Chris Benoit

[Danish Dynamite]

He was never really one of my favorites. I see his qualities, but I agree with those with whom he just didn't really connect. So I still wouldn't have had him in my top half. Guess that's what makes it even easier for me to not include him at all. Like others have said: there are so many other great wrestlers to see and enjoy, that there's really no motivation for me to bring Benoit into consideration for this project. Have no problem others rank him, but I'm pretty sure I have a Mantaur match to watch instead :-)

[GOTNW]

Don't care much for him, he was certainly great mechanically and at his best could be a really good foil for superior workers but I really dislike both the philosophy behind his work and the fandom that surrounded him and unless I'm binge watching his opponents' work I have zero desire to watch his stuff. Will much rather rank someone who does less but actually displays some personality.

[ohtani's jacket]

This isn't a dig at you, and I can understand that line of thinking, but why is it okay for Japanese wrestlers to show little or no personality but not North American wrestlers? I get shifting between different mindsets when it comes to styles, but it seems a bit unfair.

[GOTNW]

There's a huge difference between showing emotion subtly and not showing any emotion at all.

[ohtani's jacket]

There didn't seem to be much subtle about vein popping, red-faced Benoit late in his career.

[GOTNW]

Yeah and hindsight hardly makes that something to bring up as a positive.

[ohtani's jacket]

I'm sure a big Benoit fan, if any still exist, could expand on Benoit's range. Charisma, or lack thereof, is pretty subjective. There are people who say Volk Han didn't have charisma or show much personality in the ring, but a Volk fan wouldn't agree.

[jdw]

People thought Billy Robinson was colorless. I'm not shitting you. It would pop up in Meltzer's writing from time to time. Plenty of us disagree with that having seen more of Billy's 70s work.

 

So, yeah... plenty of Benoit fans in the 90s and into the 00s liked what Benoit flashed. Not everyone has to be over-the-top theatrical like Flair or Kobashi to connect with people who enjoy their work. Hell, Bobby Eaton was a less emotive worker than Arn Anderson. A JCP fan like myself could like both of their work in 1986-88 when watching the promotion.

[GOTNW]

Those are all valid points but he doesn't connect with me. Also "Benoit fans in the 90s and into the 00s" isn't a group whose opinions I'd trust much.

[Parties]

 

At worst I'd say Benoit and Angle brought out the worst in each other, but I think it's a stretch to say wrestling Benoit a lot had a lot (or anything) to do with Angle's decline as a worker. The reality is more that Angle brought out some terrible traits in Benoit, since Benoit was always a really strong seller, and was having good to great matches with a wide range of opponents before and after wrestling Angle.

What are the great post Angle feud matches?

 

 

The Regal stuff, the Finlay stuff, the MVP feud, the feud with JBL built around breaking each other's hands. The Orton title switch is a very good instance of making a young prospect. Benoit was a midcarder after dropping the world title. He became the Smackdown guy who they'd use to try to get good matches out of Sylvan Grenier, Kennedy, Snitsky, Edge, Booker, etc. There was at least one Elimination Chamber where he put over HHH for a title win. He was put into a long feud with Orlando Jordan. He was pretty clearly a player-coach who they were using to teach guys on the road and turn bad wrestlers into mediocre wrestlers.

 

This notion that Benoit doesn't have an incredibly good resume is revisionist history. Understandable, but the guy was a phenomenal wrestler, both of Great Matches and of week-over-week strong performances in meaningless three minute Nitro outings. I'm not the biggest NJ 90's juniors fan - we can all take apart the structural flaws in those matches now - but even in that flawed style he was as good as anyone and at worst comes off as the world's best Dynamite Kid.

 

More power to you if you don't wanna vote for him, talk about him, or ever see one of his matches again. Personally, I think Chinatown's one of the best movies ever made and that Caravaggio was a helluva painter. I agree with Jetlag that I'd have him below Regal and Finlay, but right now Benoit's hovering somewhere between #50-55 on my list.

[Childs]

Those are all valid points but he doesn't connect with me. Also "Benoit fans in the 90s and into the 00s" isn't a group whose opinions I'd trust much.

 

That's basically saying you'd trust the opinion of no one who was a hardcore wrestling fan from 1995-2007. Because, as the SC poll demonstrated, the respect for Benoit was broad and deep.

 

That's not to say you shouldn't form your own opinions, but I don't see the need to be glibly dismissive.

[jdw]

Yeah, that's an odd comment. The majority of fans in that era who are similar to the posters here were fans of Benoit's work. I'm not saying it was 100%, but is was quite strong. To the degree that if someone like me indicated he didn't love Chris' WWF/WWE heavyweight work, that against with the majority.

 

It's an odd comment because this board has quite a few posters who were around online in that era. So...

