Chris Benoit double-murder suicide: Ten year anniversary.

[Nice Guy Eddie]

14 minutes ago, Cristobal said:

Does it help that Michael Cole can't seem to call the move correctly?

Not calling moves correctly is vintage Michael Cole.

[nate]

I had a moment, after the whole media outburst of talking heads (incl. wrestlers looking for yet one more pay day) showed up on news channels to talk about it, where I was able to tell myself that I could separate the person from the profession.

Then there was this random moment where I watched Benoit in the Money in the Bank match where he's doing what I called at the time a "really weird sell job" ... if you've seen it, you know the one.  The bug eyes, the twitching.  That was a bit much.

I'm now in the camp of "don't cut the match off, but I don't seek it out either."

[AxB]

Right after it happened, Samoa Joe was doing his series of moves where he hits a Powerbomb, and when they lift the shoulder he turns them over and puts them in an STF, and then when they crawl for the ropes he goes into a Crossface. Except for in his first match after the Benoit incident, where he stopped halfway through applying the Crossface and put on a weird, sloppy Wakigatame instead.

[Technico Support]

10 hours ago, AxB said:

was doing his series of moves where he hits a Powerbomb, and when they lift the shoulder he turns them over and puts them in an STF, and then when they crawl for the ropes he goes into a Crossface

On an unrelated note, I hate that sequence.  I find it contrived and silly and I like the Young Bucks.

[Michael Sweetser]

I think the best way to put it was that Benoit was probably pretty fucked up from the beginning, and the steroids/stress/etc didn't help the situation.

To elaborate in an edit, I've always subscribed to the theory that pro wrestling, in and of itself, does not create new vices or mental issues - however, availability on a large scale ends up exacerbating and amplifying any existing vices that may be relatively dormant.  If you're predisposed to drugs, or alcohol, or women, or any of the other vices, those will be amplified because you have an outlet to explore them.

[Nice Guy Eddie]

On 6/21/2017 at 10:12 AM, Michael Sweetser said:

I think the best way to put it was that Benoit was probably pretty fucked up from the beginning, and the steroids/stress/etc didn't help the situation.

To elaborate in an edit, I've always subscribed to the theory that pro wrestling, in and of itself, does not create new vices or mental issues - however, availability on a large scale ends up exacerbating and amplifying any existing vices that may be relatively dormant.  If you're predisposed to drugs, or alcohol, or women, or any of the other vices, those will be amplified because you have an outlet to explore them.

This feels like the perfect post to end this thread on.

[odessasteps]

Much like the axiom about the best characters are people's personalities turned up to 10, so too are their demons. 

[ReiseReise]

I was gone on a business trip when the whole situation unfolded. I only learned about it once a lot of the information was out. I was shocked at first, then tempted to join the part of the crowd that wanted to damn him to hell. Today when I think about the whole thing it just makes me sad that Nancy and Daniel Benoit lost their lives. To me, paying "tribute" to Benoit should not be a thing any wrestler does and I fully understand WWE not wanting to promote him.

Still it doesn't make me feel weird to see Benoit's matches, while I feel uneasy seeing Ishi and Shibata headbutting each other square in the face. I cringed when Shiozaki and Sugiura palmstruck and close fist punched each other as hard as they could shortly after Misawa died in the ring. Weird, but maybe it was because Benoit never was a favourite of mine.

[Greggulator]

I really can't believe Benoit or Owen's death didn't bring the whole WWE down with it. But I do know a lot of people stopped watching wrestling after Benoit. I sort of wish I did.

In terms of enjoyment watching him: I'm drawn to outlandish personalities and cartoons. I love Ric Flair and Bobby Roode. Two of Benoit's closest peers were Eddie and Jericho. Eddie's right behind Flair in terms of combining wrestling skill with character work. Jericho's up there, too, but a level below those guys in terms of wrestling skill. (Although he's awesome.) I *LOVED* those guys. But there is always a good role for someone who is just pure intensity like Arn Anderson or Meng or Benoit. Benoit was really great at showing intensity in the ring. 

