That Was Then 6.29.07: The Benoit Diaries

When Tuesday morning started, I didn’t know what I wanted to write about Chris Benoit’s murder-suicide. I felt like I wanted to recognize what he did during his career, but also make my feelings clear about what he did on the way out. I ended up writing a few things, so I decided that instead of one summary piece, I decided to do a point-by-point timeline of what I was feeling, written as I went along from Monday night to now.

I woke up this morning in a wonderful mood. I had just spent a wonderful weekend practically glued to my beautiful girlfriend, a weekend which developed into one of the best weekends of my entire life. I couldn’t stop smiling all day today, and I went to work, the day blew by very quickly for a Monday, and after quickly checking the wrestling news, I walked out the door of my Manhattan office at 5:30pm. I actually whistled on my way from the office to Grand Central for the hour long ride home, got off the train and called my girlfriend (who is currently a state away) and chatted for a few minutes before telling her I love her and I’ll talk to her later, then turned to the internet, loaded up the news, and discovered that Chris Benoit and his entire family were found dead in Atlanta. I just went cold when I found out. I knew that Benoit had flown home from Texas because of a “family emergency” and missed the Vengeance PPV as a result. Then I thought about how everyone and their mother was banging on WWE for not making some mention of it before the show, and immediately thought about how stupid and petty that indignance was in retrospect.

As of the time I write this at 7:30 pm on Monday, I have no idea what happened other than the fact that he, Nancy, and son Daniel were all found dead and police are investigating, but I can only imagine the horror the cops found when they walked in on that scene. Then I thought about what the final day of Chris Benoit’s life must have been like. I don’t know what happened there yet, but I’m reasonably certain they didn’t all happen to die of natural causes. When stuff like this happens and there aren’t details, you always imagine the worst. Was someone holding Chris’s family hostage and waiting for him to get home so they could snuff them all? Did Chris Benoit lose his mind and pull a murder/suicide? What other horrible things could he have gotten himself mixed up in that things would end like this? I have no idea just yet, but I can only imagine what must have been going through Chris Benoit’s mind as he came home to Atlanta on Saturday night, and I can only imagine because we’ll never know since he’s dead.

It’s ironic that Eddy Guerrero died the first week I was writing here at 411, and now his best friend is dead and I’m feeling the exact same feelings I did then. I am in absolute shock. It’s really strange because I’m kind of vocal about how silly it is when a bunch of teenagers mope around all day when some rock singer drops dead of whatever, because I think it’s ridiculous how they can possibly get that upset about somebody they didn’t know personally and probably haven’t ever even been in the presence of. Yet here I sit and, though I’m not crying or mourning or anything, I was caught totally unprepared and am just in absolute shock.

I know there are people who are going to sit around and say things like “So sad that such a great worker died before his time” and “It’s a shame he never got a bigger run at the top” and other wrestling-related mournings, but I think all that is immaterial at this point. Chris Benoit’s dead. So’s his wife Nancy. So’s their young son Daniel. Something really, really bad happened and an entire family died as a result. Chris Benoit’s wrestling career should not be of any importance at this point.

Now I think about my own life and how I feel about my girlfriend and how I would be absolutely crushed if anything ever happened to her. I think about how I told her I love her before I got off the phone an hour ago, and how that could very easily have been the last time and I wouldn’t have even known it. I can’t imagine being Chris Benoit this weekend.

At the end of the day, we’re wrestling fans and we’ll miss Chris Benoit the worker, but the business will move on without him the way it did when Owen and Eddy died. But more important than that is the fact that Christopher, Nancy, and Daniel Benoit were all killed this weekend, and somebody’s children and grandchild are all gone and there’s people who are going to miss them a hell of a lot more than we ever will. I wish I could say I feel for them, but there’s no possible way I can as much as their family will.

Four hours have passed since I wrote the above. In the intervening time, I went out and had coffee with a couple of friends and one of them asked me about Benoit, and I told them all that I knew and had a rare discussion with my friends about wrestling, and I expressed how numb I felt to the whole situation. I get home and get back on the internet, and discover that authorities believe that this was not an accident, not a murder by an outside party, but was in fact a result of Chris Benoit coming home, killing his wife and son, and then killing himself. All of a sudden, the sorrow and pity I felt dissipated like smoke, and I was left with a clear feeling of disgust. I was disgusted that, albeit without a full set of facts, I believed that somebody on the outside had done this to this icon for smart wrestling fans, when it was in fact he who had committed this whole atrocity himself.

At this point, I find it hard to feel anything for Chris Benoit. How could you do this, Chris? How could you kill your own family? Yeah, great, you’re not exactly setting the world on fire as a wrestler anymore. Is that any excuse for what you’re now said to have done? I don’t care how unfulfilled you feel about your career, or even if it had nothing to do with your career. There is no excuse for what you’ve done. How could you be so selfish to kill not only yourself, but also your wife and your SEVEN YEAR OLD SON?? If you’re really feeling that sorry for yourself, just go ahead and kill yourself, but there is no excuse, NO FUCKING EXCUSE for taking your wife and son with you. As far as I’m concerned, you deserve nothing. You deserve no pity, you deserve no tears, you deserve nothing. How can any man do something like this? I think it’s pathetic, and I think what you’ve done is flat out evil.

