public.

Meltzer explained to me that while the timeline was “a” story, “to me the big story was what caused Benoit to do what he did, and when it came out he was using the drugs everyone would have expected, an analysis of the ways to make the drug testing policy more honest and effective.”

That explanation is unsatisfactory. Meltzer knows at least as well as anyone that an effective reporter cannot arbitrarily dictate the parameters of a story.
WWE
's suspicious timeline was the linchpin of the Benoit scandal at the fleeting moment when it had the public's full attention. Since how that resolved would impact the company's credibility, it was arguably the single most important factor in determining whether meaningful scrutiny of drug testing and other questionable practices of the wrestling industry would get any traction.

One of Meltzer's most-quoted observations is that if athletes in legitimate sports died at anywhere close to the rate in wrestling, the phenomenon would be front-page news. That observation seems ironic following a review of the Benoit coverage by him and other wrestling journalists. When the chips were down, they were less proactive about spurring awareness than they would like us — and themselves — to believe. Starting the day by pontificating on the uniqueness of the business, they ended it by encapsulating the question of whether the term “wrestling journalism” is an oxymoron. Quick to note the mostly trivial mistakes in non-expert renderings of biographies and urban legends, and eager to demonstrate their superior grasp of the cat-and-mouse processes of drug testing, they also behaved an awful lot like the mainstream media they criticized.

Wrestling
journalists
, after all, are wrestling
fans
; and fans have short attention spans. Fans wanted to move on from Chris and Nancy and Daniel Benoit as soon as possible, and they did . . . to Chris Jericho and Shawn Michaels' comebacks . . . to Ric Flair's retirement . . . to John Cena and Rey Mysterio's injuries and Stephanie and Triple H's family political machinations. After wiping away a tear or two, fans weren't about to interrupt their junk entertainment. Nor were the sheets that catered to them about to squander ethical capital trying to persuade them to do otherwise.

CHAPTER 12

FOR ALL WE KNOW, A POLITE RAP
of knuckles on the door of Dr. Phillippe C. Astin III's office in Carrollton, Georgia, would have served just as well. But the operatives of the Atlanta office of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration not only were armed with a subpoena; they were backed up by
TV
cameras alerted to capture a battery of agents with the letters “
DEA
” on the back of their government-issue jackets. With that many beasts needing that much red meat, no simple knock on the door would suffice. Instead, viewers of
CNN
were treated to video of a battering ram knocking the door down. The footage looped over and over, like that Pentagon video of the bomb that had succeeded in obliterating its target in Iraq with no civilian casualties.

It was June
29
,
2007
— the same day the Connecticut cops interrogated poor Matthew Greenberg — and the meter on Fayette County District Attorney Scott Ballard's fifteen minutes of fame was ticking toward zero. This was the second raid in three days on the office of Dr. Astin, who was Chris Benoit's personal physician and well known throughout the Atlanta-area sports and wrestling communities for being an easy touch with requests for prescriptions. This had put Dr. Astin in the crosshairs of the
DEA
and the U.S. attorney. After the Benoit family's bodies were found, indices of the flow of drugs in the region, maintained by the
DEA
's Office of Diversion Control, lined up with prescription information at the crime scene identifying Astin as the supplier of much of Chris's injectable testosterone and other pharmaceuticals. In a three-year period through May
9
,
2007
, Astin prescribed Benoit, on average, a ten-month supply of steroids every three to four weeks.

In the raids of Astin's office, agents seized copies of prescriptions “for Testosterone, Xanax, Adderall, Concerta, Hydrocodone, Oxycodone, and Soma,” according to a seven-count indictment on July
2
, “which were consistent, in terms of quantities, dosages, and frequencies of the prescriptions, with illegal prescription drug abuse. Multiple undated copies of prescriptions for controlled substances were also found in various medical records.” The indictment documented the doctor's high volumes of prescriptions to patients “M.J.” and “O.G.” Though they wouldn't confirm it, the wrestling community matched up these initials with the wrestlers Mark Jindrak and Oscar Gutiérrez (“Rey Mysterio”).

The public insertion of the Astin prosecution into the Benoit story meant two things. First, the family medical records, which were pertinent to the murder-suicide, remained under seal, layering puzzlement atop conundrum. Second, Scooter Ballard's rambling commentary on the varieties of the bizarre lost its dominance of the daily drumbeat of sound bites. After all, this was now, literally, a federal case.

