
Dark Side of the Ring: Pro Wrestling and Americana - firstbase
https://spectator.us/pro-wrestling-great-americana/
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ducttape12
I've heard about these issues in wrestling before, but is it just pro
wrestlers? Is the rate of drug abuse higher in wrestlers than, say, other
similar professions (boxing, MMA). Is wrestling doing this to its performers,
or does wrestling attract people who have these problems?

There's calls for easier schedules, but as they say, the show must go on. You
can't cancel a sold out arena if your lead person isn't feeling well, just
like you wouldn't cancel a football game if the quarterback is sick.

(I'm not defending some of the treatment of wrestlers by their employers nor
am I excusing their issues - I'm just asking do we know where these problems
stem from? Seems easy to blame the boss, but is it their fault?)

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forgottenpass
There's two things that make wrestling different in kind, a party lifestyle
and painkillers for dealing with the fast schedule.

Both of those have subsided from their late 20th century heights. The Ric
Flair types got replaced by a bunch of athletic theater nerds, and painkiller
abuse is understood as a thing in society.

>There's calls for easier schedules, but as they say, the show must go on.

It's not like there's a league setting the schedule. Wrestling promotions
decide exactly how much they're going to work. WWE is sort of notorious that
they work contracted talent balls-to-the-wall, where smaller promotions don't
run as many shows in a week and independent wrestlers choose exactly how many
bookings they take.

