Chris, Nancy, & Daniel Benoit found dead

[Strummer]

There's some idiot on Scott Keith's blog chastising wrestling fans for "not remembering the impact of Chris Benoit".

 

Apparently we shouldn't judge

 

 

Apparently having great matches trumps killing a seven year old and his mother.

[Tim Cooke]

Can you link?

[Bix]

http://www.rspwfaq.com/?p=487#comments

[Bix]

Mr. Kennedy posts on blog, is dumb/sycophantic:

 

Please GOD, I'm just BEGGING for someone who has actually wrestled in a WWE ring in the past decade besides Jericho, Bret Hart, John Cena, and Ted Dibiase to come forward on one of these shows and tell the world what's really going on. For these goofs, like Lanny Poffo? Ultimate Warrior? and Marc Mero???!! to repeatedly act as "experts" and "wrestler advocates" on the current situation is like having a frustrated ex-jock who rode the pine bench throughout his high school sports career give advice to Brett Favre on how to improve his game! It's ridiculous, insane, and it really makes me sick that these so called reporters like Bill O'Reilly, Nancy Grace, and Geraldo Rivera, call upon these silly bastards who are bitter and frustrated that their careers have ended to represent the WWE which of course makes all of us look like a bunch of babbling idiots who are all addicted to steroids, drugs, alcohol, etc.

 

THINGS ARE MUCH DIFFERENT THAN THEY WERE FIVE OR TEN OR TWENTY YEARS AGO! Most of the "expert", frustrated ex-wrestlers that they've had on the show came from an era where everyone wrestled every day and then went out and partied like rock stars until dawn, drinking copious amounts of alcohol, smoking cigarettes and marijuana, snorting cocaine, taking fistfuls of pills, and injecting massive amounts of steroids. They would take pills to go to sleep, snort coke or take speed to get up and do this day after day after day! This would not be even remotely tolerated in today's environment. We have a strict drug policy in place. The WWE's wellness program was designed and instituted by the same doctor who implemented the NFL and the NBA's substance abuse programs. Contrary to what somebody recently said on one of these "tabloid" shows the WWE's allowed levels are exactly the same as the NFL. (Someone, I can't recall exactly who said it, said that the WWE allowed a 10:1 Testosterone to Epitestosterone level, which is false. We have a 4:1 level exactly like the NFL and the NBA.) In fact, I knew of someone who took an over the counter supplement from GNC which he didn't know was on the banned list, which caused him to have an elevated testosterone level. This individual was suspended and fined because of it. We can't even take Ephedrine which is another legal supplement that can be bought at any gas station in the country. Since I've been with the company, I've seen the few people that did have problems with drugs either sent to rehab to try and help them overcome their addictions, (sent to one of the top rehab facilities in the country and paid for in full by the WWE) or be fired for repeat offenses. Look at the list of wrestlers who have prematurely passed away over the years, and most of them made the decision to live their lives this way. That's right, I said "made the decision" because we have this cool thing in the United States of America called "freedom of choice". I have the choice to quit my job if I don't like it, or if I feel that I'm on the road too much. I have the right to choose whether or not I want to break the law and use drugs. I have the right to choose between eating healthy food and exercising regularly and eating fast-food three times a day, not going to the gym, and becoming obese like a good majority of the citizens in this country. When will individuals be held accountable for their own actions? Will it ever happen, or will we always try and point the finger at someone else? Unfortunately as much as I respect the man, Superstar Billy Graham is ultimately responsible for the health problems he suffers from right now because of the choices he made in his career. I find it both sad and humorous that the man who many say is largely responsible for starting the whole "steroid craze" in pro-wrestling is now pointing the finger at the industry rather than blaming himself.

 

I, like everyone else in the company, have the luxury of being able to go home almost every week, play with my dog, hang out with my girlfriend, sleep in my own bed, and eat good home cooked food. This wasn't the case with these frustrated ex-wrestlers who are trying to grasp on to FIVE more minutes of fame and recognition.

