And yet, in those days in WCW, with so many established superstars entrenched in the upper card and with top-tier talent still migrating over from the WWF, the glass ceiling for home-grown talent was very real.* In one of WCW’s few smart decisions, Benoit and former tag team player Booker T were matched up in a best-of-seven series,* which managed to elevate both men to the cusp of significance. But as Benoit’s star rose, his dissatisfaction with his place in the company only increased.
On January 16, 2000, at the WCW pay-per-view Souled Out, Bret Hart was scheduled to face Sid Vicious for the WCW championship, and Benoit was scheduled to face Jeff Jarrett; Hart was pulled from the card after suffering what turned out to be a career-ending concussion from a kick from Goldberg, and Jarrett was having concussion-like symptoms from a headbutt Benoit had previously delivered him from off the top of a steel cage. Benoit was shifted into Hart’s spot and won the title in the main event. It was supposedly an attempt to assuage his dissatisfaction, but it was too little too late. Benoit jumped ship to the WWF the next day, and his championship reign was invalidated based on a technicality.*
When Eddie Guerrero returned to WCW in 1995 (he, like Benoit, had briefly worked there previously), he may have been a notch above the other first-hour luchadores, but he was firmly stuck in the past. He wrestled predominantly with friends and foes from his pre-WCW days, like Konnan, Dean Malenko (son of Russian scourge Boris), Benoit, Chris Jericho, and his nephew Chavo. Their kinship made for electric matches, but the distance between them and the top of the card seemed ever-expanding. Even though he had feuds with the Horsemen and with Diamond Dallas Page, those were self-evidently placeholder beefs for the upper-carders. He feuded with Konnan over the U.S. Championship, and later with Jericho and Rey Mysterio over the cruiserweight title, but the belts did little to distract from the fact that this was a world separate from that of the ruling class.
But whereas Benoit kept his dissatisfaction to himself, Eddie acted out both off-stage and on, demanding a push from showrunner Eric Bischoff* and walking out on the company after airing his grievances in a reality-bending worked-shoot promo. When he returned several months later, he embraced his rebellion, ironically, by affirming the affiliation that had kept him buried on the card: He formed a faction called the Latino World Order, a deliberate rip-off of the nWo that was more or less an uprising of the Mexican wrestlers stuck at the bottom of the lineup. Rather than help any of them break out, though, it only reiterated their interdependence. Despite the fact that they were getting more airtime and cutting in-ring group promos like the nWo, it was harder than ever to differentiate them from one another, their demands of fierce individuality subsumed by the insistence of their association.
On January 1, 1999, Guerrero wrecked his car and sustained life-threatening internal injuries. He was impaired at the time of the accident; he later admitted to having a serious drug problem during this period and overdosing several times. He returned to the ring seven months later.
When he returned, he formed a faction called the Filthy Animals with Konnan and Rey Mysterio that to WCW fans resembled a reconstituted LWO but which more accurately referenced his Los Gringos Locos posse from Mexico. It was Eddie’s most prominent placement in WCW, and yet he was still reliving his past. In January of 2000 he asked for his release and got it.
On January 31, 2000, Benoit and Guerrero debuted in the WWF, along with Dean Malenko and Perry Saturn—both of whom had also gone from ECW fame to WCW aimlessness—as the Radicalz.* They were functionally the last insurgent turncoats in the Monday Night Wars, and in some way, they were the greatest bellwether since Hall and Nash jumped ship to WCW. The Outsiders had signaled a new way of doing things, that there was a new major player in the wrestling industry, and the Radicalz epitomized the fact that that major player was in its death throes. Frustrated by their lack of promotion in WCW, these four jumped to the WWF in what was as much a political statement as a career advancement. But even though they arrived with significant fanfare, they weren’t necessarily fated for greatness. If their initial employment by WCW was a matter of necessity, their hiring by WWF was a matter of opportunity. They were all symbols of WCW’s lack of ingenuity and inability to promote from within. In hiring them, WWF management were able to cast themselves as visionaries by co-opting wrestlers underutilized by their rival.
The Radicalz, as they were originally composed, lasted roughly five minutes. During their first run-in, Guerrero gruesomely injured his elbow while performing a Frog Splash, and he was put out of action. By the time he returned, Benoit was moving on to a singles career separate from his Radicalz comrades. Guerrero soon found a level of personality that he’d only hinted at in WCW, and was cast as a borderline comedy act, amping up his Mexicanness and wooing the Amazonian Chyna (whom he called “mamacita”), going by the nickname of “Latino Heat.”
Benoit, meanwhile, entered into a lengthy beef with Chris Jericho, who, it must be said, was the precursor of the Radicalz in the WWF; once an undersized and underutilized WCWer himself, he went up north in 1999 and proved that there was room at the top of the card for an untraditional critical darling, and so paved the way for Benoit and Guerrero. Their rivalry felt like a grudge match to determine who had been repressed more undeservedly in WCW. When they eventually teamed up against Triple H and “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, at stake was the redemption of their entire lot.
