Benoit didn’t make the pay-per-view on Sunday, and a young wrestler named John Morrison won the ECW title instead. On Monday night, WWE paid tribute to their fallen comrade with a commemorative show. The facts of the murder scene didn’t start trickling out until the show was airing on the West Coast, and nobody considered that Benoit himself could be to blame.* WWE Chairman Vince McMahon opened the show, alone in the ring with a microphone, which not only signified the seriousness of the night but also broke the script; Vince had recently been “killed” in storylines, and Benoit’s death retconned that fiction out of existence. When the truth of the situation came out, WWE understandably scrubbed all mention of Vince’s pseudodemise from its website right along with the Benoit tributes. In a segment that aired on the Wednesday episode of ECW and the Thursday episode of SmackDown, Vince again opened things up, apologized for Monday’s tribute show, and reinstated business as usual—minus the him-being-dead thing. He promised that the tragedy would not be mentioned again. He was serious about that. The next time Chris Benoit’s name is mentioned on a WWE telecast will be the first since then.
Chris Benoit was a world champion, and he murdered his wife and son and killed himself. The latter act doesn’t actually erase the former, but it suffocates it. In the arena of professional wrestling, when all the world’s a stage, when the crowd’s response determines wins, positions, and entire careers, a reprehensible act is enough to purge reality from the record. Benoit was only ever a star because the fans screamed for him to be. Now they withdraw those screams, and Benoit’s legacy is nullified. If any of this made sense, I would say it makes a certain kind of sense.
Wrestlers love to tell Eddie stories. Even the bad ones—like Angle wrestling Eddie when he was half-paralyzed and in denial—are recounted with timeworn grins like so many practical jokes. Inherent in each of these stories is a sort of misty-eyed wonderment, a visceral reaction not just to Eddie’s personality but also to the miracle of his success. Had he come a few years earlier, Guerrero probably wouldn’t have made it to the WWF, let alone to the top of the card. Somebody could be retelling a story about life on the road, or a backstage prank, or a booze-induced argument, and there’s always the same expression: They were lucky to know him, but Eddie was luck personified—he was a gassed-up Tyche, a steroidal Saint Jude, the holy revision and rejection of the impossible: He was the grappler’s crude dream in the face of defeat.
Benoit, on the other hand, doesn’t exist. Call him Lethe, Greek spirit of forgetfulness and oblivion. Or Saint Anthony (of Padua), patron saint of the missing—and, incidentally, of miracles.
In the end, one man is forgotten, whitewashed not just from polite discourse but also from institutional memory. You see it when other wrestlers perform his moves, the subtle attempt to recast them as something other than Benoit’s. Eddie, though, can’t be forgotten—he couldn’t, with his widow dominating chunks of WWE television, but even without that, he’s canonized. We can appreciate Eddie’s overachievement without compunction, unlike Benoit’s; in some ways it’s a direct corollary, that in the years since Benoit’s awful ending, Eddie has become, if not the anti-Benoit, the un-Benoit. His life ended tragically but not monstrously: It was a self-inflicted tragedy, an understandable one, the sad end point of modern self-determination. He died like too many wrestlers have died, but he lived like we all should want to live, or something like that.
The world wants to pretend Benoit never lived because of the way he died. They want to pretend Guerrero never died because of the way he lived. Either way, it’s ritual suicide, self-mutilation in service of a dream. Eddie lived out his dream even through the pain, and Benoit lived out his dream until his pain consumed him. In that way, they couldn’t be more different, but it’s willful blindness to ignore the fact that they were so much alike. They were the real-life underdogs: They fought for everything they got; they transcended their roles; they defied the script. They determined to outperform life’s lot for them, by any means necessary, and they succeeded, and the crowd went wild, and confetti fell from the rafters. In the end, life bit back, and everybody suffered in indescribable ways.
EPILOGUE
The ref counts three, the timekeeper rings the bell, the announcer says good night, the houselights come up. The promoter counts the night’s haul. The wrestler takes a shower, a soak, a painkiller. The fan walks to his car and drives home. The wrestler takes a ride in a rental car to the next town. It’s only in that moment that the surreal recedes into reality, that the gods go back to being men. As Barthes put it, “When the hero or the villain of the drama . . . leaves the wrestling hall, impassive, anonymous, carrying a small suitcase and arm-in-arm with his wife, no one can doubt that wrestling holds that power of transmutation which is common to the Spectacle and to Religious Worship.”
