I know you're not, I'm just saying I don't see any attempts by anyone to justify what happened. we want to know, to understand, why a guy who had no previous history of these things that we were aware of would do something like this seemingly out of the blue.
and as events and pieces of knowledge trickle out, we start to put the pieces together and try to see what lead him down this road. we're attempting to put the pieces together to reconcile the heinous events of the weekend with what we knew of the man (which obviously was not as much as we believed we did).
yes, wrestlers play a role (often many roles throughout their careers), but the wrestling industry is a physical and mental grind that doesn't have a parallel in any other field. they're on the road constantly, over three hundred days a year with little to no time off and little time for their families. the abuse of painkillers and steroids to keep wrestlers going is rampant. wrestlers go out and abuse their bodies every single night in an effort to entertain their fans.
there's no off season. there's no medical insurance. there's no union. if a wrestler gets hurt, and has to take time off, they often lose their jobs and income.
the families that have been wrecked by the wrestling lifestyle are too numerous to count. many wrestlers have gotten caught up in their characters begin having trouble telling the difference between the roles they play and their own life. Randy Savage, Scott Hall, and Steve Austin are some of the better known examples of this.
there's also no shortage of wrestlers willing to backbite their contemporaries and run them down at every single turn. you'll hear stories about almost every wrestler and promoter in the business screwing someone over on some business deal or another, or not working to make their partner look good in the ring. but those types of stories never came up about Chris Benoit.
he was a hard working guy who always went out and gave everything he had in his matches. this is why he attracted followers. he came up in era when a lot of fans were tired of older wrestlers living off their reputations and doing more trash talking than actual wrestling. (yes, it's a show, but there comes a time when you have to deliver, and in the ring Benoit always delivered in spades)
but this is not really a case of identifying somebody with their onscreen character and being shocked about their actions because Benoit's onscreen character was a vicious sob. c'mon his nicknames were "Wolverine" and "Crippler". it's not like you associate those titles with a nice guy. these are more titles you would expect of someone who well. . .I don't think I need to finish this thought for you to grasp it.
but in all the glimpses we'd seen of him prior to this incident, he came off exactly as exactly that. he didn't talk shit about people, even when he had plenty of reason to. when an opponent was injured during a match with him (where he earned his Crippler name), he spent a great deal of time on the phone with their employer attempting to insure that the man would be okay and would be able to wrestle again. he spent time with children. he did charity work for the WWE organization. he went over to the middle east to wrestle in front of the troops stationed there. he always talked about his family and how much he cared for them. that's why this incident is so shocking to us and we can't understand it. because what we knew of his actual personality did not correspond to the character he often played.
all of these things, these glimpses behind the "mask", make wrestlers more human to the fans and thus more relatable. we can relate when they talk about working hard and being passed over and not being appreciated because it happens to us as well as them. which is something that Benoit and a lot of other wrestlers have all gone through and is the source of a lot of division among wrestling fans. you can dig through numerous discussions in this very forum and learn that.
so yeah, we're shocked. we're appalled. we're hurt, and sad, and confused and we want to understand why this guy would self-destruct in this manner and take his family with him. some of the statements you've quoted were made before all the information was known (and we still don't know all the information and we probably never will), but the posters that made those statements were sincere in their hopes that this incident was not what it has become.
hell, I'm sitting here writing all this out right now and I'm still hoping it's a really bad joke, you know?
some of us here have literally watched this guy perform for decades, growing up following his career. myself, I was a fan of wife as well and had a crush on her as a kid. when they got married (in real life), I was happy for them. when he won the world title and they embraced in the ring, with the kids surrounding them, I was happy for them again. (as a side note, I bought this particular dvd the day after my father died and watched it in the hopes of relieving some of my own pain).
so yeah, we want to know why this event occurred. we learn things we didn't previously know, and that filters into our understanding of the situation. the kid had a mental retardation that's known for being difficult to handle and causing family problems. the wife filed for divorce a few years ago, then reconciled. we get reports that he became paranoid and thought people were after his family. it's not too hard to extrapolate from these events that unbeknownst to us, there were problems and issues going on and it's possible that had people stepped in (or had he let people step in) that this could have been prevented. which just adds to the tragedy.
which is what this whole thing us. A huge fucking tragedy. we're not trying to justify it, but understand it, so we can better cope with it, and maybe take something away from it to better live our own lives.
that's what I have to say on the matter. that and I have no fucking patience for assholes who don't watch or care about wrestling and just want to stir shit up (you know who you are).
I only woke up a while ago, and saw where 25 posts had appeared in this thread while I had slept.
I read Bastie's post and started to form a response while reading the new posts in here, and the above post by Grimm summed up my thoughts exactly, even better than I could have expressed them.
I will add that I have a friend who is a former ECW wrestler. He was known as Harbinger. He was badly injured years ago when he was thrwn into a concession stand during a match. He now has great difficulty walking and has to use one of those battery powered cart things to get around.
Sure, there are parts of wrestling that are fake, but his injuries are all to real.
I will also say this : Benoit threw us all for a loop. We're all just trying to understand why. People need to make sense of events like this. Being able to post in this thread and talk about it has been helpful to us all here.
What Benoit did was terrible and we'll never know all the answers. We're just speculating and trying to understand.
I'm glad we can talk here, and it is as Snarf has said: This murder - suicide does make one appreciate the good things in life.
And this has made me think about a lot of things, as it has made others here think.
