Dungeon of Death:: Chris Benoit and the Hart Family Curse

Notes

Introduction

There’s kind of a running joke on my blog, although it’s less funny as time goes on. It goes like this: I leave the city, and people die. To date, the deaths of more than ten professional wrestlers, that I’ve kept track of, have coincided with my not being around my computer when they died. The joke, which some have attributed to a curse on my part, or maybe just bad luck, really isn’t that funny and never was, but sometimes you just have to cope with things as best you can.

It started with the death of Eddie Guerrero in 2005. First, I have to take full responsibility for his death, at least in the metaphysical sense. The weekend he died, my wife and I were on vacation and attending the wedding of friends in another city. While browsing through a flea market, we picked up a jade Buddha because it was supposed to bring good fortune and health. Well, I guess you get what you pay for with Eastern religion, because almost immediately upon bringing the Buddha into the car on the drive home, we got a call from my wife’s friend letting us know that her grandmother had passed away that day. Later in the week, my wife’s grandfather also died. And my cell phone was hit with a series of text messages letting me know that the wrestling world had lost Eddie Guerrero the night before. Truly this was a Death Buddha, although I’m thinking that it was our own inexperience with the whole concept that triggered such a series of catastrophes. Leave Eastern philosophy to the professionals, I guess. The Buddha currently resides on our coffee table and hasn’t killed anyone else that I’m aware of, although they can be sneaky and you have to watch them.

But I digress.

I think the worst of it came in June of 2007, when Shane Bower, aka Biff Wellington, passed away in his parents’ home, without much fanfare. Drugs were confirmed later, but then that wasn’t a huge shock given Bower’s previous troubles with painkiller medications. Everyone thought that former friend and partner Chris Benoit would probably be upset about it. I was pretty sad about it myself, because I had met Bower on a couple of occasions and found him to be a genuinely nice guy (an anomaly in wrestling to be sure), which made it easier to be a fan of his, even in the later days of his career when no one else was a fan.

A couple of days after Bower ’s death, Chris Benoit was scheduled to wrestle in one of the featured matches of the WWE’s Vengeance : A Night of Champions pay-per-view event, where he was scheduled to win the ECW World title in a match with CM Punk. The day before the show, word got out that Benoit would miss the show, although that fact wasn’t announced to the live audience at Vengeance until the match happened. At that point midcarder Johnny Nitro took Benoit’s place and nothing else was mentioned by the announcers. It was declared a family emergency, which most people I talked with attributed to Benoit grieving over friend Bower, and no one really thought much of it. That is, until the next day.

My wife called me at work on Monday morning, letting me know that she had read Chris Benoit was dead. My first thought was that she had obviously confused him with Biff Wellington (Shane Bower), as I had told her the night before about my previous meetings with Wellington and how he had been Benoit’s partner and friend. It was an easy mistake to make. Later in the day, however, more details started to emerge and it was obvious it was no mistake—especially with the added and rather horrifying addition of the death of Benoit’s whole family. I mean, that had to be an accident, right? It was a new house, so wild theories about carbon monoxide poisoning, which jibed with stories of Benoit reporting that wife Nancy was sick and coughing up blood, circulated and seemed to settle things. For about five minutes, that is. Sadly, the real truth was about to come out and was worse than anyone could have possibly guessed or imagined.

THE LIFE OF CHRIS BENOIT

They always said that he would never be a star, but in the end he will be remembered as the most famous professional wrestler in history, although not for anything positive. They always said that he didn’t have charisma, but his death drew the attention of media from all over the world and served as the ultimate heel turn in a business filled everyday with fake storyline twists.

The Chris Benoit I knew, who was the best wrestler in the world more often than not and never had a bad word to say about anyone, was a totally different person than the guy he’ll be remembered as, and I guess that makes it easier to disconnect the two of them. I prefer to think of Benoit as two different people, one guy who lived from 1967 until 2007 and the other guy who was created in 2007 and met a vile end after doing horrible things to the people he loved. Personally, I think it was slightly easier to cope with the end because Benoit was obviously coming to the end of his run in the WWE by 2007, and we as fans were mentally prepping for him not to be around any longer.