As his character evolved, Eddie was ever inching toward the mainstream, appearance-wise—his mullet receded, his mustache became a five-o’clock shadow, and his muscles virtually exploded. Benoit lost his mullet too, got more physically defined, and finally achieved a personality by fully embracing his strengths: He grinned, exposing his missing teeth; he scowled in agony at even his most joyful moments; and he kept the speaking to a minimum. As Eddie almost shockingly became a rounded, WWF-style superstar, Benoit became the embodiment of the very inability to achieve that; he was a mute, leering, violent menace, the sort of personality normally only seen in monstrous villains of the past. He came to exemplify everything the WWE mainstream was not, and in doing so, he excelled. Somehow these two underappreciated indie darlings had become mainstream stars.
Benoit won the Royal Rumble in 2004 and entered into a three-way title dispute against Triple H and Shawn Michaels, thus fully insinuating himself into the superstar ranks.
Eddie’s lengthy team-up with Chavo as Los Guerreros became a sort of meta racial parody: They played to Mexican stereotypes, thickening their accents, driving around in hydraulics-powered hooptie cars, and proclaiming as their motto “We lie, we cheat, we steal.” And yet—unlike so many other racial caricatures in wrestling history—Eddie and Chavo seemed to relish their ridiculousness. Maybe it was finally being given a chance to shine; maybe it was a realization of the path their forebears had carved out in south Texas all those years before. Regardless, the crowd was quickly cheering on these acknowledged criminals. Self-awareness gets points.
After a breakout run with the U.S. Championship, Eddie won the WWE title from Brock Lesnar at the No Way Out PPV just prior to WrestleMania. His career high didn’t turn out to be a personal high point. In an interview with the London Sun, Eddie said, “I was ready to win the belt, but not for what lay ahead of me. I wasn’t prepared mentally for what happens outside the ring—because I think that’s where the real challenges lie. I was taking things like attendances and ratings very personally. I’m an extremist and that’s one thing I’d like to change in my life.” His fears purportedly manifested in drug use—the subtext in the interview is thick with implication—though by that interview he’d found God and sobriety.
On September 9, 2004, Guerrero faced Kurt Angle in a lumberjack match, an old-school gimmick in which the ring is surrounded by other wrestlers who are tasked with tossing the matched wrestlers back into the ring if they are tossed out or try to escape. The match was significant in storyline terms for its ending, when the Big Show made a surpr
ise return and flattened practically the entire SmackDown roster, but in real-life terms, it matters for a different, more serious reason. According to Angle, Eddie was in such bad shape that night that he wouldn’t let Angle touch him—he literally yelled “Don’t touch me” repeatedly as Angle tried to improvise different moves. If you go back and watch the match, you can see it happening. Angle and Eddie—even in his state—are too good for it to be blatant, but in rewatching, it jumps out that few of their exchanges result in any kind of physical impact on Guerrero. When he’s tossed outside the ring—where he’d normally be at the lumberjacks’ mercy—they mostly stay away from him, and Bubba Ray Dudley seems to run over from the other side of the ring to shield him. Angle is uncharacteristically tentative, and the referee seems to be in a constant state of unease. There’s one big spot during the match—even more incredible when one considers Eddie’s state—where Angle superplexes Eddie off the top rope.* Angle lands and writhes in outsize pain; Eddie more or less lies still, as if he’s too hurt to emote. The referee ignores Angle and hovers over Eddie for a few seconds that seem like minutes. He’s so ready to signal catastrophe to the backstage area that he’s practically twitching. Normally when a match between two wrestlers of this caliber ends indecisively, it’s a letdown, but when Big Show came out and the match evaporated, it felt like divine intervention.
Forget the stiff punches, or the hardcore bloodlettings, or the shoot interviews: This is the ne plus ultra of reality in wrestling. The enlightened wrestling fan has likely spent significant amounts of time explaining to nonviewers that even though wrestling is staged, it’s not fake—that no amount of planning, no amount of scripting, no amount of physical trickery or assisted landing, no amount of ring elasticity or floor mat cushion can remotely assuage the physical assault of an average wrestling match. Every night on the road ends with ice bags or painkillers or just plain old pain, the unrelenting kind, the “you sit down in your rental car and electric voltage shoots up your spine” kind of pain, and so what, you get in your car anyway and drive to the next town and work another match tomorrow night and the fans cheer but they don’t know. And you get two or three days off after tomorrow or the next day, and let’s hope to God that’s enough to get you right, because then it starts all over again. And then again next week, and then for months, and if you’re lucky—imagine that word, here of all places—if you’re lucky it’ll keep going for years. And there’s no off-season, no prolonged downtime unless, God forbid, you’re seriously injured. That’s reality. Fans will try to explain this to people, but wrestlers themselves are, for the most part, too proud—or too committed to the facade—to explain it to anyone, and it’s this kind of pride, this commitment, that leads to a functional code of silence, even within the locker room, even among friends, and so to painkiller abuse, to alcohol abuse to take the edge off, to illicit drug use to get you going afterward, out of the fog of painkillers and beer. This is reality. Wrestling fans can explain this, but who can put into words the pain of working a wrestling match in which you’re in so much pain that you don’t want to be touched but you’re too proud not to go through with it? When your livelihood is your body and your body is betraying you? Best-case scenario, working a match in that shape is a cry for help. In Eddie’s case, Angle knew, the referee knew, probably a bunch of the guys playing lumberjack outside the ring had some idea, and nobody did anything. Probably Eddie was feeling better the next night or the night after that, and everybody let it drop. Because, honestly, that’s what they’d want in his position.
