Chris & Nancy

by Irvin Muchnick

  The New York Times was the first to float the theory that Benoit’s many untreated concussions may have been responsible for unhinging him. The Times attributed the theory to former WWE wrestler Chris Nowinski, who himself had been forced to retire from the ring due to brain trauma before setting up the Sports Legacy Institute, which promotes concussion-related studies and reforms. Nowinski was a Harvard alumnus. Harvard alums have an easier time getting the ear of the New York Times than the rest of us.

  In the run-up to possible Congressional hearings that never materialized, the Washington Post ran a long narrative linking the Benoit family deaths with the industry pandemic.

  NBC’s Dateline planned a Benoit documentary, then canceled it after failing to get both sides of the family on camera.

  CNN’s Special Investigations Unit did complete and air a November 2007 documentary called Death Grip: Inside Pro Wrestling. The piece had its moments, especially in exposing the WWE drug-testing loopholes, which were defended, none too convincingly, by Vince and Linda McMahon in an extended interview. But the CNN producers seemed to have paid a craven price for the McMahons’ sit-down, scrubbing a counterpoint interview with industry authority Dave Meltzer.

  The suspicion that banning Meltzer from the broadcast was a WWE quid pro quo cannot be proven, but that type of tactic has been evident throughout the company’s media relations history. (When the Benoit toxicology reports were released, WWE representatives did live interviews on CNN’s Nancy Grace on condition that wrestling newsletter writers Meltzer and Bryan Alvarez, who were also on the program, not appear on screen at the same time.) If it did happen that way, the blame lay with the documentary producers, who also did sloppy work in another area. CNN showed footage in which WWE’s biggest star, John Cena, supposedly got caught answering with a non-denial the question of whether he had ever used steroids: “I can’t tell you that I haven’t, but you’ll never be able to prove that I have.” WWE had taped the exchange with its own hidden camera, and after the documentary was broadcast, the company posted the complete Cena interview on its website, establishing that he had been quoted outrageously out of context. He was clearly referring to a hypothetical denial of steroid use by a hypothetical someone else.

  For the record, Cena himself always offers a categorical denial. Categorical but questionable. In 2007–08 he missed months of action after surgery for a torn pectoral muscle — one of those injuries that were almost never seen before the steroid era but now are found among users.

  In partnership with Chris Nowinski, Mike Benoit took to the airwaves in his campaign to explain his son’s multiple murders as the culmination of untreated brain damage from reckless wrestling chair shots and bumps. ABC and CNN both did Benoit brain-damage exclusives in 2007, and early the next year the Sports Legacy Institute doctors reproduced their findings as part of an hour-long piece, A Fight to the Death, on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s the fifth estate. The concussion research got snapped up for its freshness and probably, as well, for its unconscious appeal to the sympathy of Chris’s fans who, like his father, did not want to believe the worst about him. Unfortunately, the concussion theory, which had value, was grossly oversold. At best, untreated concussions are part and parcel of the same culture that bred steroid mania; concussions can supplement, but not replace, drugs as the explanation for the Benoit tragedy.

  During the same period, Bennet Omalu, one of the forensic pathologists who developed the postmortem brain analysis showing unhealthy protein spots on Benoit’s brain — indicating severe damage that could only be attributed to repeated hard blows to the head — authored a book, Play Hard, Die Young: Football, Dementia, Depression and Death. Omalu’s research resonated more in the press for the anecdotes of his studies of the brains of Mike Webster, Terry Long, and Andre Waters: three National Football League players who died young, in two cases by suicide, after scary post-career trajectories of mental illness.

  But despite its useful spotlight on brain injuries in every corner of sports, Dr. Omalu’s book sinks under circular logic. The doctor asserts — sometimes with a degree of rationalization echoing that of the players themselves, and conflicting with the known record — that Webster, Long, and Waters were not steroid users, or at least not heavy enough users to explain the dementia syndrome. And the syndrome itself, dubbed “Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy” or CTE, turns out to be a catch-all: vague enough to include just about anything Omalu wants, from depression, paranoia, and anxiety, to phobias and insomnia, to alcohol abuse. Omalu’s methodology has major cause-and-effect flaws.

