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Submitted by Leviathan on Tuesday, June 26, 2007 at 2:30 PM EST
 It’s late. You come home from a long day of working in ninety-degree weather. It’s not that you work hard or anything; it’s that you work at all. The clock says it’s after ten; and in the old days, after ten on a Monday night meant that you missed the first half of Raw. Without hitting the bathroom or rummaging through the fridge, you plop down in front of the television, thanking your favorite deity for your Digital Video Recorder and press the ON buttons for both the TV and the Cable box. After flipping through a few stations, because you know that your favorite Monday night obsession is already taped and taping – the red record light is on, you finger the remote over to the “saved programs” segment of your cable system. Raw should be absolutely sweet tonight because it’s going to be three hours. Tonight we’ll also learn whose DNA is it anyways? Even your girlfriend is going to watch. The Raw intro goes off and then... Chris Benoit is dead. Chris Benoit 1967 – 2007. A picture of Chris Benoit. He was forty years old. Dead. You handle the news like taking a botched piledriver. You handle the news like stomaching the entire cast and crew of a McDonalds menu. You handle the news like your best friend just died. You hit pause on the DVR and start making phone calls to your brother and your sister and your mother and your friends. Chris Benoit died. All the talking on the phone now done, you hit play again. There’s Vince McMahon. If there was a doubt in your head that Benoit wasn’t dead, Vince showing up and announcing he’s not dead, but Benoit is, erases it completely. Vince also tells us that Benoit’s wife and Benoit’s seven-year-old son are also dead. The plot sickens. Vince announces three hours of Raw dedicated to the life and times of Chris Benoit. You don’t really want to go through with this, but something inside you says you must. For the next three hours, you watch your favorite wrestlers talk about the excellence that Chris Benoit was in the ring, the man that Chris Benoit was to friends like Chavo and Edge, the great father that Chris Benoit was from Chavo and Stephanie McMahon. You watch and you cry with those who lost a man they actually knew. There is another track going on in your head though. This is the one that is jaded, made sick by a world that 9/11 can go down in. This track is telling you to listen between the lines. This track tells you that when families die, like Benoit’s did, that the man usually takes the life of his wife and child and then ends himself afterwards. You tell your girlfriend what your darker mind thinks and she simply negates it with a, “No way”. You continue to watch the Raw tribute to Chris Benoit and you keep hearing the same words and phrases: kept to himself, loner, locked himself away in his room, never knew what he was thinking, passionate, intense, locked his feelings away... You can’t help but add two and two together and think that maybe Chris Benoit, as rabid as he was in the ring, could be capable of murder if the crime was one of passion, a crime involving family. Your tears for Chris Benoit are drying up about now. Your girlfriend beckons you from the other room. You pause the Raw broadcast and head on into the other room. Your girlfriend tells you that Chris Benoit did it. He killed them. You reply, thickly and dryly, that maybe it’s time for bed as you head back to the TV and cable, turning both off. Your shadow, somewhat darker and larger, follows you down the hallway and into the bedroom.  You know, if you’re still here, God Bless you. I sure as hell don’t want to be here, writing this kind of column. I’m sure many of you don’t want to read it. While I could have gone ahead like none of this nightmare is happening, my other column idea just didn’t seem to fit in today’s wrestling world, a wrestling world where its heroes commit murder, where your all-time favorites kill their children. Each week, column writers get excitable as their day in the rotation approaches. This week, I had some sort of DVD column going. No, I wasn’t going to list my favorite DVD’s of all time. No, I was going to talk about who deserves a DVD in the first place. I might still write it one day. Who knows? The point is, I had an idea and then Raw happened. Then the news happened. Between the two, my column changed into what it is right now. When I learned of Benoit’s passing, I figured I could incorporate his incredible career into the DVD column quite seamlessly. In the ring, Benoit had no peers. Nearly every match he wrestled could be considered for DVD release. So, being a Monday night before my Tuesday due date, I began integrating more Benoit into my column idea. No problem. The world still smells of roses and looks like a fantastic boob job. Then the horrific thought that maybe Benoit ended his family’s life occurred to me. There was no news of it at this point of my thought process, but there was this nagging suspicion telling me that I probably wasn’t going to write the DVD or the Benoit Tribute column Tuesday. I knew I’d be writing something else. Here it is. I can’t tell you how very sorry I am to be writing it. I guess, like every column I write, I’d better get started. Welcome to the thirtieth column of On the Couch. It’s not going to be comfortable. It’s not going to be funny. It’s not happy. It’s column written during the worst of times. It’s just, to not write it is to let the shadow grow. I can’t let that happen.  