I think his best WWE match was the tag match with Jericho against Austin and HHH. That match was an absolute masterpiece. The heat segment on Benoit in that match is so epic. Someone broke the match down once. You would sort of think Jericho would be better for the heat segment because he's so much more expressive and charismatic. But Benoit kept his intensity despite being on the short end of the stick, and Jericho got to break out the apron work and it ended up as one of the best hot tags ever. That is on the short list of best matches in Raw history, even (and especially) considering HHH's quad popping out. 

[Marty Sugar]

On 2017-06-21 at 7:12 AM, Michael Sweetser said:

I think the best way to put it was that Benoit was probably pretty fucked up from the beginning, and the steroids/stress/etc didn't help the situation.

To elaborate in an edit, I've always subscribed to the theory that pro wrestling, in and of itself, does not create new vices or mental issues - however, availability on a large scale ends up exacerbating and amplifying any existing vices that may be relatively dormant.  If you're predisposed to drugs, or alcohol, or women, or any of the other vices, those will be amplified because you have an outlet to explore them.

Agreed. I've always been thankful that I got over all my nasty vices before I started in pro wrestling.

[Johnny Sorrow]

Wait, women are vices?

[Roman]

Depends on what you're into.

[Nice Guy Eddie]

My vices were bad enough not being in wrestling. If I got involved in wrestling, I probably would have met a fate similar to Herb Abrams, hopefully minus the vaseline.

[PetrolCB]

23 minutes ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

My vices were bad enough not being in wrestling. If I got involved in wrestling, I probably would have met a fate similar to Herb Abrams, hopefully minus the vaseline.

But that's where the fun is. 

[The Iron Yuppie]

Bixenspan on the Benoit murders http://deadspin.com/10-years-after-the-chris-benoit-killings-pro-wrestling-1794183640?utm_campaign=socialflow_deadspin_twitter&utm_source=deadspin_twitter&utm_medium=socialflow 

[Just Dave]

I've talked about this before, but I'm from Peachtree City, GA, and knew the Benoits. Not well, but I was on a "greeting and handshake" basis with Chris, Nancy knew me by name and Daniel attended a day camp I was one of the directors of. I think I've told the story before of seeing Chris at the gym in november and december 2003 going 90-100 minutes at a full run on the treadmill and surmising that he was probably going to win the Royal Rumble. What always struck me about Chris is that even when you were engaging him in conversation, he always looked like he was elsewhere. He wasn't. He'd be a full participant in the conversation, but his eyes...he looked like he was somewhere else. Chris doted on that kid. Daniel would sit by the treadmill at the gym (PTC only had two at the time, and Chris and I went to the same one) and play with WWE figures while Chris would work out. I'd also see them frequently at a local pizzeria, where the owner was always good about getting them a table away from everyone. The 4th of July after he won the WWE title, I saw him at the restaurant. Our local fireworks display was shot off not far from there, so those window views were hard to come by. My friends hadn't arrived yet, so when I walked by looking for them, Nancy invited me to sit with them until my friends got there. That night they seemed like a normal family, but in the back of everyone who knew them's mind was the time Nancy called the cops on Chris after she threw him out of their old house one night after he got too drunk and tried to get physical with her. Sorry. I'm rambling. It's so weird to me that it's been ten years. I remember Nancy and Daniel like it was yesterday. I truly hope and pray they are resting in a place far better than this. As a morbid side note, my old roommate was the first responder on-scene out there at the Benoit place, and that case is what took him off the street and into becoming a school resource officer. He said he couldn't handle it anymore. I don't go out of my way to avoid Benoit matches, but I don't seek them out either. I've heard or read Chris Jericho say several times that he feels that a demon came into Chris Benoit for him to have done what he did. Idk about all that, but Daniel Benoit is the one person I would've bet Chris would've never laid a hand on in violence, so something snapped in Chris' brain for him to have done that. That doesn't absolve him, and i think it's irresponsible to say that it does, but we are only just know beginning to learn about the long-term effects of impact to the brain, and I hope one day we unlock the secret to treatment, if there is one. Sorry for writing so much. It all just kind of came out.