[GOTNW]

I'd differentiate between someone who happens to think Benoit is a good or even great worker and a Benoit "fan" in the sense they subscribe to the ideas that came with it (Dynamite Kid worship, emphasis on workrate etc.) And "hardcore wrestling fandom from 1995-2007" seems incredibly wacky to me.

[Childs]

Wacky in what way? I'm not following.

[GOTNW]

It looks incredibly foreign to me from today's standpoint.

[Childs]

That makes sense. You're a younger guy.

 

It's a semi-interesting thought exercise to wonder how much backlash there might be against Benoit's work in a world where he didn't kill his family. I suspect some, because one of the styles at which he excelled--NJ juniors--is less en vogue than it was 10 years ago. Liger and Eddy also seem likely to drop this time around.

 

But I don't think it's correct to portray Benoit as some kind of wrestling robot. He got himself over in many contexts, contexts that were not inherently favorable to a guy who looked and worked like him. And he truly was a standard bearer for people who cared about wrestling as a craft. That was part of the reason his ending felt seismic--people had invested a lot emotion in him. I was looking back at the SC results, and he appeared on the most ballots (49) and ranked top 10 for 30 people, more than Misawa or Flair and many more than Hansen, Funk and others perceived as No. 1 candidates for this project. Only Jumbo, Kawada, Kobashi and Liger received more top 10 votes.

 

None of that particularly matters now. It's just another way of saying the guy was considered a rock-solid all-time great, a concept I imagine would feel foreign to somebody who's 20 now.

[Loss]

That context is important because the pedestal on which Benoit was placed absolutely affected the reaction to what he did in the final days of his life. A less-respected wrestler doing the same would have still been a massive news story because of the horrific nature of the crime, but it would not have initiated the larger conversation about the philosophy he embodied and the sacrifices he made -- at one time considered admirable -- to become successful, discussion of which made many of us question everything we thought we knew to be good and right about wrestling. The closest modern example would be Daniel Bryan, although if HOF voting stats are any indication, Bryan doesn't carry nearly the same level of respect among his peers that Benoit did.

 

Yes, it seems foreign now, but there was not a wrestler in the world who was held in higher regard by both hardcore fans and those within wrestling as Chris Benoit at the time. As Dave said back in '07, only Undertaker was as respected, and even then, that was mostly limited to within WWE, where Benoit had it everywhere. Benoit's actions and death shattered a lot of illusions among those of us in hardcore fan circles, to the point that if we were to look at the biggest factors that would make the context of the 2006 Smarkschoice list different than the upcoming 2016 one, it would be the easy #1.

 

And part of that respect was what he accomplished within the last few years of his career in WWE. I always felt like in general, Benoit was more over with WCW fans than he was WWE fans, but his title run in 2004 was a lifetime achievement award for simply being so good at his craft. He was never in the top spot again when he dropped the title, nor do I think he ever would have been again, but he was always treated with a certain respect because of who he was. Jericho has said Vince saw him as the no-nonsense gunslinger, the Clint Eastwood of the company. And yes, he did not fit Vince's typical views of what a WWE superstar is at all, but Vince obviously had tremendous faith in him. If you watched Benoit in 2000, the crowd reactions weren't particularly strong much of time, especially compared to other guys in similar spots like Eddy and Jericho, but he was still the most pushed of the three. His WWE run was seen as vindication from his longtime fans because it showed that a short, no-gimmick wrestler who wasn't a great promo could get over in a top spot if he was good enough in the ring. So it was a victory for that outlook on wrestling, a victory whose merits would eventually be ripped to shreds.

 

I'd say our outlook on these things is a lot more sober now, and I don't think the same level of hero worship is there anymore, even for our favorite wrestlers. I think even casual fans are more aware of when they are being manipulated because more people see WWE as the sleazy company it is. Not all of that is on the Benoit tragedy, but a lot of it is.

[elliott]

Excellent post, Loss.

[jdw]

What's funny about the 1995-2007 comment is that it evolved and changed as much in that period as 2008-2015 has. Perhaps more so. There was no nebulous "group think" in 1995-2007, and hardcore wrestling fandom changed radically from 1990 (when Benoit first was high on the list of best workers in the world) to 2007 (when the murders happened).

 

I don't know how many where around through all of that, both online and in the sheets. But I suspect Dylan would agree that online hardcore fandom in 2007 was considerably different from 1995. Kriz probably could as well... don't know if Childs was around for all of that, but I think most.

 

* * * * *

 

As far as the backlash, I think we've been talking about it for a while in this thread and other places. I think we all agree the majority of it is Murders related, with a dash of general revisit/revision that always happens but specifically has happened with the Juniors where he made his initial big impact. The revisit/revision was always going to impact him, regardless of anything else. The murders drives a lot of people to ground. As indicated, I liked his work at the time, perhaps some aspect more than others and some less. I suspect if he wasn't a murderer, I'd be fine popping in stuff like Shawn vs Jarrett and Benoit vs Jarrett to do a piece comping the two, why I thought the Starcade match was better, and what parts of Shawn's work annoyed the shit out of me. But after the murders, I don't have any desire to watch Chris.

