Chris & Nancy Read online

  I concluded the original introduction below by calling Chris & Nancy a “second draft” and expressing the basic hope that it would prod the complacent into continuing to retell the Benoit story and draw appropriate lessons from it. As a concept, that still sounds about right. Trying to list and prioritize all the various factors behind this tragedy is important. But more important is understanding that almost all of them emanate from the same source: an out-of-control entertainment industry, related in some fashion to the late-empire insecurities of a culture too abstracted from human values and too unregulated for public hygiene.

  I have one specific, gigantic, hard-to-miss afterthought, and the name of my new site and the thrust of its work spell it out for you.

  Within months of the book’s publication, the topicality of traumatic brain injury in sports and entertainment moved my investigations away from wrestling in favor of the far larger American obsession of football. The process validates the theme that the structures and behind-the-scenes manipulations of all mass spectacles (and you should go ahead and throw the political system in there along with wrestling, boxing, mixed martial arts, football, and hockey) turn out to be far more alike than different.

  Mike Benoit recently emailed me and asked, “If you had to do it over again, would you have emphasized chronic traumatic encephalopathy much more?”

  My answer: “Yes.”

  The idiosyncrasies of my writing career eased the process of catch-up. As I’ve said before, Archimedes was right: If you have a place to stand, you can move the world. The demimonde of wrestling provided a much more faithful foundation than you’d think.

  Dr. Joseph Maroon, the “medical director” of WWE, is also a guru on traumatic brain injuries for the NFL. There is not a doubt in my mind that he has played fastest and loosest with the truth in service of the latter. Along with his cronies at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, he has marketed “concussion awareness” — a misnomer spinning the existential crisis of the sport of football over its intrinsic and systematic infliction of brain trauma — via a for-profit software company that rates somewhere between suspicious and fraudulent.

  The fact that Chris Nowinski, who has become the nation’s leading lay activist on this issue, combines Harvard and WWE pedigrees, adds a delicious dollop of irony to this scandalous stew. I thought Nowinski did great work in launching the Sports Legacy Institute; got co-opted when, in 2010, he accepted a $1 million NFL grant for the Boston University Center for the Study of CTE, which he also co-directs; and, more recently, has done great work again in forcefully arguing, along with Dr. Robert Cantu, for the elimination of tackle football for pre-high schoolers.

  In 2013 and beyond, the question no longer should be whether we’re in a mess. It should be who will manage it and how. Did I hear you say Vince McMahon and Roger Goodell, with the support of Joe Maroon? Please. As in the cover-up of the connection between tobacco and cancer, emphysema, and heart disease, you might as well “call for Phillip Morris.”

  Before the climactic Mount Rushmore scene of Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, the Cary Grant character asks a secret agent which agency he represents. “FBI, CIA . . . they’re all the same alphabet soup,” the guy scoffs. And so, my fellow Americans, are the WWE and the NFL.

  Irvin Muchnick

  December 2012

  Introduction

  THE HORROR OF CHRIS BENOIT'S June 2007 murder-suicide rampage is as good a reminder as any that it is high time to demystify professional wrestling. For too long, this industry has been inoculated from scandal by a banal mystique, the widespread belief that it is an enterprise whose offbeat rhythms simply cannot be mastered, and one whose players’ motives lie beyond ordinary human understanding. Baloney and double baloney. Beneath the carny lingo and Mafioso code of silence rests a conventional profit-driven sector of show business, studded not only with glory-seeking performers but also with television executives, writers, technicians, chic-seeking kitsch kings, two-faced politicians. This is nothing less than the Periodic Table of the Elements of mainstream American pop culture. “Sports entertainment” is sports and entertainment, only more so.

