Chris Benoit and family found dead

Yeah. That wasn't a fanboy loser comment. The Guerreros and Benoit went all the way back to working in Stampede wrestling in Canada (Stu Hart's organization) and also traveled to Japan to wrestle as well. To me, as a rational fan, I would believe that Chris would have tried to get a hold of Chavo if things were going bad around him as a real life friend. Not a storyline.

 

Fair enough.

But it amazes me how many wrestling fans are stuck in their own little world about this.

 

From wrestlingobserver.com:

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.

Vince made the decision to run Smackdown and ECW tapings tonight without any angles or backstage storylines. The show will consist of straight wrestling matches and like last night, the original shows were scrapped. The attempt to put together a show was difficult because the crew and creative staff were said to be both emotionally and physically wrecked after yesterday.

The belief is they will brief viewers on what happened early in the show, and then product two low key shows of nothing but matches.

I can't believe it, but McMahon seems to be handling this very well.

 

He's dead remember? He would handle anything well.

 

that may end up being the best option when all is said and done. WWE seems to be in a no-win situation here.

 

Someone linked to that story on the last page.

 

That's almost a given. They will, one hopes, give it some time, but at some point it's going to happen. Half the guys who gave tributes to him last night will talk about the odd things he would do, and how if they were paying attention they could see this coming.

A guy I internet know (as in I've never met him in the real world but have interacted with him online) is on a radio show tonight. The guest: Kevin Sullivan. If he doesn't cancel, I'll find a link.

 

To be fair, if this were, say, Shawne Merriman killing his wife and kid (not that he would, nor do I know he even has a wife or kid), a lot of the same kinds of posts would come regarding state of the NFL and whatnot. Though maybe not so much of the storyline stuff.

Although speaking of the NFL, enough freaky stuff about steroidal and brain-damaged ex-players is coming out to make one wonder when the shit is really going to hit the fan about PEDs and the league.

 

No doubt. Raw was really tough for them because they probably knew at some point early that Benoit was likely the cause of the deaths, but the options -- a) running a normal live show with everyone still in shock, b) doing a full-fledged live tribute show like they did with Owen and Eddy, knowing it wasn't really the same thing and c) cancelling the show outright, when it's USA's top-rated show and one of cable's top shows -- all suck out loud in stereophonic sound.

I hesitate to call this "fortunate" in this context, but they've downplayed Benoit in recent months anyway. He was moved to ECW two weeks ago so he could help develop younger heels like Elijah Burke and Marcus Cor Von the way he did MVP on Smackdown. Had he won the ECW title Sunday (as was the plan) and then killed his wife and child, then they'd be a helluva sticket wicket to navigate the next show. But now they can slide him out of the storylines fairly easily (Johnny Nitro won the title in Benoit's stead on Sunday and probably will pick up his angles from here on in).

 

So he was supposed to win the title? That would have been really difficult to write him out of storylines. But, as the line goes, "The show must go on."

 

Wouldn't they just kill him off?

 

Was looking through USSportspages.com and saw that the Edmonton Sun had a couple of sidebars to the story, one of them an interview with the Hart family:

http://www.edmontonsun.com/home.html