In the intervening year after the lumberjack match with Angle, Eddie had a lengthy, compelling storyline with Rey Mysterio, after which he was again elevated to the title scene, as he was named as the number-one contender to Batista’s championship. In both stories, Eddie wavered between friend and foe of his opponent, his ambition seemingly at war with his heart. Batista beat him at the No Mercy PPV in Eddie’s last big match. He had the chance to hit Batista with a chair and presumably coast to victory, but he decided against it. Heart had beaten out ambition.
On November 13, 2005, Eddie Guerrero was found dead in his hotel room by his nephew Chavo. The coroner said it was heart failure due to arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease. He’d not been well in the week prior, said his widow.* In truth, he hadn’t been well for a while.
Angle says that when they were feuding, Eddie knew something was wrong, that some days he showed up looking “white as a ghost,” that in some matches he didn’t have feeling in half his body, that he was scared out of his mind not knowing what the problem was. And his answer wasn’t going to the doctor but instead “praying every night, working out every day,” and hoping for something to change. This is ridiculous, of course. And yet this is reality.
In the end Eddie’s heart lost out to ambition. According to his widow, “Eddie just worked out like crazy all the time. It made his heart grow bigger and work harder and the vessels were getting smaller, and that’s what caused the heart failure.” According to Chavo, Eddie “had been working hard and was at peak physical fitness as a result, doing cardiovascular and weight training exercises every day.” He prayed and he worked out; he got bigger and bigger, and his heart took on the strain of a man twice his size, and he recoiled at the success he achieved, and he broke down.
The thing you always hear is that Chris Benoit never got over Eddie’s death. That’s what they said in the early hours after Benoit and his family were discovered dead. Some people have said it since the reality of the situation came out, but usually they’re tactful enough not to footnote the story with excuses.
But that’s wrongheaded. Everything in the world is explained by excuses and caveats. None of it is ever the complete story, but it’s helpful in our understanding of it. For instance: Eddie died because he had heart failure, presumably because of the toll that years of steroids and painkillers and street drugs took on his heart and, not incidentally, because he never went to the doctor for help and because nobody intervened to take him to the doctor. Probably there are more reasons underlying his death, and presumably we will never know them all, but there’s a functional framework for understanding what happened.
Pro wrestling is about living out our demons and our fantasies on a mythological stage. It’s about finding answers to life’s inherent questions, even if they’re oversimplified—or precisely because they’re oversimplified. This is how mythology works.
Chris Benoit’s body was ravaged by the strain of twenty-plus years of wrestling, of steroid and HGH abuse, of a broken neck he’d had fused, of the relentless compulsion to prove himself. His brain was destroyed by years of diving headbutts that probably concussed him a little every time and of being hit in the head with steel chairs—Benoit is notoriously one of the only guys who would take shots to the back of his head, which is demonstrably more dangerous to your brain. His soul was ferrying the weight of Eddie’s death, of Owen Hart’s death, of a possibly dissolving marriage. The doctors eventually said that when he died he had the brain of an eighty-five-year-old Alzheimer’s sufferer. The weight of all that pain and stress on a dementia-stricken mind. You don’t have to excuse what he did to try to make some sense of it.
The night he killed himself, Benoit was supposed to win the ECW Championship. Which is to say that everything wrestling-wise was good. That nobody saw this coming.
On Friday, June 22, 2007, Benoit murdered his wife, Nancy. He tied her up and choked her to death from behind, his knee on her back. On Saturday he left an answering-machine message for his buddy Chavo Guerrero and told him he overslept and missed his flight. That was his first weak attempt at lying; I would guess that he was more in a state of denial than trying to cover anything up. On Sunday he killed his seven-year-old son, Daniel, sedating him with Xanax and suffocating him. He communicated with Chavo and other WWE personnel by phone and text throughout the next two days, and the story became that Nancy had food poisoning, that she was vomiting blood, that
their son, Daniel, was vomiting too, that he had to take them to the hospital. Benoit started texting people with vague warnings and admissions: He’d send them his address and then tell them that the dogs were pinned up by the pool, that the side door of the house was unlocked. Benoit hanged himself from the pulley of a weight machine, with 240 pounds of steel that barely outweighed his muscled frame providing the lethal counterweight. It’s hard not to see the irony: the breath choked from his log-thick neck by the cord that connected the weights to the pull-up bar that had made his back so incomprehensibly thick, the giving of oneself back over to that which made one. It was an abdication of heroism, an admission of the fraudulence of the whole thing. The lies about food poisoning and oversleeping were incidental compared to the lie of the superheroic existence, the lie of a strength that was all steroids and HGH, and of invincibility that was only a disguised masochism.
The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling Page 32