Growing up in Western Canada as a wrestling fan, you couldn’t help but get sucked into the world of Stampede Wrestling, and all the kids at school had their own favorites. Some liked the various Hart brothers, although by the time my fandom came into full swing most of them were gone and the territory was down to Bruce Hart and younger brother Owen Hart. I didn’t see the fascination, but I cheered for Owen anyway because he was exciting to watch in the ring. Some years later, he became my second-favorite wrestler in the world to watch; at the peak of his career he was forced to perform a death-defying stunt, but he couldn’t defy death as easily as he could defy gravity. Other friends of mine liked Brian Pillman, who was a teammate of the Harts and won over the Calgary faithful with his own high-flying moves and gritty underdog story. Some years later, those high-flying moves took a toll on his body and he took too many pills trying to delay the inevitable end of his career and died as a result. Still other friends longed for the return of the greatest tag team to ever pass through Stampede Wrestling—the British Bulldogs—but when they did return, it was a shell of what they used to be. Ultimately, they self-destructed just as surely as everyone else in wrestling seemed to. And when all his family had split apart or died, Stu Hart, the guy who had engineered the whole Hart family dynasty in the first place, watched his wife pass away and then lost all hope himself before dying of what many considered to be a broken heart as much as anything.

So it’s the story of Chris Benoit, mostly, but if you look back at the lives that he touched and the people that influenced him, you could almost say that a curse hangs over the Hart family and the promotion they built from the ground up. It’s also the story of those people and others that I cover whose dreams, like Stu Hart’s, were crushed by the heartless machine of professional wrestling. But let’s save the sadness for later, shall we? Like I said earlier, I prefer to remember the good person inside Benoit, not the bad one who came out later.

Born in Montreal on May 21, 1967, Benoit moved to Edmonton at a young age and, like many other young kids at that time, instantly became a fan of Stu Hart’s Stampede Wrestling (or Klondike Wrestling as it was known back then) and specifically the Dynamite Kid. In fact, according to the Kid’s autobiography, Pure Dynamite, Benoit actually met him when he was 12 years old and received a bemused endorsement for his future career path. Although he always held up the Kid as a standard, he easily topped and greatly improved on anything that the Kid ever accomplished in the business. He would never admit that, of course, because that was the kind of guy he was. Despite being small and young, he emerged from the Hart Dungeon at age 18 and almost immediately became a homegrown star, winning the International tag team titles with Ben Bassarab, a title that he would go on to hold four times (with Keith Hart, Lance Idol, and Biff Wellington) during his career in Stampede. As a side note, his tag team partners also met with pretty bad ends, as Bassarab ended up serving a prison sentence for dealing drugs, which ended his wrestling career; Lance Idol died of mysterious causes in the early ’90s; and, of course, Biff Wellington died a few days before Benoit did. As of this writing, Keith Hart is still alive and healthy. Whew.

Chris Benoit also held the British Commonwealth Mid-Heavyweight title four times during his three-year run with the company, most notably during a period when he was trading the belt with Johnny Smith. That particular rivalry, which saw the formerly clean-cut Smith turning on Benoit and going heel, actually set the stage for a later feud that featured Benoit and teammate Davey Boy Smith taking on his idol Dynamite Kid and Johnny Smith in a sort of battle of the British Bulldogs. That feud was supposed to revive Stampede again at the end of its run. It didn’t, but it’s hard to blame Benoit for that. Although he was becoming highly respected by his peers even at a young age, Benoit was always overshadowed by the only person in the territory who was even more talented: Owen Hart.

