2007-07-02 - 6:06 a.m.

It’s been a week since Chris Benoit killed his family and then himself. After missing the pay-per-view show for ‘personal reasons’ Chris sent some ‘curious text messages’ to some of his fellow wrestlers, including Chavo Guerrero. Two years ago, Chavo discovered his cousin, Eddie Guerrero, dead in his hotel room, a rictus monument to drug abuse. I’m guessing Chavo is getting pretty sick of this by now. At first Benoit told people that his wife and son were coughing up blood due to food poisoning. Then, apparently bored with the pretense, he sent messages stating his ‘physical address’ and the whereabouts of his pet dogs to Guerrero and some other lucky confidants. Chris Benoit then pinned his wife to the ground, bound her and smothered her. The next day he entered his seven-year-old son’s room and choked him to death – one only hopes not via the ‘Crippler Crossface’. After spending some more time hanging out at home while his murdered family members decomposed in the Georgia heat, Benoit eventually got around to placing a bible next to each of his victims before hanging himself in his basement gym with the cord from a weight machine. The Georgia D.A wasn’t kidding when he promised ‘bizarre details’ to the TV cameras.

It took time for all this to emerge, though. At first, all that was known was that Chris Benoit had been found dead at home, along with his wife and son. This was disclosed on Monday afternoon. The WWE was scheduled to air a special 3 hour edition of flagship show ‘Monday Night Raw’ live that evening. Ironically, it was to be a bogus tribute to Vince McMahon’s on-screen character,‘Mr. McMahon’ who had been killed off two weeks’ ago in a ridiculous limousine explosion. It was a stupid angle, seemingly designed to retire Vince McMahon from front-of-house duties, while setting up a ‘Who shot Mr. Burns?’ parody show and involving lots of bad acting from wrestlers forced to pretend that Vinny Mac really had bought the farm. Well, thanks to the Benoit tragedy they surely couldn’t persist with this distasteful and absurd gimmick, could they? For once in wrestling, decency prevailed and the fake Vince McMahon death angle was swiftly discarded. Perhaps remarkably, the entire show was canceled and the 3 hours were devoted to classic Benoit matches, clips from his DVD and tributes from his shaken fellow wrestlers. It was absolutely the right thing to do. The show began with an audibly distressed Vincent Kennedy McMahon standing in an eerily empty arena, breaking both character and the dire news. Old matches were shown, tears were shed and hastily prepared tributes proffered. ‘Triple H’ seemed to speak for everyone when he said that the one word that came to mind when thinking of Chris Benoit was ‘respect’. He was a guy that everyone looked up to. He wasn’t flashy, or even noticeably friendly, but he was the consummate professional, dedicated to his craft and utterly committed to putting on the best match he possibly could. For a fleeting moment, Chris Benoit was a tragic hero.

It soon emerged that there was no sign of a break-in and that police were treating the deaths as a double-murder/suicide. Fucking hell. Vince McMahon apologised the next night for airing a tribute to a murderer and all Benoit merchansdise was swiftly removed from WWE.com. Wrestler deaths have become a hideous cliché, sinister reminders that one’s veins are not as easily cleared as one’s conscience. In a business where larger-than-life physiques are prized above other, more useful tools it is inevitable that steroid use will not only be tolerated but encouraged. This, in an unregulated industry with no pension plan and no union. Wrestlers lead solitary, road-bound lives away from friends and family, enduring often constant pain or else forgoing pay and praise. Taking drugs not only help you cope with the boredom of hotel life, but they also enable you to throw yourself around a ring several nights a week despite that niggling back ache that you should probably get checked out. Surely not Chris Benoit, though? Not Chris Benoit, the pro, the family man, the worker, the grafter, the mute short-ass who won the fans over by simply putting on great matches wherever an audience was present. Not the Pegasus Kid. Not the Canadian Crippler. While famillcide is a rare and dreadful crime, there are a few sorry specimens involved in wrestling of whom little would surprise me. Jake Roberts springs to mind. Possibly Marty Jannetty also. I wouldn’t put anything past the Iron Sheik. Chris Benoit just didn’t fit the bill, though. Until his last days, he had never turned up ‘in no condition to perform’. His physique didn’t look that grotesquely jacked. No in-jokes were made about his lifestyle by the smart-mark fanbase. Chris Benoit, until he completely lost his mind, was a well respected and admired figure, a guy who couldn’t use the mic to save his life but made up for it with his remarkable ability to make a pro-wrestling match look like a realistic test of skill.

