Chris Benoit...

[Buehrle>Wood]

 

Around the 4 minute mark is the great Nancy Grace question and shows how informed she is and how much studying and preparation she did for this interview with Bret Hart.

 

I mean WHAT? If there is even an ounce of logic in that question, can someone please show it to me?

 

 

Also nice to see Bret Hart, who usually takes every oppurtunity he can to dump on WWE, keep a level head here.

[Soxfest]

Fox 5 News out of Fayetteville, Georgia is reporting that the office of Chris Benoit’s personal physician, Dr. Phil Astin was raided by Drug Enforcement Agents last night confiscating computers.

 

According to an article on their web site Dr. Astin had prescribed testosterone to Chris in past and he had seen him on Friday.

 

Drug Agents told the news station that the investigation of Dr. Astin stems from the prescription drugs found in the Benoit home with Dr. Astin’s name printed on them.

[briguy27]

According to abc7.com, since there were no choke marks, the one investigator says that Benoit may have put Daniel into a choke-hold. The Crippler?

[T R U]

According to abc7.com, since there were no choke marks, the one investigator says that Benoit may have put Daniel into a choke-hold. The Crippler?

 

Im not 100% but I believe they said that he used a bag..

[Gregory Pratt]

What bothers me about this -- as I wrote about and posted earlier -- is that if it's true, some will say, "WRESTLING TAUGHT HIM THAT!" and I say, Shut up. That's absurd.

[Steff]

According to abc7.com, since there were no choke marks, the one investigator says that Benoit may have put Daniel into a choke-hold. The Crippler?

 

 

I've been hearing that also. So sad. I was hoping he did it while the kid was sleeping and just put a pillow over his head. So sad.

[Gene Honda Civic]

I thought this was a good article though it's mostly about steroids and baseball, this writer seems to "get" the Benoit/WWE situation in general.

Baseball has to start doing a better job of educating the public about steroids, because no one else is going to do it. Right now, many people believe that steroids drove Benoit to strangle his own child — a belief so self-evidently simplistic and ridiculous that it allows WWE to point to its pathetic drug policy and ignore the real issues at play, which involve not only Benoit's own private demons, but a brutal, dehumanizing schedule, work that requires a level of physical punishment the body just can't handle, drug abuse as a near condition of employment, and a string of dozens and dozens of deaths about which no one has cared.

 

This is a problem for baseball because it shows how deep the ignorance about steroids runs. If people truly find it plausible that someone can murder his own family simply because of an injection of Winstrol, there's no reason to expect them to know or care that baseball's stance on T/E ratios and unannounced specimen collection shows the sport to be profoundly serious about doing its best to eliminate drug abuse from baseball.

 

People believe the mechanistic explanation, though, because they're ignorant about steroids and indifferent to the issue's complexities. And who can blame them, when those with the greatest interest in dispelling ignorance refuse to do so?

[santo=dorf]

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,287194,00.html

An anonymous user operating a computer traced to Stamford, Conn. — home to World Wrestling Entertainment — posted an entry to pro wrestler Chris Benoit's biography on Wikipedia.org announcing the death of his wife Nancy at least 13 hours before police in suburban Atlanta said they found her body along with her husband's and that of their 7-year-old son, FOXNews.com has learned.

 

Employees at Wikipedia.org said the posting went live on their site on Monday at 12:01 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. Police, however, said they found the bodies Monday at 2:30 p.m. EDT.

 

The posting reads: “Chris Benoit was replaced by [[Johnny Nitro]] for the ECW Championship match at Vengeance, as Benoit was not there due to personal issues, stemming from the death of his wife Nancy.” According to a Wikipedia.org report published after FOXNews.com made inquiries, the edit was reversed just under one hour later with the comment:

 

"Need a reliable source. Saying that his wife died is a pretty big statement, you need to back it up with something."

[BigSqwert]

Go take your sanctimony and your piousness to another thread of "OMG! GEORGE BOOSH IS TEH EVILS". In fact, take your rhetoric clogged latte liberal jackass holier than thou self to some re-runs of the Colbert Report.

 

I didn't sit here during the Sopranos and say "Did you know that they all dress up as supposed mobsters and pretend to run a crime syndicate? Did you know that they only pretend to shoot each other?" No, I and the other wrestling fans here didn't.

 

Every show is choreographed and scripted. But it is hilarious for you to single out wrestling because it doesn't meet your high brow liberal cultural standards of knowing what is good for everybody.

 

So, go take your anti-pro wrestling bias and have a nice cool glass of shut the f*** up and leave us the f*** alone on this warm summer evening.

LMAO. Perhaps you should put down the roids yourself.

[Brian]

Vince McMahon on Today Show

[T R U]

Vince McMahon on Today Show

 

Man where do you get these wrestling sigs, they are badass

[fathom]

Watched Nancy Grace before....Chris Jericho has "it" even when doing an interview about a murderer.

