by Ian Hamilton
These tag team titles were awarded to the team of Chris Benoit and Kurt Angle following a tournament of teams of SmackDown wrestlers. Unfortunately, the tandem known to some as “God’s Team” (due to their wrestling ability) would have a brief run with the titles, as they would drop the belts to the team of Edge and Rey Mysterio just weeks later. In the fall-out from that, Angle would move onto winning the WWE title, whilst Benoit ended up in feuds against the Full Blooded Italians and an up and coming John Cena. It took a feud with SmackDown General Manager Paul Heyman to start Benoit’s push to the top - and almost as a metaphor for his whole career to date, he’d have to get to the top the hard way.
After winning a 2-on-3 match, teaming with John Cena to overcome the FBI, Benoit qualified for the 2004 Royal Rumble, only to be forced to be the first entrant in the match by Heyman. History would go on to show Benoit winning the match, lastly eliminating the Big Show, leaving the door open for a title shot against SmackDown’s WWE champion Brock Lesnar, right? It wasn’t quite that simple - Benoit jumped to Raw to challenge for Triple H’s World Heavyweight Championship in a match that ended up becoming a triple-threat match, as Shawn Michaels added himself to the match. In the meantime, Benoit’s “spot” on SmackDown would end up going to his close friend Eddie Guerrero, who beat Brock Lesnar for the title a month later, before defending the belt at WrestleMania 20 against Kurt Angle.
Benoit’s match would end up being the main event. It was enthralling and would gain the acclaim of the fans both inside Madison Square Garden and those watching at home on pay-per-view around the world. Benoit made Triple H submit to the Crossface, securing his first World title belt. WrestleMania would end with a memorable scene, with both Benoit and Eddie Guerrero embracing each other, title belts in hand, as confetti rained down on the arena.
After successfully defending the title in a re-match at Backlash, Benoit lifted Raw’s version of the tag team titles, teaming with Edge to beat Triple H’s Evolution stable-mates of Ric Flair and Batista. With two titles in hand, Benoit would go on to a feud with Kane over the World Heavyweight title, whilst also having to fend off the challenge of La Resistance for the tag titles. At June’s Bad Blood PPV, Benoit lost the tag titles but retained the big one - before losing to Randy Orton at SummerSlam as WWE quickly crowned a new “youngest world champion” following the departure of Brock Lesnar earlier in the year.
Shortly after dropping the title, Benoit would engage in a feud with Edge after their attempts to regain the tag titles from La Resistance failed. The pair would have matches on and off for the best part of the following year, including a Last Man Standing match which was won when Edge hit Benoit with a brick. This preceded a move back to SmackDown for Benoit, and the start of a series of “blink-and-you’ll-miss-them” matches against Orlando Jordan for the United States title, which started after Jordan somehow defeated Benoit. With the internet community in uproar at seeing their hero lose to a rookie like Jordan, Benoit would quite literally squash him to lift the US title, needing just 25 seconds to win the title at 2005’s SummerSlam. A series of rematches were in 23.4 and 22.5 seconds - enough time to literally make a cup of coffee, as Benoit demonstrated courtesy of a split-screen.
A brief feud with Booker T didn’t exactly rekindle the memories of their best-of-seven feud from WCW, but it did lead to them trading the title back and forth as 2005 became 2006. Shortly after his first title defeat, Benoit would endure a personal hell, after Eddie Guerrero was found dead in a hotel room in Minnesota. Breaking down in grief during a video tribute to his friend, Benoit would have little choice but to piece his life back together and continue in the career that had taken the life of one of his closest friends.
With Benoit eventually ending the feud with Booker T as US champion, he would move on to a new feud. A feud with a man whose career had been revived by Benoit’s closest friend - and just like Eddie Guerrero some two years earlier, Benoit would be on the losing end of a title match with John “Bradshaw” Layfield. The feud would be short lived, as Benoit moved into a brief series with Finlay, before injuries forced him to the sidelines for a few months.
