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This dude is officially thee shit. Period. From pwtorch.com:
>Bruce Mitchell Feature Column
Headline: "Why?"
By Bruce Mitchell, Torch columnist
Tough
Chris Benoit was tough.
Many said he was the toughest, best wrestler in the world these last twenty years. It was that toughness, that single-minded passion for the professional wrestling business, that made him a great performer.
He did whatever he had to do to get in the business. He hung around the back of the cold Edmonton arena to get wrestler autographs when he was just a kid. He bugged the wrestlers in Calgary to let him in the back. He got twisted around until the veins in his eyeballs popped in the famed Stu Hart Dungeon. He did whatever he had to do to get into the Stampede Wrestling he loved to watch, then he did whatever he had to do to have the best matches on their shows.
Never mind that he was too short. Never mind that his frame was too small. Never mind that he wasn't much for talking. What real tough guy is?
He modeled himself after the toughest, best wrestler in the world at his size, the Dynamite Kid. Never mind that the Kid, as mean an asshole as this mean business has ever seen, ended up bitter, destitute, and physically ruined. That is now. When he was a wrestler, the Dynamite Kid was tough and he was great. Benoit wanted that more than anything in his world. He learned to match the Kid move for move, dive for dive, muscle for muscle. Never mind that, for years and years, the big companies in the U.S. had no use for Benoit's act, tough or not, well worked or not.
Japan did, though, and the tape traders and newsletter readers caught on quickly to how great he was in the ring. Paul Heyman is a lot of things, good and bad, but he knows how to read and watch tape (you'd be surprised at the wrestling talent coordinators who don't) and he brought in Benoit to his Extreme Championship Wrestling company for a few appearances (until he screwed up Benoit's work visa - like I said, Paul is a lot of things.) Benoit became a part of the legend of ECW as their great wrestler who was still tough enough to be "Extreme."
Eric Bischoff needed wrestlers for his expanded World Championship Wrestling promotion. Chris Benoit did whatever he had to do to have the best matches on their shows too. He even left his wife and children to take up with the booker's wife, just like the booker wrote it.
The woman he left his wife and children for while he was having stiff, physical matches with her husband, Kevin Sullivan - who controlled the course of his career, was no ordinary housewife. Nancy Daus started performing in the wrestling business as a teenager in Florida Championship Wrestling as a nearly naked member of Kevin Sullivan's faux Satanic troupe of villainous wrestlers. She sold softcore photos of herself through the wrestling magazines. As she followed her husband from company to company and became part of some of the most infamously drug-ridden wrestling locker rooms of the day, she saw every excess pro wrestling had to offer.
Her marriage to Sullivan was contentious. He was controlling. They fought. Sometimes the police were called. Sometimes the police were called because of what Nancy did.
Friends of hers were happy, in the beginning, when she finally got away from Sullivan after all those years and took up with Benoit. Now she could finally relax.
She and Benoit got married and had a son, Daniel, who was diagnosed with Fragile X disease, something that requires constant care and attention. Benoit was tough there, too. He kept his son's condition quiet and went back on the road to practice his craft.
Caring for a child with a condition like this puts pressure on a marriage. My nephew is autistic. I've watched my brother and sister-in-law change everything about their lives to make sure he has the best chance to grow and live his life to his fullest ability. Neither of them is always on the road or under constant physical and mental pressure in the same way pro wrestlers are and it takes everything they have, working together all the time, to take care of their son. I can't imagine what it would be like for my nephew if they didn't work hard together as a team and as a marriage to help him.
Then there's the pressure of knowing that a child like this might need lifelong care and financial support. There are no pensions in pro wrestling, and insurance is expensive and hard to come by because of the physical nature of a pro wrestler's job.
Chris Benoit also had other children and an ex-wife to support. He made good money as a wrestler, but his financial obligations and pressure were enormous.
The Benoits fought over money. They fought over Chris's steroid and prescription pill use, the things he needed to stay tough in the ring. It was left to Nancy day-to-day to find the proper information and support for their son, an enormously hard and confusing job. Over time, she asked for a divorce and took out a restraining order on Chris, then changed her mind and took him back.
Benoit was tough. He kept their fights quiet and his family together.
Benoit's time at his job was pressure packed, too. The bookers still hated him, some of the top stars didn't think much of his style, and the entire atmosphere was chaotic. Benoit did what he had to do again and left the WCW World Title for World Wrestling Entertainment. He did what he had to do there too, because he was still too small, in stature and personality, to main event comfortably in a company that had historically promoted big man wrestlers.
He got bigger as his career got bigger. He got so big it was as if he was stuffed with muscle, like sausage over-stuffed into its casing. No one much criticized him for steroid or Human Growth Hormone use because he was really good in the ring, really talented, and there's this idea by some that only no-talwent muscleheads use the stuff.
His image and marketing reflected his toughness. He was called The Crippler and The Rabid Wolverine by the promotions he worked for. They never specified, though, who it was he crippled.
He hurled himself off the top rope and landed headfirst on so many opponents that Harley Race, the former wrestling champion who used the flying headbutt himself, and is also on anyone's list of wrestling tough guys, said he was worried about Benoit using the move so much. He said this after his own painful surgeries to repair the damage to his neck he incurred in performing this move.
Benoit didn't listen to Race. He was too tough, too busy tossing guys straight up and back on their heads, or getting tossed straight up and back on his own head in those beautiful German suplexes that helped make his matches so much fun to watch.
