FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Sports

Throwback Thursday: Chris Benoit And After

Eight years ago this Thursday, Chris Benoit's horrific murder-suicide shocked the nation. Nothing in wrestling, and sports in general, has been the same since.
Photo By Stan Liu-USA TODAY Sports

(Editor's note: Each week VICE Sports will take a look back at an important sports event from this week in sports history. We are calling this regular feature Throwback Thursday, or #TBT for all you cool kids. You can read previous installments here.)

Only so many pro wrestling things ever cross over from the arenas and tour buses into the swirl of mass popular culture. But while the odd catchphrase has achieved exit velocity, it's usually people who make it. Only the biggest truly make it out: Hulk Hogan, Andre the Giant, Stone Cold Steve Austin, The Rock. You can probably see a mural of them in your mind's eye, stretched out in a line in their victory poses. And then you come to the leering, snaggle-toothed sneer of Chris Benoit.

Advertisement

Eight years ago today, police found the bodies of Benoit, his wife, Nancy, and their seven year old son, Daniel in their Fayetteville, Georgia, home. Benoit, it was quickly determined, had strangled his wife, smothered his son, and then hanged himself on a weight machine. He was set, on the night of his death, to claim his third WWE heavyweight championship.

Read More: Throwback Thursday: The TV Deal That Created Modern Pro Sports

It was horrific, and has lost none of its horror over time. But it was also a bifurcation point for professional wrestling, largely because it was too terrible to ignore. There is wrestling before Chris Benoit became a double murderer and wrestling after.

The media could not just look the other way. Wrestling's visibility at the time wouldn't allow it. Prior to Benoit, looking the other way was the mainstream's default response to the grimness that haunts wrestling's edges. It takes no time on the internet to come up with a list of early deaths and nasty crimes of violence which loom large in wrestling lore but didn't make the nightly news.

This is in keeping with the historical view of pro wrestling. For respectable folks, wrestling is and has always been a freak show, one staffed by failed athletes and drug addicts and watched by poor people. And anything with failures, drug addicts, and poor people is probably better off being ignored; otherwise, it's going to be mocked.

Advertisement

Benoit in Stuttgart, 2004 — Photo by d-Fens via Creative Commons

But with pro wrestling's last great boom, wrestling became acceptable, if still kind of weird. Benoit wasn't living in a trailer at the time of his crime; the periodic world champion, who spent most of his career on the upper half of the midcard, was living in a mansion. The facts of the locale loom large: nothing about this crime is the same if it happens 10 or 20 years earlier. Benoit would have been a grisly footnote alongside Bruiser Brody being stabbed to death in a Bayamon shower or the time Vince McMahon allegedly saved Jimmy Snuka after the latter allegedly murdered a woman. Allegedly.

The medical examiner cut Chris Benoit open before the news had stopped talking about steroids and drugs. They found the brain of an 85-year-old man suffering from Alzheimer's, according to Dr. Julian Bailes. A lifetime of being hit in the head and jumping into things had destroyed Benoit's brain. The culprit in the Benoit family's violent end was maybe steroids and alcohol and the rest, but it was also definitely brain damage, which he had almost certainly incurred while wrestling professionally.

This is where that demarcation point becomes clearest. WWE was already on the way toward a more PG-rated product, but it accelerated by default after chair shots to the head—those high-impact, high-drama blows to an unprotected skull—began to disappear after the Benoit autopsy. It needs to be stressed that those shots were a major part of WWE's physical storytelling in the years 1997-2007. They were punctuation marks, used whenever a bad guy needed to prove his savagery or a good guy wanted to show how invested he was in his righteous vengeance. Even as the hyper-sexualized atmosphere of the Attitude Era receded, the chair shot was still thriving.

Advertisement

[daily_motion src='//www.dailymotion.com/embed/video/xt48c' width='480' height='270']

It seems ludicrous and sad, in retrospect, to think that anyone ever believed that slamming steel onto people's skulls was anything but a terrible idea until recently. But suspension of disbelief is the game, here, and it kept the chairshot alive for a criminally long time. And here's the other place where the Benoit murder-suicide intersects with the wider culture. If it hadn't been for the crime and subsequent media attention to brain injuries, odds are that our sports would be even further behind addressing the issue.

Even though his book was released a year prior to the Benoit murders, the work of concussion awareness advocate Chris Nowinski didn't get the popular attention it really deserved until after the crime. Nowinski was, at the time, a recently retired WWE wrestler and former Harvard football player. He left the sport young after dealing with post-concussion syndrome and threw himself into what's become a life's work of trying to prevent and treat concussions.

Nowinski lurked at the confluence of three worlds: pro wrestling, football, and concussion research. The aftermath of the Benoit story launched his work into the stratosphere. This was not because he was a ghoulish opportunist; he is not. He was an expert, though, and one with unique personal experience of and insight into the murky world of brain injuries and the two sports in which they have done the most damage.

The ensuing media attention translated into money for the foundation Nowinski co-founded, the Sports Legacy Institute—eerily founded just 11 days before the Benoit story broke. With that financial backing, SLI has been at the forefront of pushing the NFL on concussion safety.

In the years since the murders, WWE has scrubbed Chris Benoit from its history. You won't find mention of him. You can't search for his matches in their archives, although they're there. Whispers arise about his legacy, as he was an amazing in-ring talent and former world champion. But Chris Benoit's legacy is his crime, finally. That and what came after the horror, the broader sense of awakening from a dream into a world where wrestling, and its cost, is anything but fake.