  Most revoltingly, Play Hard, Die Young, a thin volume, does not confine itself to science. A fervent Catholic following a strain of mysticism found especially in his native Nigeria, Omalu relates the time a brain that he was transporting in his car for an autopsy started playing supernatural tricks, such as spontaneously turning on the Omalu home dishwasher in the middle of the night. Without a shred of doubt or irony, the doctor construes this as a sign from the heavens that he had a calling to get to the bottom of CTE. Which, of course, calls to mind yet another one of CTE’s laundry list of purported symptoms: “increasing religiosity and quasi-spiritual insights.”

  ***

  The root flaws of the Benoit coverage were epitomized in the treatment of the Wikipedia affair by the Associated Press, the wire service collective that is subscribed to by many mainstream news outlets of all sizes. For several days from late June through early July 2007, thousands of newspapers, radio and television stations, and websites hyped, then summarily declared a nonstory, the mystery of why an unauthorized Wikipedia editor had posted the news that Nancy Benoit was dead before that fact was publicly known (see Chapter 9). These secondary accounts had many different bylines, and they cut-and-pasted different facts and emphases from the AP stories, as rewrites of wire copy always do. But all the stories jumped to the same faulty conclusion, based at least in part on the same erroneous fact.

  According to the LexisNexis database, the first AP file on Benoit and Wikipedia came through on June 28 at 9:57 p.m., Greenwich mean time. Subsequent feeds over the next forty-eight hours never wavered on one key paragraph:

  WWE attorney Jerry McDevitt said that to his knowledge, no one at the WWE knew Nancy Benoit was dead before her body was found Monday afternoon. Text messages released by officials show that messages from Chris Benoit’s cell phone were being sent to co-workers a few hours after the Wikipedia posting.

  The second sentence is false: Benoit’s text messages were sent nearly twenty-four hours before the Wikipedia edit. Further, WWE itself had published the chronology of those messages two days earlier. So how did AP get duped?

  I put the question to Harry Weber, the AP reporter who wrote the above paragraph. Was McDevitt the source for the statement that the Wikipedia edit preceded the text messages?

  Weber said in an email, “To be clearer, the story should have said the messages were ‘received’ by various people after the Wikipedia posting, rather than were ‘sent’ after the posting. At that early stage in the case, there was confusion caused by police, WWE attorney and others as to the timeline.” Weber acknowledged that AP spoke to McDevitt “at length.”

  I followed up: “Since you were aware that the sending of the texts preceded the Wikipedia edit, is there a reason why the story didn’t explain that?” I added that I was trying to figure out if the confusion was deliberately sown. (Tactfully, I failed to add that the text messages were already in both versions of the WWE timeline.)

  Weber: “I do believe some of the confusion caused by the timeline discrepancies provided by the WWE were [sic] intentional. We used a lot of discretion and news judgment and the best information available at the time.”

  A few days later Weber backed away from an earlier promise to talk further with me. “AP does not allow reporters to comment outside of AP or discuss our stories beyond what we have reported. I must exercise caution and not p
roceed any further. I think you are on the right track in the line of inquiry you are pursuing,” he said.

  AP also perpetuated an inaccurate statement by McDevitt, in its June 27 stories, about the sources of all the steroids found in Benoit’s home:

  Long-time WWE attorney (and former personal attorney of Hulk Hogan) Jerry McDevitt said all of the steroids found in Benoit’s home were from a legitimate prescription. “We know which doctor prescribed it,” he said. “There’s no question, none of these drugs are out there, none of these drugs came from Internet pharmacies.”

  In fact, one of the first sets of drugs, if not the very first, found by detectives was a refrigerated stash of growth hormone with the label of a Chinese company. McDevitt surely intended to refer to the Dr. Astin prescriptions filled by several local pharmacies. But the Chinese growth hormone likely came from an Internet purveyor, such as Signature Pharmacy. (Chapter 12 treats this subject in depth.)

