• Old School Wrestling Veteran Would Have Celebrated His Birthday Today
Today would have been the 80th birthday of Old School Wrestling Veteran The Missing Link (Real name: Dewey Robertson).
Dewey wrestled for several North American territories during the 60s, 70s & 80s, using different names & characters, before adapting the gimmick of “The Missing Link” in 1983, which he mainly used in Bill Watts’ Mid-South Wrestling, Fritz Von Erich’s World Class Championship Wrestling and Eddie Graham’s Championship Wrestling From Florida, before joining the WWF in 1985.
During his World Wrestling Federation days The Missing Link was managed by Bobby “The Brain” Heenan and wrestled against WWF Superstars like Ivan Putski, Paul Orndorff, Tony Garea, Salvatore Bellomo and SD Jones.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY & † R.I.P.
February 28, 1939 – August 16, 2007
WATCH: Lana, Nia Jax & Paige’s Sexy Dance Practice:
• Rob Van Dam Comments On A Controversial Topic That People Are Afraid To Talk About In WWE
During a recent interview on WINCLY, former WWE Champion Rob Van Dam talked about concussions (he noted that he has suffered 100s of concussions in his career) & CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy) and why people in WWE are afraid to talk about it.
Below is what RVD said:
“The way it was introduced to us as talent, because we didn’t know much about it, was unfortunately through the Chris Benoit incident.
Around that time, Chris Nowinski, who studies brains up in Boston, he got a hold of Chris Benoit’s brain from his dad and he studied it and he said what he found was that it was the brain of a very old man with dementia because of the wear and tear and the damage on the brain, the top protein deposits.
It was something they’d been studying with football players for years and they knew that 99 percent of the brains they tested in the NFL from people who had the high-impact concussions in their career showed what they were looking at was called CTE. It became controversial right away because WWE denied it and said it didn’t have anything to do with that.
That’s why it’s controversial, because when it’s mentioned, there’s ‘Who to blame?’ attached to it. There’s this class-action lawsuit that has a lot of wrestlers attached to it. They sued the NFL and won big money, and with the same structured suit they’re going after the WWE saying that the higher-ups knew that they were causing long-term brain damage by ignoring concussions or forcing wrestlers to wrestle when they had concussions already.
I can say I’ve never been a part of that, I never told anybody that I had a concussion because that’s the way I was brought up. If you can still wrestle, then you’re not hurt, so don’t tell anybody that you’re hurt because then you’re not gonna work. That’s an Old School mentality, but I definitely don’t have anybody to blame but myself. And also, I’m not a candidate anyway because I don’t have CTE, so for a lot of reasons I don’t mind talking about it. But it is controversial, it’s something people are afraid to talk about because they want to lay blame.
Once I found that out, I started thinking about all the times Balls Mahoney whacked me with a chair, and I’d take a second and I’d be like, ‘Whoa!’ Sometimes everything is in slow motion, sometimes the sound is out just for a couple of seconds. That happened hundreds and hundreds of times during my matches, and I just kept on going and ignored it.
Now, they want to pull you aside and make sure you’re OK because that’s a pretty big thing, which I didn’t know back then and now I do know that. But I feel fine now, to answer your question, I feel great mentally and physically.”
