Chris & Nancy

by Irvin Muchnick

  That Guerrero and Benoit could survive the orthopedic punishment of wrestling, combined with the indignities visited upon them by promoters who underappreciated and mishandled them, was a triumph of will. That they both could go on to achieve out-and-out superstardom in the face of these odds approached the miraculous. And indeed, spirituality became an openly expressed facet of Eddie’s public persona. He was simultaneously tough and tender, macho and sensitive, vulnerable and unsinkable. He projected himself as the representation of the common man — and the common fan. To boot, he was a recovering alcoholic who gave witness to a higher power.

  Like Benoit, Guerrero was a world-class worker inside the ring. Unlike Benoit, Guerrero also wove sharp interviews and story lines outside it. In February 2004, Guerrero won a WWE world title the month before Benoit won his at WrestleMania. At the time of his death, Guerrero was arguably the company’s most charismatic performer.

  In televised tributes to Guerrero on special TV episodes of Raw and SmackDown, WWE cast members broke character, pouring out their genuine and unanimous affection. No testimonial was as searing as Benoit’s. He could barely get his words out through sobs and wails of grief:

  Eddie Guerrero was my best friend, and I’m sure there’s a lot of people he knew that would be able to say the same thing about him. He was such a beautiful person, such a kind-hearted person. I couldn’t find the words — words couldn’t describe — what kind of human being Eddie truly was. I’ve known Eddie for just about fifteen years and spent a good portion of the fifteen years with him on the road. We laughed together, cried together, fought each other, been up and down each and every mountain, each and every highway. Eddie always led by example. He was the one friend I could go to and pour my heart out to, if I was going through something, if I had a personal issue, a personal problem, he was the one guy I could call and talk to and know that he would understand, and he would talk me out of it, because of all the experiences he’d been through. I believe in leading by example, and Eddie always led by example through his life, because of all the obstacles he went through and conquered and became a better person, and he often used that as an example. We never left each other without telling each other that we loved each other, and I truly can say that I love Eddie Guerrero. He’s a man that I can say I love, and I love his family, and my heart and my thoughts and my prayers go out to. And Eddie, I know that you’re in a better place. I know that you’re looking down on me right now. I only know that I love you and I miss you. [Pause as Benoit breaks down completely.] Eddie, you made such a great impression on my life, and I want to thank you for everything you’ve ever given me, and I want to thank you from my heart and tell you that I love you and I’ll never forget you, and that we’ll see each other again. I love you, Eddie.

  At that point, Guerrero was the highest-level active wrestling star to drop dead. The industry’s mortality rate was accelerating; now it was even losing its locker room leaders. Chris Benoit watched helplessly as his personal mentors, confidantes, and surrogate family went to early graves, one by one.

  On January 28, 2006, Victor Mar Manuel, the Mexican wrestler known as “Black Cat” who had trained Benoit in Japan, died of a heart attack. Manuel was 51.

  Nineteen days later, Penny Durham found the lifeless body of her husband Michael, the ex-wrestler known as “Johnny Grunge,” in bed at their home in Peachtree City, Georgia. Mike Durham was thirty-nine.[2] The cause of death cited — complications from sleep apnea, or airway blockage — rarely told the whole story. Durham was morbidly obese. He had ingested a huge quantity of Soma pills, muscle relaxers prescribed by Phil Astin, the same doctor who treated Benoit.

  Four years earlier, Johnny Grunge’s old partner in the tag team Public Enemy, Theodore Petty (“Rocco Rock”), had died at forty-nine.

  Durham was Benoit’s last link to his original circle of wrestling friends in the Atlanta area. Though estranged from most of the others, Chris had kept up with Johnny, and Nancy with Penny. On top of the loss of Guerrero, Grunge was the one that broke Chris. He no longer felt that he had anyone with whom he could talk intimately.

