CHRIS & NANCY
THE TRUE STORY OF THE BENOIT
MURDER-SUICIDE & PRO WRESTLING'S
COCKTAIL OF DEATH
IRVIN MUCHNICK
ECW Press
Grow up your forty [years old] for mighty sakes get off the stuff it’s obvious im probably not the only one who can see and we both know the [World Wrestling Entertainment] wellness program is a joke.
Nancy Benoit to Chris Benoit
text message, May 10, 2007
The scandal isn’t what’s illegal. It’s what’s legal.
Michael Kinsley
Foreword by Phil Mushnick
I SHARE AN UNINTENDED BADGE of honor with Irvin Muchnick: if Vince McMahon and World Wrestling Entertainment ever put on paper something similar to President Nixon’s “enemies list,” both Irv and I would be on it, top ten.
Pro wrestling, by industry design, and hard journalism are oil and water. Irv, like me, only far more often, focuses on this industry’s death trap, not its magic show. That’s one reason why I hope Chris & Nancy gets widely read — and, more important, acted upon.
Before I go any further, a clarification, one both of us have made dozens of times over the past dozen years: beyond our professions, Irv Muchnick and Phil Mushnick are not related. Irv’s paternal grandparents and his then six-year-old future uncle, Sam Muchnick (who would become the legendary St. Louis promoter and long-time president of the National Wrestling Alliance), docked at Baltimore, where their surname was transliterated to “Muchnick,” with a “c.” I’m a third-generation Staten Islander (my ancestors came over on the ferry), and no one’s quite sure (or much cares) why or when Mushnick became Mushnick.
Irv was living in New York in the early 1980s when I became the media sports columnist for the New York Post. At the time there were sports anchors on local TV newscasts — Warner Wolf on WCBS, Spencer Christian on WABC — who frequently aired WWF clips as legitimate sports highlights. Irv was the first of my readers to warn me that my mere outrage could not contain this phenomenon.
And indeed, by 1985 Andy Warhol and the downtown Manhattan demimonde were seizing the proverbial fifteen minutes to proclaim wrestling the newest manifestation of “camp” art. In March of that year, when McMahon produced the first WrestleMania on pay-per-view, two of his key shills were Dick Ebersol (the future president of NBC Sports and co-impresario of the disastrous XFL football league) and Bob Costas (having taken a break from his otherwise well-earned position as the “conscience of sportscasting”).
Three years later Irv Muchnick published a devastating profile of the sick Von Erich wrestling family of Texas (one son died accidentally from prescription drugs, one was a drug suicide, two shot themselves to death). The piece would be selected for the anthology Best Magazine Articles: 1988; not best wrestling magazine articles or best sports magazine articles, but the best magazine articles of any kind. “Born-Again Bashing With the Von Erichs” was the first serious attempt at legitimate long-form narrative journalism on what quickly became a pandemic of occupation-related deaths in American junk entertainment.
A few years after that, now living in California, Irv stayed at my house while he tracked down the cover-up of how Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka probably killed his girlfriend in a Pennsylvania motel room in 1983. The Von Erich and Snuka stories would be included in Irv’s 2007 collection, Wrestling Babylon.
In the 1990s, as night follows day, scandal wracked WWF. The original “mark” doctor, George Zahorian, got busted by the feds for distributing steroids like Tic Tacs. McMahon himself was indicted (but acquitted at trial). His company, competing in a race to the bottom with Ted Turner’s deeper-pocketed World Championship Wrestling, clawed back with R-rated programming, which glommed the crotch-grabbing wit of “Degeneration X” onto the perverse family pitch of the Hulkamania era.
In the course of our long friendship, Muchnick and I haven’t always seen eye to eye. He can’t always be right, ya know. But I’ve leaned on him for information, insight, and inspiration far more often than he has on me. I simply appreciate and admire Irv’s work for projecting a vision of wrestling’s dark side in a way that transcends the subject. His larger canvas isn’t wrestling. It’s how all of late-empire America has been wrestlingized.
