Chris & Nancy (17 page)

In fact, one of the first sets of drugs, if not the very first, found by detectives was a refrigerated stash of growth hormone with the label of a Chinese company. McDevitt surely intended to refer to the Dr. Astin prescriptions filled by several local pharmacies. But the Chinese growth hormone likely came from an Internet purveyor, such as Signature Pharmacy. (Chapter
12
treats this subject in depth.)

No one is perfect; errors of all sizes and shapes litter coverage of all subjects. But what the Benoit story showed was how easily, in a downscale subject like wrestling, one or two planted misstatements, nudging the narrative toward closure, can turn off the spigot. In scandals, it is often the drip-drip-drip of accumulated detail that wears down the limestone wall. Here we had more like a splash, followed by a towel-down.

***

As with all coverage by the wrestling fan media, the Benoit story was driven by Dave Meltzer's
Wrestling Observer
, the granddaddy of the “kayfabe sheets,” dating back to the
1970
s, and the largest and most influential publication of its kind. Though Meltzer does not release circulation figures, the
Observer
's weekly print edition is believed to have thousands of readers. Many more thousands browse the free and premium versions of its website. In
1990
–
91
, Meltzer wrote a column on pro wrestling for
The National
, a short-lived daily sports newspaper. Later in the decade he reported from the ground floor on the nascent sport of mixed martial arts; like boxing,
MMA
is not choreographed, but to some extent shares with wrestling a type of athletic talent and promotional infrastructures and methods. After stints covering
MMA
for the
Los Angeles Times
and FoxSports
.com, Meltzer is now a prolific
MMA
columnist for Yahoo Sports — this in addition to churning out, basically by himself, more than
30
,
000
words a week, fifty-two weeks a year, for the hard copy and electronic versions of the
Observer
.

Meltzer's astonishing output is the apex of a quasi-journalistic genre in diverse media, which has attracted passionate above- and underground followings. In the
1980
s the market dominance of the then–World Wrestling Federation, which had begun publishing a captive line of slick newsstand magazines, ended the heyday of old-school independent pulp wrestling mags. The best known of these were
Pro Wrestling Illustrated
and its sister titles, published by Stanley Weston and edited by Bill Apter.
PWI
lingers in new incarnations, but little else from that category survives.

The wrestling magazines, at least as originally conceived, were analogous to Hollywood fan fluff, with apocryphal reporting that pushed favored stars and obeyed the industry's internal practice of suspending disbelief even to the extent of not divulging that wrestling was staged. Meltzer's
Observer
— launched in his youth, sustained as a hobby while he held down conventional newspaper sports writing jobs immediately after college, and eventually developed into a lucrative full-time business and mini-empire — irrevocably changed the rules of wrestling journalism in its refusal to perpetuate that particular illusion. Like the “Apter mags” (as the new breed of so-called “smart” fans now remember them), Meltzer covered the theatrical product presented in arenas and on television screens. But Meltzer added a layer of authentic behind-the-scenes reporting and analysis. He was a genuine industry expert who brought to more discerning readers the real stories of backstage politics and the real data about wrestling's contracts, booking decisions, conflicts, growth, and emerging profile in the sports and entertainment worlds.

As wrestling's Mafia-like territorial system collapsed — to be replaced by the global hegemony of McMahon's marketing-driven
WWF
/
WWE
— Meltzer also demonstrated, among other crossover skills, an extraordinary flair for in-depth quick-scan interpretation of things like television ratings and corporate securities disclosure statements. Generally speaking, no one could quantify better than Dave Meltzer. His wrestler death list, compiled during the Benoit frenzy, was the best around; unlike fellow empiricists such as
USA Today
, Meltzer knew the difference between a wrestler who
OD
'd and, say, the right-on-schedule fatal heart attack of Andre the Giant, who had a medical condition that made him freakishly large and handed to him, on the same platter, both a lucrative wrestling career and a ticket to an early demise.

In the same vein, Meltzer refused to pander to fans who jumped on the Benoit concussion bandwagon, but neither did he whitewash that factor. The
Observer
listed
62
“major league” wrestling deaths in the decade up through Benoit's career, and Meltzer broke them down. “
ECW
[the original Philadelphia-based “hard-core” trailblazer, Extreme Championship Wrestling] definitively was the worst of the three majors [also including
WWF
/
WWE
and Ted Turner's World Championship Wrestling] in terms of deaths per capita, probably because it had the worst drug issues and the hard-head-trauma style,” Meltzer said. “But if you look at all the deaths, the vast majority took no more head trauma than wrestlers of any other generation who didn't have the death rate. Drugs, whether painkillers or steroids, and probably the combination of them, to me is a much stronger factor when you look at the individual cases. Everyone wants an easy answer, and it's no different with those who jumped on the steroid bandwagon.”

He summed up: “Concussions were no factor with Eddie Guerrero, for example, or with Davey Boy Smith [who also suffered a fatal heart attack, in
2002
]. It's very possible they played a part with Chris, but how can you dismiss other things that lead to depression when it was a crime of depression?”

Educated by analysis such as this, “smart” fans multiplied on the World Wide Web, creating dozens upon dozens of fan news sites (many, though not all, cribbing content from Meltzer), discussion boards, chat rooms, and other communication and social-networking tools. Today a few other regular print newsletters thrive alongside the
Observer
, the most prominent being Wade Keller's
Pro Wrestling Torch
and Bryan Alvarez's
Figure Four Weekly
(the latter is an online affiliate of the
Observer
).

In the quarter-century of my own relationship with Meltzer, I have found him an indefatigably helpful resource. Even though our perspectives often differ, he has never been too busy to review a draft of an article or a chapter, or to answer even the most seemingly trivial factual question. I appreciate that quality and deeply respect his original body of work, which deserves more credit than anything else for imbuing its offbeat subject with a reasonably accurate history and literature. Quirky and intrinsically fascinating, the
Wrestling Observer
is a model of entrepreneurism.

