Wednesday Cook Wednesday: The Canadian Crippler

Steve Cook looks back, and offers perspective, on Chris Benoit.

I was a huge Chris Benoit fan for many years.

The first time I saw him was on WCW Clash of the Champions in January 1993. I’d seen his name in magazines, but his match with Brad Armstrong was the first time I had seen him wrestle. He stood out to me for two main reasons:

1. His zebra striped trunks. I’ve always been a big fan of pants with animal stripes. I had a pair of bengal-striped Zubaz knockoffs that were a big hit when my high school would do Pajama Day. I also remember one of the girls in my high school that would wear zebra-striped pants once a week or so. She looked a lot better in them than Benoit did, for the record. A LOT BETTER. I wonder what happened to her?

2. The full-nelson suplex he finished Armstrong with. I’d never seen anything like it at the time. I’d seen a full-nelson. I’d seen a German suplex. I hadn’t seen the two combined. It looked just plain vicious the way Armstrong’s head bounced off the mat with Benoit’s hands clasped around it. How could you fake something like that?

Benoit didn’t do a whole lot after that. He had an awesome match with 2 Cold Scorpio at SuperBrawl that I didn’t see until years later, and teamed with Bobby Eaton for a hot minute before disappearing somewhere. Probably Japan. I had no idea of Japanese wrestling, as my viewing options were limited to WWF, WCW & occasionally ECW on a very blurry UHF station on a tiny TV. It’s amazing when people my age and older think of what we went through to watch wrestling when we were kids. Blurry UHF signals. Tape trading with fools we’d never met. Kids these days can fire up WWE Network or NJPW World or whatever on their phones. It’s crazy!

Benoit’s ECW run happened before I figured out I could watch the show on that tiny TV, so the next time I saw him was when he came back to WCW in 1995 & ended up joining the Four Horsemen. Flair. Anderson. Pillman. Benoit. I was already a Pillman fan because of his status as a former Cincinnati Bengal, and of course Flair & Anderson were awesome, so it only made sense for me to be a Horseman fan. Benoit quickly became a favorite of mine because he always went all out. He didn’t leave anything in the ring…it seemed like he was trying harder than most of his peers.

Benoit earned his stripes with me during his feud with Kevin Sullivan, and I didn’t even know all the crazy stuff that was going on behind the scenes. What I knew is that Benoit & Sullivan beat the crap out of each other and it was always a good time to me. Of course the all time best was the falls count anywhere match where they brawled into the restroom & Dusty Rhodes saw a lady in the men’s room. One of the great calls in pro wrestling history, no doubt about it. Internet wisdom at the time was different, but I wasn’t part of the scene. I saw Kevin Sullivan as the leader of the Dungeon of Doom, a guy who had been all over TV for the last couple of years trying to get rid of Hulk Hogan. Benoit beating him and forcing him into retirement seemed like a big deal to me, and seemed like it would solidify him as a major player. If that didn’t work, surely the best of seven series with Booker T soon afterwards would.

Well, it did. But it didn’t. Benoit and other people like him that were shorter, lighter & younger than the average WCW bear never really got the chance to move up to the next level. Would Benoit have worked as a main eventer in WCW before late 1999 when everything had already gone to hell in a handbasket? Who can say? Maybe WCW should have found out before then.

On the bright side, we got the Radicalz in the WWF. Which was another one of those great moments as a fan. At the time, people wanted Benoit, Guerrero, Dean Malenko & Perry Saturn to do more. We always want our favorites to do more. But not everybody can be WWE Champion, and Benoit usually had some interesting stuff to do during his time with the company. Feuding and teaming with the likes of Guerrero, Chris Jericho & Kurt Angle wasn’t a bad place to be and typically guaranteed at least one good wrestling match per episode.

We wanted more, though. Many of the people on the Internet, including myself, wanted to see Benoit win either the WWE or the World Championship. It’s only natural to want to see your favorite wrestler win the big title. Many online voices these days get mad at fans because they want to see their favorite wrestlers winning championships. The thrill’s in the chase, they say. Why not enjoy the ride, they say. They’ve been able to disengage themselves from having favorite wrestlers and instead support the promotion. Not everybody is like that. Many of us root for our favorite wrestlers. The sooner they win the championship, the better it is for us.

However, I do agree with them when they say that it’s worth the wait.

WrestleMania XX was a great moment for me. I had watched Benoit & Guerrero work their way up the ranks of pro wrestling. I’d seen some of the old tapes. I’d seen their struggles in WCW & the WWF. To see them at the top of the wrestling business at the end of the biggest show of the year…well, I imagine I felt the same way that today’s wrestling fan felt at the end of Money in the Bank when Jinder Mahal & Baron Corbin stood tall on top of SmackDown Live. Proud.

