AUTHOR’S NOTE: Today marks the two year anniversary of the suicide and crimes of pro wrestling star Chris Benoit, the most bleak tragedy in a segment of the entertainment industry that is unusually prone to them. A few days after the incident, I wrote the following essay in an attempt to get my thoughts straight on something that was both staggering and surreal. Although I sent this piece to some editors I knew, the depressing nature of these events made me not pursue its publication with my usual tenacity. To mark this grim anniversary (as well as the recent in-ring death of Japanese wrestling icon Mitsuhara Misawa AKA Tiger Mask), here is my essay on Benoit…

Pro Wrestling’s Unsustainable Lifestyle
By Bob Calhoun
June 27, 2007

Wrestlers go crazy. That’s what they do. They live their lives walking a line between fantasy and reality. The crowd might know it’s all fake, phony, a put-on, but they react to every body slam and spine buster as if they were real. Professional wrestling is a form of theatre designed to create mass hysteria. It fosters this in the fans at home watching on the boob tube, in the fans packed into the arena screaming for blood and, mostly, in the wrestlers themselves.

I worked in pro wrestling’s bargain basement for seven years. I never paid my dues the way that Chris Benoit did and I didn’t make it to the heights of Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Entertainment. But even in the little punk rock wrestling show that I used to grapple and announce for, I saw what the squared circle spectacle could do to a guy. It wasn’t just the bumps and bruises but it was the out of control desire to take those bumps and bruises. It was the need to be in the ring and in front of those fans even when there were only tens or hundreds of them let alone the thousands that a man like Benoit played to.

In a tour that I was involved with in 2001, we had a wrestler who had suffered from too many concussions. He was starting to black out in public. He was forgetting where he was. He was really spooking the rest of the boys. The promoter did the right thing and sent him home on a plane to be with his family. It was only a short time later before he got in the ring and started working small time indie shows again around his hometown. This wasn’t a guy who made his living from pro wrestling. He was probably lucky if he made 25 bucks from those shows he worked. Collecting concussions from wrestling was most likely going to endanger his ability to hold down his day job yet he still did it. He just couldn’t stay away.

Roddy Piper calls this “the sickness” in his autobiography, In the Pit with Piper (Berkeley Trade, 2002). He discusses it at length but never quite defines it. He just knows it’s there. And all of us who have been involved with pro wrestling at any level have felt its pull. After a while, you start wanting to become the character that you play in the ring. The day-to-day mundane inconveniences of family court, doing your taxes or filling out job applications pale in comparison to living in a world where all of your problems can be solved with a well-placed shot to your opponent’s skull. Now you take that mindset that’s already hard to resist and you add steroids, mounds of painkillers and weekly doses of head trauma to it and you have an all too often lethal chain of circumstances.

Wrestlers die. They die a lot. A March 12, 2004 USA Today article (High death rate lingers behind fun facade of pro wrestling) states that wrestlers have death rates about seven times higher than the general U.S. population and that wrestlers are 20 times more likely to die before the age of 45 than pro football players. A sampling of the wrestlers who died prematurely between 1997 and 2004 (the dates that the article examined) reads like a who’s who from our collective adolescence: “Ravishing” Rick Rude, “Mr. Perfect” Curt Hennig, Road Warrior Hawk, The British Bulldog, The Junkyard Dog, Crash Holly and of course Owen Hart, who plummeted to his death performing a botched 78 foot repel from the rafters during a 1999 pay-per-view. Since the publication of that article, the death toll has gone even higher and so often it has been without the media attention that the especially gruesome Benoit murder/suicide is getting.

Chris Benoit worked a hard, high impact style of pro wrestling. He regularly dove off of ladders or flew from the top rope and onto the cold concrete floor. His professionalism at so much self-abuse won him a rabid cult following among wrestling fans if not the crossover stardom that The Rock and Hulk Hogan have enjoyed. And pro wrestling is a hard business. There’s no off-season. There’s no time off. No vacations. These guys go at it 52 weeks a year with no breaks unless they need to rehab from an injury that’s so severe that the promotion and the wrestlers themselves have no other choice but to undergo surgery and subsequent rehab. You can only imagine what the incessant touring, house shows and TV matches can do to a grappler’s personal life if they ever even have one.

To cope with this, wrestlers pop pain pills at alarming rates, and then there’s the constant allure of recreational drugs and alcohol. On top of that, the business demands superhuman physiques that are usually only attainable through regular cycles of steroids and human growth hormone as well as the lifting of very heavy weights. Wrestlers are constantly on the road and more than a few have died crashing their cars as they drove the hundreds of miles in between scheduled bouts. Even more have been found dead in hotel rooms. Wrestlers spend a lot of time in hotel rooms.

But Chris Benoit didn’t meet the average pro wrestler’s ignominious end from a coronary in a Cozy 8. He became a real life horror show. For those who haven’t been paying attention to the cable TV news crawl, during the weekend of June 22-24th, he strangled his wife on Friday, suffocated his son on Saturday and then hung himself in his weight room on Sunday. Roid rage is getting a lot of play in the press for Benoit’s breakdown, but the magnitude of his atrocities make it hard to pin the blame on roids, wrestling or even the Mephistopheles-like Vince McMahon.

But still, you wonder what other profession would have had Benoit scrambling around the country away from his family almost every day of the year, taking chair shots, diving out of the ring and then having to slam steroids and somas just to stay on schedule. What other form of sports or entertainment has the recent track record of tragedy that seems to come so naturally to pro wrestling? Pro wrestling in its current form is an unsustainable lifestyle. While McMahon and his WWE are circling the wagons in order to deflect blame for this latest wrestler death, one can only hope that the wrestlers themselves take a good long look in the mirror or risk ending up in sports entertainment’s statistical slagheap.

Artwork: Brandi Valenza

Bob Calhoun AKA Count Dante was an untrained grappler and master of ceremonies for the punk rock/lucha promotion Incredibly Strange Wrestling. His memoir of those years, "Beer, Blood and Cornmeal: Seven Years of Incredibly Strange Wrestling" is currently available through ECW Press.