Prosecutors also leaked other information joining Benoit's fall to the region's drug-besotted wrestling scene. The year before, when Benoit's close friend Johnny Grunge died, empty bottles were found next to him with labels indicating they very recently contained a total of
120
Soma pills prescribed by Astin. Of course, Astin hadn't advised Durham to take them all at once. In May
2008
, federal prosecutors would issue a “superseding” indictment of Astin, adding
175
counts and several more coded wrestling names: “C.M.B.” for Christopher Michael Benoit, “N.E.B.” for Nancy Elizabeth Benoit, “R.W.H.” for Robert William “Hardcore Holly” Howard, and “M.A.B.” for Marcus Alexander “Buff” Bagwell.

On January
29
,
2009
, Dr. Astin pleaded guilty to all
175
counts. His attorney, Natasha Perdew Silas, explained to the judge that he was just a country doctor who “in chronic pain cases, . . . more often than not, would simply accede to the patient's request that they needed strong or stronger medicine to handle their pain.” As the years went by, the lawyer said, “Dr. Astin became more and more willing to bend the rules.”

***

The Astin indictment did not include counts on steroids, the congenial access to which was the doctor's most substantial claim to infamy. Technically, he was busted only for the painkillers, muscle relaxers, and sedatives heavily used by the same jocks who also abused steroids. According to law enforcement insiders, this omission reflected the embryonic state of the government's war on steroids, which escalated after President Bush pushed it in his
2004
State of the Union speech. The authorities' longer history of battling heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, and other hard-core street drugs makes possible a more direct chain of arrests for those substances. But in the early years of moving up any new distribution chain, the prosecutors must strategically go after smaller-scale users and dealers for whatever they can find in order to get them off the streets and out of business, while preserving evidence of the mass marketing of the primary targeted drug for more ambitious cases down the road against bigger fish.

The Astin prosecution revealed other steps in the evolution of anabolic enhancement and its embrace by the mainstream for both athletic and quasi-athletic purposes. These factors had informed the drug culture of pro wrestling for decades prior to reaching public consciousness.

As many sports fans now understand, the original battleground of steroids was the Olympic Games, especially in weightlifting and certain track-and-field events. It was a time when Eastern bloc countries were a step ahead of the U.S. in the technology of cheating and the Games were a major Cold War platform. By the
1960
s steroids had spread to pro football, as well as to less legitimate sports like bodybuilding and pro wrestling, where the premium was on appearance more than on conventional definitions of athletic “performance.” In Southern California, Venice's Muscle Beach scene was enabled by a network of gay doctors who traded illicit drugs for sexual favors and mirrored the hustling strategies of its core denizens. These were the precursors of what wrestling people would tab as “mark” doctors. Not all the doctors who effectively doubled as drug connections qualified as starry-eyed fans; but, for a price, all were willing to provide virtual blank-check scripts for steroids, as well as for the painkillers and other self-medications used to make the starving-artist lifestyle more palatable.

For wrestlers, the new drug regime had even more sinister implications than for bodybuilders, who perceived immediately how the ante had been upped and the competition skewed. Comprehension of the commercial benefits of steroids was a bit slower in wrestling, but over time, the marketplace spoke loudly and clearly there, too. With their far-flung tours and few days off, wrestlers competing for top spots on the basis of a favored artificial look did not have the opportunities of bodybuilders or seasonal athletes to use, taper, abstain, and start all over — the process known in the muscle gyms as “cycling.” And every element of their punishing working conditions and the cocktails they utilized to master them reinforced and exacerbated the problem. Steroids not only built muscle mass; they also hastened recovery from hard workouts, which often were squeezed in between wrestling bookings at either end of plane or automobile trips. Synthetic derivatives of testosterone, the male hormone, seemed an obvious solution to a multitude of problems. As it turned out, though, the muscle growth from anabolic steroids also overloaded the tendons connecting muscle groups. This, in turn, caused exotic new injuries, most notably torn triceps (upper arm) and pectorals (chest). That was without even accounting for other unintended effects, which ranged from the cosmetic (back acne, swollen skulls, “bitch tits”) to the alarming (shrunken testicles and impotence, liver and kidney damage, arterial blockage).

Dick “The Bruiser” Afflis, a former National Football League journeyman who hit it big in wrestling in the late
1950
s, was surely one of the earliest steroid guys. Inside and outside the ring, from coast to coast, the Bruiser brawled his way to main events and media attention. Wayne Coleman, a charismatic and flamboyant muscle man (and, unlike the Bruiser, a better talker than performer), became a prototype
1970
s heel, “Superstar Billy Graham,” and a champion of Vince McMahon's father's World Wide Wrestling Federation. Graham's gimmick inspired many other careers, including those of Jesse “The Body” Ventura, the future governor of Minnesota, and Hulk Hogan, whose style and success during the continental promotional war of the early cable
TV
era transformed forever pro wrestling and the expectations of its talent.