Making his return at No Mercy in October 2006, as a surprise opponent for William Regal (who had inadvertently exposed himself earlier in the show; pro tip: if you’re being written to wear nothing but a towel, make sure you can’t accidentally bare all!), Benoit would go onto win the US title back from another newcomer - Mr Kennedy - before being thrust into what was his last major feud, against Montel Vontavious Porter (MVP). A former champion, MVP would claim to be the best US champion in history, which was the precursor for the inevitable match at WrestleMania 23, only for MVP to win the title in a 2-of-3-falls match two months later.
Well away from the World and United State title pictures, Benoit found himself drafted to the revived ECW brand in June 2006. The intention was for Benoit to be a trainer of sorts, working with the inexperienced talent on ECW, whilst also spearheading the brand, with plans for Benoit to win the brand’s championship belt after it had been vacated by Bobby Lashley. A victory over Elijah Burke pushed Benoit into a tournament final against CM Punk. A title match was to have taken place at the Vengeance: Night of Champions pay-per-view on June 24. The events of that weekend overshadowed not just that one match, but a wrestler’s entire career.
According to a timeline released by WWE in June 2007, Benoit missed a non-televised event in Beaumont, Texas on June 23rd - claiming that his wife, Nancy, and his son, Daniel, were vomiting blood as a result of a bout of food poisoning. With Benoit apparently having his flights rebooked to make it to the pay-per-view in Houston, Texas for the next day, all was assumed to be well, that was, until a series of unusual text messages were sent.
In the early hours of morning of the pay-per-view, text messages were sent from Chris’ phone to two colleagues - Chavo Guerrero and WWE referee Scott Armstrong - giving his “physical address” as well as the worrying information “The dogs are in the enclosed pool area. Garage side door is open”. At around the same time, Nancy’s phone was used to text the same “physical address”. Benoit did not make it to Houston, and when those text messages were received the day after the show, the police were called to the Benoit family home in Fayetteville, Georgia. What they discovered was truly harrowing.
Upon entering the property, Fayette County police discovered the bodies of Chris Benoit, his wife Nancy and 7-year-old son Daniel. WWE immediately called off that evening’s live show of Monday Night Raw, opting instead to fill the three hour slot with a modified version of their now-typical tribute format, with comments from wrestlers being inserted in-between clips from the WWE’s career retrospective DVD for Benoit, entitled “Hard Knocks”. To make matters worse, the three-hour show had meant to have been holding a faked funeral for Vince McMahon, whose character had been killed off some weeks earlier after he climbed into a limo which then blew up. As the Chris Benoit tribute was broadcast, however, the grisly facts started to emerge, and questions slowly started to be answered.
Police investigations quickly deduced that the crime scene at the Benoit house was actually the scene of a murder/suicide. Nancy’s body was found in a upstairs room, with her hands and legs tied together, and her body covered in a towel, with the police theorising that Benoit had strangled his wife to death with the use of an electrical or telephone cord. Daniel Benoit was found suffocated to death in his bedroom, with toxicology results showing that he had been given a dose of the anti-depressant drug Xanax, which would likely have left him unconscious at the time of his murder.
After murdering his wife and son, Chris Benoit then took his own life, with police finding his body hanging from a weightlifting machine. Removing a pull-down bar and fashioning the steel cable into a noose, Benoit wrapped a towel around his neck, then the wire noose, before using the weightlifting machine to hang himself.
Although no suicide was originally found - one was found inserted in a Bible that was passed onto his previous wife in amongst his p
ersonal effects - police discovered a Bible left next to the bodies of both Nancy and Daniel. In the hours that followed, WWE embarked on a mission to erase Benoit from their history books - the tribute edition of Raw was never replayed, and was instead replaced internationally with a collection of some of the WWE’s best matches from recent months. All Benoit merchandise and DVDs focused on him were pulled from sale, whilst the DVDs of any pay-per-views that he was involved in saw his name and/or match removed from all advertising. Stories on the company website were edited and written to remove Benoit, with recaps of WrestleMania XX in particular now painting Eddie Guerrero vs. Kurt Angle as the show’s main event, instead of what really headlined that show in Madison Square Garden.