He tore his neck up. He tore his back up.
How many times did he land on his head? How many chairshots did he take? How many undiagnosed concussions did he have in all those years? What effect did those blows to the head have on him?
Benoit was too tough to let on.
He did whatever he had to do to for 23 years. He stayed on the road constantly, unless he was so badly injured it was simply impossible for him to get in the ring. When that happened he stayed home, made less money than he planned on, and, without the wrestling he excelled at, we now know things didn't go well.
He took pills. He took muscle enhancers. He drank. Once he made the comment while having a taste after a friend's funeral, "You know, before I got in this business I was completely straight."
It's amazing how many wrestlers have made that same observation through the years.
Chris Benoit made it to the pinnacle of his profession, winning the WWE World Title against the two top wrestlers in the company in front of a worldwide audience of appreciative fans. It was the peak of his career, a championship not given to him because he was the top draw and wrestler in the company, but because they wanted to honor his toughness and his consistently excellent ringwork.
Then his best friend in the business, Eddie Guerrero, with whom he shared so much through the years, died just keeled over brushing his teeth the morning he was supposed to win the world title again. Benoit had seen his friend through international tours, through some of the best matches of their careers, through drug addiction, through losing and regaining his family, through the rough backroom politics of two companies who didn't quite want them on top of their shows, through his shaky time facing the pressures of carrying the Smackdown side of WWE as top star and World Champion, and now he was dead.
He watched as his friend's memory was exploited and besmirched by the company he worked for in the months that followed. He hated what they were doing to his friend's legacy but he was too tough to show it, too tough to let it stop him wrestling.
His wife Nancy told her friends Chris was never the same after Eddie died. Things were worse when Chris was home. They fought more intensely. Media sources have said he was paranoid to the point of delusion. She was worried but she wouldn't leave.
Benoit was tough still. He kept working at the same top level he always had, even though he was now 40 years old and his new bookers thought he was good for providing action in the middle of the shows but was not a main eventer they wanted to promote anymore. It was a few years after his WrestleMania win and he had already gotten that medal for career excellence. Now he was an afterthought to management, appreciated for his ability to mentor and coach younger wrestlers, particularly the job he did helping young wrestler MVP gain credibility and traction in his own career.
That didn't leave Benoit with much opportunity to make the top money again, even as the culmulative effect on his body and mind of all he endured grew and the window on his time as an active wrestler began to close. He was moved to the top of the third-ranked ECW brand.
Nancy's lifelong friend in business, Sherri Martel, died. His close friend and tag team partner in his early days in Stampede Wrestling, Biff Wellington, died.
His wife contacted him while he was on the road. He went home, murdered her and his son, and hanged himself.
That incredible scene at WrestleMania XX that so many serious wrestling fans from all over the world held close to their heart, a night where the wrestling business seemed reach all its potential as an artform as it honored two who overcame so much to show what the business could be at its best, was now left in ashes, the two principals dead, one's legacy chipped away by banal bad taste, the other's destroyed by a horrific crime of his own doing, two of the family members who celebrated with him in the ring murdered in horrific fashion.
Chris Benoit's hellish weekend damaged everyone who knew him, in whatever way they knew, in ways we are only beginning to understand.
Those who were left to live with the consequences have faced incredible rush of emotional revelations. The family, friends, and fans he left behind were left parodoxically with both more answers and more questions than anyone could bear.
Everyone involved in this horror, everyone who cared in some way about Chris Benoit and his wife Nancy, and now, particularly, his son Daniel, is haunted by this. His family is in grief and uncomprehending pain. The wrestlers who looked up to Benoit for his toughness, his greatness in the ring, and his self-possession in the locker room are left shattered and betrayed.
Vince McMahon and WWE have been thrown into a media cauldron that half, barely, largely (sometimes all at the same time) understands what happened, and been subjected to bouncing pupilled hustlers who see a chance to get back in, blowhard camera hogs for whom this horror is just another segment to tut-tut through, and those with pet causes to flog. WWE may now be getting served the bill for all the death and destruction this business has engendered. Their public reaction so far to this media avalanche have impressed no one except their most loyal base. Benoit's murder/suicide may have permanently damaged WWE business.
I know I feel that incomplete ache so many do. The phone rings, the television plays, another link to another article with someone else a wrestler, a doctor, a reporter with another theory that explains some of how it might have happened in the limited space available just keeps coming. The assault of anger, depression, and fruitless hope for enlightment and rational explanations follows. I can hear it in the voices of the people I talk to, people who have lived through these deaths again and again, and there's an emptiness there that there wasn't before.
At the center of all this is a word: Why?
Was it roid rage that drove Chris Benoit to murder/sucide? Did he go into a rage, kill his wife, and then do everything else in a haze of grief and depression? Or was it a premeditated act that his wife predicted to friends? Was it the brain damage from undiagnosed concussions? Was it the pain of twenty three years of getting smashed around a wrestling ring? Was it the prescription drugs the police found in the house? Was it a toxic relationship with a wife who grew to adulthood, like he did, around the excesses of an outlaw sport? Was there just a darkness in Chris Benoit, a darkness he kept hidden from most, until the days he didn't?
Or was it a deadly synergy of all of those, some of those, none of those?
And how could anyone kill a child?
I don't know. All I know is the toughest wrestler of this generation and his family were destroyed by all the pressures the life he chose put upon him.
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WIPEMEHDOWN
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