[Corkscrewed]

Originally Posted by JamesSteele Chris Benoit just went from one of the greates success stories to one of the worst tragedy stories in the wrestling business.

Added the "just" but that's how I feel right now.

It only takes a moment to shatter a life (or three). A moment of anger. A moment of insanity.

The WWE.com story is as close to a confirmation of this as we can get without an actual confirmation. (They use a lot of qualifiers in the article... "according to..." and stuff like that.)

But if all the pieces can be put together, you have this:

• Over the past few weeks or months, apparently Benoit had looked like something was eating him up inside. Supposed mental problems, I suppose.
• Benoit calls WWE and says he'll be late to a house show... then later amends that to he won't BE at the house show. Also reports his wife and son were coughing up blood, which may very well have been true, in a twisted, darkly ironic way.
• Benoit leaves weird text messages. No-shows a PPV... which is something practically unheard of for him.
• Police discover three bodies in his home. It appears the wife and son died two days before Benoit, who appeared to have killed himself Monday morning.

A very private person who obviously had some sort of disorder (domestic or mental), who kept it to himself extremely well, who snapped at some point and killed his family, then possibly contemplated his actions for a day or two before realizing he'd just ruined his life and his reputation and has no apparently better choice (to him) than to kill himself too. Perhaps he was so disgusted with himself after sanity returned to him that he couldn't live with what he had done, and thus committed suicide.

To me, that makes a lot of sense, even though the acts are very senseless. What caused that murderous fit of insanity? I'd love to know, but we may never know.

Does this tarnish Benoit's legacy? Absolutely. He'll always be respected and loved as a wrestler, but he may very well be reviled as a person. If this turns out to be true, I will definitely lose respect for Benoit. I can't help it. Like someone else said, anyone who kills his family is despicable, no matter how temporarily insane or mad he went. If I found out (God forbid) that my own father did something like that to my mom and my little brother, my love and respect for him would plummet (I have a super relationship with my dad, btw, so saying that carries a lot of weight).

Ultimately, we can agree that this was a tragedy. If this story holds true, I'm sure there will be those who find pity for Benoit and his sudden descent to madness. There will be others who hate him for his despicable crime.

If he killed his family, then so much for those rosy musings of putting on a clinic with Eddie Guerrero in heaven. And how WWE handles this will be really tricky too, because they'll have to cross the fine line between honoring Benoit as a legendary wrestler and avoiding praising a murderer.



Last week, I think it was, someone said that at this point in Benoit's career, it would have been impossible to make people boo Benoit, because he was so respected (I think this might have been in reference to his future in ECW). Well, like I half-joked earlier, this would definitely be the biggest, most effective heel turn in the history of the wrestling business.