Chris & Nancy

by Irvin Muchnick

  In 1980, at thirteen, Chris engineered a backstage meeting with the Dynamite Kid, his favorite wrestler. The British Kid, then in his early twenties, was already the lead bad guy for Stampede and an industry revolutionary. In Japan with Satoru Sayama, “Tiger Mask,” Tom Billington broke new ground in the working of matches. His bouts were built around highspots and lightning-quick changes of advantage. So spectacular were the Kid’s athletic precision, timing, and psychology that they obliterated conventional notions of lifting the crowd’s emotions slowly up and down; the Kid kept everyone in a bell-to-bell frenzy. With his cousin Davey Boy Smith, he would graduate from Stampede to a lucrative run in the World Wrestling Federation (WWF, later WWE) as the British Bulldogs tag team.

  In order to get there, Billington had to take thousands of bumps in rings before smaller audiences, and he lived on the painkillers and alcohol that got him through the physical and mental ordeal. He also gassed himself to the gills on steroids, because if a small man could find a small opening in the big time, it was still just a small opening, and you still needed to meet a minimum size threshold. In 1986 he had spinal surgery. The next year he had the first of two near-fatal seizures. By 1996, at thirty-seven, he was through for good, though he had been a shell of the classic Dynamite Kid for many years, messed up by injuries and by a menu of drugs that included both LSD and gammahydroxybutyrate or GBH, popularly known as the “date-rape drug.” Divorced from wrestling great Bret Hart’s sister-in-law, and from a second wife, Billington returned to England to live alone, in a wheelchair, and on the dole.

  In 1980, all thirteen-year-old Chris Benoit knew was that he wanted to be exactly like the Dynamite Kid. Chris begged his family to get him weight-training equipment, and his father complied. Scrawny but determined, he lifted enough and took enough steroids to pump himself over the 200-pound mark (he would grow to a little over five-eight, quite short for a star wrestler, and weigh around 220, sometimes more, at the peak of his career).

  When he was eighteen, Chris knocked on Stu Hart’s door in Calgary and asked for a tryout with Stampede. Stu did what he first did with all wannabes: he took Chris down to the Hart house basement gym, known as the Dungeon, where the upstart was stretched and “hooked” in numerous vein-bursting, impossible-to-break legitimate wrestling holds. It was certifiable torture. Benoit passed the test by not complaining that day and by returning for more the next day, and he was put into the rotation for full training as a pro wrestler. He learned how to distribute his body to cushion those jarring bumps to the extent possible. He learned how to “sell” an opponent’s moves, how to carry himself, how to play off his opponent. These were in weekend sessions; at that time, Chris worked for his dad’s business in Edmonton during the week and made the nearly 200-mile commute to Calgary by bus every Friday, returning home Sunday evening.

  Later in ’85, Stampede sent Benoit out on tour in wrestling’s exalted backwater, the often frozen tundra of the Western Canadian prairie. Every week the boys drove from Calgary to Saskatoon, Regina, Red Deer, and Edmonton, in a four-wheel-drive van prone to breaking down in the middle of nowhere. And Chris loved it, and the fans loved him. They said he was the spitting image of the Dynamite Kid — the same dives without regard for his own neck, even the same crisply executed snap suplexes.

  In 1987, Benoit moved to Japan to live for a year in the dojo, or training facility, of one of the two top promotions there, New Japan Pro Wrestling. The punishment could hardly exceed what he had already experienced in the Dungeon. But dojos also boasted strict pecking orders and hazing rituals, and for a foreign peon, the psychological humiliations were even worse. Chris did the dirtiest housekeeping chores and ran the most degrading errands for the veterans, all while picking up more tricks of the trade, Japanese style. Eventually New Japan booked him as the masked Pegasus Kid, and he was formidable enough in that role to capture championships and become a two-time winner of the Super J Cup, a prestigious tournament dedicated to the junior heavyweight division.