 

I hear some of these guys talking about how the WWE doesn't have any type of benefits. I heard Johnny Grunge's widow on Nancy Grace saying that wrestling leaves you with nothing, and that two weeks after her husband was released from WCW that they lost their cars and their home. It apparently wasn't obvious to Nancy Grace, who is reportedly an extremely intelligent person, that they were obviously living outside of their means, and they weren't doing something that my parents taught me to do when I was a little kid……SAVE MONEY. This job pays well, but I know that it won't last forever. It's the same problem with pro athletes and actors in Hollywood who spend, spend, spend, like the money grows on trees and like it's always going to be there, and then falls flat on their faces when their careers are suddenly cut short. Who's fault? The team? The studio in Hollywood? I'm sorry, but I have no sympathy for people who don't save money and spend everything that they earn so they can impress everyone around them with all the NEAT THINGS that they own. As far as the having no health insurance thing goes, I've been seriously injured twice since I've been in the WWE. Every red cent has been paid for in full by the company, which is the case for any employee who is injured during a work or work-related event. Yes, I have my own supplemental insurance which is a bit expensive, but if WWE paid for it, I'm sure that, just like every other company in the country that offers health insurance to their employees, I would just be paid less, so it's a wash!

 

In the end, we are all responsible for our own actions. Saying that Vince McMahon is responsible for the deaths of the Benoit's is like saying that you and I are responsible for the deaths of Anna Nicole Smith and her son. The millions of people who tuned in every week to be entertained by "how funny" she was when she was all PILLED up and DRUNK, suddenly became the same people who acted SHOCKED and APALLED when she died of a drug overdose. Somebody, PLEASE, stop the insanity!!!!

 

KK

[Loss]

I would like for someone to explain for me in terms I can understand why they consider Marc Mero to be out for another 15 minutes of fame, and also why they think Debra is being disingenuous.

[Bix]

Mero is an easy target because of his facial surgeries and the fact that he's plugging his gigs.

 

Debra is just proof that most wrestlers and wrestling fans hate women.

[kjh]

Don't forget Bix that Mero was married to Sable, perhaps the most universally loathed woman in backstage WWE history. In the misogynistic minds of many wrestlers what could be worse than being completely upstaged by your talentless spouse?

[sek69]

Also don't forget that Kennedy has become a disciple of Steve Austin, so that would at least somewhat explain his views.

[Bix]

And if you want to hate the world, here's me and PeteF3 vs Kennedy's blog commenters.

[CodySave]

Why the hell is WWE letting its employees get away with blogging right now? They're already in a PR mess and to have half the roster share their thoughts through badly-written essays is not a good thing to let happen.

 

[EDIT] Holy shit...I'm in the process of moving footage from unlabeled tapes to DVD, and a Chris Benoit sit down promo from post Royal Rumble 2003 pops up. After speaking about the emotions he felt from his family after the match, how proud they were of him, Kurt Angle pops into the screen and proceeds to say that his wife is his WWE title and that his children are his gold medals. So Benoit says:

 

"I look forward to one day taking your family away from you."

 

Really, really eerie to watch in hindsight.

[World's Worst Man]

Those people will never get it. It's in their nature to be gullible, uninformed suck-ups. I do like that one person, Stephanie (OMG STEPHANIE MCMAHON!!) who is actually replying and trying to completely dismiss the information as being false. I

 

Meltzer's sources are all in WWE. He just can't name them until they die (which happens a lot, unfortunately) because wrestling is the way it is about information.

Haha, classic.

[sek69]

People will eat up comments like Kennedy's because it's basically what they want to hear. No one wants to be told their heroes are all drug addled freaks, so they will sport titanium blinders and only believe what fits in their worldview.

 

Also, I can't wait for Kennedy to have a match on RAW against a jobber named "David Bicks" just so Ken can get his interweb heat back.