Okay, now here’s the thing that’s going to get me all kinds of nasty emails, but you know what? I don’t give a flying fuck what any of you think, and if any of you disagree with what I’m about to say, you need to seriously sit down and reevaluate your priorities and your sense of right and wrong. Chris Benoit, you may have been one of the best workers to ever come down the pike, but you are a miserable, despicable son of a bitch, and even being the atheist I am, I’m right now wishing for the existence of Hell just so you can burn there for what you’ve done. How could you be so damn selfish as to do something like that? I can’t believe that not just me, but everyone else was sitting around feeling bad for you when it turns out you were the catalyst for the entire situation. This has nothing to do with wrestling, star ratings for your matches, or how bad you were held down everywhere you’ve ever wrestled. YOU KILLED YOUR FAMILY. You took two innocent lives, and I don’t care if Nancy was running around tagging every other guy in the neighborhood, that’s no reason for her to have to die, and it’s certainly not any reason for your SEVEN YEAR OLD SON to die.

It astonishes me how anyone can even bring themselves to do something like that. I’ve got a foul mouth. I’m heavily opinionated. I’ve been known to blow my stack on more than one occasion. But I don’t think there’s any anger, any frustration that could ever bring me to harm the people I love and who love me. These people cared for you, and you ended their lives. I’m sure there are people who are going to give you a free pass just because you were a great worker, but fuck those people. If that’s how they’re going to look at this, their opinion is not just flawed, but totally invalid as far as I’m concerned. I think any tribute to you after learning what we’ve learned is completely unwarranted, because quite frankly, you don’t deserve it Chris. I’ll never deny how great you were as a wrestler, but as a human being, you certainly left a lot to be desired.

Monday night, I emailed the above to my friend James to see what he thought. Since he lives in New Zealand, I didn’t get his response until the following morning, but he had some good points and after getting his permission, I thought I’d add what he thought as well:

Yeah, I mean, who can argue with that? Both parts were good in context, but obviously you have to go with your rant because, barring a complete mistake on the part of the Georgia police, there’s not much else you can say but that Benoit was a sadistic, deserves-no-respect monster. I’m not “mad” like you are, just really disappointed. He hasn’t hurt me or anyone I care about, but he killed his family, which is downright sick, and he went and killed the hopes and adoration that so many wrestling fans had for him and the business. I mean, what is that supposed to make us wrestling fans–and even worse, NON wrestling fans–think? It really makes you jaded and depressed that a so-called “respectable” wrestler could do that. You’re right: Nancy would have been one thing (though that certainly doesn’t excuse him to murder her), but killing Daniel was downright despicable. What a disappointment. I have no respect for the guy, and I actually met him, albeit for only a quick handshake at WWF New York. I thought it was so cool to have met Benoit, this world-class guy, and I hadn’t even watched many of his matches apart from the ones he had in the E. Now I have no respect for him myself, at least not as a person. How can anyone watch his matches with fondness and respect anymore? Now he’s no longer a wrestler in people’s eyes. He’s a coldhearted, selfish murderer.

Worst to me is how we all thought he was going home to attend family business, but in reality he probably skipped a PPV to go home and kill his family! Now that’s REALLY sick. If all is true, then he left a chance to become a champion, or at least challenge for to become champion (I don’t care if it was for a crap title–he would have made it respectable) to go and kill his wife and son. Think about how sick that is. Wow. What a letdown for all the people who thought he was a good worker and a good guy. Now he’s just a miserable human being rotting in hell. Sad.

It’s now been three days since I first discovered what had gone down concerning the Benoit family, and it’s taken me a couple of days to really feel like adding anything because, quite frankly, I was on a level of news overload I hadn’t felt since 9/11 and started getting numb to the whole thing. While my initial reactions were of shock and sorrow, then followed by anger, I had leveled out and was now just taking things as they came in without being affected to any great degree. The more I heard, the more I just shook my head at the whole thing. The grisly details about how Nancy had been tied up before being killed and the way Benoit hung himself in the basement disturbed me, but after that everything just started to melt together. I didn’t read anything anyone else had to say about it because, quite frankly, I didn’t care to hear more of people either vilifying Benoit’s actions or trying to retionalize them. I didn’t even bat an eye when I heard that Benoit’s doctor got raided, and I was not the least bit surprised when the media latched onto the steroid thing like they had lockjaw. The only thing that really affected me in any way was when I learned about Daniel’s medical condition, and then it started to make a little sense.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to justify Benoit’s actions or rationalize them in a way that will take the blame off of him, but this might at least help explain what might have been going through Benoit’s mind in those final days. Having retarded kids is not easy, and can be an incredible drain on someone. There are also likely to be feelings of anger and resentment toward the child, as in “Why me? What did I do to deserve this?” Maybe Benoit thought he was doing the right thing to stop the suffering of everybody involved? Who knows. As for the steroid thing, I highly doubt it was a roid rage, it was obviously premeditated (whatever his state of mind) and drawn out over several days. It might have contributed to his mental state, but I blame it more on the difficulties of raising a retarded kid combined with the normal stress of being on the road.

Really, I have no answers. I don’t know that anyone does. We may never get any, though we all know that the media’s going to blame it on steroids whether that’s what it really was or not. Whatever the case, three people are dead and never to return. I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to separate Chris Benoit the worker from Chris Benoit the murderer the way some people are trying to, and much like the career of Bret Hart will forever be tainted by Montreal, everything Chris Benoit’s ever done, from his work in Japan as Pegasus, to his stint in ECW, to the series of brawls with Kevin Sullivan and best of seven series with Booker T in WCW, to his Royal Rumble and World Title wins in 2004, to his seemingly neverending series of matches with Eddy Guerrero, it’s all going to fall under the shadow of this murder-suicide, maybe forever.

It’s a shame, it’s just such a damn shame.