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Excerpt from
Chapter I
The Mark
“The world [of wrestling] doesn’t
push you to the depths of darkness. You do. That drives me
nuts … It’s not the world of wrestling that drove [troubled
wrestlers] to alcohol, the world of wrestling that drove them to
drugs. You do that to yourself.”
Chris Benoit in 2004.
At
the time abusing steroids, painkillers, alcohol, amphetamines, and
psychiatric drugs because, as he told his father, “If I want a job,
I have to.”
The most sacred,
beautiful thing in the world to Chris Benoit was professional
wrestling. Among his
admiring colleagues, it was considered an indisputable fact that no
one in the world took “the art” of pro wrestling more seriously.
Performing in a wrestling ring was the transcendent creative high
that Benoit dedicated his life to chasing. Benoit was addicted to
that in-ring euphoria, and his obsessive hunger for his fix warped
his personality and his priorities. He made sacrifices to advance
and later to sustain his career that most people would not make for
country, creed, love, or wealth. By most accounts a thoughtful and
compassionate man in his private life, Benoit within the confines of
pro wrestling was a self-righteous fool who repeatedly jumped
headfirst onto a hard canvas until all four lobes of his brain
sported brown polka dots of dead, rotting tissue. Benoit was
wrestling’s tortured artist; he tortured himself and called it art.
Benoit dispatched his
professional duties according to a medieval code of honor founded on
sacrifice, humiliation, and the ritual self-infliction of pain as
punishment for every flaw. Behind the scenes, this hysterical
fanaticism motivated Benoit on one occasion to threaten to
intentionally cripple himself on national TV if he was given a
storyline he didn’t like. While training in Japan, Benoit suffered
physical abuse worthy of the Inquisition in order to be taken
seriously as a wrestler. When it was his turn as a veteran to
discipline the “Young Boys,” Benoit beat, choked, ridiculed, and
humiliated rookies.
Somehow, this otherwise
normal and kind family man believed that the most important thing in
the world was his rank in pro wrestling’s bizarre, militaristic
backstage brotherhood. One pro wrestling legend and longtime
coworker of Benoit’s told me that Benoit “wanted to be the guy that
all the other guys pointed to and said ‘He’s the best.’ He wanted
‘locker room respect’ as being the ‘best of the Boys’ more than
anything else in life. He was possessed by the desire.” The
sacrifices Benoit made to achieve this nebulous goal cannot be
defined as anything other than insane.
Known as an uncommonly
doting and gentle father, Chris rarely saw his children so that he
could make every date of his outlandish international touring
schedule. Married to a woman with legendary sex appeal, Benoit left
her at home to spend thousands of monotonous, lonely nights in
dreary hotel rooms with stained carpets. A financially secure
millionaire who lived in a mansion, Benoit left his luxurious home
every week to pilot rental cars on interminable, transnational road
trips with a junkie traveling partner who he dared not trust with
any of the driving responsibilities. The friend of countless
wrestlers who suffered fatal heart attacks due to steroid abuse, the
naturally slight Benoit nonetheless knowingly poisoned his
cardiovascular and endocrine system with the enormous amounts of
bodybuilding drugs needed to sustain his wrestling career. Benoit
sacrificed his relationship with his family and his quality of life
so that he could perform in the wrestling ring, and, when Chris
Benoit performed, he did his best to sacrifice what was left of his
health and sanity.
In the words of former
World Wrestling Entertainment writer Dan Madigan, “Benoit always
left it all in the ring. He was never satisfied unless he
left every drop of his soul in that ring every single goddamn night.
He felt he owed it to the business he loved.” Benoit demonstrated
his love and respect for the business by performing to the absolute
limits of his drug-enhanced physical endurance in every match he
wrestled, no matter how irrelevant. Nicknamed “The Cyborg” backstage
for the way he combined the ferociousness and energy of an animal
with inhuman mechanical precision, Benoit’s wrestling style was a
relentless onslaught of authentic violence and reckless crash test
dummy stunts. In a profession where even the lazy and cautious end
up physically ravaged, Benoit worked far too hard; he put far too
much of himself into every move, every strike, every fall. Chris
Benoit crippled himself for a living.
By the time he was forty,
Benoit’s body was in constant blinding pain, and his profoundly
damaged brain was further scrambled by years of heavy amphetamine,
steroids, alcohol, painkiller, and psychiatric drug abuse. For most
of his life, Chris Benoit was a study in irreconcilable contrasts.
In the end, Chris Benoit the mentally disturbed, self-mutilating
wrestling freakshow and Chris Benoit the decent family man became
one: Benoit murdered his own son with a variation of his fictional
character’s signature wrestling hold.
It is blackly hilarious
that, in a medium where lazy writing leads to idiotic plotlines in
which the most saintly good guys undergo unexplained split second
transformations into Satanic maniacs, it was “the best man in pro
wrestling” who would commit the most gruesome, savage, and
inconceivable real-life crime in wrestling history. None of Chris
Benoit’s unlikely achievements can compare with his last, miraculous
feat: he united wrestlers and fans alike around a single episode as
the undisputed Low Point in pro wrestling history. Though it does
not boast its own championship belt, the Bottom of the Barrel has
arguably always been the most hotly contested title in the world of
wrestling.
Conceived by carnival
conmen and mobsters as a watertight method of scamming ignorant
sports gamblers, pro wrestling from the beginning has been a cruel,
lawless, and corrupt business. It attracts the same sort of mad,
marginal misfits and street smart predators commonly associated with
touring rock bands, motorcycle gangs, or the porn business. Chris
Benoit was considered too decent, too honest, and most of all too
small to survive in pro wrestling, where he could expect to be
humiliated and tortured by his gigantic circus freak ex-con
colleagues and worked to death by the shitbag promoters who make
fortunes selling tickets to slapstick farces in which their
ill-paid, uninsured employees kill themselves for applause. The
humble, shy, soft-spoken Canadian gentleman with a reputation as
wrestling’s most devoted father was the last man anyone would have
ever expected to put all the other atrocities committed by
wrestling’s roll call of killers, crooks, and conmen to shame.
After all,
how could polite, respectful Chris Benoit compare to people like WWE
Chairman Vince McMahon, Jr., the jacked-up billionaire whose feudal
business practices have guaranteed that the wrestling industry will
be a gruesome, high-fatality meatgrinder for decades to come?
This is how:
on Friday, June 22, 2007, Chris Benoit bound and strangled his
sedated wife Nancy with a TV cord. In the early morning of June 23,
Benoit woke his sleeping seven-year-old son Daniel and fed him the
anti-anxiety pill Xanax. Shortly afterwards, Benoit suffocated
Daniel with his bare hands; Daniel’s unusual wounds were consistent
with Benoit’s trademark wrestling submission hold, the Crippler
Crossface. Finally, after a day of indecision over whether he
should continue his pro wrestling career until his crimes were
discovered, Benoit tied a noose around his own neck using a cord
from his lat pulldown weight machine and lynched himself. |