[Gregory Pratt]

Bret “The Hitman” Hart was a close friend of Chris Benoit, as many of the Canadian wrestlers were, but their friendship was deeper than country. Hart’s father, Stu, trained Chris Benoit to be a professional in the prestigious Dungeon and they remained close over the years, with Hart serving as a mentor in World Championship Wrestling where they worked together and they were quite familiar with one another’s family, which is why Bret Hart has hit the talk show circuit following the death of three close friends. Hart is, like Benoit was, a World Champion.

 

Yesterday, Bret Hart was on CNN for an interview with Nancy Grace. It was a fairly uneventful interview as Grace asked him the usual (grating) questions (”You’ve known him for decades: did you ever know that he could do something like this!?”) until she asked him a question that perfectly illustrated the media’s lack of knowledge, research and understanding of the situation that has rocked the wrestling world and overtaken Paris Hilton as the media’s taste de jour.

 

“Do you think Benoit became depressed after going from the elite Four Horseman to Raw?” (It is a slight paraphrase: specifically, she mentioned that he’d gone from “the Four Horsemen to Raw” and that that’s “a little bit of a demotion” so “how bad do you think he took it?”)

 

First, I’ll explain: the Four Horsemen were a wrestling “stable” (group) in old wrestling promotions and the now-defunct but formerly powerful World Championship Wrestling organization. Benoit was a member of WCW in the nineteen nineties until he decided to leave the federation along with three of his dearest friends for the World Wrestling Federation which was at the time the leading company in wrestling having just reclaimed that title from WCW after a long, exhausting ratings war that spanned much of the nineties. “Raw” is the name of WWE’s Monday night wrestling program, and so you see the question’s history and, I hope, flaw. The Four Horsemen were at that time a declining stable in a company that was crashing and burning and he was moving to an organization that he wanted to wrestle for, that pushed him to the top immediately and that eventually gave him a reign as World Heavyweight Champion that began at Wrestlemania XX (arguably the biggest event in wrestling history), so there was no “demotion.”

 

Bret Hart should’ve answered:

 

“Yes, Nancy. Chris Benoit murdered his wife and child then hung himself because he left the Four Horsemen by choice in 1999 and wound up at a better federation with better pay and an eventual run at the World Championship along with an immediate ‘push’ up the organization’s depth chart. He was also upset because the WWF was forced to change its initials to ‘WWE’ a few years ago because it meant that there’d be a little blur in all the DVDs of his old matches under the WWF banner.”

 

Instead he politely said, “I couldn’t say,” and went off to explain how much both of them loved wrestling, pure and simple, drawing a parellel between them because of the fact that they both used their real names on stage.

 

The interview was hard for me to listen to not just because Grace asked such graceless questions as that but because of some painful details that it brought to light. Grace mentioned the love and adoration that Benoit seemingly had for his child and the fact that it appeared mutual (next to his son’s bed was a statue of Benoit), but then said, “It leads me to believe that he was under the influence of steroids.” That may very well be true, but there were a ton of different prescription drugs in the home and I’d imagine them to have just as bad an affect as steroids, if not more. I don’t think that steroids would’ve created such a situation as “roid rages” are rages and they don’t last for days, as Vince McMahon and others have said, and the point raised by Bret Hart that it’s likelier to have been the result of a domestic dispute seems to carry more water.

 

One interesting thing that’s come out in the last few days, though, is that Benoit’s son suffered from a disease called Fragile X Syndrome which is similar to autism and the child took steroids for that, so at least we know that Benoit wasn’t a sick freak injecting his child with steroids for kicks, and it’s possible that he wasn’t on steroids, although I do doubt that. Who knows? We’ll see what happened but I firmly believe that steroids had little to do with this.

 

It isn’t just Bret Hart being interviewed and interviewed poorly, though. World Wrestling Entertainment chief Vince McMahon appeared on the Today Show today and was asked a variety of questions about his wrestlers and steroids. There were two things that really bothered me about it:

 

1. The continuing lack of knowledge: Guerrerro didn’t die of steroids, at least not per se. Guerrerro died because he was a heavy drug user and alcoholic years along who used to use steroids. As a result of that, his heart enlarged and he died, young, and as a result of that, WWE instituted a drug testing program that Bret Hart, among others, applauds. So let’s not try to turn Eddie Guerrerro’s ghost against Vince McMahon.

 

2. The continuing lack of shame. The host who interviewed McMahon asked him, “In any way does pro wrestling contribute to the creation of monsters?”

 

The correct answer, given by McMahon, is No. These are men who decided when they were children that they wanted to entertain the masses like the wrestlers who had entertained them, men who were dazzled as children by the graceful acrobatics and charismatic promos, by the bright lights and theme songs, fireworks and commentary, passion and sacrifice of professional wrestling and decided that that line of work would fulfill the evenings of children and their families, along with themselves. Wrestlers inspire millions every day, and I know many of them set out to do that at the beginning of their careers.

 

On the other hand, I don’t see how anybody can watch this media “firestorm” and listen to these interviews with half a handle on the situation and say, “I’d like to be a reporter one day!” In fact, I would point out that wrestling has never had a tragedy quite like this and yet the wrestlers are coming together and people are asking questions hoping to make sure that this never happens again, wondering how it happened and why. This shameful display by the media occurs every few days with all sorts of different topics, from political ones, to ridiculous ones to tragic ones, and yet the media allows itself to degenerate into a smorgasborg of stupidity with every disaster that comes its way.