  No one is perfect; errors of all sizes and shapes litter coverage of all subjects. But what the Benoit story showed was how easily, in a downscale subject like wrestling, one or two planted misstatements, nudging the narrative toward closure, can turn off the spigot. In scandals, it is often the drip-drip-drip of accumulated detail that wears down the limestone wall. Here we had more like a splash, followed by a towel-down.

  ***

  As with all coverage by the wrestling fan media, the Benoit story was driven by Dave Meltzer’s Wrestling Observer, the granddaddy of the “kayfabe sheets,” dating back to the 1970s, and the largest and most influential publication of its kind. Though Meltzer does not release circulation figures, the Observer’s weekly print edition is believed to have thousands of readers. Many more thousands browse the free and premium versions of its website. In 1990–91, Meltzer wrote a column on pro wrestling for The National, a short-lived daily sports newspaper. Later in the decade he reported from the ground floor on the nascent sport of mixed martial arts; like boxing, MMA is not choreographed, but to some extent shares with wrestling a type of athletic talent and promotional infrastructures and methods. After stints covering MMA for the Los Angeles Times and FoxSports

  .com, Meltzer is now a prolific MMA columnist for Yahoo Sports — this in addition to churning out, basically by himself, more than 30,000 words a week, fifty-two weeks a year, for the hard copy and electronic versions of the Observer.

  Meltzer’s astonishing output is the apex of a quasi-journalistic genre in diverse media, which has attracted passionate above- and underground followings. In the 1980s the market dominance of the then–World Wrestling Federation, which had begun publishing a captive line of slick newsstand magazines, ended the heyday of old-school independent pulp wrestling mags. The best known of these were Pro Wrestling Illustrated and its sister titles, published by Stanley Weston and edited by Bill Apter. PWI lingers in new incarnations, but little else from that category survives.

  The wrestling magazines, at least as originally conceived, were analogous to Hollywood fan fluff, with apocryphal reporting that pushed favored stars and obeyed the industry’s internal practice of suspending disbelief even to the extent of not divulging that wrestling was staged. Meltzer’s Observer — launched in his youth, sustained as a hobby while he held down conventional newspaper sports writing jobs immediately after college, and eventually developed into a lucrative full-time business and mini-empire — irrevocably changed the rules of wrestling journalism in its refusal to perpetuate that particular illusion. Like the “Apter mags” (as the new breed of so-called “smart” fans now remember them), Meltzer covered the theatrical product presented in arenas and on television screens. But Meltzer added a layer of authentic behind-the-scenes reporting and analysis. He was a genuine industry expert who brought to more discerning readers the real stories of backstage politics and the real data about wrestling’s contracts, booking decisions, conflicts, growth, and emerging profile in the sports and entertainment worlds.

  As wrestling’s Mafia-like territorial system collapsed — to be replaced by the global hegemony of McMahon’s marketing-driven WWF/WWE — Meltzer also demonstrated, among other crossover skills, an extraordinary flair for in-depth quick-scan interpretation of things like television ratings and corporate securities disclosure statements. Generally speaking, no one could quantify better than Dave Meltzer. His wrestler death list, compiled during the Benoit frenzy, was the best around; unlike fellow empiricists such as USA Today, Meltzer knew the difference between a wrestler who OD’d and, say, the right-on-schedule fatal heart attack of Andre the Giant, who had a medical condition that made him freakishly large and handed to him, on the same platter, both a lucrative wrestling career and a ticket to an early demise.

  In the same vein, Meltzer refused to pander to fans who jumped on the Benoit concussion bandwagon, but neither did he whitewash that factor. The Observer listed 62 “major league” wrestling deaths in the decade up through Benoit’s career, and Meltzer broke them down. “ECW [the original Philadelphia-based “hard-core” trailblazer, Extreme Championship Wrestling] definitively was the worst of the three majors [also including WWF/WWE and Ted Turner’s World Championship Wrestling] in terms of deaths per capita, probably because it had the worst drug issues and the hard-head-trauma style,” Meltzer said. “But if you look at all the deaths, the vast majority took no more head trauma than wrestlers of any other generation who didn’t have the death rate. Drugs, whether painkillers or steroids, and probably the combination of them, to me is a much stronger factor when you look at the individual cases. Everyone wants an easy answer, and it’s no different with those who jumped on the steroid bandwagon.”

