The starting point for advisers talking to pro wrestlers about taking out protection is not asking them: ‘Whatcha gonna do when you get injured and can’t work?’
This is according to Rhys Schofield, protection adviser for Peak Mortgages and Protection, who spoke to Health & Protection after taking to social media this week to reveal he had just sorted out protection for his latest wrestling client.
The hazards are real
While wrestlers in the US can command million dollar salaries, their peers in the UK tend to have to hold down a 9-to-5 job as well.
And though wrestling is entertainment, the hazards are real, with the likes of legend Paige only returning to a WWE ring this year following her retirement due to a neck injury almost a decade ago.
But Paige actually started her career wrestling for her parent’s promotion in the UK and it was just this sort of establishment that introduced Schofield to the UK wrestling scene.
Wrestling school
“This all came off a meeting that Dave Corbett and I had about 18 months ago where we went down to a pro wrestling school in South Wales,” Schofield explains.
“Honestly, it was amazing. We walked through the front door and there were people flying off the top ropes, crashing off the mats and that sort of thing.
“Dave’s eyes lit up. He’s been to Wrestlemania and we thought, this is cool. I’m in my element here.”
Sports injuries
The need to ensure these individuals could take out protection given the risks of injury in the ring is obvious, but Schofield’s experience with covering sportspeople actually dates back even earlier and an entirely different sport.
“When I started Peak, my bread and butter was my mates who were coming to me from my rugby club to say: ‘I’m worried about what happens if I break my leg playing rugby, cruciate ligaments etc’,” Schofield says “They’re doing a dangerous pastime. Can I get cover?
“Rugby is a bit easier because with amateur rugby, you can still do income protection. You can still do the MetLife injury cover as well on MetLife Everyday Protect.
“At that level, everyone’s an amateur. I was certainly never a professional and even if you go to the next tier up, everybody’s still got a day job at the end of the day. So there are very few full time pro-rugby players.”
Day jobs
Though Schofield adds that while the likes of the WWE can pay wrestlers the big bucks, the same is not true of UK wrestling.
“Most UK professional wrestlers have a day job,” he continues. “They’re teachers. They’re engineers. They’re brokers. They’re doing office jobs in the day and then the pro wrestling is in the evening.
“Okay I do it in the evening. I get paid for doing the shows. The reality is it’s not the main line of work where I earn most of my income.”
No dropdown menu option
A further obstacle blocking wrestlers from securing protection cover has been a lack of recognition as an actual career by insurers.
“A few years ago, it was quite difficult to work out how an insurer would treat someone as they didn’t have a drop down box for professional wrestler as you can imagine,” Schofield continues.
“I have seen it once or twice. I like to think that creating a ruckus and a problem has got the industry to create that dropdown box to a certain degree.
“It’s a dropdown box where they can say no unfortunately, so it’s not necessarily a nice dropdown box.
“But actually what we’ve done is five units of MetLife Everyday Protect because what was worrying them was the injuries and the lump sums.”
Securing cover
And this takes us to this week’s client who Schofield reveals works as an engineer as her day job.
Having gained more experience on securing cover for wrestlers, Schofield reveals they can gain some income protection through their union and supplementing this with accident insurance from the likes of MetLife.
“It’s where there will be payouts for a broken bone under MetLife Everyday Protect. It’s accident insurance, but it’s going to cover sporting injuries.
“They get £800 per unit for a major broken bone. That’s per bone. There’s some lump sum payments in there as well.
“So she’s going to get £4,000 for a bone break. There’s big lump sum payments for paralysis or permanent injuries and things like that as well.”
Schofield adds that his client also wanted the active lifestyle element of the policy, which covers the likes of dislocation, ligament tears and tendon ruptures.
“The reality for this client is that being an engineer working for an office if they broke their arm or their leg, they could continue to earn an income, but they wouldn’t be driving for a while, so would need to get a taxi everywhere,” he continues.
“They might want to pay for physiotherapy or something like that or rehab from an injury.
“Well, they’ve got a bit of money to do that.
“So this was to provide that safety net of what happens if I do pick up the injuries which in all probability I probably am going to get at some point.”
Start with hobbies
And in terms of what it might make a wrestler say: “Oh Yeah!” to protection cover, Schofield warns advisers against channelling their inner Hulk Hogan and asking: “Whatcha gonna do if you get injured and can’t work?”
“The way to do this is rather than just ask old style, how would you feel if this happened? I think it’s actually important to find out a little bit from your client,” he continues.
“This was a client who had heard about me and knew what they wanted to do beforehand, but a lot of the time, we’ve got to medical questions with clients and I have started asking clients, if I know I’m going to be talking about protection, I tend to do my medical questions towards the start of the process.
“We’ve got loads of ways of doing that these days and we’re asking about hobbies and past times.
“As much as we’ve got the dropdown list on there, what actually drives the conversation is around hobbies and pastimes.”