Colin McEnroe Show: Revisiting 'Ringside With Professional Wrestling'

I've been wrestling with wrestling.

It's tough to apply normal journalism methods to the WWE because, of course, a lot of things are supposed to be fake or staged. So when does that stop and reality start?

For example, one of the people on today's show will tell you wrestlers do get badly hurt, do suffer brain trauma and do wind up addicted to painkillers because some of the fake violence can't be achieved without real pain and injury.

I asked WWE spokesman Robert Zimmerman about that. He said wrestlers often emerge from what appears to be a vicious beating without any bruises. If the WWE allowed its wrestlers to suffer the kind of real trauma that appears to happen in the ring, they wouldn't have have anybody available to perform the next day and the day after that.

Obviously, the Senate candidacy of Linda McMahon has awakened a great interest in this sort of thing.

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