  He summed up: “Concussions were no factor with Eddie Guerrero, for example, or with Davey Boy Smith [who also suffered a fatal heart attack, in 2002]. It’s very possible they played a part with Chris, but how can you dismiss other things that lead to depression when it was a crime of depression?”

  Educated by analysis such as this, “smart” fans multiplied on the World Wide Web, creating dozens upon dozens of fan news sites (many, though not all, cribbing content from Meltzer), discussion boards, chat rooms, and other communication and social-networking tools. Today a few other regular print newsletters thrive alongside the Observer, the most prominent being Wade Keller’s Pro Wrestling Torch and Bryan Alvarez’s Figure Four Weekly (the latter is an online affiliate of the Observer).

  In the quarter-century of my own relationship with Meltzer, I have found him an indefatigably helpful resource. Even though our perspectives often differ, he has never been too busy to review a draft of an article or a chapter, or to answer even the most seemingly trivial factual question. I appreciate that quality and deeply respect his original body of work, which deserves more credit than anything else for imbuing its offbeat subject with a reasonably accurate history and literature. Quirky and intrinsically fascinating, the Wrestling Observer is a model of entrepreneurism.

  The decision to build this book around the timeline mystery was largely shaped by facts and insights Meltzer conveyed to me but not to his readership at large. This would both enrich my research and become a source of tension between us. When we discussed the centrality to my theme of WWE’s “worked” Raw tribute to Benoit, Dave said in an email, “It’s an angle I’d push pretty hard.” He added, apparently half-facetiously, “Can I write it?”

  Cynically conditioned to dismiss WWE’s manipulations of public opinion as matters of taste only, without larger lessons for its culture of death, I might never have zeroed in on the Raw nugget if not for Meltzer’s encouragement. He corroborated company executives’ earlier-than-acknowledged information pointing to murder-suicide — a 6:05 eastern time call to him from a well-placed Canadian source, which aligned with what a Royal Canadian Mounted Police report documented and Mike Benoit had already verified (see Chapter 6). For me, Meltzer’s corroboration then became the impetus for “reverse-engineering” the company’s overall shaky timeline subseq
uent to Chris’s criminal acts. Since Benoit was unquestionably the perpetrator of the murders, exploring that shaky timeline and its meaning became this book’s investigative mission.

  But as research proceeded from there, Dave and I did not see eye-to-eye on my approach, and I told him so and he told me so. I thought the Observer published far too little about the case, and without nearly enough persistence, to the point where, wittingly or not, Meltzer enabled the resumption of business as usual. While I don’t presume to put words in his mouth, he clearly disliked the style of much of my blog reporting and writing, and felt I alienated potentially helpful long-term sources.

  That was where the rubber hit the road. For all its ridicule of the mainstream media’s shallow grasp of wrestling, the Observer and the other sheets themselves operate like gossip networks. At a certain point — a very early one, considering the amount of muck raked — they circle the wagons around the people in the industry they cover. Meltzer bore the brunt of my exhortations to the wrestling journalism community to do a better job of exposing the essence of the Benoit saga so as to spur overdue reforms in drug testing and talent management. Dave didn’t always take kindly to the suggestion that he might be part of the problem rather than the solution; like insiders in Washington politics or anything else, he tends to exaggerate in his own mind what he risks and to downplay how much he protects. His paternalistic modus operandi demands a set of assumptions I don’t share.

  Over time, I had to confront the implications of what Meltzer chose to say and not say, for they added up to an unresolved paradox. Tipped almost as soon as the bodies were discovered, Meltzer himself knew from day one, hour one, that WWE’s Raw tribute was manipulative. Most of the talent on the show didn’t yet realize it, but company brass already understood that they were honoring a murderer and that the news might even reach the public before Raw’s first feed, to the eastern two-thirds of the country, went off the air. Yet, over the next days, while cable TV news people were hammering WWE over this possibility, based only on the sort of generalized innuendo of sleaze that is routinely leveled at wrestling promoters, Dave limited himself to agreeing that WWE and the USA network might have exercised better judgment by pulling the later West Coast repeat of Raw.