  Though he continued to devote himself to performing to the highest standards, his fortieth birthday was approaching and his in-ring skills were diminishing. The phenomenon was subtle — nothing his superior experience and psychology couldn’t cover for several or even many more years — but the joy of the process had abandoned him. One’s position in the pecking order of the promotion was just one part of the payoff for all those one-night stands, all that pain. To keep from becoming unglued, you also needed an inchoate but ever-present sense of camaraderie: the banter, the ribs or practical jokes, all the absurdities that, amidst the pressure and the mindfucking, provided detachment and pleasure.

  Even Eddie Guerrero’s sudden passing, in a strange room on the road at the height of his powers, carried a note of elegy in the denouement of a tragic life. But Johnny Grunge’s decay was simply sordid, coldly judgmental on the shallow resources of Chris’s limited world.

  As wrestlers died, a new and macabre subgenre emerged: memorial benefit shows. Most prominently, from 1998 through 2001, Cincinnati promoter Les Thatcher ran an annual production to assist the widow and children of Brian Pillman, who had wrestled with Benoit at Stampede and died suddenly at thirty-five while with WWF. Benoit (along with Eddie Guerrero, Rey Mysterio, and Konnan, a Cuban-born star in Mexico and on the U.S. independent scene) was known as one of the most generous of the top-tier wrestlers; on his days off, he volunteered for the Pillman and other benefits.

  The Pillman show on May 25, 2000, at the Schmidt Fieldhouse on the Xavier University campus, featured a classic match between Benoit and William Regal. The exhibition, memorable for its realistic butchery, was credited with reviving Regal’s career and spurring WWE to sign him shortly thereafter. WWE had permitted Thatcher to bill the match as being for the WWE intercontinental championship, one of the company’s minor titles, and the end product was impressive enough that the video of it would be included in a DVD package of Benoit highlights entitled Hard Knocks.

  Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, who was in Cincinnati that night, remembered it as “the same Benoit-Regal match they always did,” with a spot in which they head-butted each other repeatedly until they drew so-called “hardway” blood. In other words, rather than concealing razor blades inside their wrist bands before pulling them out and discreetly scraping them over scar tissue on their foreheads — the conventional method of “juicing” — Benoit and Regal legitimately pounded on, or “potatoed,” each other until the red stuff gushed, whipping the crowd into a froth.

  “I don’t think there were any specific instructions other than Regal wanted the best match possible, as they had done that spot in matches before and they did it in matches after,” Meltzer said. “This one is remembered because of the setting and because they were given time instead of being rushed through. Regal credits it for saving his career when everyone wrote him off for his ongoing drug problems. He’s a friend of Triple H [Vince McMahon’s son-in-law], so who’s to say Regal wouldn’t have gotten the chance anyway, but it’s not an exaggeration to say that he revived his reputation with this match, and it likely saved his career at that time.”

  After Guerrero and then Grunge joined the long list of fatalities, Chris had had it. He swore off benefit shows — and funerals. They were too depressing.

  [1]. Sixteen months after Guerrero’s death and three months before Benoit’s, the former would be named in an investigation of steroids in sports published on the Sports Illustrated website.

  [2]. The original edition of this book misspelled Durham’s last name as “Dunham.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Last Days in Fayette County

  IN THE SUMMER OF 2006, Holly Schrepfer was driving home when she saw a disheveled and upset woman walking along Quarters Road. The woman was her new next-door neighbor, Nancy
Benoit, whom Holly had not yet properly met. Holly asked Nancy if she was OK. The answer was no, not exactly — she had just had a fight with her husband, who threw her against the wall, and she was afraid to go back inside. Holly drove Nancy to a hotel near the Atlanta airport, where she spent a couple of nights before things at home cooled off.

  In the first years of their marriage, the Benoits, employed by the Atlanta-based WCW, had settled in Peachtree City. Wrestlers from the South generally liked to live closer to the center of metropolitan Atlanta. Out-siders like Benoit (Canada), Johnny Grunge (New Jersey), William Regal (Great Britain), and Fit Finlay (Ireland) favored Peachtree, another rim away from the nearest suburbs and somewhat more sanitized, even sensory-deprived. WCW ring announcer Dave Penzer and TV cameraman Darwin Conort also lived there. The wrestling people formed a regular social circle, hanging out together at places like the Ginza Japanese Steak House. Their wives, especially, bonded, swapping insecure gossip about what their husbands were up to on the road.