[PetrolCB]

Thanks for your insight, Drew. 

[Michael Sweetser]

"Liking" that post is not the right action name, Drew, but I very much appreciate that you wrote it.

[Nice Guy Eddie]

11 minutes ago, Michael Sweetser said:

"Liking" that post is not the right action name, Drew, but I very much appreciate that you wrote it.

That's how I felt as well. Thank you Drew.

[Playa Shunna Ver 3.0]

Just saw this thread....so many interesting things shared here.  That was such a bizarre and surreal day and week.  This event literally chased me away from being a wrestling fan for a while, and I don't think I have ever been able to fully comeback and enjoy the sport I loved as a kid.  Thanks for sharing DVDVRMB.

[Michael Sweetser]

Oddly, the whole thing didn't really affect my viewership, and I think it's because I just wasn't that big of a fan of Benoit.  I enjoyed his matches but I found him bland, and his promos were borderline atrocious at times.  Eddie's death affected me far more.

[Nice Guy Eddie]

I was about the biggest Benoit fan in my circle of friends. I shrugged it off when he wasn't particularly nice to me when I met him. I didn't care about his perceived lack of charisma or mic skills. He had it, but it was just different. I care about wrestling ability and execution first. He was my wrestling god...until he wasn't.

[NikoBaltimore]

Finally had the chance yesterday to read the two Observers from that time.  It showed not only the sadness and disbelief of it all, but also how crazy/stupid the media was being in their TV coverage.  It was a really chaotic time to be a wrestling fan with the questions I got and even a few "How can you still watch this?" type questions.  My fandom never waned but considering many were asking me about it it did make me wonder if it was worth checking this out anymore.  Thankfully after the news stopped covering it all was fine.  I still maintain that if the Benoit incident can't stop me from being a fan then nothing will.

I'm hoping that we never have an incident like this again.  While concussions were definitely an issue then, thinking about people with possible CTE and lesions in their brains now is terrifying to think about.  It's one of the main reasons I don't want Daniel wrestling again.  But at least now they protect their talents better when they do get one, and thankfully they banned chairshots to the head and stuff like that.

[Matt D]

I made one semi-snarky comment earlier in the thread but nothing actually heartfelt. I actually suggested around a year ago that Paul make a thread like this when the time came. It's a tough topic but maybe it'd help with closure a bit more and let's face it, he's the nicest guy out of all of us.

A lot of us are of a certain age (some a bit younger, some a bit older). A lot of us have been together on this board for not just years but a decade and a half or more. It's hard to get across to people who just started being fans (or who joined the online community of them) in the last five or even ten years what it was like back in 1997-1998, when the internet was a new thing and we were just sort of branching out to find people online with similar interests and more expertise. There's a cult of identity now, but it was a smaller, more compact community then, and I'd like to think it was stronger for us who weren't born into the internet. I was 16-17 when I got back into wrestling after a few years of not watching and while I always liked the small quick guys instead of the muscle bound ones, it was news to me that there was a whole sort of elitist identity around that. All of us, even at a time when wrestling was mainstream, probably felt a little self-conscious about being wrestling fans, especially if it didn't entirely sync with our other interests or the picture we had of ourselves and it was easy to cling to this idea of "smark mark," to looking down on other sorts of fans, to see Japan as some sort of mythic ideal. DVDVR was, in some ways, better than other places for that, but for the sort of generation (of just a few years) after some of the initial RSPW guys, who came in not on usenet but on AOL or Prodigy Internet or (a little later) MSN, this was a way to identify yourself, a creed to follow, a brotherhood, a place where you belonged and a way to figure out at least one aspect of yourself.

And Benoit fandom was the ultimate symbol of that sort of mentality. He wrestled a "Japanese style (with real credentials)," was constantly put down (they wouldn't even publicize his TV title win), was a huge wrestling fan (and a huge Dynamite Kid fan, a workrate Aristotle to DK's workrate Plato), and someone who went out and worked just as hard whether he was being pushed or not. He leaned into everything, but his body at risk, had cool moves (did you hear that he did a second rope tombstone in Japan!), and yet was still accessible. We could see him every Monday night. We could see him if he came around for a house show. We're not talking about Misawa or Kobashi here. He was ours in a different way. Being a Chris Benoit fan was like a secret handshake when you were off the internet. It's how you knew you were dealing with a fellow traveler. When I had to make a webpage for CompSci 2a my freshman year of college, I put a picture of Benoit that I stole from the DVDVR site on it, explaining why he was great.