Exactly like WrestleMania XX.

I would have guessed it was a pretty safe bet that the ending of WrestleMania XX would live on as one of my favorite wrestling memories for the rest of my life, no matter what happened afterwards.

Hoo boy.

The last three years of Benoit’s career seemed a lot like the previous ones. After his title run ended he settled back into the upper mid-card workhorse role on Raw & SmackDown. Still producing great matches. People would complain from time to time that he should get more to do, but by & large the things he was involved with weren’t terrible. Things got complicated, though.

The death of Eddie Guerrero was a terrible moment for wrestling fans. We’d watched Eddie conquer his demons and make it to the top of the wrestling business. By the time he got there, he had become a total package. He was supremely talented in the ring, and he was also among the most entertaining characters in WWE. Benoit never quite made it to being a complete performer on the level of Guerrero. He was always a great talent inside the ropes, but something held him back outside of them. Not everybody can be a tremendous talker. Sometimes, people have difficulty opening up and showing their true personality. As much as Benoit didn’t hold back in the ring, he never really brought that same mentality to his promos.

It was the one area of his life where he did hold back.

I was writing Ask 411 Wrestling at the time of the murders. This was my response:

Monday night, 411Mania presented a special tribute recognizing the career of Chris Benoit. However, now some 43 hours later, the facts of this horrific tragedy are now apparent. Therefore, other than my comments, there will be no mention of Mr. Benoit today. On the contrary, today’s column will be dedicated to everyone who has been affected by this terrible incident. Today marks the first step of the healing process. Today, I will do what I do better than anyone else in the world-answer questions using random wrestling knowledge and obscure websites.

My apologies to Vince McMahon for ripping him off, but I thought his words on Tuesday night were very fitting. This is Ask 411 Wrestling, and I am Steve Cook. Today we try to go about business as usual, as I answer questions from twenty of you readers and inject some wit and sarcasm into the proceedings as only I can. Currently there are thirty e-mails sitting in my in-box. I would appreciate it very much if you added to that total…as long as you don’t ask any questions about Chris Benoit. Any information you want will be on the 411 Newswire, and quite frankly I don’t want to talk about the fact that one of my favorite wrestlers killed his wife & son and then hung himself in another instance of what Roddy Piper calls “the sickness” consuming a pro wrestler.

So we’ll go ahead and get this thing started. Thank you very much for reading.

I chose to ignore the situation. It served a couple of purposes…for one, the story was all over everything at the time and I always liked writing about stuff that other people weren’t talking about. The other thing it accomplished was making sure I didn’t have to write about it. Who wants to write about one of their favorite pro wrestlers being a cold-blooded killer? It’s not the most inspiring thing to write about in the world.

We’ve learned since then that it wasn’t as simple as that. Benoit had accumulated years of brain damage thanks to his high-impact style of wrestling. Decades of diving headbutts, diving head-first into barricades, unprotected chairshots & other head-related trauma played a role in what Benoit became. Specifically, pro wrestling played a role. Benoit wanted to get to the top of the business, and the best way for him to do that was the style that he wrestled. We supported it at the time because it was entertaining. We should have known that the effects down the road could be negative, but I don’t think anybody could have suspected what ended up happening.

Benoit’s fans have handled the aftermath in different ways. Some deny that they ever were fans of his. Some don’t really care and still say he was an awesome wrestler. Others still play the “truther” card and are in denial about the whole situation. And some are so disgusted by the guy that they can’t watch his matches. I’m one of those people. Avoiding him is easy, as there are hours upon hours of classic wrestling matches & TV shows out there that don’t involve the Canadian Crippler.

Some will say that avoiding Benoit matches is a silly thing to do. The wrestling business is full of scummy characters that did terrible things outside of the ring. Jimmy Snuka is a recent prominent example of this. For me, it’s a little bit tougher when it comes to Benoit since I was a fan of his for so long. I guess I’m supposed to be a journalist and above these sorts of things, but it affects me more with Benoit because I was a fan.

I talked last week about how I’ve grown to appreciate workers like Dusty Rhodes that were uber-charismatic and used that to connect with audiences instead of fancy wrestling moves. I should probably admit that Chris Benoit’s demise played something of a role in that, even though I had changed on Dusty prior to the murders. But in the years since, I’ve been less drawn to the moves style that’s prevalent in Japan and the indies and more interested in the basic stuff that makes pro wrestling work the same way in 2017 as it did in 1987.

Guys killing themselves for my entertainment is no longer something I find entertaining.

Hopefully, the steps that pro wrestling has taken since 2007 will keep me from having to regret rooting for one of my favorite wrestlers again.