 

I guess I’ve never truly realized how bad the media can be until I listened to Nancy Grace ask Bret Hart if Chris Benoit killed his family because he was “demoted” from the Four Horsemen.

[Brian]

Man where do you get these wrestling sigs, they are badass

 

I steal them off the WrestleCrap boards. I'm guilty.

 

Watched Nancy Grace before....Chris Jericho has "it" even when doing an interview about a murderer.

 

Agreed. He did a good job shooting down some of the things the media is trying to blow out of proportion. Also had to explain to Nancy about how the 4 Horseman is different from Raw. Ha.

[CWSGuy406]

Agreed. He did a good job shooting down some of the things the media is trying to blow out of proportion. Also had to explain to Nancy about how the 4 Horseman is different from Raw. Ha.

 

Is there any place to see this interview? I checked youtube, I don't think it's up there.

[Gregory Pratt]

Is there any place to see this interview? I checked youtube, I don't think it's up there.

 

It'll be up relatively soon, I'm sure.

[MHizzle85]

According to CNN there was an empty wine bottle and ten empty cans of beer next to Benoit's body.

[Soxfest]

Geraldo needs to open more vaults! ............From PW Torch below.

 

Gerlado Rivera was a guest analyst on The O'Reilly Factor tonight and made a huge mistake in trying to create a conspiracy because he mistakenly believed that Sherri Martel and Nancy Benoit died on the same day, then loosely tied Sherri with Nancy's ex-husband, Kevin Sullivan (whom he didn't mention by name) and said she was his "booker," whatever that means. He then managed to get wrong the dates of the text messages, saying they took place on Sunday night during the PPV.

 

Mid-discussion, Geraldo moved to the Wikipedia posting at midnight on Sunday. He said it could have been by chance, a hoax by someone making it up. He said another coincidence is that Chris kills his wife on Friday, June 15 or Saturday, June 16 and that Sherri Martel also died of unnatural causes related to drug use. He said she is another woman connected to these pro wrestlers. He said Sherri knew Nancy's ex-husband.

 

He asked if the posting was made by a WWE official, "they were obviously in communication with Chris Benoit." He said it was alleged that Benoit was text messaging his friends as he was watching a wrestling event he was supposed to be at in Texas. "The Feds have to subpoena every single electronic communication," he said. "I think this is going to be gigantic." He wondered if it was bigger than a murder-murder-suicide. O'Reilly said (completely off-topic), "If they can prove steroid abuse was ordered by the top guys in the wrestling federation, they'll arrest them." Geraldo asked, "What if you can prove everybody in town knows whatever everybody is doing and do nothing. Now it's a little less clear as to their criminal liability, but I think you've definitely got a story here that will affect professional wrestling in a profound way."

 

Earlier in the discussion, Geraldo said: "I think there is going to be increased scrutiny of WWE... in the steroid abuse of the people who are their actors in this entertainment venture. There is obviously great athleticism. They know about their heavy steroid use." He brought up the raids on Chris Benoit's doctor and internet pharmacy. He said WWE tried to downplay the steroid involvment and place the blame on Chris or Nancy arguing over the care of their child. "What a bunch of bunk that was," he said. "They were trying intentionally to deflect the public's attention from this steroid use."

 

WK ANALYSIS: Okay, how does a news entity with Fox News resources get a story so so so so so wrong? It is just embarrassing that Geraldo said Sherri and Nancy died on the same day. It's embarrassing on a lesser scale that after Geraldo presented this flawed potential conspiracy theory and then O'Reilly said something completely unrelated as if he either wasn't listening or didn't understand the basics of what he said.

Edited June 29, 2007 by Soxfest

[Gregory Pratt]

News: Chris Benoit was drinking. So was Geraldo Rivera.

 

Looks like I have a start to a post on my blog tomorrow.

[Gregory Pratt]

The Ultimate Warrior was on Hannity and Colmes.

 

I repeat: the Ultimate Warrior was on Hannity and Colmes.

 

Oh, Fox. Oh, Cable news.

[T R U]

The Ultimate Warrior was on Hannity and Colmes.

 

I repeat: the Ultimate Warrior was on Hannity and Colmes.

 

Oh, Fox. Oh, Cable news.

 

Hey GPratt is that Sunny in your avatar?

 

I met her and Ahmed Johnson once haha

[Gregory Pratt]

Yes, that is Tammy. I loved her.

 

Previously, I had had Beaulah. Next is probably Dawn Marie.

[T R U]

Yes, that is Tammy. I loved her.

 

Previously, I had had Beaulah. Next is probably Dawn Marie.

 

Man she use to be so hott, last time I saw her she was fat

[Gregory Pratt]

Yeah, she had some illness or something but it's gone away now, I've heard.

[whitesoxfan101]

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,287194,00.html

 

Wow, that just sent this story in a whole different direction. Who could possibly have posted that?