[Bix]

Haha! From Kennedy's blog:

 

Banned by webmaster. Your comments will not be added

[Tim Evans]

I would like for someone to explain for me in terms I can understand why they consider Marc Mero to be out for another 15 minutes of fame, and also why they think Debra is being disingenuous.

I don't know if it's widly known but Mero has a gym in Orlando. He gets a lot of air time on a local radio station and helped train the host of the show, Russ Rollins to get in shape. Russ Admited a couple months ago that he was talking Steriods. while training with Mero. I beileve he's still training with Mero and off Steriods. I'm probably the only one that cares about that but that's why I don't really take Mero's comments to heart. He has a lot of good points and is right about most things concerning steriods though.

 

The only one that I think really really cares about cleaning up wrestling is Konnan. I mean how many of his friends has he lost in 5 years?

[Bix]

Other new info from the WON:

 

- Italia 1 is largely a network for kids, and thus felt obligated to cancel SD.

 

- Kurt Angle never failed a drug test for painkillers. His failure was for testing positive for deca with an expired prescription.

 

- Astin had Benoit's chart with him when the first raid started.

 

- Nobody's sure why Ballard said Daniel was almost a dwarf.

 

- David Benoit, the older son, looked similar to Daniel at the same age.

 

- In 1997, Nancy was charged with aggravated battery after Kevin Sullivan claimed she went after him with a knife. She claimed that she was holding it and nothing else, and the charges were later dropped.

 

- The Nancy/Heavy Metal incident (Meltzer doesn't name Metal) where he held her hostage in his hotel room and bit her tushie led to major problems between AAA and WCW.

 

- A friend of Chris's noted that while it's probably grasping at straws, he was addicted to caffeine to a freakish degree a few years ago. Dave then goes into the weirdness of caffeine withdrawal symptoms.

 

- For whatever reason, ART in Arabic-speaking countries aired the tribute show on 6/29 with the announcers heavily praising Benoit.

[PeteF3]

Well, even if nothing changes on the WWE side of things, some good can come out of printing and saving those comments on Kennedy's blog: anyone who accidentally swallows poison can read them to induce vomiting.

 

And yes, I got the Ban Hammer as well. I'd love to know what TOS we actually violated.

[Bix]

This reply was pretty epic:

 

People don't listen to what idiots like Bix have to say. He's just one of these typical anti-WWE smarks on the internet. He's just some goof who is obsessed with making claims of sleeze in wrestling. He is also known for having this mentality that he has to battle WWE cause he's the rightful owner of old time wrestling footage and wrestling history. He's a piece of trash ROHbot who thinks he's going to be the next Dave Meltzer.

Seth | 07.12.07 - 7:16 pm |

[tomk]

Hey Tom, I guess you didn't see Tawny when she was on the Surreal Life. No doubt about it she was on some drugs. Plus her Fiance was sleeping with her manager. And well, when I think whitesnake, I think Herpes.

Oh I watched her on the Surreal Life and she was clearly completely nutball (not the worst bipolar drug casualty surreal life cast member ever, but still). She was both completely off her rocker insane (and there look to be some anti-psychotics on prescription list that I don’t think can actually be abused) and a ridiculous drug addict (the majority of the list that jdw posted). So I knew all that before even looking at the prescription list. What I didn’t know was that she had such a filthy vagina. That was new info.

 

Dave Meltzer also posted about this on the WrestlingClassics.com message board:

 

 

QUOTE

Just checking in.

 

Although it will be denied until the end of time, WWE was aware that Chris most likely killed Daniel and Nancy well before 6:15 p.m. Eastern time.

 

They will deny it. But how was I told at that time by someone, who got the info from one of the top people at WWE at 3:15 p.m. Pacific time.

 

Maybe they were in disbelief, but I can't say that either. I was in disbelief when told the news and didn't accept it until midway through Raw when it became apparent. But the person who repeated it knew full well and believed it. It wasn't said as a maybe, it was said as, this is what the company was told.

 

Keep in mind many people have denied this within the company, but that fails to explain how I was told the explanation at 3:15 p.m.

