I feel you trust me. But it falls under the "this is the life you chose" theory. I want to defend him as a fan because of how much I love his work but I can't get around the idea that he chose this profession and was ultimately responsible for what he did that night.
Depends on if u meant "kayfabe" or real life thread wise tho.
Yeah I get what you mean but still....I mean he did what he did because his brains were fukked up, he wasn't sane...I don't think that Benoit knew the he would've ended up being so mentally unstable that he would spazz and kill his family. That isn't really common, even in the wrestling world.
When I think scumbag, I think about guys that are selfish, conniving backstabbers that will do anything for their own gain, or are just straight up a$$holes.
As for the last part there, kayfabe or real life, it doesn't matter.
This is always the complicated thing about the Benoit murders...just what or who's really to blame for what happened there?
I know that this is a "who, individually, is the biggest scumbag in wrestling" question, but what happened with Benoit and his family, and the way that if affected wrestling is of such magnitude that it really seems a bit short-sighted to simply confine it to the bounds of a "Chris Benoit was/was not a reprehensible a$$hole" narrative.
Benoit murdered his family. Whether it was in a fit of insanity or not, it was a very deliberate and calculated set of murders, as well as a deliberate and calculated suicide. This much, we know. But do we just call him a reprehensible murderer who chose his own path, or do we look at what the path needlessly did to him?
Yes, Benoit took a crazy amount of unnecessary risks, even for a wrestler (this is part of the reason why it's imperative to watch Benoit matches: as much for what
not to do as for what to do in a ring). And he must take responsibility for what happened to his body to some extent, as he did not have to take all of the idiotic risks that he took in order cement his place in wrestling history (unprotected chair shots, cringe-inducing diving headbutts, etc.).
And yet, how much of what happened to him happens without WWE's relentless schedule, without the stigma placed on wrestlers (until after the Benoit murders, to an extent) to be as aesthetically huge as possible, without the "keep pushing through any and everything" mentality that pro wrestling breeds? I would almost say that Benoit's case is so exceptional, as both the wrestler and his environment are implicated in his horrendous crime, that he should be rendered exempt from the simple judgments that mark someone like an Ian Rotten (true scum of the Earth, and I do not use that term lightly). If for no other reason than the fact that, for a very brief second, wrestling had to examine what it was in light of the Benoit murders, as well as for the fact that we are still seeing wrestling affected by the Benoit murders to this day (the true extent of those effects notwithstanding), Benoit should be beyond something so simplistic as a "scumbag" label.
It just seems reductive to pin the whole thing to a single concept, a single word, because in reality what happened to Benoit involves a whole lot more than just what Benoit did that weekend.
(And, honestly, this is the reason why I'm so against WWE erasing him from history in the way that they have: because in denying his existence, they're also denying that WWE and the way in which the wrestling business runs can bear any responsibility for what happened to him and his family. It's ridiculously disingenuous, in my opinion, refuted by the small changes they've made to their workings since his death.)
