There was a time in recent memory when I was a fan of World Wrestling Entertainment. I went to the pay-per-views. I hollered at the screens along with the unwashed masses. I mocked the people who obviously still thought it was real while alternately ooing and aaahing at the athleticism and grace on display in many of the match-ups. I played the collectible card game. Hell, I went to a Wrestlemania. This was not a passing infatuation, is my point. I was a fan. Scratch that, I was a BIG fan. I tell you this not as an awkward confession or because I'm somehow proud of supporting this business. I just want to set up context so you can have a frame of reference for what I'm saying here.
Eventually there came a point, however, when I had to walk away. For many, this isn't that strange of a concept, as they also had to at some point put aside childish things and walk in the shoes of an adult. For me, however, my break with the WWE came about not as a result of maturation but rather disenfranchisement. Ultimately, I got tired of seeing the performers I loved die. I was an Eddie Guerrero fan. I adored Latino Heat, a man with charisma coming out of every pore who could actually move in the ring and who, even when he was playing the good guy, still had this edge of being a cheating SOB that the crowd ate up. He brought himself back from an early life of drug abuse only to die of a heart attack in 2005 at the age of 38 after cleaning his life up. I liked Mr. Perfect, who killed himself with painkillers and cocaine. I watched Miss Elizabeth, Bam Bam Bigelo, Andrew "Test" Martin, Kris Kanyon, and so many others that I saw fall. But none of them, none of them, affected me the way the Chris Benoit murder/suicide did.
I remember the day it happened clearly. I just happened to have been at home alone that Monday night, meaning I could turn on Raw and not hear any grumbling (as it turned out, she was as shocked as I was.) That show was dedicated to him, with tear filled interviews being gushed out by the wrestlers on the roster who hadn't heard what had actually occurred. The next day, as the news came out, those stories became the most sour mockeries of good taste that had ever graced the WWE airways (and this is counting when Owen Hart fell to his death from the rafters, only to be rolled out of the ring so the show could go on.)
Chris, it turned out, had never been a great husband or even necessarily human being. His wife had left him once previously from reported abuse, and rumors of more had quietly lingered in the background for some time. However, especially in light of his in ring persona as a hard working every-man type character, Benoit was well liked and typically was a fan favorite. Nothing implied that he was capable of strangling his wife and suffocating his son while he lay in bed, before ultimately hanging himself from his weight bench. No one could have imagined it was possible. I mean, didn't all his friends and family go on Raw that night and let out the testimonials of how great a guy he was? How could anyone be capable of this?
The answer, it turns out, is that it could have been a lot of things. He had his own trouble with drugs, again, particularly the painkillers that plague most wrestling locker rooms. He was found to be taking steroids, either as a prescribed drug as WWE claimed or, probably more likely, to help provide the impressive addition to his bulk that had appeared some years prior. All of these gained the initial brunt of the blame for the events, but some time later another result came along which I ultimately found more compelling.
Examinations of Benoit's brain found him to be suffering from a severe form of concussive traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a disease resulting from repeated traumatic brain injury. As described by Dr. Julian Bales, head of neurosurgery at West Virginia University, Benoit's brain was found to be so damaged that it resembled the brain of an 85 year old Alzheimer's patient. Some of his coworkers would say later that Benoit was one of the few people who would take hard hits like taking a chair shot to the back of the head, a spot that is currently banned from WWE matches. And as I heard this news, I remembered all the times I watched Benoit take some of the hardest hits I could remember, guys nearly turning him inside out from clotheslines of throwing him violently to the mat from top turnbuckles, and I started to realize that by doing the best he could every day at his job, the WWE may have damaged this man's brain so thoroughly that he no longer was the same person anymore, and the company he worked for may have let it happen. And as I looked at Benoit, and looked at all the other wrestlers that had died young after working in this industry, I discovered that I could no longer, in good conscience, support with my customer dollars an industry that kills it's performers. So I walked away from wrestling fandom, and I never looked back.
Why do I bring this up now? Because CTE is starting to show up elsewhere, particularly in the ranks of the National Football League. Chris Henry and Owen Thomas are examples of football players who are no longer with us and who have been found, after their death, to have suffered from CTE. Concussions are currently at the forefront of the consciousness of many football fans and, probably more importantly, many parents of kids who want to participate in the sport. It's unclear if this is just a small example amongst a wider problem set of if this is truly as pervasive a issue in football as it appears it could be, but the bottom line is we have to find out, and we have to do something to stop it.I would hate for things in the NFL to reach a point where I have to make a similar call between my conscience and my passion for sport.
