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Submitted by Degenerate on Tuesday, September 11, 2007 at 5:51 PM EST
 Welcome back to another stirring rendition of the column that's manly enough to post a picture of a unicorn for no apparent reason. I'm your host, Degenerate, the only guy who boldly declares that "You all want me, but you can't have me" in the Columns Forum. All ego-centric lapses aside, I'm glad to be here once again, and hopefully give you all a little something to think about. The unicorn doesn't have absolutely anything to do with anything at all. I'm just trying to fill the LordsOfPain.net Main Page with its quota of mythical beasts. I don't think there's enough pictures of those posted here. Thanks anyway to aisce and KrazE from the LOPForums for supplying the pic for totally out-of-context usage. I don't know about you all, but all this steroid talk has got me bored. I'll talk about it as little as possible to avoid falling asleep in my keyboard. As everyone else, I was glued to the news when the suspensions these past weeks broke out, but after a while, it just gets old. Also, it just feeds the media, who jump at every single change, no matter how small, to bash the "low-brow" world of professional wrestling. While I personally think there are a lot of places to spread the blame, the media just blames the industry as a whole, which angers me for some reason. Oh well, nothing else we can do, just wait until the mystery unravels, I guess. No more steroid-pumping talk from me. I'd prefer to talk about leprechauns, rumors of quitting wrestlers, empty promises and brain damage. Lots of fun. * I will personally go out and kill anyone who four weeks ago thought that Hornswoggle was going to be Vince McMahon's so-called son. Nobody could've guessed that, not even if they were smoking weed and took three hits of LSD at the same time. I mean, it was plausible, in a sense that "anything can happen in the WWE". I remember when Todd Pettengill said that at least three times per hour in every single WWF show he appeared on in the mid-90's. Anyway, with all the rampant rumors about Kennedy being the "chosen one", I'm think the WWE didn't want the announcement to be so obvious, so the little leprechaun is was. My guess is that they're going to run with this for the next couple of weeks, until some evidence comes out and shows that the little guy was actually not a bastard. In any case, Hornswoggle has had the best run of any little man in the WWE since the Haiti Kid / Little Mr. T. That should count for something. * I was shocked to find out that Ric Flair walked out of the WWE. The jury's still out on this one, as conflicting reports say he's still part of the active roster. However, his absence on TV seems to drive the point home. His name wasn't on the original list of suspended wrestlers who violated the Wellness Policy or anything. Even though a later report mentioned his name, I don't believe Flair was taking steroids recently. Maybe back in the 70's and 80's, but it seems that someone pushing 60 is plain stupid to take those dangerous substances. So unless he had a major problem with some of the higher-ups, which I somehow find highly unlikely, I don't think these rumors are true. Well, maybe he did read a pre-copy of Batista's book and found out he didn't have the big man's respect, prompting him to pack his bags, teary-eyed, and give his notice on the spot? * Nice how TNA started yapping all week about an announcement of their so-called negotiations with a former world champion, only to not mention those negotiations at all this Sunday on their Pay-Per-View? To anyone or any company out there: If you talk, please back it up. It's not cool to leave people hanging because you probably hit a snag in the negotiation period. Next time, just leave the deal-talkin' in the office, please. At least they did announce their expected two-hour time slot that starts next month. I'm very curious to see how they'll deal with this much time. I think they'll have to get more talent to balance out the shows. Also, production costs will certainly get higher, which is something that most people don't think about. Let's see if TNA can handle it, I'm sure they will. Just get ready to see more of Jeff Jarrett now. I can't wait! * So, now it's brain damage that Chris Benoit had, that prompted him to do one of the most heinous acts any human being can ever commit. While it's nice to believe this, I'm still calling bullshit on this. Due to the very unexpected situation, Benoit's family members, friends and fans are trying to tack a reason on why he did this. People tend to disbelieve everything bad and try to put something plausible that sounds "nicer", if it can possibly be, just to ease the minds of those involved. Benoit going crazy because of 'roid rage: bad. Benoit going crazy because he had brain damage and he didn't know what he was doing: slightly better. Now, it may be true, but there's still no nice way of putting murder. Christopher Nowitzki's never-ending campaign for concussions is getting a bit annoying to me. * Cryme Tyme got shown the pink slip last week after an incident with Lance Cade and Trevor Murdoch in a house show. If what Cryme Tyme did was true, then I agree it's a serious offense. No wrestler, under absolutely any circumstance, should threaten physical harm to another wrestler at all. However, being fired, and seemingly on the spot? I disagree with that action, if the only thing that happened was the situation in the house show. A suspension would be fine, probably necessary, to cool down the tensions between both. But just think about it: If John Cena, Randy Orton, or another of the WWE's "golden boys" threatened to beat the hell out of someone in the ring, they wouldn't be fired at all. Hell, I lost count at how many times Hardcore Holly stiffed the shit out of many young wrestlers. Unless