  Benoit also wrestled in Mexico and Europe. Working in the German “catch” league, he met his first wife, Martina, with whom he would have a son and a daughter in Edmonton before divorcing. In Japan, where the master German wrestler Karl Gotch was a major influence, Chris already had perfected, and made into one of his patented moves, the German suplex, in which his opponent was whiplashed up and over Benoit’s body and onto his own neck.

  They called Benoit “The Rabid Wolverine.” While at the Philadelphia-based Extreme Championship Wrestling in 1994, Benoit cemented a second nickname: “The Canadian Crippler.” This came after he accidentally broke the neck of another wrestler, Sabu, when they miscommunicated and botched a move. Promoters rarely miss an opportunity to exploit even unintended doses of reality, and ECW’s Paul Heyman was no exception. Under Heyman’s tutelage, ECW generally upped the ante on violence and risk. Marketing largely to young kids in the early Hulk Hogan years, WWF had taken on a comparatively patterned and safe style. But the promotional war with World Championship Wrestling (WCW), Ted Turner’s Atlanta promotion, along with ECW’s way-out-there rendition of the art of the work, pushed WWF to enhance its athleticism and cater more to a demanding new base of “hardcore” fans. Though more often playing a babyface than a heel, Benoit embraced the elevation of his persona to that of a ruthless dispenser of spinal injuries. His submission finishing hold was called the Crippler Crossface.

  Chris, who had wrestled briefly for WCW in 1993, returned permanently, with a nice guaranteed contract, in 1995. At twenty-eight, in his athletic prime, he finally had a foothold in the North American wrestling mainstream.

  * * *

  Like Chris, Nancy Toffoloni had started in wrestling as a fan, hooked up with a regional troupe in the territorial days, and risen to a steady position with one of the two major companies left standing in the cable TV era.

  Nancy graduated from high school in DeLand, Florida, near Daytona Beach. She got a job selling programs at the Orlando shows of Championship Wrestling, a promotion based in Tampa, and owned and operated by former wrestler Eddie Graham. The Graham office, which controlled all of Florida, was one of the most successful of what at one time were more than thirty thriving full-time regional promotions throughout the United States. Graham had a tight relationship with the largest line of independent pulp wrestling magazines published in New York. A photographer for the magazines discovered Nancy and used her first as a bikini model and then in a series of pictorials, popular at the time, that were billed as “apartment house wrestling.” These were soft-core porn depictions, catering to the fantasies of young men and boys, of attractive women groping each other in street clothes, which were often shed in stages in the midst of matches said to be privately staged for an exclusive clientele. They weren’t wrestling bouts at all, of course, just cheesy still photo shoots. Apartment house wrestling stories sold well on newsstands and were credited with extending the heyday of the by-then-struggling old-school wrestling mags.

  Playing the apartment house girl named Para, Nancy met wrestler Kevin Sullivan at one of the sessions. Nearly fifteen years older, the stumpy Bostonian was taken by her youthful curves and her sultry dark features, which included prominent cheekbones and eyes that narrowed menacingly on cue. In 1984, at age twenty, she began touring with Sullivan on the Florida wrestling circuit as his valet. “Fallen Angel” was also mixed up in the TV character Sullivan created for himself, the “Prince of Darkness,” some sort of satanic cult guru, in a story line considered innovative for its time. Nancy had married Jim Daus, a boyfriend from DeLand, but she soon divorced him and married Sullivan.

  With the exception of a few gimmick matches, Nancy didn’t wrestle. Yet as one of the most “over” of the ’80s generation of valets or managers, she helped pivot the participation of females in pro wrestling away from their burlesque-like and largely unglamorous roots. In the golden age, most were trained in the tired formulas of promoter Billy Wolfe and, late
r, long-time champion Lillian Ellison (“The Fabulous Moolah”); they wore one-piece suits and mixed a few moves of mat grappling with mild elements of catfights and gender-based sight gags. (In Moolah’s favorite heel spot, she hid a “foreign object” in her brassiere and was never busted because the referee “couldn’t” inspect there.) Following Nancy Sullivan and her contemporaries were today’s fitness-queen vixens, the WWE divas, who mostly drive website traffic and push merchandise, as well as tangle on the undercards of live shows.