More ‘bizarre details’ continue to seep out. Needle marks were found on the son’s arm. It’s possible that the seven-year-old Daniel Benoit was considered underdeveloped by his parents and was being given growth-hormone drugs. Another possibility is that he was secretly suffering from the futuristic-sounding condition known as ‘Fragile X Syndrome’ - a good name for a finishing move if ever I heard one. Certain parties are theorising that this retarding illness put an unbearable strain on the Benoit marriage. At least one other party has denied there was anything wrong with the lad. What certain news outlets have leapt upon is the supply of drugs, including anabolic steroids, found at the Benoit homestead. This is the detail that threatens to bring this story from tawdry tabloid footnotes to mainstream investigations of the formerly ignored wrestling industry. Many self-righteous pundits have been quick to finger Roid Rage as the reason for these three deaths. It’s a simple, and seemingly logical explanation: wrestler, under pressure to look big beyond his frame, takes steroids, gets angry, murders wife and son in druggy rage. Just like that a storied career becomes a steroid career. Naturally, the WWE was quick to counter these claims. They pointed out that Benoit passed his last drug test (in April) and that the staggered nature of the murders points to premeditation rather than drug-induced rage. Yet, anabolic steroids were found in the house. Legally prescribed anabolic steroids. Then there’s the rumours about Benoit being a fan of date rape’s official drug, GHB. Oh, what a tangled web.

I’m not sure who is more reprehensible: wrestling fans who are such marks that they feel the need to deny any possible drug problem riffling through the wrestling industry, or knee-jerk news anchors who find a simple answer in steroids and then try to raise the tone above the tawdry threnody of pro-wrestling. It would be hopelessly jejune to deny the soothing clutch of addiction upon the world of professional wrestling. They take tests, yes, but not real tests. Not the sort of tests that get scrutinised by official panels. Just sort of token tests, every now and again, if you can be arsed. If you think ‘The Masterpiece,’ Chris Masters, got muscles like that simply by spending all his spare time in the gym then you must be thicker than Andre the Giant’s liver. Other athletes in combat sports work out. They spend time in the gym and they end up with some definition between muscle and gristle. They certainly don’t waddle around with the bulging tendons displayed shamelessly by many wrestlers. But do drugs cause you to commit acts of extreme immolation? Do the ball-shrinking side effects of steroids make the user so mad that he feels the need to compensate by choking the life out of his wife and son? I think not.

Something tells me that there was far more wrong in Chris Benoit’s life than simply pressure from work to look muscular. Plenty of wrestlers have managed to take steroids and plenty of other, more fun, drugs, without feeling recourse to murder. Chris Benoit must have been wrestling with some vile demons for longer than he was wrestling for world titles. The horribly ironic thing is that Chris Benoit was a model pro in front of the cameras and a fucked up husk in his private life. Usually in wrestling, it’s the other way around. Maybe this incident will blow the lid off pro wrestling. Maybe we’ll get more scandals than the last time Vinny Mac was up in front of the beak for foisting drugs on his wrestlers and presiding over a company where sexual abuse was all part of the glamour. Will we finally see the swollen, rotten heart that beats under the glistening body of professional wrestling? Part of me hopes that Chris Benoit’s mental collapse rips this shitty business asunder. I want all the muck raked up. I want to gawp and blog and coagulate. Let’s fucking wreck it.

RIP Chris Benoit
Great Wrestler
Fucking Cunt.

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