I’ve received numerous email responses (at [email protected]) to my piece at SLAM! Wrestling, “The unbearable ambiguity of Benoit.” (The link is http://slam.canoe.ca/Slam/Wrestling/GuestColumn/2008/12/02/7605856.html; the full text will be posted at this blog when it cycles off the SLAM! front page.)
Much of the feedback is thoughtful. Some of it reinforces unfortunate stereotypes of wrestling fans.
For example, one correspondent fed me a tip about early knowledge of the Benoit family deaths on Sunday that is so far high-and-outside that I’m not going to reproduce it. The anonymous emailer (easily ID’d as a fan and self-styled indy wrestler in Ohio) did not reply to my invitation to discuss the matter on the phone.
More interestingly, someone told me of Sunday discussion at a particular board of Chris’s absence from the pay-per-view show: “There was no grim talk at all, and I think many well wishers at the point we heard his wife ‘Woman’ was sick and throwing up blood.”
This is either a lead or a mistaken memory on the part of the correspondent, as there were not, so far as I know, public references to Chris’s Saturday cover story (in various phone conversations) until the Tuesday publication of the first version of WWE,com’s timeline. See “WWE Is the Source for BOTH Benoit Timelines,” October 1, http://muchnick.net/babylon/2008/10/01/wwe-is-the-source-for-both-benoit-timelines/.
So I will be trying to drill into the history of that board in particular.
As always, I thank SLAM! producer and wrestling author extraordinaire Greg Oliver for giving me the real estate for my minority report. Thanks, also, to Jason Powell of PROWRESTLING.NET for publicizing the story.
Irv Muchnick