As I'm sure that it does for everyone right now, I really don't know what to think at this point in time when I look at the picture of Chris Benoit. As a fan, I watched as he was a member of the 4 Horseman, when he resisted and fought the nWo, when he had his match with Bret Hart at Kemper as a memorial to Owen Hart (one of my top 10 favorite matches), when he finally won the WCW Championship in their last ditch effort to keep him from leaving the company, when he showed up on RAW with Malenko, Eddie and the rest, his many close calls at winning the WWF/E championship, the Royal Rumble win, and the culmination of everything with his win at Wrestlemania XX and the subsequent title reign. Through the wonders of DVD I've been able to go back and watch his ECW days as well, and through a series of connections with my Mom's company, I also got to meet him my senior year of high school. Chris Benoit was one of the greatest entertainers in the business, and his death has truly saddened me.
After nearly a week, after countless developments in the whole ordeal, and after the complete disacknowledgement of Benoit by the WWE, I still don't know how to respond to any of this. What he did was despicable, it's a real tragedy and inexcuseable on every level. The legacy of Chris Benoit is tarnished irreparably, and barring everything the investigators are saying being wrong, there is no way it can ever be recovered. Over the course of this week I've covered nearly every conceiveable emotion on subject, sadness, anger, disappointment, shame, none of it seems to make sense.
That is where the problem comes in to play, on the one hand, Chris Benoit was a character on a television show. At that, he was portrayed as a bad ass, a tough guy that was one of the best and respected as such. He was a legend and a future Hall of Famer with the WWE, and had just been switched to another roster to work as a player/coach of sorts in an effort to help develop new talent for the next generation. On the other hand, Chris Benoit is now a murderer, a possible roider, and overall just a horrible human being. How do we view him with his two different persons? Are we ok to view him as the great that he was in the ring, despite his overwhelming character flaws and issues that stand to destroy the name he made for himself in his profession? I guess this is kind of similar to OJ Simpsons in the effect of, OJ was great as a football player which was his profession, but lets face it, he did it. So are we supposed to now ignore what he did as a football player in response to what he did off the field? Is it wrong for us to still give credit for what Benoit was as an athlete/entertainer despite what he did outside the ring? Only time will tell how this will all play out. It's about seven months away from when they will begin to announce the class for the 2008 WWE Hall fo Fame, should Benoit be considered?
Think about it.