You know, this is going to be a lot harder than I thought. Where to begin? When Eddie died, I didn’t feel this bad. I enjoyed Eddie Guerrero’s work. I loved his character. Eddie was great. He was never on my top five list of all-time favorites though. Chris Benoit was. Sometimes I’ve even considered Benoit my favorite wrestler ever. Eddie made me sad. Benoit is making me miserable in ways I couldn’t have fathomed two days ago. He was weak... I think I loved Benoit’s work more than others because he took a small frame, an off kilter face, a thinning hairline, and a missing tooth farther than anyone dared imagine. Chris packed muscles into his body that most of us don’t even have. He studied his craft to the point where he knew more than most. If he’d ever learned to talk on the mic, we’d all be wearing his clothes right now. He snapped... If you’re somebody like The Rock, you use maybe 60 percent of who you are in the ring and at a WWE show. You’re all natural, charisma and athletics and “People’s Eyebrow”. Benoit had none of that. Benoit used 100 percent of himself plus. That’s what made him so damned good. You were watching perfection of self-perfection in Chris Benoit. He used everything he was and everything he had and everything he learned to make under six foot believable when facing other “Heavyweights” in the ring. He overachieved because of who he was, not because bookers, on a whim, booked him to look credible against larger opponents. He took his own life... If I look back over the years, some of my favorite wrestling memories are of Chris Benoit in the ring. The series of matches against Kurt Angle over the Olympic Medals showcased both superstar’s prowess in the ring. The mat work involved was simply incredible with all the holds and reversals. Angle and Benoit will go down in history as two of the most intense in-ring competitors to ever lace up their boots. He was wound too tightly... Austin himself mentioned another of my favorite wrestling matches as one of his favorite matches, this one pitting Benoit against Steve Austin for the Heavyweight Title in Benoit’s hometown. If you remember this match, it’s the one where Benoit gave Austin ten German suplexes in a row and nearly beat Austin that night. This is probably the single best match ever given away on free TV. He murdered his wife... And how damned good was Benoit at applying that Crossface out of nowhere? How many times did we witness him reversing someone’s finisher into the “Crippler” Crossface out of thin air? In the ring, Chris Benoit could do no wrong. He was simply the best. He killed his seven-year-old son... For that man, the master ring technician... I shed a tear or two. It’s funny how close we come to these wrestlers over the years without ever really knowing them. We laugh with them. We get mad with them, sometimes at them. We cheer and boo them. We’re sad when they retire and we cry when they die. They’re friends we never talk to, but they’re certainly part of our journey through life. I can’t forgive him... No, I can’t forget and I can’t forgive. I might be able to understand a crime of passion against a wife or husband if they’re caught in the middle of the sex act with another partner. That might make a little sense to me. I can see the black before the rage and the aftermath of such an event, sure. What I can’t understand, or get my head around is ending the life of your little boy. He was seven! My mind keeps repeating, he was seven, seven, he was seven! I’m not saying that I could get over him murdering his wife or just offing himself either; but the thing that gave me nightmares last night, the thing that kept me awake when I wasn’t screaming in my sleep was – he was seven, seven, seven, he was just seven-years-old. When I came to bed last night, I started bawling. I couldn’t help it. Sure, I shed a tear or two for Chris Benoit, when it was just Benoit that died and possible robbers/sick fans killed him and his family. When I found out later that Chris killed his wife and his child, I shut down for a few minutes before bed. My suspicions were true and I was angry that I was