Chris & Nancy (4 page)

“Basically, this is a submission move where I'll ride the guy down by his arm and wrap my hands and lock my hands around his face,” Benoit said. “And I pull back as hard as I can on his head. It is really a devastating submission move when applied correctly. But you get a lot of these kids in the backyard that watch us doing it, and have no training, no experience, do not have any idea of how to apply the hold.”

“Among kids, what could they do to each other if they tried this move?” Bachwal asked.

“Oh, you could tear a rotator cuff. You could dislocate your shoulder. Severe nerve damage, spinal damage.”

WWE
put up a website with advice for parents. An article in
WWE Magazine
showed how Benoit did the Crippler Crossface, “arguably the most feared submission hold in the sport”:

As the head is pulled back, the victim's neck is at a point of severe stress [and] the carotid arteries and the jugular veins are partially cut off, depriving the brain of precious blood. . . . [W]ith Benoit's hands clasped across his opponent's face, the possibility of a broken nose is very real.

* * *

WrestleMania XX
, March
14
,
2004
. A packed Madison Square Garden in New York and an international pay-per-view audience watched the main event, a “Triple Threat Match” in which Benoit and Shawn Michaels simultaneously challenged Triple H for the
WWE
Raw
brand's world heavyweight championship.

Twenty-four minutes into the brutal three-way ballet, Michaels launched his finishing move, the superkick he called Sweet Chin Music. Benoit ducked and Michaels went flying out of the ring.

Attacking Benoit from behind, Triple H attempted his coup de grace, a face-first piledriver called the Pedigree. But the Rabid Wolverine spun out and reversed it, clamping Triple H in his own finisher, the Crippler Crossface. Triple H reached for the ropes to force a break, but Benoit managed to roll him back to the center of the ring, and the champion had to tap out.

After fighting for eighteen years in hundreds of venues, large and small, on three continents, Chris Benoit was a champion of wrestling's only truly worldwide franchise. As the belt was handed to him, Benoit's face contorted in pain, joy, and awe. Eddie Guerrero — who earlier on the show had successfully defended the
WWE
championship, the top title of
WWE
's SmackDown brand — entered the ring. The two best friends embraced tearfully.

Chris's dad, Mike Benoit, and Chris's son and daughter from his first marriage, David and Megan, had flown in for the show, and they climbed through the ropes and joined the celebration. So did Nancy and Daniel (who had recently turned four). Confetti fell from the rafters. They hugged. They cried.

* * *

The first pay-per-view after
WrestleMania XX
was
Backlash
, from Edmonton's Rexall Place.
WWE
orchestrated a five-day buildup centered around the local kid who made good. Thousands of fans greeted Benoit at a rally when he arrived at Edmonton International Airport on Tuesday, April
13
,
2004
. Mayor Bill Smith declared Sunday “Chris Benoit Day.”

“Excitement is building,” Mayor Smith said in a
WWE
news release, “as local wrestling fans prepare to welcome their hometown hero for Backlash® on April
18
. It will be a great time in Edmonton.”

CHAPTER 3

ON NOVEMBER 13, 2005,
Chavo Guerrero found his uncle and fellow wrestler, Eddie Guerrero, thirty-eight years old, unconscious on the bathroom floor of his room at the Marriott City Center Hotel in Minneapolis. By the time Chavo carried Eddie to the bed and performed
CPR
, he was probably already dead of a heart attack.

Chavo called Chris Benoit, who arrived quickly. Before calling
911
, Chavo and Chris took care of an important preliminary piece of business: they flushed down the toilet Eddie's supply of stanozolol (Winstrol), an anabolic steroid he'd just stocked up on for an upcoming European tour. In
1984
, in a hotel room in Tokyo, Bruiser Brody flushed away David Von Erich's Placidyl sleeping pills before the authorities arrived. Ever since, concealing the drugs near a dead wrestler was standard operating procedure for colleagues interested in protecting the business.