My dad, who’s a holy man himself, once ran into Animal from the Road Warriors and the Warlord on an airplane. He didn’t know who they were, but he judged from their bulk that they were wrestlers, and he proceeded to get their autographs for me on a yellow legal pad. I was mystified, not least because they were on-screen enemies but also because he said they were both nice guys. Nice guys! Even the goldenest of golden boys has a mean streak I’d have been reluctant to arouse. But they were off duty, and physiques aside, they were human. Every other fan has a story like this. Sometimes, though, the wrestler’s not as keen to be hounded—they either stay in character and stalk away or they gruffly dismiss their fans: “Can’t you see I’m eating?” And you can hardly blame them—dinner is a human concern, separate from the characters they play. Gods don’t sign autographs.
In the ring, they’re near-invincible symbols of good or evil, but the wrestler outside the ring is left to deal with the real-world ramifications of his on-screen sweat. The tolls of the job have changed little over the years. As Marcus Griffin puts it in closing his 1937 book, Fall Guys:
Disease dogs the footsteps of the modern pachyderms. . . . Some matmen die in the ring, others succumb from the shocks sustained while taking those trick falls and out of the ring dives, and others end up mumbling and spatting like punchy fighters who walk on their heels. Stanley Stasiak . . . died from blood poisoning after being cut during a bout in Worcester, Massachusetts, with Jack Sherry. Steve Snozsky . . . succumbed from an attack of locomotor ataxia, directly traced to injuries caused from falls taken during wrestling bouts. . . . Jim Browning, one time world’s title holder . . . spent the last few months of his life half blinded from the ravages of trachoma and in intense pain from the stomach ulcers. . . . Mike Romano, veteran grappler who held over from the Sandow era, collapsed in a Washington, D. C. ring one night in June, 1936, while engaged in a bout. . . . He had died from athlete’s heart, an ailment so common to other grapplers who follow the hard and strenuous schedules that participation in professional wrestling requires.
Sadly, the list continued on and on. All the subjects I’ve dedicated chapters to in this book are dead. And if few of them died directly in the line of duty, it’s hard not to draw a straight line between the fantasy lives they led and the hard reality of their endings. It’s more than a little uplifting, though, that the rash of deaths that first spurred me to chronicle them has petered out. The new generation of wrestlers largely grew up watching their heroes die and learned the appropriate lessons, and WWE, the last standing major promotion, is invested—be it out of compassion or marketing, it really doesn’t matter—in making sure its employees don’t wreck their lives. Now it’s said that you’re more likely to find a superstar playing video games in his hotel room after a match than partying in the hotel bar. But even if the epidemic of dead wrestlers has ended, wrestlers will never stop dying so long as wrestling exists. They’re human, after all.
The history of pro wrestling is one of profound fakery, sure, but when balanced against the truth of the lives the wrestlers lead and the greater truth their actions represent, is the on-screen world really so diminished a real
ity? After all, as Lansing McCurley, sports editor of the Philadelphia Daily News, says in Fall Guys, while you may be able to fix the matches, you can’t fix death: “You get great gashes over the head from ring posts and cracked bones and torn muscles. You get noises in the head and funny spells. And you get shouts and accusations of fake and in the bag and one hundred and one other epithets.”
It’s an ignoble existence out in the real world, a painful and deadly one. That, above anything, is what matters. So many fans were shocked into submission by the litany of deaths in the ’90s that we convinced ourselves that we were appalled by the drugs, the steroids, the hard living that drove our heroes to early graves. It never gets any easier to see heroes die, even when they’ve led long, full lives. Because after all we’ve invested in them, it’s always hard to see our gods as humans.
They’re human in death, but in the ring, they’re gods “because,” says Barthes, “they are, for a few moments, the key which opens Nature, the pure gesture which separates Good from Evil, and unveils the form of a Justice which is at last intelligible.” If it’s all about justice in the end, I hope I’ve done the wrestlers and the industry a little bit of justice in this book.
The night’s done, the show’s over, it’s time to go home.