  The industry’s dominant company, World Wrestling Entertainment — controlling more than ninety-five percent of the North American market and a vast majority worldwide — has grown into a multinational with more than a billion dollars in capitalization. It features an accompanying dark side as broad as a half-moon, hidden in plain sight. The brainchild of Vincent Kennedy McMahon, trailer-park incorrigible turned Forbes 400 squatter, WWE flowered in Connecticut, the same greenhouse that produced Phineas Taylor Barnum. The state’s former governor, Lowell Weicker (once upon a time a hero of the Senate Watergate Committee), is a charter member of the WWE board of directors[1]. In the 1990s, when McMahon was sinking under the first round of steroid and other scandals in what was then called the World Wrestling Federation, Weicker had helped rehabilitate his image with an appointment to a prominent position with the Connecticut branch of the Special Olympics.

  In May 2007, a month before Benoit strangled his wife, Nancy, snapped their seven-year-old son Daniel’s neck, and hanged himself, Vince McMahon delivered the commencement address at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut. SHU is the New England region’s second-largest Catholic university. Vince McMahon’s wife, Linda, the chief executive officer of WWE, is on the SHU board of trustees. As the university explained it, “Using self-deprecating humor to explain his choice as recipient of a Doctor of Humane Letters Degree and commencement speaker, McMahon . . . left most graduates and those in the audience with a sense of hope that anything is possible, even in the face of overwhelming obstacles.” The mother of the student government president, in a sound bite no doubt crafted by the campus public relations department, called McMahon “a good choice for the school considering how he started his career and how he has parlayed it into this multi-million-dollar organization.”

  In sum, ladies and gentlemen, girls and boys, you can tell the players without a scorecard.

  And enough with the Talmudic musings about how to categorize wrestling; they are irrelevant to whether the benefits of unregulated junk spectacle trump the public-health cesspool that “sports entertainment” has turned into. In 1982 a Hollywood star, Vic Morrow, and two Vietnamese-American child actors were killed in a gruesome late-night helicopter mishap during the filming of an action sequence of The Twilight Zone: The Movie. Reforms of filmmaking standards and California child-labor laws quickly followed. By contrast, Nancy and Chris Benoit were approximately the ninth and tenth of the approximately twenty-one wrestlers and in-ring personalities who died before their fiftieth birthdays in the year 2007 alone. Some scores or hundreds of others fill parallel lists over the past several decades — choose your time frame and methodology. Dave Meltzer, publisher of the authoritative Wrestling Observer Newsletter, said the list of eighty-nine deaths under the age of fifty, from 1985 to 2006, in my earlier book, Wrestling Babylon, was “incomplete, to be sure.” Giving the numbers the best context I have seen, Meltzer drew up a list of sixty-two young deaths in “major league” wrestling organizations from 1996 to 2007.

  The profile and tabloid details of the Benoit case shed a useful light on a generation-long legacy of shame; to dismiss this — and the probability that wrestling’s drug-and-lifestyle deviances, induced from the very top, are major factors in the equation — is to make scoundrels’ arguments.

  Yet here is what has changed as a result of Benoit: almost nothing. Dissecting how that came to be is the second mission of this book. The first mission is to compile a comprehensive and accurate history of what happened in Fayette County, Georgia.

  Toward that end, I strove to distinguish this book from others about wrestling by sticking to the public record as much as possible, and by emphasizing that if that turns out to be a problem, it is a problem shared by fans and non-fans alike. For example, everyone has an op
inion on the significance, or lack thereof, of the 59-to-1 ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone in Benoit’s postmortem toxicology tests. The few people who want to believe that such a finding tells us very little are far outnumbered by the many people who know that it tells us a lot; it’s just that the few add more heat to the discussion than the many add light. While in other areas of life we may need fewer facts, wider-ranging intuition, and a spirit of live-and-let-live, wrestling has reached the point where it needs more facts — facts tethered to accountability — and less paralysis by analysis.

  No, the butler didn’t do it; Christopher Michael Benoit did. But honest scrutiny of what transpired before and after can demonstrate how WWE, as desperate and cagey as any gun or tobacco lobbyist, pulled the strings to ensure that wrestling’s death pandemic would remain unaddressed. In real estate, the key is “location, location, location.” In the Benoit story, the most fertile ground is “timeline, timeline, timeline.” WWE’s published timeline was as phony as its match results, and simultaneously far less entertaining and more illuminating.

