Nothing Important Happened Today

Originally written June 26, 2007

The words never did seem real to me. The weight of it all crashed down upon me with a stunned silence. There had to have been a mistake. This could not be happening.

There was no one around that I could tell what happened. There is no one left that would understand the meaning of it all. Silence. I could walk miles in any direction and I would not hear a sound. Nothing was registering. Everything had faded to black.

In the days of future past, before The Battle of Evermore, before Hong Kong, London, before Kansas and Washington D.C., back when everything fell into place, there was wrestling. Like so many teenagers in the mid to late nineties, we would watch our drama on Monday night, where our cherished characters would come to life before us. We admired those men that put their lives on the line to entertain us, we appreciated them and applauded their efforts. Time passed, and we would learn more about the men behind the characters, their triumphs and tragedies we all confront at some point in our lives. These wrestlers took on a human persona, far different than the characters they portrayed.

For me, one man was a cut above all the rest. Chris Benoit was perfection inside and outside of the ring. Despite a small frame during a time where sports entertainment promoted only its biggest creatures, Benoit found a way to succeed outside of the conventional norms. He trained tirelessly to become the greatest mat technician who ever stepped inside a wrestling ring. He would become the textbook example for Olympic wrestlers for form and technique. Benoit was never charismatic; he could never carry a crowd with the microphone. But it is a testament to how hard he worked for all of us in the ring to win over the respect and awe of the toughest of crowds. He was the most respected backstage, he was the stoic leader his peers would look up to.

When his son was born, I remember sending an email to his personal website congratulating him on what I wished to be the happiest day of his life. I received a short, simple response from him thanking me for the thoughts. There was this man, not the character but the man himself, the man that made me a fan of wrestling, that email was enough to say he was real.

After the London adventure, I lost touch with the world of professional wrestling. Sometimes I would like to think that just like when I stopped collecting comic books, that all the characters rode off into the sunset along with any emotional investment I once had in them. But it was never as simple as that.

Chris Benoit, the role model, the idol, the man before the character, perseverance and dedication personified, murdered his wife and seven year old son before taking his own life.

We search for some explanation, how this could have happened, to find some way to reconcile the reality and disbelief. But there is none to be found. These murders were deliberate; they were thought out and executed over three days.

For those that never followed wrestling, you would see him for what he is, a psychotic, a killer of a woman and child. But for years he was someone we looked up to, respected, admired. He was a man that defied the limits placed on him. There was no mistake.

I should be terribly upset, I want to be as angry as the red and the black. Instead I feel nothing at all. Silence. Today I learned that my role model was a murderer.

I suppose there will be answers one day. I suppose we will all move on and forget it ever occurred. I suppose these things happen.