Benoit: One Year Later
It's been a year since the empty arena. A year since I came home from a training in St. Louis and turned on Raw midway through the show. They were showing one his Japan matches and I wondered why. I barely caught the little graphic of Chris, Daniel and Nancy that flashed across the screen before they went to commercial. "What was that? Was that his whole family?" I asked my girlfriend. "I think so." They came back from commercial to that empty arena and a couple of announcers telling me soberly and out of character that the Benoit family had been found dead in their home in Atlanta. Tonight they were celebrating his career.
Was it a gas leak? Was it a home invasion? I remember thinking "Poor Chavo." He'd gotten too good at doing memorials. William Regal gave his and the tenor changed. Regal, only giving a stilted, short greeting card sentiment. They cut to the Smackdown announcers and JBL looked disgusted. When they cut to ECW I remember Tazz was looking off to the side the whole time he was on screen as though he couldn't look us in the eye. I remember saying "Please don't tell me he killed them." If the rumors are true, that would have been the time the real word started trickling out to the boys. When the show was over it was like they couldn't get off the air fast enough.
I was without internet and cable at the time so I had to rely on the morning radio to get the news that what happened was an apparent murder / suicide. I was floored. Recounting this, I'm still there. The next night Vince McMahon opened ECW by telling us that the name Chris Benoit would never be spoken on WWE TV again. He became an un-person.
Then came the talk shows. It reminded me of The Watchmen somehow. It was like superheros were on Larry King, opening the curtain between our world and theirs. There's Jericho, intelligent and well researched, nearly begging the talking heads to have a conversation with him while they kept asking question after question about steroids. The easy answer.
It was family annihilation. It wasn't just steroids. It wasn't just that he was battered and bruised and on the road 270 days a year. It wasn't just that (according to one study) he'd had so many concussions that his brain was that of an 80 year old man's. It wasn't just that Benoit was incredibly fucked up by the sudden death of his best friend and road brother Eddie Guerrero. It wasn't just a million things.
What he did was evil and unforgivable. I refuse to think that he was evil though.
I hate that this has become such a horrible image. I remember being genuinely moved when it happened at the end of Wrestlemania. Benoit finally got his due and won the world title in the main event. Eddie popped up behind him and gave him That Grin, legitimately surprising Benoit. They hugged and I loved that these two men who had traveled so far with each other and endured so much together had finally made it and became champions at the same time. In a phoney business full of big phonies it was a legit moment of joy and it warmed my heart. Now Eddie's dead from a drug-weakened heart and Benoit's a killer who died by his own hand.
A year out... this is the blackest thing I can think of.