  To the question, “Was there a Benoit conspiracy?”, we have a clear answer: you bet there was. It was a conspiracy between those who care too much about wrestling and those who care too little. The first group consists of the fans who enjoy the pageantry and the people who profit from them. The second group consists of those who can’t be bothered, except possibly to blow hard on cue whenever a comment, no matter how ill-informed, is deemed fashionable.

  Like everyone else, I’ll take my best stab at what it all means, but even this is only the second draft of history. The most important step is simply to cut through all the taboos that make wrestling an appropriate subject to cluck about, but not to study for its off-the-charts human fallout and for its seedy but pseudo-respectable big-business DNA. I submit that anything to which millions of people devote blocks of time every week is serious. Clusters of deaths are serious.

  Let’s tell and retell the Chris Benoit story in the hope that it will eventually make enough of the right people care in just the right amounts.

  [1]. Weicker left the WWE board after Linda McMahon’s 2010 Senate race against Richard Blumenthal, in which Weicker remained neutral. Weicker openly supported McMahon’s opponent Chris Murphy in the 2012 Senate race.

  CHAPTER 1

  “They’ve Killed the Family!”

  THE FIRST PERSON TO ENCOUNTER the dead bodies of Chris Benoit’s wife and their seven-year-old son, at around 2:45 p.m. Monday, June 25, 2007, was the next-door neighbor. Holly Schrepfer ran out of the house screaming to two Fayette County Sheriff’s officers on the driveway outside, “Daniel and Nancy have been murdered! They’ve killed the family!”

  At 1:35, Deputy Donna Mundy and Lieutenant Larry Alden had pulled up to the front of the Benoits’ property in unincorporated Fayetteville, Georgia, in response to a call nineteen minutes earlier to the county 911 Communications Center. The cops faced an electronically locked double-iron gate separating a stacked stone wall from the circular driveway, which was set off nearly 200 feet from the main road. (The whole plot measured more than eight acres, typical for this area.) Mundy tried the call box outside the gate: no answer.

  The officers noted that the fence on either side of the gate could be easily scaled. But the more significant obstacle to access was the presence of two German shepherd guard dogs roaming the front lawn near the gate and menacing anyone who might dare to traverse it.

  Deputy Mundy had 911 dispatcher Chris Nations ask a World Wrestling Entertainment security consultant, Dennis Fagan, if anyone knew the gate pass code and how to pacify the dogs. Fagan had made the original emergency call. After checking with other WWE people, he reported back that while he couldn’t come up with a pass code, he did learn that the neighbor to the left of the Benoits’ house took care of the dogs whenever the family was away. This set of exchanges, including intervals between follow-up calls, lasted the better part of an hour.

  The officers found Holly Schrepfer at home. Before joining them on the return to the Benoits’ gate, Holly called Nancy. As had been the case for days, there was no answer.

  Shortly after 2:30, Holly was climbing over the fence and calming the dogs. Their names were Carny and Highspot, inside jokes from Chris and Nancy’s careers in professional wrestling. A carny, or carnival figure, refers to the sport’s roots in the nineteenth-century big top, and its reliance ever since on a jargon (“mark” to signify a naive fan, “work” as a synonym for staging something fake, “kayfabe” for the overall con) comprehensible only to insiders. A “highspot” is an aerial maneuver in a wrestling match. During the two decades in which Chris Benoit rose to become one of wrestling’s biggest stars, his signature highspot was a spectacular diving head butt from the top rope, sometimes called the Swan Dive.

  Holly ushered the German shepherds through the unlocked door on the side of the garage leading into the house. The door led up a short flight of stairs to a mudroom where the dogs were kept in portable kennels. Holly locked up Carny and Highspot.

