Former WWE Superstar Chris Nowinski, co-founder of the Concussion Legacy Foundation and a leading voice in brain injury research, joined Chris Jericho on his ‘Talk Is Jericho’ podcast to talk about CTE and its role in the 2007 Chris Benoit tragedy. Nowinski didn’t blame CTE alone for what happened, but he made it clear that it likely played a major role. “You can’t say that disease caused that single act, because… there’s so many other variables involved,” Nowinski said. “That being said, I think we have maybe… 10 murders in the brain bank that all have sort of the same story: that they were fine, then they started having some mental health problems, then they went off and k!lled people.”
He mentioned that out of nearly 500 retired NFL and NHL players studied, 93–95% showed signs of CTE. It’s a number that shows just how widespread the condition is in contact sports.
Still, Nowinski pointed out that pro wrestling has made real changes.
“Wrestling is dramatically safer than it used to be,” he said. “Because they’re putting top-down constraints on what can happen. We all want to be the star of the show, have the biggest bump, take the biggest risk, but if everybody does that, it gets out of control; people get hurt. So, I couldn’t be more proud of the way the wrestling industry has responded to this work in the last 12 years.”
He also spoke about how performers today are thinking differently about risk in the ring.
“The only thing the public really knows is, like, the chair shots are banned to the head and all that in WWE. I guess in AEW, there’s different…it’s extremely rare…certain things need to happen to let it be allowed. I would say a lot of it is driven by different risk management choices from the performers themselves.
So you are now empowered to realize, like, ‘I don’t need to go off the top of that ladder through a table if there’s another way I can get the same pop,’ sort of think about the reward in a more explicit sense and think about brain health.”
CTE awareness, according to Nowinski, has changed dramatically in the last decade.
“The big change over the last 10 years has been the recognition that CTE is a much bigger issue than we wanted it to be.”
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