In my Post column, Vince McMahon’s sleaze mill gets less attention than it once did. This fact does not reflect that there are bigger fish to fry so much as it acknowledges this sad triumph of wrestling values throughout sports and culture. In years to come, for example, we’re certain to see more and more veterans of baseball’s steroid era dying young, like Ken Caminiti and like the hundreds of wrestlers both before and after him. The ESPN TV, radio, and magazine brands — not to mention sports talk in general, and even national political discourse — all subscribe to the puerile “attitude” playbook pioneered by WWE. As a critic, I no longer need to note that fringe programming foretells the content of the mainstream. The future is now, and crude is in, and not likely to fade.
Meanwhile, from his own perspective, Muchnick is still throwing facts into the fire, still connecting the dots between the sacred cows of respectable society and the WrestleWorld they collude with. I’m glad he is. The Benoit murder-suicide was one of the most sensational crime stories of 2007, and it cried out for the scrutiny of someone with a longer attention span and more intellectual integrity than the local authorities, the media, and Congress brought to bear on it. If you can read what Irv has dug up and continue to turn your head, then your powers of denial exceed mine.
Introduction to the Digital Edition
On December 1–2, 2012 — the very weekend I thought I would be putting the finishing touches on this introductory essay — the National Football League had its very own Chris Benoit. Jovan Belcher, a 25-year-old linebacker for the Kansas City Chiefs, shot his girlfriend (the mother of their two-month-old daughter) nine times, in the presence of his own mother. Kasandra Perkins, 22, died within minutes. Belcher then drove to the nearby Chiefs’ practice facility at the Arrowhead Stadium complex and, ignoring the pleas of the team’s coach and general manager, blew out his own brains just as the police pulled up.
On June 25, 2007, WWE’s top executives, who already knew Chris Benoit had murdered his wife, Nancy, and their seven-year-old son before taking his own life (though Vince and Linda McMahon were careful not to share that information with the performers under their thumb), decided to go forward with a new live episode of Raw that night. Five years later, the NFL decided to go forward with the Chiefs’ game the next day against the Carolina Panthers.
The NFL’s decision was perhaps a tad more effortless. The football people spun a tale of tragedy and sweet sentiment, the latter built around the woebegone Chiefs’ inspirational victory despite hearts as heavy as their offensive guards. The fans at Arrowhead observed a moment of silence and had other production flourishes in honor of “victims of domestic violence.” Two of the league’s broadcast partners, Fox and CBS, dealt with the events cursorily as part of their normal coverage of a package of Sunday games. A third, NBC, focused in prime time on the aftermath of the Chiefs’ emotional victory on the field earlier that day; Bob Costas added commentary suggesting that we all take away from these gruesome events the need for better . . . gun control.
It’s hard to say whether the $10-billion-a-year NFL could have pulled off all of this so smoothly in the absence of what turned out to be Belcher’s legal possession of a veritable arsenal of firearms — one of which he turned on Kasandra, another on himself. In our story, Chris Benoit did not use a gun to kill Nancy or Daniel or himself. The nebulous “gun culture” that Costas railed against was, however, also somewhat in evidence in wrestling. As we were
gathering photos for the original edition of this book, a collection of images from one of Benoit’s WWE tours entertaining American military forces in Iraq, for the holiday television special Tribute to the Troops, was submitted over the transom by a freelance photographer. These showed Benoit and fellow wrestlers posing with automatic rifles, which soldiers on duty apparently had handed over to them for this purpose. My publisher, ECW Press, told the photographer no thanks.
Make of my comparisons and contrasts what you will. Participants in the blame game look at the perpetrator, the circumstances, the mode of crime, and, last but not least, the “culture” as variously defined. The deeper mystery of what motivates domestic murder-cum-suicide invites any and all speculation.
In the event, football definitely shared with pro wrestling some sharp criticism of its show-must-go-on mentality. But as an entity that famously proceeded with a slate of games in the wake of the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy (and at first vied for business as usual right after the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001, before New York Jets players practically went on strike), the NFL expected nothing more — or less. Neither did its public.
