From The Top Rope To Six Feet Under

Chris Benoit, left, poses with Eddie Guerrero, right, at Wrestlemania 20.

On June 24, 2007, World Wrestling Entertainment held “Vengeance: Night of Champions'' inside the Toyota Center in Houston, Texas. The concept of the show was simple: every single championship being held in WWE would be defended at the show. While the main event was a star-studded five-pack challenge for the WWE Championship, many fans were more excited about a different match: a one-on-one contest for the vacant ECW Championship between young up-and-coming superstar CM Punk and beloved ring veteran Chris Benoit.

The ECW Championship match went on third. CM Punk entered first to a thunderous ovation from the crowd, walking intensely down to the ring. But fans were dismayed once the ring announcer, Justin Roberts, announced that Chris Benoit had not been able to make it to the event for unknown reasons, and was instead replaced by multi-time tag team champion Johnny Nitro. As Nitro strutted down to the ring, climbed atop a turnbuckle, and performed his signature pose, the crowd booed and chanted “We want Benoit!”.

What no one in attendance at the show, nor anyone backstage, knew at the time was that almost one-thousand miles away in Fayetteville, Georgia, Chris Benoit’s body was hanging from a weightlifting machine in his basement. He was dead. And so were his wife and son, both sedated and strangled over a span of two days.

Over the following days and weeks, more and more details would come out about the bizarre double murder-suicide. What made Chris Benoit snap? What was the impact of WWE’s lax Wellness Policy? Could concussions have played a role? Did someone set him up? Thirteen years after the incident, we still cannot confirm all of the answers to these questions. But the Chris Benoit double murder-suicide has left its mark on the world, and is often referred to as the darkest event in professional wrestling history.

Born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Christopher Michael Benoit was obsessed with wrestling from a young age. At twelve years old, he attended a local show headlined by the Dynamite Kid and Bret “the Hitman” Hart, and decided that his destiny was to become a professional wrestler. Training under the tutelage of the legendary Stu Hart, Benoit quickly adapted a high-impact style of wrestling reminiscent of the aforementioned Dynamite Kid, adopting his idol’s finishing maneuver, the diving headbutt, as his own.

It is incredibly important to note here, early on, that the creator of the diving headbutt, professional wrestling legend Harley Race, later stated that he regretted ever using it due to the massive damage it inflicts on the head, neck, and back, and encouraged all wrestlers to never use it or they would end up paralyzed. Benoit’s idol, the Dynamite Kid, sustained numerous concussions from the move and was confined to a wheelchair in the final years of his life. In a way, the writing was on the wall for Benoit.

After a short stint in Stu Hart’s Canadian promotion Stampede Wrestling, he traveled almost entirely across the world to Japan in 1986, joining the dojo of New Japan Pro-Wrestling. While Japan was heavily important to Benoit for allowing him to hone his craft, it was even more significant for another reason: his introduction to future best friend Eddie Guerrero.

Eddie Guerrero was a professional wrestling legend in his own right. A member of the illustrious Guerrero family, he had already made his mark in Mexico’s AAA promotion. Now a member of New Japan Pro-Wrestling as the masked Black Tiger, Eddie was hungry for a competitive match. And Chris Benoit was the perfect opponent.

Originally, the pair absolutely hated each other—Guerrero even went so far as to tell his wife Vickie that Benoit was a “prick”—but a mutual respect developed between the pair, from which a friendship blossomed. The two became inseparable as they left New Japan and joined the rosters of Eastern Championship Wrestling and World Championship Wrestling, where the pair would rack up numerous achievements: Guerrero would be a mainstay of the cruiserweight division, winning the Cruiserweight Championship twice, whilst Benoit would be a main-event talent in WCW, winning almost every single title and becoming the seventh WCW Triple Crown Champion. But with greener pastures ahead, the pair once again jumped ship together—this time to WWF.

The achievements that both Eddie Guerrero and Chris Benoit garnered in WWF (now WWE) are too extensive to touch on in this short of a paper. To sum their respective achievements up, Guerrero had massive success as both a comedic character and wrestler, winning the WWE Championship as well as various other titles, while Benoit won the 2004 Royal Rumble despite being the first entrant and went on to win the World Heavyweight Championship in the main event of Wrestlemania 20. As Benoit celebrated his win with confetti falling from the ceiling of Madison Square Garden, Eddie walked down to the ring to raise his best friend’s arm and hug him in one of the most memorable moments in Wrestlemania history. Both men were on top of the world.

