CHRIS BENOIT CASE/NACHWIRKUNGEN

[Nefercheperur]

Scott Williams hat wiedermal eine gute Kolumne geschrieben, er sagt genau das was ich gestern gesagt habe.

When I stopped this column about a year ago, Daily News sports editor Joshua Buckley and I agreed to revive it if something in wrestling merited the coverage.

If you had told me then that Chris Benoit murdering his family and hanging himself would have been that something, I would have just stared at you.

A week ago, Benoit was inarguably one of the most talented, most respected pro wrestlers in an industry that typically gets little respect.

Monday afternoon, he was the focus of mourning by wrestling fans, when news broke that he, his wife and 7-year-old son were found dead in the family’s Georgia home.

By the next morning, Benoit stood revealed as the murderer of his wife and child. He is now one of the most reviled men in North America, a sick cross between O.J. Simpson and Andrea Yates.

Had Benoit been a convenience-store manager, his almost-ritualistic crimes would have made national headlines. His wife, Nancy, was strangled, her body bound and bloody. Young son Daniel was smothered to death, hours later, in the child’s bedroom. Hours after that, Benoit hung himself, in his weight room. Fayette County sheriff’s deputies found Bibles beside Nancy and Daniel's bodies.

That Benoit was a celebrity, of sorts, only exacerbated the mass media frenzy of last week. Cable news shows and newspapers throughout the United States and Benoit’s homeland of Canada have tagged their stories of the murders with “’Roid Rage.”
Dead bodies — with enlarged hearts that stopped beating before age 50 — litter pro wrestling history. The pseudo-sport and its fans tacitly encourage a dangerous cocktail of performance-enhancing drugs (to maintain a muscular, marketable look) and prescription painkillers (to allow these musclemen to go back out and get thrown around the next night). Often, wrestlers take both in toxic quantities.

However, wrestlers have been taking steroids for more than 35 years, and there’s been no great rash of child murders by pro wrestlers. There’s more to the Chris Benoit story, a lot of which we’ll likely never know.

However, authorities’ suspicions that heavy drug use altered Benoit’s thinking led them to raid his personal physician’s office Thursday night.

We also know that for every outraged parent who first read or heard Benoit’s name when this news broke, there’s a wrestling fan trying to rationalize. Don’t take my word for it – use any search engine to find an online wrestling message board or blog. You will find someone trying either to explain circumstances to mitigate the double murder, offer bizarre alternate theories, or argue that we should focus more on Benoit’s tremendous in-ring ability than the crimes that punctuated his life.

It’s this mentality that has kept fans from getting outraged at the dozens of drug tragedies in wrestling’s recent history. It’s this mentality that led fans last year to care more about Kurt Angle’s next in-ring opponent than the real circumstances of his departure from World Wrestling Entertainment, where Benoit also worked.

This is the mentality of wrestling fans — not all of them, but a disturbingly large percentage who speak out. It allows them to weep and wail about wrestling’s latest tragedy (which they inevitably never saw coming), while they plunk down money for entertainment they know is bought with dangerously heavy drug use and simultaneously say, “It’s not my fault that (dead wrestler’s name here) chose to put bad things in his body.”
Is WWE owner Vince McMahon to blame for Chris Benoit killing his family and himself? Are wrestling fans? No, Benoit has deservedly traded in adulation for revulsion, ultimately accountable for his hideous acts.

But the wrestling business fosters an environment that’s anything but healthy, and both it and its fans spring to the unhealthy system’s defense whenever tragedy hits and outsiders question it. We’ve seen plenty of that this week, as well.
In the weeks to come, we’ll get an answer to at least one question: will this tragedy torpedo the wrestling business? Those who knew him best say Chris Benoit loved the wrestling business. Ironically, it’s possible that his end could precipitate its end.

However, we already have an answer — one that’s been evident for a long time, to anyone willing to look hard and honestly — to another question: Does wrestling deserve to be sunk?

That answer is a sad, sorry “Yes.”

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