  But eventually the Benoits withdrew from the group. Chris, who could be gregarious on the road, was distant and awkward at home. The only person with whom he continued to keep in touch was Grunge, which was why his death, on top of Eddie’s, hit Chris so hard.

  The core of Benoit’s personality remained an enigma to the end. Even some of his closest friends and colleagues could be intimidated by his intensity, his single-minded focus on wrestling, and his fanatical workout regime of stair-climbing and squats, along with weight training, from which he had never lapsed, going all the way back to his days of humiliation at the lowest level at a Japanese dojo. Former wrestler Superstar Billy Graham was among those who observed a fundamental social disconnect, a quality whereby Benoit, in the middle of a non-wrestling dialogue in a group situation, was prone to zoning out without warning. Later, struggling to make sense of Chris’s murderous rampage, Graham remembered that a lot of the guys called Benoit “the zombie.”

  Another wrestling colleague who puzzled over Benoit was Chris Masters, who put it this way: “To be perfectly honest, I respected the hell out of Chris Benoit for being the man that he was, but there was always an intense energy coming from him every time I shook his hand. It made for sometimes short and awkward conversations.”

  On CNN’s Nancy Grace, fellow Canadian wrestler Chris Jericho described Benoit as “almost a tale of two cities, a tale of two people. There is the Chris Benoit that had these horrendous acts of extreme psychopathic lunacy in the last couple days of his life, and then there’s the Benoit that I myself traveled with, lived with, said ‘I love you’ to on many occasions. He was my mentor. He was one of my best friends. And he was a brother to me in so many ways. And the fifteen years I knew him and the two days that he decided to do these horrible, horrible acts, it’s hard to kind of discern the two. And that’s why we have to figure out what would cause such a mild-mannered, polite, influential, tremendous person and performer to do such things.”

  Jericho called Benoit “a very quiet man but not a recluse and not a hermit, just quiet. He minded his own business, but he was always around. If there was a joke, he would laugh. And of all the years I was with him, I never once saw anything — if there was a fight — if I went nuts and wanted to beat somebody up, he was the guy that would contain me. And a lot of people can tell you that.”

  Journalist Dave Meltzer also had a nuanced view of Benoit. He considered being accessible to his fans his own important responsibility, and when Meltzer launched an Internet radio show in 1999, Benoit was his first on-air guest. “Chris was uncomfortable and distant, but was very nice and a good listener to those he knew,” Meltzer said. “I think he was someone who was always thinking and a very private person. He definitely needed to be by himself and didn’t like being social at times. He internalized a lot. He was not a ‘dumb jock’ type.”

  One factor in Chris and Nancy’s isolation from the Peachtree City circle was that, even back then, they had a habit of breaking out in operatic public fights that embarrassed those around them. Nancy had a sharp tongue, especially when she was boozed or pilled up, and she hit all of Chris’s buttons. Their friends were hardly surprised when, in June 2003, Nancy filed for divorce and was granted a temporary restraining order based on an April incident in which Chris, according to Nancy’s court papers, “lost his temper and threatened to strike the petitioner and cause extensive damage to the home and personal belongings of the parties, including furniture.” In August, they reconciled and Chris moved back in.

  * * *

  If Chris wasn’t a hermit before he lost his twin anchors of Eddie Guerrero and Johnny Grunge, he became one afterwards. The Benoits built a sprawling new house, in the classic Federal style, at the edge of Fayetteville. They didn’t even bother to secure a purchaser for the Peachtree house before moving to the new one — partly because the housing market was in a slump and they didn’t need the cash, and partly because Chris wanted nothing more than to wall himself off in a gated mansion, as quickly as possible.

