"From my 17 years in the business, I know probably 40 to 45 wrestlers who dropped dead before they were 50," said Lance Evers, a semiretired wrestler who goes by "Lance Storm" when he's in the ring. "It's an astronomical number."
Then, he added in a voice tinged with anger and sadness, "I'm sick and tired of it."
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Alvarez, who covers the sport extensively for Web site http://www.wrestlingobserver.com, has some inkling of the demons that might have overtaken the wrestler.
He said Benoit never got over the 2005 death of Guerrero, a former WWE champion and four-time tag-team titleholder who was 38 when he died of a heart attack, perhaps caused by the alcohol and drug abuses that friends thought he had beaten.
"Chris' closest friend in the world was Eddie Guerrero," Alvarez said. "He could cry to him. He could tell him everything. After Eddie died, I talked to Chris. He was broken man."
Last year, another of Benoit's wrestling buddies, 263-pound Mike Durham (known in the business as Johnny Grunge), died at 39 from complications cause by sleep apnea, a condition that often affects larger people such as wrestlers and football players.
"It was about this period of time that people started noticing weird behavior, paranoid behavior, which would indicate (Benoit) was using a lot of drugs," Alvarez said. "He was alone. He was on the road a lot, having to perform at a high level, having to look a certain way. I think the drug use escalated, and his whole world basically fell apart."