To forge his own name, Benoit started touring Japan in 1987, originally under the name Dynamite Chris (which he hated) and later under a mask as the Pegasus Kid. Although he initially hated being low man on the totem pole again, he grew to love the country and built his career around trips there. To say Benoit took the Japanese by storm would be an understatement, as he was trained again in the New Japan rookie camp and was instantly treated like a star because of his resemblance to Japanese legend Dynamite Kid. I should also note that the New Japan camps had a brutal reputation, often working new recruits nearly to death and engaging in extremely strict discipline routines. This training of course bears no small resemblance to the same treatment that Benoit endured as part of Stu Hart’s Dungeon and goes a long way toward showing why his personality may have been the way it was. While jumping back and forth between Japan and Calgary, and later Mexico, he was earning a reputation as one of the top young workers on the international scene. He won the first ever Super J Cup in 1994 by defeating Tiger Mask’s protégé The Great Sasuke in the finals. That match was notable for not only being off-the-charts great, but for also being a blow-by-blow tribute to the matches between Dynamite Kid and Tiger Mask that defined the light heavyweight style in Japan years earlier.

But while the Japanese loved Benoit, American audiences were indifferent. With Stampede long dead by 1992 and Benoit trying to break into the North American market again, he was limited to tryouts and one-shot deals to get a foothold. It is little remembered that the WWF actually wanted to sign him after giving him a tryout match against Owen Hart of all people in 1993, but his Japan commitments prevented that from happening. WCW was easier to work with, in that regard, thanks to their deals with New Japan, and so Benoit appeared for them doing weird stuff like a four-star tag team match with old partner Biff Wellington against Brian Pillman & Jushin Liger, or a four-star singles match in the opening match of SuperBrawl III against 2 Cold Scorpio. Apparently, however, having great matches and a cult following of hardcore fans just wasn’t enough to crack the elite ranks of WCW, where top-tier talent like the Shockmaster, the former Tugboat who debuted on live TV by tripping and falling through the wall of the set, or Evad Sullivan, whose imaginary rabbit friend was a better worker than he was, were pushed to the main event. However, while doing yet another oddball one-off show, an AAAWCW collaboration called When Worlds Collide in 1994, Benoit finally earned enough attention to get a full-time gig in the U.S.

That gig was in upstart promotion ECW, as Paul Heyman was a smart judge of talent and knew that Benoit had a built-in following. In fact, both the NWA (which was largely a joke at that point) and ECW were bidding for Benoit’s services, and Heyman stole him out from under the lame-duck NWA, along with Eddie Guerrero and Dean Malenko. Heyman’s plan was to build the company around Benoit, and to that end he was made the number two guy under ECW champion Shane Douglas, as Douglas formed a team with Benoit and Malenko that became known as the Triple Threat. It was kind of a Four Horsemen for the Gen-X set, and it was during this period that Benoit earned his first gimmick the hard way. He was wrestling Sabu, who was known for taking crazy bumps, and Sabu decided to use a strange headfirst landing off a simple suplex, which resulted in Sabu breaking his neck. Heyman immediately put his marketing genius into action and dubbed Benoit The Crippler, finally giving him a hook after years of only having great wrestling matches as a gimmick. And once he was a star for the fledgling ECW and had a gimmick ready-made, WCW came calling again before Heyman could build his company around Benoit. Plus Benoit couldn’t get a work visa thanks to Heyman’s lack of organization, so he couldn’t come back to ECW if he wanted to. It is ironic, of course, that WCW stole Benoit, Guerrero, and Malenko out from under ECW and Paul Heyman complained loudly about it because Heyman had done exactly the same thing to the NWA in the first place! Chris debuted in the fall of 1995 as a full-timer for WCW, although he still occasionally jumped back to Japan and won the Super J tournament in 1994. When the Four Horsemen reformed for the millionth time in 1995 with his friend Brian Pillman as the third guy, Benoit was brought into the group as the fourth Horsemen, although he rarely did interviews. But it was with that group that the next phase of his life would begin.

The Horsemen were feuding with Kevin Sullivan, who was booking WCW at that point, and Kevin wanted to have a major feud with Benoit because the matches would be great and he’d look like a million bucks while wrestling him. They had a classic, genre-defining crazy brawl at Great American Bash 96, which was Benoit’s first big push and saw him pinning Sullivan after suplexing him off a table on the top rope. I should also note that at one point they fought into the women’s bathroom, resulting in every brawl that WCW put on after that having to do the same spot. It’s one of the rare matches I’ve given five stars, because it set the stage for every hardcore match that came after it.