The decision to build this book around the timeline mystery was largely shaped by facts and insights Meltzer conveyed to me but not to his readership at large. This would both enrich my research and become a source of tension between us. When we discussed the centrality to my theme of
WWE
's “worked”
Raw
tribute to Benoit, Dave said in an email, “It's an angle I'd push pretty hard.” He added, apparently half-facetiously, “Can I write it?”

Cynically conditioned to dismiss
WWE
's manipulations of public opinion as matters of taste only, without larger lessons for its culture of death, I might never have zeroed in on the
Raw
nugget if not for Meltzer's encouragement. He corroborated company executives' earlier-than-acknowledged information pointing to murder-suicide — a
6
:
05
eastern time call to him from a well-placed Canadian source, which aligned with what a Royal Canadian Mounted Police report documented and Mike Benoit had already verified (see Chapter
6
). For me, Meltzer's corroboration then became the impetus for “reverse-engineering” the company's overall shaky timeline subsequent to Chris's criminal acts. Since Benoit was unquestionably the perpetrator of the murders, exploring that shaky timeline and its meaning became this book's investigative mission.

But as research proceeded from there, Dave and I did not see eye-to-eye on my approach, and I told him so and he told me so. I thought the
Observer
published far too little about the case, and without nearly enough persistence, to the point where, wittingly or not, Meltzer enabled the resumption of business as usual. While I don't presume to put words in his mouth, he clearly disliked the style of much of my blog reporting and writing, and felt I alienated potentially helpful long-term sources.

That was where the rubber hit the road. For all its ridicule of the mainstream media's shallow grasp of wrestling, the
Observer
and the other sheets themselves operate like gossip networks. At a certain point — a very early one, considering the amount of muck raked — they circle the wagons around the people in the industry they cover. Meltzer bore the brunt of my exhortations to the wrestling journalism community to do a better job of exposing the essence of the Benoit saga so as to spur overdue reforms in drug testing and talent management. Dave didn't always take kindly to the suggestion that he might be part of the problem rather than the solution; like insiders in Washington politics or anything else, he tends to exaggerate in his own mind what he risks and to downplay how much he protects. His paternalistic modus operandi demands a set of assumptions I don't share.

Over time, I had to confront the implications of what Meltzer chose to say and not say, for they added up to an unresolved paradox. Tipped almost as soon as the bodies were discovered, Meltzer himself knew from day one, hour one, that
WWE
's
Raw
tribute was manipulative. Most of the talent on the show didn't yet realize it, but company brass already understood that they were honoring a murderer and that the news might even reach the public before
Raw
's first feed, to the eastern two-thirds of the country, went off the air. Yet, over the next days, while cable
TV
news people were hammering
WWE
over this possibility, based only on the sort of generalized innuendo of sleaze that is routinely leveled at wrestling promoters, Dave limited himself to agreeing that
WWE
and the
USA
network might have exercised better judgment by pulling the later West Coast repeat of
Raw
.

On his website on June
26
, previewing that night's SmackDown/
ECW TV
shoot in San Antonio, Meltzer focused on McMahon's purported sterling leadership of the troops:

The lack of an understandable explanation to the circumstances of the death of Chris, Nancy and Daniel Benoit has left virtually the entire wrestling community reeling.

Within WWE, the obvious questions and lack of answers are no different from fans and most of his long-time friends.

Vince McMahon was the inspiring general both to the wrestlers as well as the office staff all day yesterday. He held it together and was a rock of strength for much of the talent, which because of their admiration and in many cases love for Benoit, were saddened, perplexed and having an incredibly difficult time dealing with it.

Eventually Meltzer told
Observer
print readers that the McMahon family “had to know” the perpetrator and nature of the crime when they green-lighted the
Raw
tribute. Instead of saying so prominently and clearly, however, Meltzer buried it in the middle of his weekly mountain of verbiage. All the while, he was urging me to push “pretty hard” my own investigation of what had happened behind the scenes at
Raw
!

Meltzer's audience admires his comprehensiveness and so do I. But in this instance and in my opinion, he generated only gobbledygook. In November
1997
, when McMahon pulled strings with agents, a referee, and other wrestlers to conspire against Bret Hart, the outgoing
WWF
champion who was moving to rival promotion
WCW
, Meltzer had written the definitive account of the incident forever after known as the “Montreal screwjob.” But Meltzer attempted no similar takeout on
WWE
's Benoit timelines. The contrast added up to a posture that the treacheries of pro wrestling choreography were more important than the full story of three brutal deaths. Never, to my knowledge, did Meltzer even cite the report about the Mounties and Mike Benoit's recollection of how he got the news — which was on my blog after being not only inspired by Meltzer, but in certain areas virtually ventriloquized by him.

Moving backwards in time from that key finding, I went on to feed Dave voluminous details of how the Georgia authorities played fast and loose with the investigative record to stymie information on what
WWE
knew and when. Dave sometimes misattributed the few piecemeal stories he chose to write based on that material, stating that they resulted from new public document releases rather than from the original reporting of another writer. In and of itself, that was just a vanity issue. But Meltzer, in my view, also reported the information selectively and out of context, wrong-headedly dismissing its significance.

The missing telephonic evidence, he wrote in the newsletter, “doesn't prove anything.” Yet during the same period, he was telling me privately, “One person who saw the [text message] list told me it was weird how they had some texts he sent but not several others.” Meltzer's failure to investigate the timeline, or even to disclose in good faith what he knew about the validity of another reporter's investigation of the timeline, betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of the journalistic process.