  Championship Wrestling from Florida folded during the promotional war fueled by Vince McMahon’s national expansion of the WWF. Kevin and Nancy, however, landed on their feet with the cast of WCW. Sullivan became influential on the WCW booking committee, and Nancy stayed on the air as Woman, a manager with assorted protégés and story lines. With one significant break for a run by the Sullivans together, and then separately, in Extreme Championship Wrestling, that was where things stood when Chris Benoit got his own permanent WCW gig.

  What happened next was a milestone moment in wrestling’s seemingly boundless capacity for life imitating art. Kevin and Nancy’s marriage, tumultuous all along, was on its last legs. Meanwhile, Sullivan, wearing the hat of booker, noticed that Benoit, a brilliant but colorless performer, could use an “angle” that gave him more “heat” and drawing power. And maybe Chris and Nancy also had eyes for each other, really and truly and almost instantly. Only their hairdressers knew.

  Whatever the bottom line in reality, Chris and Nancy were thrown together in TV skits in which they messed around behind Kevin’s back, and sometimes right in front of him. This kindled a wrestling feud between Benoit and Sullivan, culminating in a match that Chris won with the stipulation that Kevin then had to “retire.” (In fact, Sullivan was plotting his retreat from the ring to concentrate full-time on WCW management.) Nancy soon formally left Kevin and moved in with Chris. The inside joke in the industry was that Sullivan was the booker who had scripted his own divorce.

  Further complicating the picture was WCW’s subsequent puzzling refusal to push Benoit harder as a main-event attraction. That may have been personal retribution on Sullivan’s part, or it may simply have been yet another reflection of the company’s wall-to-wall mismanagement. By this time, several other smaller wrestlers were in the same boat, including Benoit’s pals Eddie Guerrero and Dean Malenko, who were also undersized but talented; they called themselves the “Three Amigos.” All were wooed by WWF and jumped. Benoit’s case for release from his high-paying but frustrating WCW contract was strengthened when the Turner human resources department learned that Mike Graham, one of Sullivan’s assistants, had threatened to slit Chris’s throat. (Graham was the son of Nancy’s Florida boss, Eddie Graham, who committed suicide in 1985.) Chris took a pay cut to leave Georgia for Connecticut, but he was happy to abandon, after only a single day, the WCW championship that was belatedly bestowed on him. Long-term, this proved an excellent career move.

  Weeks after debuting with WWF early in 2000, Chris was given a few days off to join Nancy in Georgia as she gave birth to their son, Daniel Christopher Benoit, on February 25. Chris and Nancy married nine months later.

  * * *

  In 2003, Chris’s wrestling home, which had changed its name to WWE, embarked on a public education program to tame a phenomenon the media were labeling “backyard wrestling,” in which anecdotes emerged of serious injury and even death. In the 1950s, several kids were reported to have jumped from upper-story windows trying to emulate actor George Reeves in the TV series Superman, which led the show’s producers to insert into scripts disclaimers about how no mortal should ever attempt the feats Superman performed. Similarly, WWE bowed to pressure in its “Don’t try this” warnings to young viewers at home. The company cooperated with the Canada Safety Council in a campaign that included an appearance by Benoit on Canada AM. The host, Ravi Bachwal, showed a video clip of Benoit executing the Crippler Crossface and asked him to explain it.

  “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.”

  [1]. Michael Benoit, Chris’s father, says Nancy’s birthday was May 17, and he would be in position to know. All the sources I rechecked still say May 21, but it is possible that such research has become self-fulfilling, with Internet bios simply following my lead.

  CHAPTER 3

  Living with Death

  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 1990s 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.