WWE
would explain Eddie Guerrero's fatal coronary as a consequence of his “past” abuse of alcohol and non-steroid drugs during his time with another promotion, before his very public and inspiring rehabilitation with
WWE
. The grim truth, however, was that Eddie was “clean” only in wrestlers' vernacular; he could not have maintained the size required to perform in his main-event-level push while being truly free of steroids. “Clean” here means not that he didn't use but that he, allegedly, didn't abuse
^[1]
.

Five months younger than Chris Benoit, Eddie Guerrero was his soul mate. Both were superb technicians who climbed improbably to the pinnacle of their profession without the advantage of great size. Guerrero descended from a famous Mexican wrestling family, and his fast-paced, high-flying style (derived in part from the
lucha libre
tradition) fit awkwardly with the ponderous big-man choreography of the major U.S. promotions, especially
WWE
's. But the steroid scandals of the
1990
s had created a bit of daylight for diversity in the size of the top wrestling talent, as an acrobatic masked wrestler, Rey Mysterio, proved that a smaller man could get “over” in the major leagues. Though not the high flier that Mysterio was, Guerrero led a savvy pack, combining ring generalship with a refined grasp of crowd psychology. Like Benoit and their “Three Amigos” running mate, Dean Malenko (another second-generation wrestler), Guerrero had honed his craft by synthesizing techniques picked up not only on the American indie circuit but also in extensive tours of the wrestling-mad capitals of Japan and Mexico.

That Guerrero and Benoit could survive the orthopedic punishment of wrestling, combined with the indignities visited upon them by promoters who underappreciated and mishandled them, was a triumph of will. That they both could go on to achieve out-and-out superstardom in the face of these odds approached the miraculous. And indeed, spirituality became an openly expressed facet of Eddie's public persona. He was simultaneously tough and tender, macho and sensitive, vulnerable and unsinkable. He projected himself as the representation of the common man — and the common fan. To boot, he was a recovering alcoholic who gave witness to a higher power.

Like Benoit, Guerrero was a world-class worker inside the ring. Unlike Benoit, Guerrero also wove sharp interviews and story lines outside it. In February
2004
, Guerrero won a
WWE
world title the month before Benoit won his at
WrestleMania
. At the time of his death, Guerrero was arguably the company's most charismatic performer.

In televised tributes to Guerrero on special
TV
episodes of
Raw
and
SmackDown
,
WWE
cast members broke character, pouring out their genuine and unanimous affection. No testimonial was as searing as Benoit's. He could barely get his words out through sobs and wails of grief:

Eddie Guerrero was my best friend, and I'm sure there's a lot of people he knew that would be able to say the same thing about him. He was such a beautiful person, such a kind-hearted person. I couldn't find the words — words couldn't describe — what kind of human being Eddie truly was. I've known Eddie for just about fifteen years and spent a good portion of the fifteen years with him on the road. We laughed together, cried together, fought each other, been up and down each and every mountain, each and every highway. Eddie always led by example. He was the one friend I could go to and pour my heart out to, if I was going through something, if I had a personal issue, a personal problem, he was the one guy I could call and talk to and know that he would understand, and he would talk me out of it, because of all the experiences he'd been through. I believe in leading by example, and Eddie always led by example through his life, because of all the obstacles he went through and conquered and became a better person, and he often used that as an example. We never left each other without telling each other that we loved each other, and I truly can say that I love Eddie Guerrero. He's a man that I can say I love, and I love his family, and my heart and my thoughts and my prayers go out to. And Eddie, I know that you're in a better place. I know that you're looking down on me right now. I only know that I love you and I miss you. [Pause as Benoit breaks down completely.] Eddie, you made such a great impression on my life, and I want to thank you for everything you've ever given me, and I want to thank you from my heart and tell you that I love you and I'll never forget you, and that we'll see each other again. I love you, Eddie.

At that point, Guerrero was the highest-level active wrestling star to drop dead. The industry's mortality rate was accelerating; now it was even losing its locker room leaders. Chris Benoit watched helplessly as his personal mentors, confidantes, and surrogate family went to early graves, one by one.

