By Irvin Muchnick
Your humble blogger calls ’em as he sees ’em. Competing author or not, I’m here to tell you that the new book by Matthew Randazzo V, Ring of Hell: The Story of Chris Benoit & the Fall of the Pro Wrestling Industry, is a worthy addition to Benoit literature. Above all, Randazzo isn’t afraid to let it fly. I respect that.
Randazzo’s methods and content are imperfect, but I want to emphasize what I enjoyed about and learned from Ring of Hell. He is a good writer who tells a good story. Personally, I favor a different version of the story and prefer to tell it in a different way. But for readers who want to delve into pro wrestling history’s biggest mainstream bombshell, there’s no reason why this title and my own forthcoming Chris and Nancy: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death (scheduled to be published in 2009 by ECW Press) can’t rest side by side on the shelf labeled “Books on how sports entertainment pathology intersects with late-empire culture.”
Ring of Hell is a shaggy dog of a book. Randazzo (or at least his publisher, which gave him poor editorial support) wanted to rush to print with the first fairly comprehensive Benoit narrative. You don’t get the impression that Randazzo is defensive about the resulting limitations, any more than he shies away from stepping on Triple H’s toes. Where there’s an insight or a description that can be rendered novelistically, Randazzo brings it. Where there’s dish for the sake of dish, he shovels the prose like manure. He pulls off this concoction thanks to the ear of a wiseguy – his bloodlines are New Orleans Mafia – and the fanaticism of a hardcore.
The latter trait both energizes and weakens the portrait of Benoit, whose true (and admittedly elusive) personality is, in my opinion, never allowed to breathe. Every biographical nugget must serve an agenda. Thus, if Chris once threatened to deliberately break both his hands on camera if forced to participate in one of those ludicrous WCW storylines, it’s treated as a signature anecdote, flat proof that he was crazy from the get-go. Never mind that wrestlers – like people in all walks of life – regularly vent. Never mind that Benoit, in the end, wasn’t forced to decide whether to execute his plan to bust up those particular bones. He did most of his damage from the neck up.
Randazzo rolls out encyclopedic evidence of the degradations Benoit endured: the Hart Dungeon, the Japanese dojo, the American promoters who rewarded his talent too slowly and for the wrong reasons. In turn, Benoit became an especially sadistic practitioner of inside “ribs,” the author summarily concludes. (Randazzo never theorizes when he can declaim.) Documented examples of this streak are in small supply; further, I think they misread this wrestler’s inner torture. The key to Benoit isn’t that he was a neurotic worshipper of Dynamite Kid. The key is that he was a Tom Billingtonesque performer overlaid with fatal and undeveloped soft-spokenness and sensitivity. Cursed with an inability to be a thoroughgoing coward and bully, he couldn’t protect himself with a coating of bluster. Something drove Benoit, rather, to be simultaneously quiet and (until that horrendous weekend in Georgia) “merely” self-destructive.
Drugs? Concussions? The pressures of backstage politics, a grueling schedule, and a fantasy existence? An unraveling family life? Some mysterious powder-keg “it” factor embedded in his character? Check, check, check, check, check. Randazzo is smart enough not to play favorites among causes – all are symptoms of a sick industry that is both too big for its britches and, paradoxically, too disreputable to be regulated. (By the way, what is this “fall of the pro wrestling industry” nonsense? WWE had record revenues for the 12-month period from June ’07 to June ’08 and is in full transcontinental launch.)
Ring of Hell could have tried to say something mildly prescriptive, if Randazzo weren’t too busy painting wrestling as uniquely evil, which it is not. I’m reminded of the line in The Godfather, when Michael Corleone says to his fiancée, “Now who’s being naïve?”
Though Randazzo’s account is wildly unbalanced, the hardcores can be counted on to be more forgiving of him than they are of ironically detached observers, who get nitpitcked. Randazzo genuflects at the altar of dirt sheets, Internet boards, and “shoot interviews.” He knows how to pit one bullshitter against another, then take the side of the bullshitter who gives him the best access. His overreliance on disgruntled ex-WWE writers, even when their main testimony consists of irrelevant, rambling, score-settling subplots, is comical.
I try not to get caught up in the fool’s errand of separating the carny wheat from the carny chaff – what I like to call the Superstar Billy Graham problem. Many years ago, Graham was one of the main sources for my People magazine expose of Hulk Hogan’s steroid abuse. Last summer, during the Benoit media frenzy, I noticed that the Superstar was still hanging in there. He said some useful things about his own cautionary tale in relation to the tragedy du jour, but he also couldn’t resist adding that he had never, ever lied about anything related to steroids or his personal responsibility for ingesting them. Well, never “except for one brief period when I filed a fictitious lawsuit against WWF.”
I find such mind-bending navel-gazing more prosaic and less charming than people like Randazzo do. So shoot me. Specific knowledge of the subject is important. So is an appreciation of its role in the dance of corporate forces in 21st century America. Wall Street likes its bottom lines sweet, no questions asked. Politicians take their donations a la carte and reciprocate when it counts. Good ole boy district attorneys are mesmerized by TV cameras and the slickest hocus-pocus WWE’s money can buy.
Ring of Hell gives us, in three dimensions, Chris and Nancy and Eddy and Kevin and a cast of hundreds. To the extent that it climaxes with a double murder-suicide, it does not, however, give us classic true crime. Randazzo’s deadline didn’t afford the time to process the criminal investigation, and narrative liberties take up the slack. Who knows which rooms of his mansion Benoit wandered through on June 23-24, 2007, and anyway, what difference does it make? On WWE’s clean-up operation, the main takeaway is that the Raw tribute show had to be staged in an empty arena in Corpus Christi because – as one anonymous discussion board bloviator trenchantly commented – hypocrisy-sniffing live fans would have rendered the spectacle not only revolting but, worse, untenable.
Yes. Or maybe Vince McMahon, in the course of counting his hundreds of millions, has learned to book a show with his gut and doesn’t give a rat’s ass what DamianSuplex_69 thinks it means.
Despite these flaws, Ring of Hell is an admirable, at times dazzling, penetration of a nearly impenetrable netherworld. Congratulations, Matt Randazzo.