 

I believe the wrestlers didn't know. I believe the wrestlers believe Vince didn't know.

 

I believe everyone was in a state of shock and won't knock them for doing what they did.

 

But the key person had to know 2 hours, if not significantly more, before that show started.

From the July 5th Observer, Meltzer writes:

 

I can't believe Mcmahon "knew" as in believed Benoit was responsible or he'd have never done the show, nor would people like Austin, Cena, Jim Ross, JBL down the line made the comments they did if they believed and accepted it.

I'm not sure whether Classics post is so much a change in his reporting or if just in hindsight Meltzer realizes that McMahon would have aired that show even if he did believe or not.

 

I think McMahon would have aired that show even if he "believed". I think his first priority is to the company. And his experience is that the company's top goal is how to get the show to go on, get past this and move them back to the job of putting smiles on peoples faces. Focusing on that goal could easily blind him into making bad judgement call.

 

I think Meltzer is wrong in his belief that none of these guys would have made comments they did if they believed and accepted. Ross is still saying nice things about Benoit. It’s harder to quickly condemn a friend/colleague then it is to say the good things about them. And I don't see tributes speeches(even if they all "believed and accepted") as being uncharacteristic of normal human behavior after a tragedy. Of course part of that is that people don't really ever "believe and accept". I find myself agreeing with Ohtani's Jacket as when someone you know commits a heinous crime,I don't know if you ever fully register, "My friend was an awful human being" so much as you go "Why did he throw his life away".

[tomk]

People certainly should have noticed that he was going overboard in the "locker-room kangaroo court" setting. When you're suddenly up there with Undertaker and Bradshaw when it comes to putting the rookies in their place, that's a Hell of a change in a short period of time.

 

Since this may be based on something I wrote.

 

I'm not sure if he suddenly joined the kangaroo court, or if there was a point where Meltzer suddenly started writting about Benoit as active in it.

 

I find it funny that people thought the Larry King stuff would be anything but pro WWE. Larry King lost respect when he kissed Brando and had on Paris Hilton. Money talks.

It's Larry King. For all the shit that Nancy Grace gets for being uninformed. Larry King's schtick is that he is deliberately uninformed. He won't read books or info on guests before show that way he comes in "unbiased".

 

The only one that I think really really cares about cleaning up wrestling is Konnan. I mean how many of his friends has he lost in 5 years?

I don't know, Konan is aguy who owes his career to steroids and is currently suffering the health consequencces but I think he still is heavily pushing Cibernetico.

[tomk]

I would like for someone to explain for me in terms I can understand why they consider Marc Mero to be out for another 15 minutes of fame, and also why they think Debra is being disingenuous.

 

This is what I wrote in pique if anger at dvdvr:

 

QUOTE(bAzTNM @ Jul 12 2007, 09:35 AM)

What are the media wanting here in regards to slandering the WWE? Do they want to see Vince in court?

 

 

No one is slandering Vince.

 

This was a horrendous crime. And while the cover up has been scummy, I can’t imagine anyone arguing that “it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up”. When wrestlers and their apologists argue that “It’s not the crime, it’s the coverage” they should be laughed at.

 

A wealthy carny , a highly regarded member of a traveling gypsy troupe of performers who lived by a carny code of secrecy, bound his wife and strangled her, killed his six year old son using his hands, and then hung him over the course of a weekend. If this happened forty years ago in Easton Europe it would have inspired pogroms. Twenty years ago and their wouldn’t have been official pogroms, but their would still have been Roma slaughtered indiscriminately in the streets.

 

None of that is happening. Some overly simplistic media coverage, and talks of congressional hearings into steroid use in wrestling. But really no push to get advertisers to stop advertising, no pogroms, nothing. Is Vince/wrestling that dependant on steroid use, that congressional investigations into steroid use will ruin him?