right when I never wanted to be more wrong in my life. I hit the bed and just let go of all that blackness put in me by the night’s events. I cried the sorrowful way a man cries, with my emotions coming up as tears from that down in the darkness place of male feelings. I cried because I am a man and I am a father. My hero, a murderer... I live in a world where my former heroes are capable of murder. Benoit was a hero of mine. I believed in him. I believed him to be a good man, a passionate man, a man of excellence in character and will. It turned out, I believed in a killer of women and children. I believed him to be strong, not weak like the Benoit that took his own life after ending the lives of his immediate family. As a wrestling fan, much of my wrestling library is now painted black. I can’t watch it anymore. The three-way where Benoit won the title? Great match, but I can’t stomach watching a guy who killed his son. The Royal Rumble where Benoit miraculously manhandled Big Show out of the ring? Black. Gone. Any Benoit match is now tainted by one word, “murderer”. A twenty plus year history of wrestling is now off-limits to me. I can’t watch it anymore. So many gaps now. So much lost history. Years of Royal Rumbles possibly ruined by one entrant, Chris Benoit. Am I honestly supposed to overcome such a thing? Can you? Can you sit down and watch a murderer wrestle? If you can, maybe you should look at Daniel’s face again. I wonder, as I write this, if wrestling itself is ruined for me. I question if I can get past this. I question if I want to ever write a wrestling column again. It all seems so pointless right now. I can only think of one good thing and it’s really just another horrible thing. What follows is all I’ve got. At least the wrestlers won’t be pulling off crossfaces and wearing CB armbands for the next year. The truth of the matter is that there has never been a darker day in sports entertainment history. The whole wrestling world is black. I keep thinking about all the wrestlers who spoke Monday night, talking about how they really knew Chris Benoit; and I fear that the newfound knowledge that they knew a murderer instead of that great guy in their hearts will damage them in some way other deaths in the world of wrestling never could. I think about the fans across the globe considering the death of Chris Benoit and his family today, all trying to get a grip on Chris Benoit the murderer instead of Chris Benoit, the best technical wrestler ever to lace up his boots. Even if he no longer wrestles in a ring, Chris Benoit is now that shadow that lurks behind everything wrestling. Chris Benoit’s lasts acts on earth cast shadows taller than our souls. These shadows fall upon the hearts and minds of every wrestling fan in the world. They’re thick. They’re wicked black and they threaten to remake our world without heroes. These shadows seek to deprive us of the faith we need to simply be a fan, to believe in something or someone beyond the tactile, beyond ourselves. Only time will illuminate and wither that blackness, that shadow that now seems to cling to every pore of every wrestling fan in the world. Benoit’s last days on earth are such murky and vile occurrences that I wonder if any of us has the patience for time to cleanse this blackness from our consciousnesses. I might not have the patience either. I know it’s only been two days now, but I’m begging someone to turn on the bright lights and cast those mean old shadows aside.  As you can see, there is no Anxiety&Depression segment this week. I think we covered both of those heavy hitters in the main topic of the column, don’t you? I don’t think anything else could be as depressing as recent events. I only have one prescription for all of us still surviving the day after the Benoit family double-homicide, suicide. I want all of us to somehow get better. I want us to get over this and get back to enjoying the fake world of wrestling – the one where people don’t really die and everyone laughs and cries because they want to, not because they have to or lack the ability to stop themselves. I have an incredibly small, lingering hope that this is all due to bad police investigation, that Chris didn’t do the deed and that Chris can somehow die the hero’s death. I really wish this were the case. As always, thanks for taking the time to read, On the Couch. I know this isn’t the kind of couch you wanted to sit on today. I understand. Barring anymore deaths or homicides next week, or the week after, the Couch will return to it’s previously scheduled programming, hopefully something lighter fare than this one. You can reach me at LeviathansCouch@aol.com . Until the next time we do this... *NEW GALLERY* AMAZING!! More Uncensored Kelly Kelly Bikini Photos! Very Rare!
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