"The Benoit Tragedy" was the best I could come up with as a title for this. What title do you give to a post like this, on a weekend like this? There are no jokes to be had here, I'm not writing this for website traffic. Just to talk about it the only way I know how.
For those unaware, this weekend marks what was the darkest weekend in professional wrestling history.
This was the weekend back in 2007 that Chris Benoit - the once highly respected professional wrestler - murdered his wife and son before killing himself. It was not some warped wrestling angle, it was very much real. Forget what it did to the wrestling industry as a whole, what it did to the immediate Benoit family and Benoit's closest friends was horrific enough.
Aside from pockets of wrestling fans who can look passed what he did, since that fateful weekend the wrestling world has pretty much tried to repress Benoit and his memory. It's undeniable that Benoit was one of the greatest technical wrestlers in the history of the industry, but he also became an infamous figure who's reputation now is one of a murderer.
A lot has been written about what Benoit did that weekend. Fans' have written about how the Benoit saga put them off wrestling for a long time, broke their hearts and changed the landscape of the industry. Most of us who were fans at the time can probably remember the whole horrific situation unfolding like it happened yesterday.
We can remember where we were when we heard the shocking news. We can remember Vince McMahon standing in an empty Raw arena confirming it. We remember the tribute Raw WWE did before they realized what had happened, and the subsequent speech Vince McMahon gave on ECW in which McMahon did the only thing he could do: burying the name and legacy of Chris Benoit.
Some people can still watch a Benoit match, some can't. Admittedly, I fall into the latter category. Knowing what we know now, I can't bring myself to watch Benoit's matches. No matter how good he might've been in the ring, what he did was unforgivable.
It's sad that a man so highly respected and loved by friends, family and fans could do what Chris Benoit did. It shocked the entire world and put a black eye on the wrestling industry, which the industry had an extremely difficult time healing from. Chris Benoit's actions shook the wrestling industry to its core in the most tragic and unfortunate of ways.
But I'm not going to spend today mourning the loss of Chris Benoit. I'm going to spend it mourning the loss of Nancy and Daniel Benoit. After all, they were the real victims in all of this.
R.I.P. Nancy and Daniel Benoit.
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