Chris Benoit

Those of us who grew up watching wrestling will remember, as we progress through the years, how our perspectives towards the great profession evolved while the constancy of our passion always remained. As children we cheered the on-screen heroes and jeered the villians, having no inkling of the backstage politics and manoeuvring which provides the world of professional wrestling with its charming ambiguities and intoxicating blends of fantasy and reality. As we grow up we acquire the lens of skepticism and begin to dissect the parodies, dramas and social critiques, or simply laugh our heads off at those priceless moments of wrestling ludicrity. To me, wrestling is such a lure because the squared circle represents a melting pot, where you throw in all of reality's burdens, conflicts and desires, project them onto outlandish human prototypes and resolve them via simple dichotomies of A versus B, as if righteousness or evil or sin or lust carried themselves in neat 300-pound packages. It is this grevious but intentional misunderstanding of wrestlers, and what they truly mean to the world inside and outside of the ring, that brings me such a bolt of pain and confusion upon hearing the news that Chris Benoit has died, bearing suspicion of murdering his wife and kids and commiting suicide thereafter. The accursed Vince McMahon death angle, the chilling no-show at Vengeance PPV, then the bombshell; another dastardly attempt by Fate to paint a portrait of connections out of human misery. If Benoit really carried that enormous emotional baggage around, finding little solace from his onscreen character and compelling himself to live out the Rabid Wolverine while suppressing the wretched soul beneath, should we who are still alive today move on with renewed respect for the great man and the business he has fought his entire life for, or should we come to turns with our endless tryst with professional wrestling, and come to realise that afterall, the squared circle is but a haunting microcosm of our hapless world?