To this day, WWE go out of their way to exclude Benoit in any video releases, either in mentioning his name, or showing his image. Although they have released some of his matches, or matches where he has a cameo, he is not promoted or featured, and at times, the footage has been edited to include him as little as possible. Understandably, it’s at the point where Benoit’s name is up there with the company’s old WWF logo and initials in terms of “things that must not be mentioned on anything we release”.
In the days and weeks that followed, a massive spotlight was shone onto the wrestling business, with news talk shows throughout North America speculating as to what could have been responsible for these murders. Was it steroids? Was it a combination of other prescription drugs? Was it caused by the results of chair shots? Was it caused by the combination of the other artefacts of his hard-hitting wrestling style? Or was it something else that we’d all experienced - death. Fans across the world were witness to Benoit’s quite public breakdown on television following the passing of Eddie Guerrero, but it was only part of the puzzle, as Benoit appeared to struggle to cope with the death of many wrestlers whom he’d travelled with over the years: Johnny Grunge (formerly of ECW cult tag team “Public Enemy”) was a death that hit Benoit particularly hard, coming barely three months after Guerrero’s passing. Just days before Benoit took his own life, a former tag team partner from his early days in Stampede - Biff Wellington - was found dead after an apparent heart attack, although it is unlikely that Benoit was aware of this.
As all interested parties awaited the results of autopsies and toxicology reports, claims and counter-claims were thrown all over the place. Active WWE wrestlers appeared on news shows to defend their employers - some coming across in a positive manner, others not so - as former WWE employees and wrestling reporters also threw in their two cents. Then, when the tests came back, it all started to make sense.
Despite having had a Wellness Policy in place for over eighteen months by this point, the toxicology results showed that Chris Benoit had extremely elevated levels of testosterone in his body. Whilst representatives from the WWE had acknowledged Benoit’s steroid use - he had been given a “therapeutic use exemption” for steroid testing in the Wellness Policy - very few people could have defended just how elevated his testosterone levels (caused by injecting steroids) were. The tests conducted on his body registered his levels at a staggeringly high 59:1 ratio.
Whilst the levels of Xanax and hydrocodone (Vicodin) present in Benoit’s body were at fairly normal levels, the absurdly high levels of testosterone just added credibility to the claims that the most important part of WWE’s Wellness Policy was nothing but a sham. After all, how else could you explain having a wrestler somehow pass various drug tests (where a 10:1 ratio between testosterone and epitestosterone is a failure), yet have levels almost six times greater than what would have been classed as a test failure at the time of his death?
Other tests showed that Benoit’s brain had suffered extensive damage, with the Sports Legacy Institute finding that his brain had a disease known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Although it can only be positively diagnosed after death, CTE is usually characterised in the living with symptoms such as memory loss, aggression, depression and confusion. At the same time as diagnosing Benoit’s CTE, the Sports Legacy Institute - headed up by former WWE wrestler Christopher Nowinski - declared that the brain injuries suffered by Benoit had left him with a brain akin to that of an 85 year old Alzheimer’s sufferer. That particular declaration raised eyebrows, not least amongst those who worked with him every day, noting that, at work, Benoit did not fulfil any of those criteria. After all, when was the last time you saw an 80-something-year-old wrestle, let alone someone with Alzheimer's?
The After Effects
It’s no surprise that professional wrestling has to deal with death so often. After all, we’re still living in a time where those who wrestled in the days of territories are still alive - and the increased number of people involved in the sport, it’s only natural that the death toll is higher. Although there are a fair number of those who died of natural causes and of old age, there are also plenty of cases where wrestlers are dying before their time.
