CHRIS & NANCY Holiday Errata Project

Earlier this month Dave Meltzer offered an odd Wrestling Observer Newsletter Good Housekeeping Seal in a post on his website’s discussion board: “Irv had a story to write, and his story was how the wrestling media covered up for Vince McMahon. Whether the truth jived [sic] with the story was immaterial.”

One sentence later — and with no indicaton that he grasped the contradiction — Meltzer wrote: “… I [helped] him proof his book.”

Why Dave chose to frame this non-review review of CHRIS & NANCY in personal terms, as a false “claim” by me of a “falling out” between us that he full well knows I’ve never made, is a mystery. I think most intelligent readers would prefer, instead, that he proceed with his usual thorough job of reviewing a book’s findings and interpretations.

In my own words, among the many findings and interpretations of CHRIS & NANCY is the story of how the wrestling media, catering to their fans, downplayed or self-censored stories about the Benoit case – precisely when their unique knowledge of a peculiar industry could have had the hygienic effect of lending momentum to calls for reform by challenging WWE’s credibility. Examples in the book:

*  To my knowledge, neither Meltzer’s nor any other major fan organ has examined why WWE published two different timelines of events prior to the discovery of the Benoit murder-suicide.

* Also never reported, certainly not in any depth, were the implications of the 30-hour gap between when Chavo Guerrero and Scott Armstrong received Chris Benoit’s final text messages and when WWE called 911.

* Meltzer, again setting an understandable but unhelpful tone for the fan media coverage, dismissed any possible significance in the premature edit of Benoit’s Wikipedia page, which later proved to have connections to these timeline issues.

(My book also breaks a fourth story, about the strange and immediate presence of Dave Taylor near the crime scene, which Meltzer and company likewise have failed to pick up.)

One answer to the question of whether I take seriously the responsibility of making the truth “jive” with the story came more than a year before CHRIS & NANCY was published. In June 2008, WWE lawyer Jerry McDevitt complained that I was mistaken in asserting on my blog that the company had sat for an extended period on information about certain wrestlers’ purchases of steroids and growth hormone from Signature Pharmacy. I immediately ran a correction. For his part, Meltzer never reported either WWE’s legal threats (a story in itself) or my response to them. In the process, he issued a lookaway pass to the base source: erroneous information in a prominent and nearly year-old Observer report (which, by the way, never resulted in a complaint from WWE and was never corrected).

Below is a list of the factual errors and problems that readers of CHRIS & NANCY so far have brought to my attention, followed by my responses. Anyone wishing to add to the list can email errata@muchnick.net; cc newstips@wrestlingobserver.com.

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Johnny Grunge’s real name

In his review for SLAM! Wrestling, writer David Bixenspan  noted  that Johnny Grunge’s last name was incorrectly rendered as “Dunham.” His name was Michael Durham.

*****

Chavo Guerrero’s clip on the June 25, 2007, Raw

Also in the SLAM! review, Bixenspan wrote that I erred in stating that Chavo Guerrero’s remembrance of Benoit on the WWE website was different from the testimonial Guerrero did on Raw. I believe Bixenspan is correct: the clip transcribed by me on pages 117-18 of the book was not a web exclusive but simply a reposting of his Raw speech that night.

My source was Meltzer, but there could have been confusion in our exchange of emails on this point. In order to assess all this, Dave would have to add his explanation to mine here. He said nothing about the passage when he fact-checked the book.

Since Meltzer had reported that both Chavo Guerrero and William Regal either looked out of the ordinary or said things out of the ordinary on Raw, I sought the precise example for the former. (Regal’s example was crystal-clear: he said in his interview that Benoit was the best wrestler he’d ever faced, but otherwise wanted to reserve comment.) I came across a Chavo clip that had been posted at wwe.com. I mentioned to Meltzer that it seemed straightforward – so I wondered if this was a web-exclusive clip recorded at a different time. Meltzer replied that yes, it was. Perhaps he misunderstood the question. Or perhaps Meltzer thought there was something subtle in Chavo’s clip that I missed. Or Meltzer’s report of Chavo’s withdrawn demeanor was based on something else entirely in the June 25, 2007, edition of Raw. Again, Dave would have to speak up to clarify that. But David Bixenspan was right in calling out this factual error.

*****

Scott James / Scott Armstrong

A reader complained that it was awkward and misleading for me to refer to Scott throughout the book as “Scott Armstrong,” after footnoting, in the first reference, without further explanation, that the police report called him “Scott James.”

I should have explained that Scott Armstrong is his wrestling name and Scott James is his real name. My sole intention here was to use throughout the name with which most readers were most familiar. I was not intending to imply that the authorities’ use of his legal name had any significance one way or the other.

*****

“Three Amigos”

A reader complained  that “Three Amigos” was the name of the late Eddie Guerrero’s finishing move (a series of suplexes) – not a term to describe the bond of Guerrero, Benoit, and Dean Malenko.

Mike Benoit, Chris’s father, was the source for the statement that Guerrero, Benoit, and Malenko privately called themselves the Three Amigos. I did not say, nor intend to say, that this was an official gimmick or group, such as the Four Horsemen.

Irv Muchnick