I’m not yet sure what other big-picture parallels can be drawn. In the slow-news summer of ’07, most of the follow-up talk on Benoit was about steroids. The possible additional factor of brain injury did not gather momentum until September, when Boston’s Sports Legacy Institute highlighted the study of Benoit’s brain tissue and finding of chronic traumatic encephalopathy by Dr. Bennet Omalu. Since then, CTE and associated public-health costs from American football have become, in my view, the number-one issue in sports — a story with a tail that will drag deep into the twenty-first century, through litigation and policy debates. At this writing, I am much too close to the Belcher incident to offer useful perspective on the impact the combined Benoit and Belcher criminal anecdotes are having on those debates.
Of course, some of us wrestling fans/observers/critics hold the opinion that wrestlers are “canaries in the coal mine” — that what happens to them is destined to play out later for their brethren in more “legitimate” sports. In that spirit, let’s take a wild guess and predict that the Belcher tragedy will fill the bill.
And let’s move on to what I had intended to say before the real world of the NFL intruded on my updated contemplation of the real world of WWE.
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I was going to start with black humor — by asserting, tongue in cheek, that the most significant new development vis-à-vis this narrative, between first publication and today, was the rejection of Roger Clemens by the sportswriters who vote for the Baseball Hall of Fame. Post-Benoit, the United States House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, then chaired by Congressman Henry Waxman, investigated WWE’s “wellness policy.” But as I explain below in unlucky Chapter 13, the Waxos sort of lost interest somewhere along the way. The release of baseball’s Mitchell Report on steroids promised more bang for the pandering buck. Conflicting testimony over the alleged injections of growth hormone into Clemens’ ass by his estranged personal trainer, Brian McNamee, was the basis of a sensational internationally televised Oversight Committee hearing — leading to criminal perjury charges against Clemens, of which he would be acquitted at trial. Those casting Hall of Fame ballots, though, have been less forgiving to Clemens and to the other alums of what is termed baseball’s Steroid Era, including home run kings Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, and Sammy Sosa.
The clinching aphorism here is a hoary one in my dog-eared joke book: “People care much more about fake records in the real sport of baseball than they do about real deaths in the fake sport of wrestling.”
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No, obviously, the most important thread since Chris & Nancy 1.0 went to bed is not Roger Clemens. Rather, it picks up literally from the very last line of the book. I refer to the dismal political career of Linda Edwards McMahon.
When we were so rudely interrupted in 2009, Linda had just been appointed to the Connecticut Board of Education. But she and Vince were after much bigger game. Over the next three years, supported by a total of nearly $100 million in “self-funding,” Linda twice ran for a seat in the U.S. Senate. Each campaign was as disruptive of the partisan democratic process as it was spectacularly expensive and unsuccessful.
In 2010, Linda McMahon won the Republican nomination over a patrician moderate and former congressman, Rob Simmons, before losing by about a dozen points to the popular long-time state attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, in the general election. At one point McMahon was thought to have a chance when she bloodied up Blumenthal with exposure of his lies about his military service. (Over the years Blumenthal had said, or at least suggested, that he was a Vietnam veteran, when in fact he had simply served stateside in the Reserves in the Vietnam war era.) But the voters were ultimately repulsed by Linda’s policy inexperience, her robotic message, and her saturation TV advertising and mailers.
In 2012, Linda McMahon won the Republican nomination over a patrician moderate and former congressman, Chris Shays, before losing by about a dozen points to another congressman, Chris Murphy, who was far less well known and popular than Blumenthal, in the general election. At one point McMahon was thought to have a chance when she bloodied up Murphy with exposure of his past difficulties in meeting home mortgage payments. This gambit boomeranged when a New London newspaper, The Day, dug up detailed records on the now centimillionaire McMahons’ default on debts totaling $1 million in their 1976 bankruptcy. In addition, the voters were repulsed by Linda’s policy inexperience, her robotic message, and her saturation TV advertising and mailers (including but not limited to the week before the election, as the people of the state dug out of the wreckage of Hurricane Sandy, and the state Republican party refused to endorse McMahon’s effort to pin on Murphy the frustration of voters with their beleaguered electric utility company). There were further banana-peel wrinkles — capped on Election Day by the McMahon campaign’s epic-fail payments to mercenaries in African-American precincts who pushed ticket-splitting votes for the Democrat Barack Obama for president and the Republican McMahon for senator.