 

It’s wrestling. It’s a profession that is built on deliberate lies and secrecy. Complaining that the media gets the coverage wrong, when you are doing everything in your power to prevent them from getting it right is embarrassing. And anyone who actually follows wrestling who falls for that should be branded an idiot.

 

Vince decided early on to handle this the way wrestling handles scandal. The same way wrestling handles negative media attention after Kat went topless. What happened in Atlanta was a horrendous crime, that needed to be treated differently then how you handle nudity. Wrestling is an old carny hustle, that is based on protecting its own codes and being fearful of allowing the outside world to know too much. And they handle scandal/protect themselves by closing down the doors to the outside world even tighter. (http://www.wrestlingobserver.com/wo/news/headlines/default.asp?aID=20128). Bury it and save company.

 

A normal company would have put together a “How to talk with your children about tragedy” piece for their website given out information about who to call if victim of spousal abuse, suicide hotline numbers etc, and gone on television announcing how they will cooperate fully with the police. You open up all the information you have, because slow drip keeps this kind of story out there and is far more damaging.

 

WWE has been on the defensive from the get go, pretending nothing has happened, accusing the media of sensationalism (as though somehow the murder of an entire family isn’t sensationalistic on it’s own), not allowing their wrestlers to talk to media (where fearful employee wrote on website ““I truly don’t know what I can say and not get in trouble with the WWE. But I think what I have to say is more important.” Before doing nothing more than giving out suicide hotline phone numbers), and then sending out their lieing consiglere, a guy who looks like a malevolent Rip Taylor (someone who will tell bad puns and then rape you with confetti) who both presented himself as a forensic psychologist and helped to spread a rumor that a six year old had a mental defect.

 

 

If you don’t allow your current employees to speak to the media, you can’t complain about ex-employees who do. If you don’t allow your employees to talk to the media, having your lawyer claim that he discovered that Daniel had a disease by an independent investigation where he talked to Benoit’s co-workers is a dead letter.

 

 

The WWE created the conditions that resulted in the way the media is handling this.

The WWE created those conditions because that’s the way they normally handle “scandal” ranging from Bret blading when policy was no blading, to Kat exposing her breasts on PPV, etc.

 

-Blame the media for sensationalism. They don’t get it. Wrestling is a secret business but part of the way the “work” “works” is to make the audience feel like they are apart of the world. The audience is inside. The media is positioned as outside. They media is sensationalizing that which you the audience understands but the media doesn’t.

 

-Not allow wrestlers to talk with the media. Thus media is only left with retired wrestlers or wrestlers from different companies. The hope is enough of those guys will want WWE jobs that you will get majority of them to cover for the WWE. Those that don’t are just out of touch/disgruntled /don’t know anything about the current product.

 

-The promotion wasn’t involved/we knew nothing. Over-enthusiastic performer did this on their own. I think enough wrestling fans really want to “believe” that they fall for this, people outside wrestling don’t know enough not to fall for this.

 

That they are treating Benoit slaughtering his family the same way they treat Kat exposing herself really sickens me. But as seen by the Ken Kennedy board they know their audience.

[Tim Evans]

Bix why do you even bother trying to reason with the marks? Your above that.

 

If the story about Finlay being on Nancy Grace is true, I can't wait to see it. He should just get in a shouting match with her talking heads, Especially Susan Moss.

[Bix]

Anger, I guess?

[Tim Evans]

Reading Meltzer's reaction to the Kennedy blog I'm wondering, Does he really think Kennedy is stupid enough to go against Vince Mcmahon and say stuff like Mero and Graham have said. If he wants a job, He'll go the company line. The only thing that will change the buisness like has been said millions of times is If Vince gets indicted. Or HHH goes on a crazy roid rage spree and starts hitting Stephanie, Austin style.

[sek69]

I think it's just a matter of Dave getting frustrated/disgusted at guys defending the company when they're on top at 30 then doing a 180 when they get thrown out with the trash (unless like he mentioned with DiBiase they're trying to get their kids a job).

[Bix]

You can also shut up or find ways defend the company w/o looking like an idiot.