CREDITS
ii–iiiFrontispiece © Jack Delano/Courtesy of the Library of Congress
7The Golden Era © Library of Congress
30Hackenschmidt © Library of Congress
33Andre the Giant and Terry Funk vs. the Fabulous Kangaroos © Wrestling Revue
49Gorgeous George © Stanley Kubrick/Library of Congress
55The Fabulous Moolah © Wrestling Revue
63GLOW cast © Mike Lano
65Fritz, Kevin, and David Von Erich © Wrestling Revue
71Greg and Verne Gagne © Wrestling Revue
80Madison Square Garden in the 1960s © Mike Lano
83Terry Gordy © Wrestling Revue
91Bruiser Brody © Wrestling Revue
99Chief Wahoo McDaniel © Wrestling Revue
99Chief Jay Strongbow © Wrestling Revue
109The Spoiler vs. J. Ruffin © Wrestling Revue
113Mr. T, Cyndi Lauper, and Hulk Hogan © Ann Clifford/Time & Life Pictures
125S.D. Jones © Wrestling Revue
131Bobo Brazil © Wrestling Revue
143Junkyard Dog © Wrestling Revue
151Jerry “The King” Lawler © Wrestling Revue
155Andre the Giant © Wrestling Revue
165Captain Lou Albano © Wrestling Revue
177“Macho Man” Randy Savage © Wrestling Revue
193Miss Elizabeth © Wrestling Revue
201Hawk, of the Road Warriors © Wrestling Revue
213The Fabulous Kangaroos © Wrestling Revue
217Rick Rude vs. Terry Taylor © Wrestling Revue
227Davey Boy Smith © Wrestling Revue
237“Mr. Perfect” Curt Hennig © Wrestling Revue
247The Ultimate Warrior © Wrestling Revue
257Eddie Guerrero, Vince McMahon, and Triple H © Peter Kramer/Getty Images Entertainment
274Shawn Michaels, Mike Tyson, and “Stone Cold” Steve Austin © Jon Levy/AFP/Getty Images
281Brian “Crush” Adams © Wrestling Revue
289Sheik Adnan Al-Kaissie and Boris Zhukov © Wrestling Revue
297The Big Boss Man © Wrestling Revue
305Owen Hart © Wrestling Revue
315“Killer” Kowalski vs. “The Nature Boy” Buddy Rogers © NY Daily News via Getty Images
319Rodney “Yokozuna” Anoa’i © Mike Lano
327Ludvig Borga © Mike Lano
329Brian Pillman © Wrestling Revue
339Chris Kanyon vs. Perry Saturn © Mike Lano
349Chris Benoit © Wrestling Revue
349Eddie Guerrero © Wrestling Revue
PARTIAL BIBLIOGRAPHY AND WORKS CITED
Barthes, Roland, Mythologies: The Complete Edition (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012). Print.
Beekman, Scott M., Ringside: A History of Professional Wrestling in America (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006). Print.
Bowden, Scott, Kentucky Fried Wrestling, http://www.kentuckyfriedwrestling .com/.
Capouya, John, Gorgeous George: The Outrageous Bad-Boy Wrestler Who Created American Pop Culture (New York: Harper, 2008). Print.
Gotch, Frank, Wrestling (Boulder: Paladin Press, 2008). Print.
Griffin, Marcus, Fall Guys: The Barnums of Bounce (Chicago: Reilly & Lee Co., 1937). Print.
Jares, Joe, Whatever Happened to Gorgeous George (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1974). Print.
Klein, Greg, The King of New Orleans: How the Junkyard Dog Became Professional Wrestling’s First Black Superstar (Toronto: ECW Press, 2012). Print.
Krugman, Michael, André the Giant: A Legendary Life (New York: Pocket Books, 2009). Print.
Online Onslaught, http://www.oowrestling.com/.
Online World of Wrestling, http://www.onlineworldofwrestling.com/.
Slam! Sports: Wrestling, http://slam.canoe.ca/Slam/Wrestling/home.html.
Smith, Red, Press Box (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1976). Print.
Solomon, Brian, WWE Legends (New York: Pocket Books, 2006). Print.
NOTES
The perception of Gotch: Thesz, Lou, & Kit Bauman, Mike Chapman, Editor. Hooker: An Authentic Wrestler’s Adventures Inside the Bizarre World of Professional Wrestling. Wrestling Channel Press, 2001.