  It was a warm early-summer afternoon in North Georgia, temperature in the low 80s Fahrenheit. The central air conditioning system in the Benoit house was off, which made the odor hanging in the air, powerful but indistinct, more stagnant and intense.

  With foreboding, Holly called out, “Nancy? Daniel?”

  Holly ascended two flights to the upper level to look in Daniel’s bedroom. The decor was dominated by posters and action figures of his wrestling father; on the dresser lay two toy replica championship belts. Holly found little Daniel, in a long-sleeve blue SpongeBob T-shirt, and pajama pants with a soccer-and-baseball design, lying in bed on his stomach, his left cheek on the pillow over turned-down covers. Next to him were two stuffed Winnie-the-Poohs and a book, My First Bible — a children’s edition of the New Testament — propped atop his extended right hand. His right leg was bent, with the foot touching the left knee. As Holly got closer, she could see that Daniel wasn’t just sleeping. His face was discolored. Dried-up foam was crusted around his mouth and nose.

  Holly gasped and scrambled down one flight of stairs. She knew that Nancy kept a home office and liked to watch television in a room above the garage. That room, too, was strewn with wrestling memorabilia: framed photos, plaques, baseball caps promoting WrestleManias past.

  There Holly found Nancy lying on her right side on the hardwood floor, a red fringed throw rug covering everything except her head and feet. She faced the wall between the sitting area and a wet bar. A pillow, askew, leaned against a messy head of brunette hair. Another Bible, a regular adult edition with a burgundy cover, lay alongside her. Nancy was in a white tank top and blue striped pajama bottoms. Her hands were tied together behind her back, at shoulder-blade level, with coaxial cable. A second cable, along with a small white rope, extended from there and wrapped around her neck. Her feet were bound with the cord from an electric charger, secured by black tape. Nancy’s face was blue and black, her stomach bloated; her arms were already in an advanced state of decomposition.

  Holly hurried down the steps, through the mudroom, and out the garage side door, yelling to Deputy Mundy and Lieutenant Alden that Daniel and Nancy had been murdered.

  The officers told Holly to stay put in the driveway while they went inside and followed her directions to the two bodies. After confirming her discoveries, they searched the entire house, eventually making their way to the basement, which doubled as a home gym.

  At 2:48 — traumatized, isolated, and worried about the officers’ safety — Holly punched 911 on her cell phone.

  “They asked me to hop the fence because they have attack dogs and I went in and someone had — the little boy and the mom are dead,” Holly explained breathlessly to the dispatcher. “And so I ran out to scream to them but then they went in the house but they haven’t come out yet. Are they OK?” She added, “I didn’t see Mr. Benoit. I don’t know wher
e he is. I didn’t want to go down in the basement for some reason. He might be dead.”

  The 911 dispatcher called the sheriff’s dispatcher, who made contact with the cops inside the house. They assured Holly they were OK.

  They were in the basement, where Chris was, indeed, also dead. They found him sitting upright on a bench facing a Magnum Fitness weight machine. He was shirtless, wearing red gym shorts and socks and sneakers. His left leg was extended, his right leg bent at the knee, foot tucked under his left thigh. The black nylon weight machine cable was around his neck; a strip of a white towel was underneath to keep the cable from cutting the skin.

  Chris was being held in sitting position by the cable, which passed through pulleys attached to 150 pounds of weight. The weight stack on the machine had been supplemented by two forty-pound dumbbells on top. The weight was lifted and kept from going slack by Benoit’s own 220 pounds of body weight, plus two additional ten-pound dumbbells, which appeared to have dropped from his grip to the floor. Clearly, he had put much thought and masochistic discipline into hanging himself in near-perfect equipoise, not only to ensure a successful hanging but also to maximize the pain he must have intended to inflict on himself in the process. When the dumbbells had dropped, his body rotated right, just over the spot on the floor where two cell phones, his and Nancy’s, rested next to a water bottle filled with green tea. Also on the floor was an empty bottle of Dynamite Vineyards 2004 merlot[1].