However, to continue the feud, they did an odd deal. Here’s the setup: Nancy Woman Sullivan was married to Kevin Sullivan in real life, but her role on TV was valet to Ric Flair and the Horsemen. Everyone knew that Nancy was married to Kevin, so they started taping vignettes whereby Benoit would be romancing Nancy, at which point they admitted the Sullivans were really married. That’s not the weird part. The weird part is that Kevin was so obsessed with the realism of the angle that he demanded that his wife accompany Benoit on the road and backstage, just in case someone saw them and reported back to the Internet that they might be having an affair for real. Well, Kevin Sullivan proved to be too smart for his own good, as Chris and Nancy really were having an affair, which made the feud only that much hotter. Unfortunately, Kevin found out about it and his marriage collapsed, at which point Benoit moved in with Kevin’s wife and things started getting bad for him in his business life.

First, the Four Horsemen fell apart due to an injury sustained by Arn Anderson. Then Benoit got involved in a lengthy feud with the debuting Raven and ended up losing the majority of the matches against his flunkies to build up the big blowoff between them. The matches they eventually had were great, but now Benoit was being manipulated by politics where he hadn’t been before. The Benoit-Raven feud somehow turned into a Raven-DDP feud with Benoit also involved, because DDP was smart enough to raise his stock by having great matches with Benoit. However, Benoit was the guy who always ended up doing the job there (taking the loss to keep the other two strong) and it left him almost totally directionless as a result, despite wrestling for the U.S. heavyweight title on a regular basis without ever winning it. However, by the midway point of 1998, WCW figured out that they could get another guy over by using Benoit, and booked a best-of-seven series between Booker T and Benoit to determine the number one contender for the TV title. This series quickly became the stuff of legend, drawing great ratings for Nitro and newbie show Thunder, and Benoit’s fortunes appeared to be rising. However, he lost the series in the end and still had no titles to show for his years of service.

The problem was politics, in that WCW was a very political place and Benoit was not involved. Once he stole Kevin Sullivan’s wife there was little chance of fair treatment, and he didn’t have powerful enough friends to stand up for him. Things got worse when Kevin Nash took over booking in late 1998 and immediately put the WCW World title on himself and sent the promotion into a downward spiral from which it never recovered. Nash’s feelings about Benoit and his smaller friends were well known, as he was quoted in one backstage meeting as describing them as vanilla midgets who could never get over. However, Benoit finally got a major title, winning the WCW World tag team titles with long-time partner Dean Malenko as a part of the final failed iteration of the Four Horsemen. But he was clearly going nowhere as long as Kevin Nash was in charge. Nash was finally cut loose in August, and Benoit was given a push by the temporary committee in charge of the promotion, as he won the U.S. title from comedy act David Flair before dropping it to Sid Vicious in a ludicrously booked match at Fall Brawl 99. I say ludicrously because everyone knew going into the match that Sid would win the title, because Sid was getting a main event push and didn’t need the title or the win. And the match was even worse than expected because of Sid again. Before the match, agents specifically told Sid that at one point Benoit was going to lock him into his finishing move, the Crippler Crossface. Sid would then escape, but at no point should he tap on the mat because that would indicate submission. And what did Sid do when Benoit grabbed his hold at the crucial point in the match? He tapped the mat like crazy.

Benoit’s highest-profile match came because of a sad circumstance—the death of Owen Hart. With Bret off for months to grieve and recover, the new management wanted to do a big match to pay tribute to Owen while they were running Nitro in the arena that he had died in. The natural matchup was Bret Hart v. Chris Benoit and the result was a modern classic. It was the longest match in the history of the program at nearly thirty minutes and an easy five-star classic that was carried by Benoit. Fan sentiment on who should have won was sharply split, with many (myself included) thinking that this was Bret’s big chance to make Benoit into a giant star in Owen’s name, but it wasn’t to be, despite Bret’s best efforts.