And then on November 13, 2005, on the day he was rumored to win the World Heavyweight Championship for the first time, Eddie Guerrero died in a Minneapolis hotel room of heart failure. He was only 38 years old. Upon further investigation by both the media, medical personnel, and WWE themselves, it was discovered that Guerrero’s untimely death was accelerated by addictions to drugs and alcohol and was as a whole almost exclusively due to his abuse of anabolic steroids. As an immediate response, WWE announced on February 27, 2006 that they had enacted a Talent Wellness Policy, where all talent were subject to random drug tests throughout the year for substances such as steroids and recreational drugs and punished accordingly. The media praised WWE for their quick action, and it seemed that the worst was over.

But, in a lot of ways, Eddie Guerrero was not the only wrestler to die on that cold November morning. His best friend of almost twenty years, Chris Benoit, had essentially died on the inside. Once a bright figure of the locker room, Chris receded from the eye of his fellow wrestlers while his friendships with individuals such as Chris Jericho, Edge, and Christian slowly faded away. Gone was the Chris Benoit who had excitedly hugged his best friend under the lights at Madison Square Garden—in his place was a hermit dedicated only to wrestling, prone to sudden emotional breakdowns, and a rapidly-degrading home life.

And so we’ve returned to where we started our story. Chris Benoit would murder his wife Nancy via strangling her with a telephone cord on June 22, drug and murder his young son Daniel by suffocating him with a pillow on the following morning, and kill himself by breaking his neck via the pulley apparatus on a weight machine on the morning of June 24.

When the world learned of the tragic deaths of not just Chris Benoit but his entire family, it became headline news. With the early advent of the Internet, message boards were filled with various conspiracy theories due to the unknown details of the incident: these included a hit by the Canadian mafia, Benoit taking revenge on Nancy for potentially hurting their son, and, by far the most outlandish one, it being a hit job by Nancy’s ex-husband, fellow professional wrestler Kevin Sullivan, and his satanic cult. But as the initial waves of conspiracy theories fizzled out and more details were discovered, fingers began to be pointed at potential malpractice on the part of WWE.

When Chris Benoit’s autopsy was performed, the levels of testosterone found in his body were found to be far more elevated than they should have been. It was also discovered that had Benoit not perpetrated these heinous acts of malevolence, he would have died regardless within ten months due to an enlarged heart from the effects of anabolic steroids. However, WWE denied these reports and stated that Benoit had recently passed a Wellness Policy test under their own roof. Vince McMahon, the owner and CEO of WWE, furthered the fact that Benoit had not failed a wellness test during interviews with various news organizations, and while the world had a hypothetical raised eyebrow at the actions of WWE, the Benoit case began to fade from the public eye just over a month after it occurred.

And then the Signature Pharmacy scandal occurred.

Just over two months after the Benoit murders and Vince McMahon’s denial of steroid usage by Benoit was broadcasted on live television, Florida law enforcement officers raided Signature Pharmacy in Orlando after a long probe by the Albany County District Attorney for the illegal distribution of steroids. Upon release of the names of the clients receiving said illegal steroids, ten of them were employed by the WWE—and all ten had been passing each and every single Wellness Policy test. The media was once again sent into uproar as WWE was forced to suspend all ten of the Signature Pharmacy clients for 90 days. With a metaphorical egg on their face, WWE was once again in the spotlight of the media—for all the wrong reasons. The Wellness Policy was reformed, and stricter testing protocols were developed as a result of the incident.

But as the term roid rage was being thrown around by newscasters such as Nancy Grace, a even more striking theory was being put together by Dr. Christopher Nowinski, head of the Sports Legacy Institute. A former professional wrestler and colleague of Benoit’s, Nowinski was forced into retirement due to a series of concussions. When Benoit had died, Nowinski suspected that Benoit’s years of taking unprotected chair shots to the head—as well as his aforementioned diving headbutt finishing maneuver—had something to do with the shocking murders. After gaining permission from Chris’ father Michael, the brain of Chris Benoit was sent to be studied by Dr. Julian Bailes, professor of the department of Neurosurgery at West Virginia University, and Dr. Bennet Omalu, the Chief Medical Examiner of San Joaquin County, California. The findings were nothing short of shocking: according to the report released by Sports Legacy Institute, “Mr. Benoit’s brain exhibited large amounts of abnormal Tau protein, manifested as Neurofibrillary Tangles (NFTs) and Neuropil Threads [NTs]. These represent aggregates of abnormal Tau protein, which are remnants of the cytoskeleton of the brain cells and their connections.” Essentially, Chris Benoit had taken so many hits to the head that his brain had been damaged beyond repair.