there's something hidden behind the scenes that caused this release, it's just totally unfair. My guess? They stole something. For reals. I fucking hate my job. Yeah, I'm sure you've heard that one a trillion times before by your family members. If you have a job right now, I'm sure you've said it a hundred times before yourself. I say it a hundred times per day. It seems that once you reach adulthood, you realize how much life can suck when you have a job. You need to wake up early, work either in a terrible environment or with thankless bosses, go home late at night, just to go to sleep and do it again the next day, five times a week. I sometimes liken my routine as a real-life Sims session. Pretty sad, actually. It wasn't always this way. When I first got this job, I considered myself extremely fortunate getting a job in my related field of studies straight out of college. Most people aren't fortunate enough to get a decent job in what they want to. In fact, my commute during those first months was a two-hour drive from one side of the Puerto Rico to the other side at 5:00 AM, and two hours back in the late afternoon. I didn't mind, I was happy. And when I was happy, I did a lot of work. Now that my happy days were gone, and I saw the modus operandi of this place, my productivity went down - way down, and simply waited for Friday afternoons when I got my check and headed home. It happens everywhere. An unhappy or uncomfortable employee is an unproductive employee. Just like things are at my current job, as things stand now in the WWE, morale seems really, really down. Following the Chris Benoit and steroid scandals, I'm sure the environment isn't as joyous as when the company was a few years ago, maybe as short as a few months ago. A whole lot has happened in a very short period of time. Even though the scandals don't directly involve the current wrestlers, I'm sure it takes a large toll on them. After all, they are the face of the company. And that may be one problem by itself. Outside of the McMahons, there are a ton of people who hold executive positions and are much higher up the food chain than the lowly wrestlers. But who the fuck cares about them? A high-ranking WWE executive can walk by me right now, smack me in my face, and I still wouldn't know he earns about 100 times my salary while working for a multi-million dollar company. I'm sure those execs are feeling the pressure of the company's woes. However, when the media comes out to attack, do they target an executive not named McMahon? They don't. I'm sure these pressures, along with the regular pressures of the rigorous lifestyle they wrestlers need to maintain, along with the pressure to perform flawlessly in front of large, rabid crowds, is enough to depress any person on this Earth. In fact, I'm pretty surprised that we don't hear about wrestlers being treated from depression or a similar mental disorder. Just like any music or movie star, you can have a large amount of fame, wealth and recognition, yet still be depressed for any reason. Yet, when these wrestlers are feeling down, and I'm sure they are, they should fail to perform to an adequate level, right? These mounting pressures should make them crack, and not want to go out and give it their all. They should be out there dragging their feet in the ring, giving lazy hip-tosses and boring sleeper holds until their allotted time was up, do their finish and go to the back. Then they'll just go to their hotel and dream about the day they get paid and can be home for a couple of days before heading back on the road. Just like me. However, the wrestlers don't drag their feet to the ring and sloppily finish their match, nor half-ass their match just for the sake of ending it (well, at least in most of the cases). On the contrary, you see most of the wrestlers going out to the ring, psyched up with the crowd reactions, leaving everything in the ring and doing their damn best to please everyone in attendance and watching on TV. And this is after they haven't seen their families for a week or two, and they most likely slept only three hours the day before because they needed to drive six or seven hours to the next town. A couple of months back, I wrote a column about how wrestlers have real lives outside of the professional wrestling spotlight, yet we, the fans, treat them like they're robots who need to go out and give five-star matches all the time. We sometimes expect them to do the impossible, and we don't know if they just had a serious problem at home with their wife or kids. For example, if you're married and your wife asked for a divorce in the morning, would you honestly be mentally prepared to work at full capacity the rest of that day? Of course not. So why is it expected from the wrestlers? It's pretty unfair, if you ask me. My entire point of this column was going to be just like the column I mentioned above. We treat wrestlers like robots, unfairly having super-high expectations for the every single day, and on those off-days when they don't perform well, we bash them to death. We should be admiring them for going out of their way for us. Yeah, we pay for the entertainment, but we still make the wrestlers pay a high price to risk injury and even their own lives. But after re-reading that particular column, something else came to mind. Just like I said before, a lot has happened in a short amount of time. Since I wrote that column, a downside of these wrestlers keeping their damn problems at home has appeared, and it wasn't pretty, although it's simply just a thought and most likely isn't the case. From all accounts, Chris Benoit was someone who never told his problems to anyone, kept everything to himself, even from his very close friends, and was always viewed as someone who had things under control. Of course, that wasn't the case. Were mounting problems responsible for his