The Wrestler tells a true tale of a ‘sport’ in crisis

Mickey Rourke's comeback as Randy 'the Ram' Robinson in The Wrestler is not just a perceptive tale of a man facing up to his failures. It's also a grimly accurate portrayal of a world where entertainment matters more than safety.

On the fan website Wrestlezone, a writer reviewing the film's final scene, when Randy, taped up and aching after a recent heart attack, climbs the turnbuckle in the corner of the ring for one final signature 'Ram Jam' slam, complains that it confers too much dignity on "a bastard art form". "Haven't the past two decades taught us that wrestling has no nobility?" he asked. "The body count alone should have smartened us all up."
 
So it should. Earlier this decade, research showed that death rates among professional wrestlers are seven times the US average. The list of dead wrestlers - both those who made the big-time with the WWE, or the plumbers, insurance brokers and priests who don leotards and perform in small-town school gymnasiums across America on Saturday nights - keeps getting longer.
 
Paul E Normus, real name Fuchs, was a bodybuilder and celebrity bodyguard who had a cameo in one of The Wrestler's locker-room scenes. Surprisingly, Fuchs was an animal cruelty campaigner who was urging his MySpace friends to adopt a pitbull - "smart, loyal, will love you unconditionally" - earlier this month. Then, on January 16, he was found "unresponsive" at five in the morning at his parents' New York house. An hour later he was dead.
 
The rollcall of dead wrestlers has its share of murders and accidents, but all too many have died because of what they did to their bodies to make it to, or stay at, the top. In 2000, Yokozuna died of a heart attack, aged 34. In 2005, Eddie Guerrero - 'Mr Lie, Cheat and Steal' - died from an enlarged heart after years of drug abuse. He was 38. In 1999, 'Ravishing' Rick Rude died, with a bottle of painkillers open at his bedside, of a heart attack. He was 41. There are plenty of others: Big Boss Man, Andre the Giant, Road Warrior Hawk, all now dead.
 
So what makes wrestlers destroy themselves? In part, it's a tragedy they share with other athletes. Faced with life after adulation, their waning physical prowess and an early retirement they were never trained for, many sportsmen self-destruct.

An alarming number of former county cricketers, for example, have killed themselves. With wrestlers though, the theatrical excesses of a career spent in character, threatening audiences and assaulting opponents with props, makes a peaceful retreat to another life even harder.
 
Mostly though, drugs are to blame. At the start of the 1990s, back in the 'Wild, Wild West days' before any semblance of regulation, one wrestler remarked that: "There was a joke: If you didn't test positive for steroids, you were fired."

To earn a good living, pro wrestlers have to weigh 20 stone, have mountains for biceps and work four nights a week, every week. Their chance of making a name for themselves depends on how gory and dramatic they can make their show. But when they get genuinely injured and cannot work, they don't get paid. Even though the fights are choreographed, there's still a danger of getting concussion, tearing a cruciate ligament, or dislocating a shoulder.

Scott 'Raven' Levy used to take 200 pain pills a day so he could keep working. "It's part of the job," he told USA Today. "If you want to be a wrestler, you have to be a big guy, and you have to perform in pain. If you choose to do neither, pick another profession." Often, wrestlers find that the only way to escape the numb lethargy of painkillers is with harder, livelier drugs like cocaine.

When the news of how many wrestlers were dying first came to light in 2003, WWE impresario Vince McMahon belittled the reporter asking him about it, knocking the notes from his hand. Only one wrestler, 'Rowdy' Roddy Piper, spoke out about his experiences: "You're in your hotel room. You're banged up, numb and alone. You don't want to go downstairs to the bar or restaurant. The walls are breathing. You don't want to talk. Panic sets in and you start weeping. It's something all of us go through."

Since then, wrestling has started to face up to its problem. In 2006, the WWE instigated a 'Wellness Program', with a comprehensive list of banned drugs with names like methyltestosterone, oxymesterone and norandrostenediol. Several big-name stars have since been suspended. But as the results of fights are pre-determined, 'roided-up' wrestlers will never face the public opprobrium that real sportsmen like cyclists or sprinters do when they're caught cheating.

Drugs have long been ingrained in pro wrestling's culture. Paul Fuchs will not be the last to die young. ·