The Intro
Even now, this is a tough column to write. I wanted to distance myself from the subject matter and get something down on paper that was intelligent and reasonable, that covered what happened and how we all felt about it, drew rational conclusions about why and how the business changed, and what else can be done to ensure it never happens again. I want that to be the MO of Poll Position as a concept, that it can take the thoughts and feelings of a group of fans and come up with something a little opinionated, a little educational, a little thought provoking, and maybe a little controversial.

I’m not sure that’s going to happen with this one, and with that in mind, there are a few disclaimers we’re going to need to kick aside before we get started.

1. Chris Benoit was my favorite wrestler. I followed his career for over a decade. I admired him for the very qualities I now believe were likely the main contributing factors in the events of that fateful weekend in June of ‘07; his dedication to his craft and his relentless, obsessive pursuit of perfection in his chosen field.

2. I don’t believe in God. At all. This necessarily precludes a belief in biblical concepts of good and evil. You will not find those words used in that context here, and you will find my disposition towards them less than accommodating.

3. I don’t believe in objective journalism. It’s all opinion, kids. This will be mostly mine.

Let’s do it.

The Results

A good response this week, and discussion in the forums that’s still going on. The debate, in fact, is far more rational than the poll alone suggests. Of which more later.

The Analysis
As wrestling fans, we’re all to blame – 0%
One of the things that intrigues me about wrestling fans specifically is the dichotomy between what we want to see and what we’re willing to take responsibility for. After all, we’re the ones buying the tickets and the pay-per-views and the merchandise. It’s our money. Whenever I’ve advanced the view that wrestling promotions (and especially the WWE) largely dictate the direction of the product to the fans, I’m met with a wave of righteous indignation and reminded of the power we have, that without us there would be no product.

Yet in the Benoit tragedy, we are entirely innocent.

I’m not suggesting that wrestling fans are responsible for the deaths of Nancy, Daniel, or even Chris Benoit. That would be absurd. But I remember all the people who said they’d never watch WWE again in the wake of what went down that weekend and the following Monday, the vast majority in a state of genuine distress. I was one of them. But we all went back, didn’t we? Nothing really changed and we all went back.

Just last night, a friend was attempting to show me CZW’s Death Match tournament from a couple of months back. I sat through only one match, a three-way between champion Drake Younger, Scotty Vortekz, and OMG (yes, that’s really his ring name), that was apparently a Thumbtack Kickpads match (I‘m not kidding). It was a bloody, stupid mess that ended when Vortekz hit a belly-to-belly on OMG from the top rope and onto Younger, who was laid out beneath a sheet of plate glass balanced on top of four steel chairs (still not kidding). If that doesn’t sound moronic enough for you, at one point in the match, OMG fluffed a piledriver on Younger when he lost his balance in a ring that looked like it was about to fall apart, the mat littered with trash and foreign objects. This of course led to that most retarded of wrestling chants, “you fucked up!” from the crowd that had gathered in what appeared to be a local park to witness the event.

Granted, CZW is a shitty garbage promotion where guys take insane risks for very little reward, but the attitude of those fans struck me as an extreme version of the attitude many of us have. Maybe the majority don’t need guys going through sheets of glass or bleeding like stuck pigs, but we’re only a few weeks removed from a WWE pay-per-view many bemoaned for its lack of blood and big spots.

All of which may seem a little extreme for some. Don’t worry, I’m going to talk about other factors in much greater detail, but that 0% bought a small, sad smile to my face.

He and his family were casualties of a callous, cruel business that destroys lives – 10%
It’s a true statement, it just doesn’t tell the whole story. For me, how callous and cruel the business is has become more apparent in the aftermath of the Benoit tragedy, and especially in light of the work done by the Sports Legacy Institute, headed up by Chris Nowinski. Their research into the cumulative effects of multiple head traumas and specifically the results of the examination of Chris Benoit’s brain should have led to massive and fundamental change throughout the industry. Instead, we got denials of the study’s validity from noted biologist Vincent K. McMahon.

Make no mistake about it, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) is not some pie in the sky idea cooked up by a bitter ex-wrestler. The Sports Legacy Institute has done and is doing legitimate and important work that has consistently stood up to peer review. According to these studies, CTE is a form of brain damage that results from repeated head traumas and has been discovered in multiple athletes who take part in contact sports, most notably professional football. It can lead to erratic and irrational behavior, including depression and paranoia. The examination of Chris Benoit’s brain discovered such extensive damage that doctors concluded he may not have even been responsible for his actions at the time he murdered his wife and daughter.

It’s worth noting that not one neuropathologist (that being the specialization that is in a position to comment) has come forward to dispute or discredit these claims.

Of course, accepting the CTE explanation as truth when there is clearly still plenty of research to be done that the Sports Legacy Institute lacks the funding for is easy when you were a fan. Coming into this column, a part of my research was revisiting my e-mail exchanges from that evening and even going back to the threads that were started here at Inside Pulse. At the center of it all, the sense of disbelief and betrayal that comes with realizing that a man you admired and followed has done this terrible, terrible thing. We looked for other explanations back then, and those of us who still think about it are likely still looking for them now. CTE seems…easy, somehow.

The existence of CTE is a recent discovery, and perhaps it’s only natural that the WWE dismiss it until such time as the study reaches more definite conclusions. The abuse of steroids, painkillers, amphetamines, and alcohol by multiple employees (or ‘independent contractors‘, as the WWE would have it) is not. Michael Benoit (Chris’s father) is quoted as saying that Chris had told him of these abuses and had explained that he needed to keep doing them in order to keep his job.