On January
28
,
2006
, Victor Mar Manuel, the Mexican wrestler known as “Black Cat” who had trained Benoit in Japan, died of a heart attack. Manuel was
51
.

Nineteen days later, Penny Durham found the lifeless body of her husband Michael, the ex-wrestler known as “Johnny Grunge,” in bed at their home in Peachtree City, Georgia. Mike Durham was thirty-nine.
^[2]
The cause of death cited — complications from sleep apnea, or airway blockage — rarely told the whole story. Durham was morbidly obese. He had ingested a huge quantity of Soma pills, muscle relaxers prescribed by Phil Astin, the same doctor who treated Benoit.

Four years earlier, Johnny Grunge's old partner in the tag team Public Enemy, Theodore Petty (“Rocco Rock”), had died at forty-nine.

Durham was Benoit's last link to his original circle of wrestling friends in the Atlanta area. Though estranged from most of the others, Chris had kept up with Johnny, and Nancy with Penny. On top of the loss of Guerrero, Grunge was the one that broke Chris. He no longer felt that he had anyone with whom he could talk intimately.

Though he continued to devote himself to performing to the highest standards, his fortieth birthday was approaching and his in-ring skills were diminishing. The phenomenon was subtle — nothing his superior experience and psychology couldn't cover for several or even many more years — but the joy of the process had abandoned him. One's position in the pecking order of the promotion was just one part of the payoff for all those one-night stands, all that pain. To keep from becoming unglued, you also needed an inchoate but ever-present sense of camaraderie: the banter, the ribs or practical jokes, all the absurdities that, amidst the pressure and the mindfucking, provided detachment and pleasure.

Even Eddie Guerrero's sudden passing, in a strange room on the road at the height of his powers, carried a note of elegy in the denouement of a tragic life. But Johnny Grunge's decay was simply sordid, coldly judgmental on the shallow resources of Chris's limited world.

As wrestlers died, a new and macabre subgenre emerged: memorial benefit shows. Most prominently, from
1998
through
2001
, Cincinnati promoter Les Thatcher ran an annual production to assist the widow and children of Brian Pillman, who had wrestled with Benoit at Stampede and died suddenly at thirty-five while with
WWF
. Benoit (along with Eddie Guerrero, Rey Mysterio, and Konnan, a Cuban-born star in Mexico and on the U.S. independent scene) was known as one of the most generous of the top-tier wrestlers; on his days off, he volunteered for the Pillman and other benefits.

The Pillman show on May
25
,
2000
, at the Schmidt Fieldhouse on the Xavier University campus, featured a classic match between Benoit and William Regal. The exhibition, memorable for its realistic butchery, was credited with reviving Regal's career and spurring
WWE
to sign him shortly thereafter.
WWE
had permitted Thatcher to bill the match as being for the
WWE
intercontinental championship, one of the company's minor titles, and the end product was impressive enough that the video of it would be included in a
DVD
package of Benoit highlights entitled
Hard Knocks
.

Dave Meltzer of the
Wrestling Observer Newsletter
, who was in Cincinnati that night, remembered it as “the same Benoit-Regal match they always did,” with a spot in which they head-butted each other repeatedly until they drew so-called “hardway” blood. In other words, rather than concealing razor blades inside their wrist bands before pulling them out and discreetly scraping them over scar tissue on their foreheads — the conventional method of “juicing” — Benoit and Regal legitimately pounded on, or “potatoed,” each other until the red stuff gushed, whipping the crowd into a froth.

“I don't think there were any specific instructions other than Regal wanted the best match possible, as they had done that spot in matches before and they did it in matches after,” Meltzer said. “This one is remembered because of the setting and because they were given time instead of being rushed through. Regal credits it for saving his career when everyone wrote him off for his ongoing drug problems. He's a friend of Triple H [Vince McMahon's son-in-law], so who's to say Regal wouldn't have gotten the chance anyway, but it's not an exaggeration to say that he revived his reputation with this match, and it likely saved his career at that time.”

After Guerrero and then Grunge joined the long list of fatalities, Chris had had it. He swore off benefit shows — and funerals. They were too depressing.