Thoughts on Benoit

Hands down, Ric Flair is my all-time favorite wrestling performer. Stated with equal conviction and certitude, Chris Benoit is my all-time favorite in-ring wrestler. His body of work over the last 20 years -- from his stiff yet high-flying junior-heavyweight matches in Japan as Wild Pegasus/The Pegasus Kid against Jushin Thunder Lyger, Shinjiro Ohtani, and the Great Saskue, to his underappreciated yet test-of-time enduring mid-card encounters with Kevin Sullivan, Eddie Gurrero, Dean Malenko, and Chris Jericho in WCW, to those memorable, physical heavyweight style battles with the likes of Kurt Angle, Steve Austin, Chris Jericho, and Fit Finlay in the WWF/E, to his to his ability to carry lesser workers in whatever company he competed (see his bouts with the likes of DDP, Raven, The Rock, Randy Orton, and even MVP) to matches that ranged from very good to outstanding, to his career capping title victory over Shawn Michaels and HHH at WrestleMania XX (and subsequent victory at the Backlash rematch), to his apparent stylistic influence on future top stars of the business like Samoa Joe and CM Punk -- eclipses all but a handful of men to ever don a pair of revealing spandex tights and meticulously polished boots.

Chris Benoit never had bad matches, only inferior opponents.

In spite of all these accomplishments and accolades, the fact remains that Chris Benoit took his own life yesterday, but not before murdering his wife Nancy and son Daniel in the family's suburban Atlanta home in what appears to be a case of "roid rage." This tragedy not only deservedly tarnishes Benoit's professional legacy and personal reputation, it also offers a scathing indictment of professional wrestling's "don't ask don't tell" approach towards steroid and painkiller use and abuse and rebuke of its infatuation with cartoonish muscles and inflated physiques.

Inside the ring, professional wrestling is all about grit, drama, physicality, endurance, confrontation, gaining revenge/payback, innovation, and execution. Outside of the ring, professional wrestling is a rotten industry filled with dubious practices (like rampant steroid and painkiller usage) and some real sketchy, seedy, sleazy, immoral characters: drunks, drug addicts, hustlers, hotheads, sadists, racists, womanizers, home wreckers, deadbeats, wife beaters, and ex-cons (of course, it is populated by plenty of honest, decent, kind, considerate men as well). And as much as it truly pains me to state it -- solely and therefore irrationally based upon my admiration of Chris Benoit's tenaciousness and versatility and astonishment at the consistency and quality of his wrestling output -- my favorite in-ring technician of all time might very well be the most vile, loathsome, and revolting human being outside of the ring in the history of the business.

How's that for an obituary?