[The wrestlers] would go to the mat: Joel Sayre, “The Pullman Theseus,” The New Yorker (March 5, 1932): 26.
They started at 4 o’clock: Arthur Daley, “The Same Old Script,” The New York Times (November 5, 1952).
The revival of a sport that was in the doldrums: Morris Markey, “Catch as Catch Can,” The New Yorker (April 18, 1931): 37.
The World Almanac for 1931: Joel Sayre, “The Pullman Theseus,” The New Yorker (March 5, 1932).
But even if they’re not: Grantland Rice, “Rasslin’ Gets a Toe Hold,” Collier’s (March 14, 1931): 26.
No New York newspaper: Joel Sayre, “The Pullman Theseus,” The New Yorker (March 5, 1932): 26.
A Foreign Menace: A. J. Liebling, “From Sarah Berhardt to Yukon Eric,” The New Yorker (November 13, 1954).
For O’Mahoney’s part: “O’Mahoney,” The New Yorker (July 20, 1935).
His ignorance of the sport: Arthur Daley, “The Same Old Script,” The New York Times (November 5, 1952).
The veteran wrestling fans recall: John B. Kennedy, “Pillars of Sport,” Collier’s ( September 19, 1931).
Not the least interesting: Morris Markey, “Catch as Catch Can,” The New Yorker (April 18, 1931): 37.
If this be play-acting: Joel Sayre, “The Pullman Theseus,” The New Yorker (March 5, 1932): 26.
It isn’t a sport; it’s show business: Jack Miley, “Jake’s Juggernauts,” Collier’s (October 22, 1938).
The trouble, according to [Pfefer]: A. J. Liebling, “Pull His Whiskers,” The New Yorker (July 8, 1939).
It’s television: Lawrence Laurent, “Grunt and Groaners Pin Down Another TV Myth,” The Washington Post and Times-Herald (March 10, 1956).
In the documentary Lipstick and Dynamite: Ruth Leitman, dir., Lipstick and Dynamite (Ruthless Films, 2005), Film.
Abby met her at the airport: Mike Lano, Dutch Mantel, Desperado Hero, (September 16, 1999), www.Hack-Man.com
Ed McDaniel wasn’t a full-blooded Native American: Mike Shropshire, “Wahoo McDaniel,” Sports Illustrated (July 2, 2001).
Scarpa himself said fairly explicitly: Mike Mooneyham, “Young Flair set for Charlotte debut,” The Post and Courier (November 23, 2008).
It’s a testa
ment to the degree: “Masked Marvel Is Wrestler Henderson,” The Day (New York: December 31, 1915).
At least I could go on the streets: Greg Oliver, “Leukemia claims ‘The Spoiler’ Don Jardine,” Slam! Sports (December 17, 2006).
You can practically hear Vince drooling on commentary: Adam Nedeff, “The Name on the Marquee: Wrestling at the Chase (01.07.84),” (August 21, 2011), 411mania.com: Wrestling.
In the most recent Nielsen ratings: Bruce Newman, “Who’s Kidding Whom,” Sports Illustrated (April 29,1985).
It was good business for Jones too: Greg Oliver, “S.D. Jones dies in Antigua,” Slam! Sports (October 26, 2008).
In 2005, Jones told Canada’s Slam! Sports: Dave Hillhouse, “S.D. Jones: An unforgotten gladiator,” Slam! Sports (June 12, 2005).
In the South and West: David Bixenspan, “Black Wrestlers and the World Heavyweight Title,” Cageside Seats (February 4, 2011).
This was at a time when most other public events: “Sputnik wrestled against prejudice,” The Washington Times (December 2, 2006).
He was one of a few wrestlers: >www.infinitecore.ca/superstar/index .php?km_km_ict=6e16f84c6b0b68940b62ede692437cc1&threadid= 72110& page= 0#pager.
He similarly referred to black wrestler: www.salon.com/1999/05/07/gaffes.
I’m more of a nigger than you are: www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/sport/wrestling/1084589/WWE-suspend-Michael-Hayes-after- racist-slur.html#ixzz25YXJNpll.
As wrestling writer Rick Scaia puts it: Rick Scaia, “Road Warrior Hawk, Dead at 46 . . . ,” Online Onslaught (October 20, 2003).
The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling Page 33