Without turning into Marc Mero and pulling out a list of every wrestler who’s died who’s been employed by any of WWE, WCW, ECW or TNA, a selection of the names of those who had recently been a mainstream star anywhere in the world makes for depressing reading:
1997: Brian Pillman (heart disease)
1998: Louie Spicolli (drug overdose)
1999: Owen Hart (fall), Richard Wilson (WCW’s “Renegade, committed suicide), “Ravishing” Rick Rude (heart attack)
2000: Yokozuna (heart attack)
2001: Terry Gordy (heart attack), Chris Adams (shot)
2002: “The British Bulldog” Davey Boy Smith (heart failure), “Flyboy” Rocco Rock (heart attack)
2003: Curt Hennig (best known as “Mr Perfect”, drug overdose), Road Warrior Hawk (heart attack), Crash Holly (suicide)
2004: Ray Traylor (best known as the “Big Bossman”, heart attack)
2005: Chris Candido (blood clot/complications from surgery), Eddie Guerrero (heart attack)
2006: John Tenta (best known as “Earthquake”, cancer)
2007: Mike Awesome (suicide), Bam Bam Bigelow (drug overdose), Sherri Martel (drug overdose), Brian Adams (best known as “Crush”), Chris Benoit (suicide), Nancy Benoit (best known as “Woman”, murdered)
2009: Andrew “Test” Martin (drug overdose), Mitsuharu Misawa (spinal cord injury during a match), Eddie Fatu (best known as “Umaga”, acute toxicity after drug overdose), Steve Williams (cancer)
2010: Chris Kanyon (suicide), Lance Cade (heart failure)
2011: “Macho Man” Randy Savage (heart disease)
Just the sheer length of this list is depressing to read. Once you take into mind that out of this list, two of the deaths actually took place during a wrestling event, four were suicides, six were attributed to drug overdoses (or the effects of drugs) and ten were heart attacks or heart failures, questions have to be asked. Even looking at just the eight-or-so years prior to Eddie Guerrero’s death, the loss of wrestlers to heart attacks and drug overdoses meant that questions were being asked long before the phrase “wellness policy” became a part of WWE’s lexicon.
Whilst it is true that WWE did have a drug testing policy in place in the 1990s - a policy that was abolished in the mid 90s to save money, when the company was quickly running out of cash - it is also fair to say that this policy only really was applied whilst you were with the company, especially with rival promotion WCW not having much of an effective drugs policy to speak of. In the case of the British Bulldog, although he was fired by WWE in late 1992 (reportedly for receiving shipments of Human Growth Hormone, possibly in a bid to subvert any possible steroids testing), Davey Boy Smith simply went home to England and wrestled there before being picked up by WCW, where his chemically-enhanced physique showed no changes. That seemed to be the running theme in the world of wrestling - if a company with a testing policy caught you taking drugs, you either got off them or left for a company that didn’t test. In the 90s, it was WCW. In the 2000s, it was TNA. Even after the death of Eddie Guerrero, although the numbers of wrestlers
dying young slowed somewhat, there still were the few wrestlers who managed to make a mockery of the tests. In August 2007, Sports Illustrated magazine revealed a list of wrestlers whom were on the list of clients of Signature Pharmacy - a company which prescribed and delivered drugs to clients, including painkillers, muscle relaxants and steroids.
Although at the time, WWE weren’t revealing names of people who had failed their Wellness Policy, WWE did confirm that ten wrestlers had been suspended following the Signature Pharmacy bust. Unfortunately, subsequent news reports from the New York Times and ESPN provided the names of WWE performers past and present who had been caught out by Signature Pharmacy.
The mis-count sparked a new furore against the WWE, especially when their own Wellness Policy was supposed to prevent performers from using other doctors and online pharmacies to obtain medication. As this came at a time where WWE were still reeling from the Benoit murder-suicide, it resulted in yet more clampdowns in the company’s drug-testing policy, although it seemed that, at least for the active WWE wrestlers who were on the list, if they hadn’t been receiving deliveries since the company’s Wellness Policy came into effect, they would avoid any suspension. Regardless, the story caused yet more headaches for the company, with top-line wrestlers such as Mr. Kennedy being busted by the Signature Pharmacy scandal as having received steroids a year after the Wellness Policy came into force - this coming just a few months after he’d volunteered to appear in front of the US news media to defend the company post-Benoit and state that he had stopped taking steroids when the policy was brought in. Whoops!
