If you have been wondering why WWE Tag Team champions Air Boom have been conspicuous by their absence from Raw over the past five weeks, then there is a good reason for that. Evan Bourne is being punished for his stroppy reaction to being suspended on November 1st for failing a drug test for smoking Spice, a brand of synthetic marijuana, and his partner Kofi Kingston is caught in the crosshairs. Not only did he immediately retweet a link to an article by Irv Muchnick critical of the ImPACT concussion management software that WWE uses and was developed by their head doctors Joseph Maroon and Mark Lowell, but also later made a sarcastic dig at the company's current obsession with getting things trending on Twitter during all their live TV events:
I wonder if WWE '13 will have our twitter handles, random tweet pop ups and Cole talking tweets? Might make gameplay as annoying as viewing. My guess is WWE 13: "The Network". You are Vince and control the WWE with a WWE "Univers(e)al" Remote. Create history and earn money!
It's surely evidence at how irate he must have been about his punishment because every WWE star should know by now that you (or your girlfriend for that matter) can't get away with posting biting, crazy or offensive comments on their official Twitter accounts and expect it to not go unnoticed by WWE management. Just ask the likes of Matt Hardy, Michael Cole, John Morrison, Melina, Gail Kim and Drew McIntyre (anyone remember him?).
To be fair this wasn't mere impetuousness by Bourne; he had a right to feel hard done, given that he had been out partying with another WWE performer -- higher in the pecking order than him -- who had also partaken in some Spice, yet this mystery man wasn't suspended at the same time Bourne was and was just levied with a $2,500 pot fine instead. The identity of the man in question was soon revealed to be Survivor Series headliner R-Truth, who, in very suspect timing, was suspended for the usual 30 days for a first serious infringement of the Wellness Policy just two days after the pay-per-view. One wonders whether Truth would have ever been suspended had this story not been leaked to the dreaded dirtsheets. Better for this dark secret to have been completely hushed up rather than the fiasco they ended up with that calls in to question the seriousness of their drug testing regime.
As Dave Meltzer reported in this week's Wrestling Observer Newsletter, Triple H, not known for his versatile acting ability, managed to play Hercule Poirot more like Inspector Clouseau, and falsely fingered Evan Bourne as the traitorous mole who ratted out management's double standards to the low rent rags:
Bourne was confronted by HHH a few weeks back and blamed him for the story about R-Truth's suspension being for spice getting out, as well as how they were doing it together and the delay in R-Truth's suspension.... It wasn't, although the perception would be such since Bourne complained about how it was possible for him to be suspended when the guy doing the exact same thing wasn't.
This doesn't bode well for Bourne's long term future with WWE, as few performers recover from being publicly chewed out by Hunter and live to tell the tale about it, even if his wife Stephanie McMahon Levesque is a key supporter on the creative team of the uniquely talented high flyer.
Continuing on, Meltzer gave damning evidence that WWE doctors even made up medical mumbo jumbo to cover for the whims of Vince McMahon on how to handle different drug test failures, in order to have answers for Evan Bourne who naturally probed WWE's drug testing head Dr. David Black at how two people who broke the same rule ended up getting punished differently (well, at least initially):
This led to a lot of weird double-talk, including one person involved in testing explaining that if you did spice and also marijuana, that the marijuana would somehow cause the spice to be blocked on the test and you'd only come up positive for pot. And pot is a fine, but not a suspension, while spice is a 30 day suspension. Of course, that makes no sense given R-Truth actually did fail and was suspended, only three weeks later. That's weird how he was pinpointed given the entire locker room knew the story. I suppose had Bourne never questioned Dr. Black about how two people could be doing the same thing and one is suspended and the other isn't, with nobody knowing the other was going to be suspended a few weeks later, probably nobody would have heard the story to begin with.
I see that Vince McMahon is still "a pretty persuasive gentleman" and is continuing to have "pointed conversations" with Dr. Black all these years later, even though the latter had the professional indignity of being hauled in front of congressional investigators on September 25, 2007 in the fallout from the Chris Benoit double murder suicide. I suppose that will never change given that the WWE's drug testing program continues to be a lucrative money spinner for Black's Aegis Science Lab.