While the hulking likes of Batista more commonly spring to mind when one thinks of steroid abuse, the truth is that consistent use is far more obvious in smaller performers. Chris Benoit and Eddie Guerrero were prime examples of this, and both men were clearly packing as much as fifty pounds of chemically induced mass onto their bodies during their time with the WWE. Again, this is more than idle speculation. Read up on the effects of steroid use and the telltale signs. You may not be able to spot an athlete who occasional cycles steroids for a bulkier physique, but Benoit and Guerrero were way beyond occasional cycles. Their appearance was – at times – freakish.

“Benoit paces back and forth, his slicked-back hair accentuating what appears to be an enlarged skull, a side effect of human growth hormone abuse. Benoit’s face looks prematurely old, flat, and shark like, and his arms are so swollen even for him that it’s clear he upped his dosage for his big night.”

The above is writer Matthew Randazzo’s description of Benoit during a backstage segment that aired during Wrestlemania XX, the night he won the World Heavyweight Championship. Based on my own memories of that night, my fan’s memories, I thought this a massive and unfair exaggeration on Randazzo’s part. With that in mind, I went back and watched the segment again only to find myself feeling an almost indescribable sadness for a man who was clearly already a wreck as his best friend Guerrero, who would die seven months later, psyched him up for the main event.

I simply cannot see a way that WWE could be unaware of Chris Benoit’s drug abuse. Or Eddie Guerrero’s. Or Brian Pillman’s. To call it murder or manslaughter or even criminal negligence is perhaps a step too far – both Guerrero and Pillman used drugs recreationally, and I don’t believe substance abuse was ultimately the cause of Benoit’s death – but there are too many ethically disturbing questions the company has never answered to call them blameless.

I separate the performer and the man, and still enjoy his work – 20%
This isn’t really an issue for me, as there are only a handful of shows I have ever watched more than once anyway, and that was usually for research. Before writing this, I re-watched Hard Knocks, Royal Rumble ‘05, and Wrestlemania XX. The only difficulty I found I had was reconciling the joy I felt when Benoit pulled Big Show over the top rope and made Triple H tap to the mixture of emotions I feel now.

Do I enjoy his work? No. Not anymore. As I’ve already said, my belief is that multiple head traumas were the main contributing factor in the meltdown of Chris Benoit. I cannot sit down with that knowledge and watch him taking bumps. I’m honestly surprised I can watch wrestling at all anymore.

He murdered an innocent child. Nothing more needs to be said – 30%
I knew this would get a decent percentage of the vote, just as I knew it would bother me. It must be nice to be able to see things in such stark shades of black and white, to believe that Benoit was ultimately an evil man and hope that he’s burning in hell for what he’s done. Ignorance is bliss, as they say.

It was Benoit that made the decisions and sacrifices that eventually drove him to do what he did. Blaming the business is unfair – 33%
Without that final sentence, I think a few more people would have gone for this option than some of the others. The dominant opinion certainly seemed to be that Benoit was responsible for what he did but that calling the wrestling business blameless was a little much.

Chris Benoit was responsible for what he did. Even if he wasn’t in his right mind when he murdered his wife and son before killing himself, even if years of drug abuse and head trauma had left him a demented shell, barely human and capable of a monstrous crime against the woman he married and the son that – by all accounts – he adored, nobody forced him to that point. The only gun ever held to Chris Benoit’s head was that of his own ambition, and he was playing a game of Russian Roulette that has left the path to the top of the professional wrestling business littered with its dead. Benoit was not a stupid man, and he – even more than his employers – must have known the risks he was taking with his health. There’s no way he could have known that the path he chose to follow would end in such a horrifying place, but the precedents were there for an early, tragic death, and they were many.

With that knowledge, Chris Benoit continued the relentless pursuit of his craft until it killed him. Until it killed his wife and young son.

Chris Benoit was a monster.

The Position
It’s sixteen years since I saw a fresh-faced Canadian in silver tiger-stripe tights wrestling Joey Maggs on an episode of WCW Worldwide. I was thirteen years old, I lived on another continent, and even though I knew wrestling was fake, I still believed. Over the next twelve years, I watched Benoit rise to the top of his profession and do the very thing they said he never would – become the WWE World Heavyweight Champion. Even in my mid-twenties, as cynical and jaded about wrestling as I had become, Benoit’s victory was inspiring, a fairytale ending amongst the politics and the seedy realities of the business.

Then I came home from work one Sunday evening, jumped online, and found a stunned e-mail from the very same friend with whom I’d screamed for Triple H to tap as we watched the live broadcast of Wrestlemania XX.

“My God,” he’d written, “this can’t be true.”

In many ways, the story of Chris Benoit is the story of pro wrestling, and his legacy is the legacy of a generation of fans who are more survivors now than anything else. Two years on, far from embracing the wholesale changes that would protect performers and give more than a small minority the chance at a life after wrestling, the business is instead choosing to embrace a new audience, sweeping the Benoit generation aside in much the same manner as it swept aside the man whose actions came to define it.

But they were his actions. That much is true.

The Pimpage
A Science Daily article on Benoit and CTE.

The Sports Legacy Institute’s page regarding Benoit and CTE research.

The CBC documentary A Fight To The Death.

The Future
Given CM Punk’s alleged demotion for not wearing sexy enough threads for The Undertaker’s taste, Poll Position takes a look at the men who carry wrestling companies as I ask: What The Most Important Aspect Of Being A Heavyweight Champion?