  In addition to eschewing wrestlers’ funerals, Chris renounced religion. Or maybe he swore by it as much as at it — the distinction wasn’t clear. Nancy took him to counseling sessions with their pastor, George Dillard of the Peachtree City Christian Church. Together, husband and wife read the Bible, and he started memorizing passages, which he quoted to friends and family.

  Chris’s remarks in an email to journalist Greg Oliver shortly after Guerrero’s death showed the unrealized objectives of a tortured odyssey:

  I know that he has left us but I still feel like I’m going to see him on the road next week. I do not know if I will ever have as good a friend as I did in Eddie. I was able to talk to him about anything in my life, and he was always able to make sense of things or change my perspective.

  He was somewhat of a spiritual guide for me. I do not know if you read the Bible at all, or what your beliefs are, and I will respect you for whatever your beliefs are. But if you ever get the opportunity to read about Job, it reminds me so much of Eddie. At one point after coming out of rehab, he had nothing but the clothes on his back. He had physically, mentally, emotionally and monetarily hit rock bottom. He lost his family; his wife and children had left. But he never lost his faith and through it was able to overcome the odds.

  Instead of Eddie becoming bitter, Eddie became better. In our business it is really difficult to understand why we do what we do and why we think what we think unless you are in it, unless you have a passion for it. It is so demanding physically, mentally and emotionally in every possible way, but when you love it as did Eddie, as I do, you have a better understanding of why we do what we do.

  I do not believe that I will ever find someone that I will bond with and be able to understand and be understood as I was with Eddie. I’m not looking forward to going back on the road, not that I ever did. I hate the road, but I looked forward to Eddie’s company and camaraderie. Both of us hated the road, being away from our families, but both of us lived for that in-ring bell-to-bell time.

  Without his Three Amigos road partner, Chris was lonelier than ever, but this condition collided with an ironic reality: while the WWE schedule remained punishing, it was somewhat more manageable than it used to be. The war with WCW was long over, and WWE talent no longer needed to be away from their families 300 days a year. Live events were built more than ever around TV shoots and pay-per-views; though there were still regular “house” shows, as well, the scheduling was marginally lighter and more rational. In December 2005, while Nancy recuperated from surgery in which a long-damaged disk in her neck was fused and repaired, the company even gave Chris an extended leave, which also gave him a chance to recover from several nagging injuries.

  But even if you could afford the expenses of bouncing back and forth from the road to home (and Chris, who made more than $500,000 a year, could afford it more than most), you had to make choices, and Chris was increasingly choosing to stay away. Like
many wrestlers, he liked to say he was a homebody at heart, and like many wrestlers, he seemed to be saying so, with repetition and overwrought sentiment, in an effort to convince himself as much as others. “Quality time with my family is a big vice. It’s something I’ll fight for and crave,” he told the Calgary Sun in 2004.

  The juxtapositions — “quality time,” “vice,” “crave” — showed an inconsistency of more than just rhetoric. The evidence of the last months of Chris and Nancy’s lives, including an incomplete record of the text messages from their cell phones, brings into high relief the bitterness of their alienation, spotlighting both specific issues and the general inability of this particular man, in a profession celebrating misogny, to embrace domesticity.

  In late March 2007, Nancy told her mother-in-law that she suspected Chris was not “doing the right thing” on the road. Margaret Benoit said she would talk to Chris about it on his July trip to Canada.

  On May 5, Nancy text-messaged Chris: “Daniel has called twice today. What you cant bother with him either.”

  On the morning of May 9: “One night your textgng I love you durin the day you wont talk. Get off the crap your on its makin you passive aggressive and I dont need the abuse.”

  Three hours later, the subject was Nancy’s charge that Chris had not made himself available to his two kids with Martina, who were visiting from Canada: “Your big claim ask anyone you work with how you are, know one knows what goes on behind closed doors. and the excuses about not being able to see your kids is your failure in putting no effort to them. paying out lots of money sending for them twice a year is a far cry for being a Dad. you need to get it together. I will not except this steroid enduced rollercoaster ride of emotional abuse. ignoring the problem or running away isnt going to help you face it you need professional and only if your fully honest about all of it.”