Vince McMahon was the promoter who won the war, largely through guiding Hogan to crossover stardom in the period leading up to the first
WrestleMania
in
1985
. By then, 'roids were defining not just
a
look in wrestling but
the
look up and down the rosters of even less formidable promotions. The problem was made more intractable by the personal fetish for size and cartoonish muscularity of McMahon himself, who lifted weights and was “on the juice.” (At the time he didn't perform, except as a
TV
announcer.) The fact that wrestling is “worked” put promoters in a unique position to set standards, even if it is not fully appreciated that they hardly have absolute “power of the pencil” and are destined to fail if they don't heed fan feedback. From his position as the head of the first multinational wrestling corporation, which morphed into a merchandising powerhouse, McMahon had a particular vision of maxing out on multiple revenue streams in every conceivable entertainment avenue, and it worked. His decisions on which performers to push reflected this bias. In turn,
WWF
's impossible-to-misinterpret signal got internalized by every independent wrestling troupe, every up-and-comer, every wannabe.

To say, as many do, that wrestlers are role models for the kids watching them on
TV
reduces a complex dynamic to a Parents Television Council slogan, and in so doing, vastly understates the problem. Willingness to do steroids, and just about whatever it takes in order to get oneself “over,” has become as integral to wrestling's rewards system as facelifts and breast augmentation surgery are to Hollywood's.

In the years prior to Vincent Kennedy McMahon's
1982
purchase of the Northeast wrestling territory from a group headed by his father, Vincent James McMahon, and in the first two years of
WWF
's ambitious expansion, the promotion's syndicated television shows were taped in Allentown and Hamburg, Pennsylvania. The state athletic commission-appointed attending physician for those shows, a Harrisburg urologist and osteopath named George Zahorian, reveled in his access to the wrestlers and in his bonanza as their connection. Before Allentown shows in the '
80
s,
WWF
ers lining up for their Zahorian-administered blood-pressure tests clutched hundred-dollar bills, for which the doctor swapped his bags of goodies. Zahorian also FedExed them to wrestling people — Hogan and McMahon among them — more or less on demand.

In
1990
, following an undercover investigation conducted through Bill Dunn, a power-lifter and University of Virginia strength and conditioning coach,
DEA
agents raided Zahorian's office and arrested him. (Dunn himself faced a long list of charges before turning state's evidence, and died shortly thereafter.) The following summer, a jury found Zahorian guilty of eleven felony counts of illegally distributing controlled substances. It was the first conviction of a physician under the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of
1988
, the first statute to define steroids as a controlled substance and to ban their prescription for non-therapeutic purposes. Zahorian did federal prison time in addition to paying a fine and seeing the government seize his condo office complex.

The wrestlers testifying at Zahorian's trial included Superstar Billy Graham (by now crippled by bone and joint degeneration from his decades of steroid abuse), Rowdy Roddy Piper, Rick Martel, Brian Blair, and Danny Spivey. In one of his earliest and most important interventions, lawyer Jerry McDevitt got the judge to quash Hulk Hogan's subpoena to testify. But Zahorian's shipments of steroids to Hogan still came out in court, and news accounts carried a photo of the two posing together. The scandal unraveled when Hogan went on Arsenio Hall's
TV
talk show, where he was expected to own up to a mistake but instead lied through his teeth, insisting he had never used steroids except on two occasions, under Zahorian's supervision, to treat injuries. Former wrestling colleagues went on the record and persuasively contradicted Hogan. And the drug scandal fueled a sex scandal when ex-
WWF
ers came forward with anecdotes of both hetero- and homosexual harassment by company executives.

In
1994
, Vince McMahon himself was in the dock in a federal courtroom on Long Island for alleged conspiracy to distribute steroids. But this time the government's case overreached: a conspiracy, by definition, requires the participation of more than one person, and the mere suggestion that
WWF
's booking priorities rewarded the unnaturally musclebound was insufficient to establish one. McMahon also may have lucked out. In
1990
, through social connections, he had gotten a tip that Zahorian was hot, which motivated
WWF
to stop hiring him as a ringside doctor. During much of the period in question, Zahorian was employed by the Pennsylvania State Athletic Commission; after the passage of deregulatory legislation, there was still a requirement for a ringside physician, who henceforth would be appointed by the promotion. At McMahon's trial, the former
WWF
employee in charge of that task, Anita Scales, testified that she had tried to cut off Zahorian, but McMahon assistant Pat Patterson overruled her, saying, “The boys need their candy.”