ProWrestlingViews.com

Posts Tagged ‘weight-loss pills’

Former WWE wrestler Chris Nowinski is calling for the federal government to declare the WWE an “unsafe work environment,” as well as calling for the McMahon family to be drummed out of the industry. What’s all the uproar about?

Well, Nowinski is a kid who was a Top Three finalist on the first season of the MTV/WWE reality show, Tough Enough. Though he didn’t win, Nowinski was indeed ultimately hired by WWE and wrestled as a heel under the moniker, Chris Harvard. His career was short and injury-interrupted; he lasted only two years, retiring from the ring in 2004.

Since then, the Harvard graduate has gone on to write books on brain injury in the NFL, other professional sports, and he was a leading activist in the effort to study the brain of Chris Benoit following the Benoit Family Tragedy of 2007. His book, Head Games: Football’s Concussion Crisis, is a surprisingly careful and scholarly effort.

While his campaign to drum the McMahon family out of their own company is clearly a case of tilting at windmills, Nowinski’s research has borne fruit; the autopsy of Benoit’s brain showed the 41-year-old had suffered such head trauma in his career that he possessed the equivalent of a brain of an 80-year-old man with dementia.

That’s startling, and while his solution’s a bit preposterous, credit should go to Nowinski for shining some light on the very real and prevalent problem of brain injury in pro wrestlers, as well as pro athletes. Makes a lot more sense than hawking weight-loss pills for a living!