One recurring sentiment over these 8 pages is the idea that cutting back on unprotected chair shots and only using them a few times a year, when they could really matter, you might say. That bothers me quite a bit. The idea behind it is that the overall volume of violent chair strikes to an unprotected head will decline, thus causing less overall damage. A side benefit would be the boon it would grant to the booker when he would decide to employ one in his big storyline.
But the problem with this idea is that it presupposes that few are preferable to some or many. Now, it is certainly better for those performers who will not take chair shots that otherwise might have come their way. But the individual performers who take the chair shot they would have taken anyway experience the same impact.
This is not an issue of reducing the median impact and trauma level of a given sample size. There is no averaging that can be done. The unprotected chair shots are individual, large-scale events in terms of trauma that have a very specific point of impact and can cause unpredictable ripple effects. If anyone has read Taleb's
The Black Swan, they'll get what I'm trying to say. The unprotected chair shot is akin to the stock market crashes of 1929 and 1987, while the regular bumps of a no-gimmick TV match equate to the day-to-day market fluctuations of a few pennies on the dollar. Unprotected chair shots are "Black Swan events," which means that the impact (in this case, specifically the immediate and long-term effects thereof) lacks the predictability necessary to prepare for the consequences.
Concussions of the sort athletes will complain about typically are severe. MLB players Corey Koskie and Mike Matheny had to retire because of PCS. Matheny's concussion was from backswing that caught his catcher's mask. Koskie was trying to catch a pop-up, slipped, fell backward, smacked his head and suffered whiplash to boot. Jim Edmonds was diagnosed with PCS in 2006 after colliding with the wall making a catch and only missed a few games, but he wasn't fully there and knew it. Scott Rolen missed 15 games in 2009 on account of PCS. Hiroki Kuroda missed 3 weeks with PCS after being hit in the head by a line drive last year.
NHL concussions - what with the ice, the glass, the speed, and the braking - are damn common, and like wrestling and the NFL have long been completely ignored. Heck, the NHL still allows "upper body injury" to define both concussion and sprained pinkie. The NHL just made an in-season rule change because of increased concussion awareness.
One of the less-publicized disagreements between the NFL owners and the NFLPA in the CBA negotiations is the amount of money the owners ought to be putting toward the health care needs of the many, many players from previous eras with serious health issues . The NFL owners want to wash their hands of those guys, ignoring the fortunes they built off of those guys in the days before players had any bargaining leverage or knowledge of the long-term effects of injuries and the patchwork treatments (the late Walter Payton's liver was ruined in part by the processing of painkillers that the team pumped into him so he could play each Sunday). And if anyone here is interested in what concussions do, check out the story of
Mike Webster or one of the other NFL players who have become part of Dr. Bennet Omalu's research into PCS and the real problem, CTE.
Chronic traumatic encephalopathy is basically "punch drunk syndrome," and there is plenty of documentation showing the signs and symptoms.
So this whole idea that a few small instances of intentional brain trauma for shock value and entertainment are harmless is a factually wrong thought, not an opinion. Unprotected chair shots to the head do cause trauma, concussive or not. There aren't nerve endings within the brain that scream in pain every time the brain sloshes around and bangs against the cranial cavity's wall. So of course it hurts less than getting hit in the back. But "hurt" and "damage" don't mean the same thing. A bruise goes away and one dose of Tylenol for two or three days, and then back to normal, is a whole lot different than long-term painkiller use because of the eventual (or sudden, for some people) headaches and other issues.
The black swan event is what it is because it can't be predicted. We don't know when a SSP will go wrong because a turnbuckle is sweaty. We don't know when a superplex will go wrong because one guy improperly balances his weight, ill preparing him for the fall. We don't know when the inconceivable, unplanned for event will happen. Nor can we be sure
which chair shot or bump will be the tipping point. But we
do know that chair shots carry more potential danger than a scoop slam, regardless of which has absolutely crippled more people.
Allow me to illustrate that last point:
A town has two hospitals, one large and one small. You run into a doctor who tells you about one day last week when at one of the hospitals, 60% of all the babies born were boys. Which hospital was he most likely talking about?
{Spoiler}The small one. The small hospital has a smaller carrying capacity for patients and thus is more subject to greater fluctuations. The large hospital can have more patients, which increases the sample size. There will absolutely be more boys born there than at the small hospital at any given time, but the same can be said for girls.
I can say with ABSOLUTE certainty that more scoop slams than unprotected chair shots to the head have
not caused concussions. The two sample sizes render absolute data meaningless.
So where does that leave us? It leaves us here: the black swan in pro wrestling is when something, anything, goes wrong. A queue is missed. A move is botched. A jobber's trunks split. A wrestler gets hurt doing something he's drilled for hours and hours and has done right thousands of times.
The black swan does not extend to the chair shot itself, then. Rather, the chair shot is the outlier event among a median of regular moves and bumps. The black swan is the aftermath of the chair shot: concussion? what grade? PCS? migraines? painkillers? sleep issues? sleep pills? confusion? afraid of missing work? working hurt? hurting them? retiring due to injury? multiple concussions? compounded over years? CTE? early-onset dementia between 36-55, as is being seen in dead retired NFL linemen and is possible in Chris Benoit's case? The result cannot be predicted with any level of surety, no matter how predictable the physical force of impact and how much is known about possible effects.
Lance Storm has a valid point. And really, anyone with enough understanding of the implicit mathematical reasoning underlying the "straw that broke the camel's back" argument should be convinced purely by the list of 41 names of people whose early deaths couldn't come as complete surprises, but at the same time were often interrelated to so many things, the full extent of the hazards of which [awkward, I know] weren't understood then as well as today. Especially by wrestlers who demographically through history haven't exactly been Jack Swaggers and Shelton Benjamins in the schooling department, let alone Chris Nowinskis.