The Tragedies of Pro Wrestling
There are a lot of people who take the stupidly simple and arrogantly misinformed approach when discussing pro wrestling. They deride it as fake, a classification that is as wrong as it is ignorant as it is infuriatingly hypocritical. They refuse to acknowledge wrestlers as either athletes or entertainers, casually casting the craft of professional wrestling into the seedy shadows of illegitimacy. The fact that the game has a predetermined outcome, admitted as such by wrestling kingpin Vince McMahon over two decades ago, is held up by detractors as the kryptonite which will kill any argument in favour of wrestling, failing to note that nearly all forms of entertainment are to some degree staged. They fail to mention the sheer popularity of professional wrestling, the tremendous athleticism wrestlers must combine with an ability to interact with an audience is usually ignored, the physical and emotional toll of a sport with no regulatory authority or job security or the impact pro wrestling has had on pop culture.
Professional wrestling is real. Very real.
The cheers The Rock received when he held aloft the WWE world heavyweight championship are as real as the cheers Michael Jordan received when he hit a game winning three or Andrew Johns got when he kicked a game winning field goal. The blood shed by Mick Foley, Triple H and Terry Funk is the same as the blood shed by Benny Elias, Rick McCosker and Jeff Fenech. The idolization of Hulk Hogan, Steve Austin and Sting is as real and as genuine as the idolization of Larry Bird, James Hird and Wally Lewis. Broken bones snap the same in the wrestling ring as they do on the football field. Heroes are heroes are heroes. Entertainment in no way relates to whether an outcome is predetermined or not. When children clad in the red and the yellow cried for the Hulkster, that was real. When Ric Flair returned to reform the Horsemen in 1998, his words and tears were real. When Owen Hart fell to his death live and on pay-per-view, that was real. When Vince McMahon put dozens of promotions and countless hundreds of wrestlers out of work, that was real. The money, the travel, the constant expectation, the loneliness, the uppers, the downers, the injuries, the job insecurity; they are all very real too. Through the charade of the show exists a very real business with very real people and very real moments.
Just ask Eric Kulas, the seventeen year old kid who posed as a twenty three year old wrestler named “Mass Transit”. Kulas talked his way into filling in for a wrestler who no-showed an Extreme Championship Wrestling card, a scam he would soon regret. He asked to be bladed (wrestlers cut themselves just above the brow with a razorblade to draw a small amount of blood, which mixes with sweat and causes the illusion of mass blood loss) by a bounty hunter turned jailbird turned pro wrestler called New Jack. New Jack bladed him, cutting Kulas from ear-to-ear and leaving a lake of blood pouring from his head and onto the ring and frontrow fans. Kulas left on a stretcher with all and sundry saying it was the most brutally horrifying and criminal action they had seen in a wrestling ring.
If the above words are not understood the immediate relationship between writer and reader looks tenuous at best. Ignorance, on this occasion, will not be tolerated from this end and there will be violent ramifications for those who continue with an ignorant and closed minded view of the wrestling business.
The above is not meant as an excuse for the horrific tragedy of the Chris Benoit double murder-suicide. To my mind no excuse for that kind of nightmare exists. But it does go some way in highlighting the truth of the business and the life of professional wrestling, something not often seen on Raw or Nitro or Saturday Night Main Event or Wrestlemania or Starrcade. And it lays out a fairly accurate description of the world Chris Benoit existed in and the demons so prevalent in that world.
Chris Benoit was discovered last week, hanged, swinging from a weight machine. His wife, a wrestling personality from the late eighties/ early nineties known as Woman but recognised as Nancy in everyday life, was found bound and dead in another room, a bible at her side. His son, seven years old and suffering from a form of mental retardation known as Fragile X Syndrome, was found suffocated in yet another room, a bible at his side. Details soon emerged that the multiple World Champion and one of the most respected workers in the game had murdered his family and then killed himself in a misfortune that shocked not only an industry with a long and sad history of personal tragedy but the world that usually shuns the spectacle of professional wrestling.
Until the tragedy that will never be fully understood and the shocking events which will come to define Chris Benoit, the Canadian Crippler was one of the most respected men in professional wrestling. In and out of the ring. He was a worker who became a superstar not by a catch phrase or a cheap gimmick but on an ability to wrestle brilliant, believable matches. In these days of shock value and extreme stunts, Benoit was unique. Not many of his kind resonated with the fans because promoters rarely put the gimmicks to one side to allow the wider public to sample old-school wrestling. But Benoit did. He grappled like a wrestler and for that he was respected by fans and insiders alike. In a game with a carnival heritage of nothing is as it seems, Benoit was known as one of the few truths of the industry. His legacy was pure, a grappler who neither sold out to commercialism or the ludicrousness of pro wrestling nor sold out the fans.
Not anymore.
Benoit will forever be remembered, and rightfully so, as a man who murdered his family and then himself, torn apart by his demons but essentially a coward for taking the cheap option. He will head a list of wrestling tragedies that themselves are more real than the box scores or the batting card or the match results of entertainment considered legitimate. The tragic in-ring death of Owen Hart. The fallibility of the Von Erich family, a family of second-generation wrestlers torn apart by the tragic deaths of four of the five boys, three via suicide. The knifing of Bruiser Brody in a Puerto Rican dressing room. Brian Pillman, “Mr. Perfect” Curt Henning, Eddie Guerrero, “The British Bulldog” Davey Boy Smith, Rick Rude and Miss Elizabeth, among many others, who all died as a result of the drug abuse that has felled so many wrestlers.
But Benoit tops the list of tragedy and not in any form of romanticized notion of death and lost talent. The tragedy is that a woman and a young boy were taken before their time for reasons that will never be comprehensible to anybody of sound mind.
Truth is, as they say, more compelling than fiction. For good or ill and in this case, violently ill. And it is necessary to understand the truths of professional wrestling. Between the marks who believe in wrestling as a sport and the fools who casually deride it as fake is the fact these very real people who wrestle pay a very high cost to entertain. Sometimes, you have to wonder, why nobody seems to care and why it takes a tragedy like this to make people listen and take note. Just because it is wrestling doesn’t make it any less real or any less important.