But that was not all: Benoit was found to have severe chronic traumatic encephalopathy, otherwise known as CTE. According to HHS Public Access, “Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is a neurodegenerative disease thought to be associated with a history of repetitive head impacts, such as those sustained through contact sports or military combat.” (Baugh et. al). With the concerns of the public about CTE afflicting athletes on the rise, Chris Benoit’s brain examination proved to the world that CTE was not exclusively found in football players—any high-contact sports athlete was at risk for the crippling affliction.

While WWE did not acknowledge Chris Benoit on public television due to his actions, they immediately took steps to reduce the risk of CTE in their wrestlers. Gone were the days of unprotected chair shots to the head, as well as certain high-impact moves to the head. In another move to remove Benoit’s legacy from the spotlight, his finishing submission, the Crippler Crossface, was absent from WWE’s annual video game release.

In the wake of Benoit’s murder-suicide, WWE took massive steps to rebuild their public image brick-by-brick. Numerous anti-bullying campaigns, an increase in charity work, events like Tribute to the Troops, and a focus on PG-based storylines have, in many’s eyes, been WWE’s way of trying to rebrand itself as a family-friendly entity. But while the WWE has turned its eyes to building its way back up, scars from its more extreme past have come back to haunt them. Most relevant of all is the WWE concussion lawsuit, a class-action suit brought to court by over 60 former WWE wrestlers alleging that WWE failed to protect them from repeated head injuries, concussions, and long-term brain damage. While this lawsuit was tossed out of court on the basis of frivolous proof and an expiration of the statute of limitations, it revived old chatter about the effects of certain moves on the long-term health of wrestlers both in WWE and other promotions worldwide.

Another issue brought to note is WWE’s notorious anti-unionization stance. In almost every other sports organization, athletes have had player’s unions that advocate for benefits such as worker’s protection rights, paid time off, a regulated schedule, and even insurance benefits. WWE has blocked any potential of unionization by their talent on the basis of identifying them as independent contractors due to a loophole in the system: since WWE wrestlers do not have corporate responsibilities, they cannot unionize. This has prevented WWE wrestlers from receiving benefits such as paid time off, a regulated schedule, holiday breaks, and regulated pensions. The “independent contractor” issue grew to a head during WWE’s trip to Saudi Arabia for its “Crown Jewel” event, during which a plane carrying dozens of wrestlers, referees, and other employees was (allegedly) held hostage on the runway due to a financial dispute between Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman and Vince McMahon. The trip, which already was a massive PR debacle due to its closeness in temporal proximity to the Jamal Khashoggi murder, once again sparked the debate of whether WWE is abusing the idea of their talent being “independent contractors”, with almost all talent being required to attend the event. John Oliver touched on this aspect on his late night talk show, a segment which went viral and was boosted to the front pages of not just Reddit and YouTube, but Twitter as well. Once again, WWE was in the limelight—for all the wrong reasons.

So, to end things, let’s go back to the question I posed earlier: what made Chris Benoit snap? Here’s my opinion on the matter. When looking at an individual like Chris Benoit, he was someone who was evidently married to his work and obsessed with his legacy, and was obsessed with putting on as perfect a performance as possible. To achieve this, Chris Benoit had developed a high-impact style from the beginning of his career. As his career progressed, his fear of being replaced in the main-event scene if he took a break to recover from lingering injuries led him to abuse steroids to allow his body to heal faster. This returns us to the debate of WWE repeatedly suffocating any unionization efforts: if Chris had been able to have paid time off, there is a chance that he could have healed somewhat from the weekly injuries he was obtaining in the ring, and perhaps this entire incident would never have occurred.

Chris’ death was an inevitability—the autopsy reports of his enlarged heart from steroid abuse proved that. However, if Chris had adapted his in-ring style and ceased his usage of the diving headbutt earlier in his career, he potentially would have been remembered far differently—as a man who was one of the greatest professional wrestlers of all time who had died of heart failure at the young age of 40. But due to Chris’ coldhearted and callous actions, his likeness, name, and legacy will never be portrayed on WWE television ever again. To conclude, I truly believe that the only thing Chris loved more than wrestling itself—even more than his own family—was Eddie Guerrero, and once Eddie died, Chris Benoit’s will to live had died with him.