Castrodale: Linda McMahon still wrestling with her past

Depending on what state motto is embossed on your license plate, this may be one of the years where the upcoming US Senate elections mean that your nightly newscast features a number of action verbs like “mudslinging” or “facing off” or the adorably antiquated “muckracking”. If you’re in Connecticut, though, you can add “chair throwing” and “piledriving” to the list, courtesy of Republican candidate and former World Wrestling Entertainment CEO Linda McMahon.
Although McMahon resigned from the WWE’s board last September, she spent the past thirty years surrounded by more men in tights than the director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. After smacking down two challengers in last week’s primary election, McMahon will now face Connecticut’s current Attorney General Richard Blumenthal (D) in a November election that her husband Vince could probably bill as the Senatorial Showdown, add Chris Jericho to the undercard and try to sell on Pay-Per-View.

McMahon’s current and former opponents have raided the USA Network archives to find embarrassing excerpts from WWE broadcasts that they could use to discredit her, but none of their YouTubery has yielded anything more unfortunate than her turnbuckle-shaped hairstyle. It doesn’t seem to faze McMahon, although she alternates between distancing herself from her full-nelson filled past and embracing it. What she doesn’t seem to realize is that it’s unfair for her to focus on what she accomplished in the boardroom while simultaneously trying to shove the WWE’s more unsavory aspects into the supply closet of an empty arena.
McMahon does face more Catch-22s than a freshman English class when it comes to her qualifications. She has to rely almost exclusively on her business credentials because her political resume is shorter than Brett Hart’s hair. The only experience she has is a one-year stint on the Connecticut Board of Education, a position she justified to her critics by touting a pair of youth education programs she developed while with … wait for it … wait for it … the WWE.
One of her recent campaign commercials features a pair of Desperate-looking Housewives in designer separates discussing — what else — Linda McMahon’s qualifications. The talking tax bracket on the left says that McMahon “tamed the traveling show world of professional wrestling, turned it into a global company and created 500 jobs here in Connecticut.” The ad’s tag line is a harmonized “OH YEEAAAAHHH,” which — as anyone who watched the WWF during its Mr. Perfect and neon pants era knows — is the trademark vocal signature of former wrestler and Slim Jim aficionado Macho Man Randy Savage.
Speaking of chemically-enhanced meat products, the parts of McMahon’s $1.2 billion dollar corporation that she tends to ignore are the wrestlers themselves. According to the WWE, the men who get oiled up and beaten up several times each week aren’t employees; they are “independent contractors.” That means that the WWE isn’t required to pay Social Security or Medicare or provide unemployment benefits to their approximately 150 wrestlers. They also don’t provide health insurance coverage and there’s no retirement plan.
While they work for the WWE, the wrestlers often perform up to two hundred days a year, traveling across the country from Ticketmaster to Ticketmaster in a virtual Contusion Caravan. There’s no off-season and if they don’t work — or can’t work — they don’t get paid, a scenario which has unsurprisingly led to steroid use. The unpronounceable, unregulated cocktails some of them shoot into their hips both help them develop biceps the size of laundry baskets and — perhaps more importantly — help them recover from spending every Friday night having their faces rearranged by a folding chair.
The McMahons — both Vince and Linda — have danced around the issue of steroids since the 1980s, since Hulk Hogan first beat the tartan out of Rowdy Roddy Piper. The WWE (then known as the WWF) didn’t begin testing for steroids until 1991. Two years later, Vince was indicted on charges that he was providing recreational injectables to the wrestlers and — during his subsequent trial — Linda replaced him as president of the company in a move that, of course, wasn’t politically motivated at all. McMahon was eventually acquitted of all charges after it was determined that the wrestlers who sampled from the anabolic buffet did so because they wanted to, not because they were forced to or because it was an item in the employee handbook.
“Who knows what causes people to have addictions and do what they do?” Linda McMahon asked. She tossed that rhetorical question toward reporters just last week, when she was asked about the death of 29-year-old Lance Cade, one of the WWE’s former empl–um, independent contractors. Cade, whose real name was Lance McNaught, was signed by WWE ten years ago, bouncing back and forth — sometimes literally — between the mainstage and their equivalent of the minor leagues. His official cause of death has yet to be determined though the initial reports suggest heart failure, possibly due to substance abuse. In January, Cade asked for time off to check into a rehab facility where he completed a thirty-day program. By April, he was unemployed.
The number of WWE-affiliated wrestlers who died prematurely is staggering, regardless of how you categorize them. Do you look at the ones who were still employed as independent contractors? Because there have been five of them since 1997. What about the ones — like Cade — who had recently been let go? Add another four to the total. And where do you draw the line for any accountability the WWE may have had? Curt Henning — the aforementioned Mr. Perfect — died at 44. Davey “The British Bulldog” Smith — the first wrestler suspended under McMahon’s first steroid policy — was dead at 39.
The WWE suspended their steroid testing program shortly after the pharmaceutical suspicions surrounding Vince McMahon disappeared. After the 2005 death of Eddie Guerrero and the stomach-turning Chris Benoit crime scene, they reinstated the tests. In 2006, forty percent of their independent contractors tested positive.
Since handing her corporate title belt back to her husband, McMahon doesn’t have to deal with those issues anymore, not on a professional level. But personally she can’t — and shouldn’t — ignore them either, not while highlighting the WWE portions of her resume during her campaign. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, McMahon has spent $22 million of her own money — of the money she earned from the WWE — so far. That’s well over a million Eddie Guerrero t-shirts, which WWEShop.com still sells, five years after his death.
In one of the WWE “Raw” clips that the Democrats have unleashed onto the internet, an indignant McMahon scolds her daughter and her husband before burying her foot in the crotch of commentator Jim Ross. “The only way to garner respect from people is not by yelling and screaming or by pitching a fit,” she tells the crowd. “It’s by taking action.”
That, Linda, is exactly what you need to do.
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Jelisa Castrodale is a writer and comedian who has learned a lot about life by making a mess of her own. She chronicles her failures at The Typing Makes Me Sound Busy, and twitters while she waits at stoplights. Castrodale was featured in the book Twitter Wit and was named one of Mashable’s 10 Funniest Twitterers. Contact her at jacastrodale@gmail.com.
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