It was for carbon-copy recurrences like these that my fellow St. Louisan Yogi Berra (or his childhood neighbor and later baseball catching colleague Joe Garagiola — or whoever writes Yogi’s material) coined the phrase “déjà vu all over again.”
My own intrusion into Connecticut politics was much more substantial the first time around than the second. In 2010, I did a mini-bookstore tour and media blitz in support of the just-published Chris & Nancy. One TV news outlet, WTNH, even made me the lead story at six o’clock (presumably because nothing else that day that bled could be led). And the state public radio talk maven then confronted Linda with a taped sound bite from his interview of me a few days earlier. The hapless and outgunned Congressman Simmons was said to walk around with a copy of my book in his pocket.
In my role as designated civic schoolmarm, I bemoaned the focus on the misogynistic and lowbrow content of WWE television content on Linda’s watch as company CEO. Instead, I urged examination of pro wrestling’s gratuitously hazardous occupational health and safety — the, ahem, cocktail of death. After the sudden passing in the middle of the campaign, at age 29, of ex-WWE performer Lance Cade, we had what I considered the most damning example. Among other outrages, there was Raw video of Cade getting blasted over the head with a chair by Shawn Michaels — a year after Vince and Linda McMahon told CNN they were eliminating this practice out of an abundance of caution.
Weeks before the election, the Blumenthal campaign asked me to help arrange for Michael Benoit, Chris’s dad, to travel from Edmonton to Hartford for a Linda-bashing news conference. I obliged. Mike and I have become friends through his advocacy of brain-trauma awareness as a legacy of what happened to his family. According to Mike, Blumenthal looked him in the eye at their meeting in Hartford and shook hands on a pledge to carry forward energetic
ally on the issues that had given rise to the fly-in of a Western Canadian for a partisan political fight in the Eastern United States.
Following his victory at the polls, Blumenthal did not once respond to letters from me suggesting that he had a moral obligation in these areas — for example, to help ensure that an election year state audit of WWE’s abuse of independent contractor classification, which quickly fizzled, had some teeth. To Tricky Dick, I say, “Screw you too.”
During Linda 2.0 in 2012, I was, by calculation, much less visible. The main exception was in October, when someone — a disgruntled WWE employee or ex-employee, I suppose — anonymously sent me an internal company document about its multimillion-dollar settlement of a state tax dispute. Though not naïve about its injection late in the Senate campaign, I actually thought the story flowing from it was only mildly revealing. But Linda didn’t need further reinforcement of the message that she was a rich person enriched by a rich corporation that hired the richest lawyers and accountants so as to make its tax bill less rich. For me, the takeaway was a belated awareness of bipartisan exploitation of one of the more ludicrous plutocratic loopholes in our tax system: state-by-state tax credits for companies involved in producing “films,” and the deficit-defying secondary market in them among beneficiaries. Truth be told, a number of mainstream Connecticut journalists — whom I tended to criticize for being soft on Linda McMahon — had been aggressively and incisively reporting on this issue for years.
This all reminds me to tell you that many of the web links in the book below are out of date. My website is now http://concussioninc.net, and in the archives there you can read everything I wrote about everything at the time.
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I don’t believe in airbrushing history, including my own. The only differences between the pages you are about to read and the original hard-copy edition of this book are a handful of corrections of known typographical and other errors; the latter are flagged with footnotes. Though I take all mistakes seriously, I also realize that a threshold of them is inevitable, especially in the age of blogs and Twitter. What matters more than the existence of errors is whether they were major or minor, habitual or incidental, and resolved in good faith.
Chris & Nancy Page 1