We were shocked and excited when he jumped to WWE. We grumbled when he started jobbing to Kane. We were elated for the Smackdown six stuff, and were proud, not just of Benoit but of the CROWD in Boston for Royal Rumble 03 (and i was proud to be in it), and then, at Wrestlemania, when Benoit and Guerrero were in the ring together holding those belts up, that was it. It's why we watched. It's why we followed. It's more than we ever could have hoped for. I was in Grad School in London and that was the only wrestling I watched that year. I stayed up all night to watch it. I was 22. We knew it wouldn't last long, that the belt was going to go back to HBK or HHH or would go to someone else (we didn't expect Orton so soon, though), but at least we'd always have that night. Nothing in wrestling could ever be better.

I think other people have covered the rest. There's such a clear line basically tearing down everything we identified with. The mad drive to be the best, the drugs he took to get the size to have a chance to do what he could, the concussions and injuries from his style, the legacy of the Dynamite Kid, the brain damage, the anger issues, the bullying. You couldn't write a story with such clear, connected causality. The very things that made Benoit our ideal were the things that drove him to such destruction. You almost wouldn't believe it in a story because it's too neat. It's the sort of fan fiction one of us could have written when we were 17. 

Personally, I had been drifting off by 07 because my life went in other directions, but that was the full stop end of it. I was done watching until 09 when I suddenly had a lot of time to be a captive audience and justin.tv started up with old territory footage streaming, and even then I only watched old things at first, old Memphis or Mid-South or Crockett, and old WWF TV/PPVs. Part of that was nostalgia, which was a different way to interface with wrestling, a different identity to have that wasn't a smark. Part of it was beacuse the working style was so different from Benoit; it was everything he rebelled against for the most part. We had become a community of just looking for high ranked workrate matches out of context, of leaving all the other deritus behind. It was refreshing to sit through a Beefcake vs Genius match just to see how it worked as part of the total package, to see why they made the creative choices they did and how it played into everything else. That's when I started to really see patterns and started to see wrestling in a different way. That's when I came to appreciate guys like Bill Eadie or late career Andre. I don't think I entirely looked back even when I started to get drawn into 2009 ECW and then back into the main product from there. 

I guess the point of this is to try to express to those who weren't there ten years before it happened (as we stand ten years after) why it mattered that it was Benoit and not someone else (not even Eddy though others feel differently). In some ways he's part of that blanket of tragedy, with Eddy and Eddie Gilbert and Misawa and Hashimoto and Pillman and Owen (etc, etc)., but in other ways, he was the alpha and the omega, the central lightning rod around the early IWC and he was the symbol for which we claimed our identity. 

What a monkey's paw wish, huh?

[iwcnorm]

So many great posts on here thanks for sharing.

To this day, I haven't come to terms with most of it.

I was there at the ECW Arena for his ascension, and knew him fairly well from my behind the scenes interactions since many of the workers wrestled for me in Pittsburgh on their weekends off.

I was there for his three day tryout swing with the WWF, and saw the Bob Holly, Adam Bomb, and Owen Hart matches live. I was well pleased when he signed his deal, but didn't have much hope for either he or Eddie. 

To be honest, once I was fully entrenched in promoting and the funeral thing, I had little time to pay attention to the WWE product. But I was able to catch the Mania when he and Eddie ended the show in the ring.  As a long time gigantic fan of both, it was otherworldly to see this happen.

I'll never forget the call I received from Tom Brandi when Owen fell.  

I'll also never forget the text I received from another worker telling me of Chris, Nancy, and Daniel's passing, and then following up with the unbelievable truth.

I've never looked at wrestling the same way. 

It's a shame because since I was 5, I was a gigantic fan.