disgusting actions? If so, did keeping them bottled up help with his self-destruction? While we may never know, it sounds totally reasonable. Who knows, if Benoit had personal problems that were treated on time, like providing counseling to help his real-life woes, maybe this wouldn't be happening at all. But by keeping it inside, it probably just kept on building until it exploded. If this was the case, why didn't he tell anyone about the problems? A similar case comes to mind, which is Eddie Guerrero. When Guerrero had his drug and alcohol problem, he never told a single soul about the problems. Of course, he got help because his good friends (which ironically included Chris Benoit) saw he had a problem and informed the adequate people in charge about it. Even though it eventually got him fired, in the long haul it helped him realize his problems, which got fixed in time before they exploded. So if talking about your problems helps out with the healing process, why don't more people do it? Most times, I think it's the machismo that comes into play, stopping someone from talking about their problems. A lot of men fear of being seen as weak or unable to control what seems like a simple problem. Other times, people think that others are completely unable to helped them in any way, when that's obviously not true. In other occasions, we have insensitive bastards are "friends" who just rip on us unmercifully when they know about the problem. Finally, there are cases when disclosing a tough issue, like drug abuse or alcoholism, can lead to a suspension. All of those things might happen. What does a large company do to remedy this problem? It's difficult to tell. I don't know how things are run backstage, or how accessible the right people are in a busy day when TV tapings start in a few hours. But first things first, the wrestlers should be able to have the freedom to talk to someone who can genuinely help in resolving any pending issues. Again, by all accounts, the wrestling world is ruthless, and very few people can be considered true friends, so knowing who to talk to is vital in these cases. Another issue at hand should be easing up on being so strict when it comes to scheduling, although nowadays things are more lax than before. I believe when Ricky Steamboat was in the WWE back in the late-80's and was Intercontinental Champion, he requested time off to be with his pregnant wife, who was expecting a child soon. The company, bitter over this, took the title from him, then shoved him off to the lower-mid-card for the rest of his run there. That doesn't happen now, as the WWE does grant time off sometimes. But the wrestler mentality is to fulfill their obligations at the expense of everything else in the world. That's not a healthy frame of mind at all. In short, the company should be responsible up to a certain point with the mental well-being of their wrestlers. They should be as open and helpful as possible, especially understanding to their talent's needs. But the wrestlers need to get their ass into gear and help fix their own problems too. Most of the times, the problems we all have in our daily lives are blown way out of proportion, just to keep them bottled up inside. I hope people start taking responsibility for their own mishaps and put as much strength in fixing the problems as they do trying to keep them under wraps. If not, then it's your problem. Right now, the Columns Forum is holding a tournament dubbed Wargames 2007 for their up-and-coming talent. It's a nice, three-round tournament to give bragging rights (and a one-time Main Page spot) to one lucky writer there. Those tournaments are great for those involved, as well as the readers like you, who enjoy seeing the creative juices flowing from these brilliant writers. Right now the Columns Forum is swamped with columns for the tournament, and many of them are excellent reads. However, seeing that I'm a distinguished judge for the tourney (or maybe I was the last person in the queue of potential judges), my regular column-reading suggestions won't be part of the tournament. Don't fret, though I will give three great columns not related to the tournament for you to read. The Supreme Xperience (Vol. #13) - Success! By X-FV1 How does one measure the success of anything in this world? Is there even a definition for success? My pal, Version 1 of the former X-Factor, asks around the Columns Forum these same questions. I think he did so because he's lazy enough to answer it himself. Black Lesnar Battles the Pink Robots By aisce and MadChuck I enjoyed Bobby Lashley for these past couple of months before his injury. However, there are those who still can't grasp why Lashley has been pushed to the moon. Thanks to some research, asice and MadChuck teamed up to shed some light on Black Lesnar (as Lashley is affectionately known to this duo) and his popularity. The Vault: Tuesday Night Tension by BC Reposted by YourAyatollah In his quest to preserve the legend of the Columns Forum, Columns Forum Hall of Famer extraordinaire YourAyatollah reposted this gem by former Main Pager (and formerly awesome) BC from 2005. Although it's a shame YourAyatollah only does reposts these days, these columns from yesteryear show the greatness that comes out from the forums. That'll be all this week. Thanks to all for hanging out here for a while. If you feel compelled to write me something, even if you think the column above is the worst piece of trash that has ever graced your eyes, shoot a quick message my way at dennmart@gmail.com, or head on over to my feedback thread and leave something there. Your words are always appreciated and always answered. Swing on by next time for another kick-ass column. Or so my mom says so. See y'all next time, Degenerate ***DIRECT LINK*** Over 14 Total HIGH QUALITY Maria 2008 PB Photos! MUST SEE!
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