[JerryvonKramer]

On the flip side, I'm someone who completely doesn't let the murders affect the way I assess him, and he really hasn't impressed me in the several matches I've watched of his.

 

But caveats are:

 

* I never worshipped Benoit in the first place and always thought he lacked something

* I am generally down on late 90s / early 00s stuff insomuch as I've been lower on other stuff from around that time relative to other people

* Most of the material has been from WWF run, especially Smackdown Six era

[Loss]

I didn't worship Benoit in the first place, either. I thought he was a great worker but liked Jericho and Eddy better because they seemed like better all-around packages. Still, him making it to the top was a victory for the hardcore fan outlook on wrestling -- for those who seek purity or meritocracy in booking decisions -- that was perverted within a few years. It wasn't about Benoit so much and how to reconcile Benoit. It was about how to reconcile the way we watch wrestling and what we care about, when you saw that someone doing something we thought was great made him so crazy that he eventually snapped and murdered his family. There was a lot of reflection around here about how much we were contributing to the problem.

 

Add that to the fallout that saw mark doctors get arrested, spouses and exes speak up and get demonized for it and a DEA raid of a Florida pharmacy that was providing drugs to almost a dozen wrestlers on the WWE roster (that we know of ... the story at the time was that all of the women breathed a sigh of relief because they were off the DEA radar). THAT was the part that had the greater impact on me as a fan -- it just felt like a huge house of lies that came tumbling down in a very short period of time. We always knew wrestling had a dark side, but it had never been given quite so much daylight. Benoit ignited it all, but it was much bigger than Benoit. I'm not sure how you would have reacted to being around the board at this time -- so many of us were so disillusioned and morally conflicted over watching and enjoying something that seemed to destroy the lives of everyone involved in it. For some people, it meant taking a break. For some people, it meant changing their value system. For some, it meant checking out. Some, probably most, did keep on trucking just like they always did, but it is something that had a disproportionate impact on those participating in this poll.

[jdw]

On the flip side, I'm someone who completely doesn't let the murders affect the way I assess him

 

On one side, I can say that I haven't let it affect the way I assess his work since it's largely frozen in time.

 

But the reality of it is that it does affect the way I assess his work. If you no long can watch someone's matches without having the visualizing of him strangling Nancy to death in a very horrific fashion, then drugging and suffocating his seven year old son to death... well, it does affect how one assess him. We can have a discussion about some match and I can pull it up and take a look at it (say a Baba vs Race match), and my assessment on them may be different than before, or confirmed. With Benoit... I have no idea what I'd think of the Starcade match with Jarrett. I can only say what I thought about it in 1996, and what I thought about it when re-watching it in the early/mid-00s.

 

That does affect how I assess him.

 

As I said, he's pretty fixed in time for me.

[Jingus]

It's kinda bizarre to me for anyone to claim Benoit had no charisma, when he was standing next to guys like Dean Malenko and Perry Saturn for so much of his career. Chris showed way more fire and emotion than those dudes ever did.

 

One big reason why Benoit and others like him became so beloved in the late 90s was that they were the complete antithesis to what was popular at the time. In the NWO/Attitude era, "workrate" was practically a dirty word. Tall guys who cut long-winded catchphrase-filled promos were most often pushed as the most dominating stars of the time; nevermind the fact that they could do little but punch, stomp, and choke when it came time to actually get in the ring. Benoit was the polar opposite, a guy you didn't want to see talk (partly because he wasn't good at it). When he was involved, you only wanted to see him kicking ass in the ring. In the late 90s, which featured SO much more talking than wrestling, Benoit became the symbolic face for the fact that there was another way for wrestling to be which didn't necessarily center around endless dirty jokes and guys bragging about how great they were at nauseating length.

[ohtani's jacket]

So, it occurred to me that I've never watched the Liger/Pegasus Kid series in its entirety and I've been kind of wanting to watch Liger of late, whom I've been down on the past few years. The version of 8/19/90 I watched was JIP and showed the pair going through the motions of a finishing stretch. The excitement level for me barely rose above zero. There's something wrong w/ Benoit wearing a mask. It didn't fit Owen either. They seem too jacked up to wear one. Few luchadores had the builds they did and the ones that did looked stupid in a mask as well except for maybe Scorpio Jr. Benoit seems way too big for Liger as well even though Yamada was also juicing. Weird match-up. I'll give a point to the robot criticism since he was wrestling that way here and I remember him doing the same against the Villanos in his UWA run.

[Childs]

I don't think the robot criticism is way off base when applied to the Liger series. That always felt like two guys showing off how good their shit looked and not much more.