Funny as I was reading one of the dirt sheets and that Chris Nowinski had a talk with Benoit about the whole concussion thing and Benoit seemed to know something was going on with himself and asked to continue this conversation at a later date. Nowinski called Benoit shortly down the road and Benoit supposedly had no recollection of the conversation.
Yeah, Nowinski also contacted Mike Benoit
(Chris’s dad) after the “incident” to request permission to have tests performed on Chris’s brain. Nowinski and the elder Benoit became proponents of attributing Chris’s actions to Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, or CTE.
Nowinski sought to illustrate a connection between CTE and pro-wrestling, while Mike Benoit used it as a vehicle to
(attempt to) shift blame away from his son and place it instead on…Vince McMahon.
The flaws in Mike Benoit’s rhetoric should be readily obvious. Sure, we can probably link Chris’s CTE to injuries he sustained in wrestling, but Mike B. augmented this link into a non-sequitur, thinly-veiled attack on the WWE and the McMahon family…conveniently coinciding with Linda McMahon’s senate run.
Here’s a quote from Mike B.’s letter:
Another WWE wrestler, Andrew Martin, was 33 when he died. What did Andrew Martin have in common with my son? He was one of many of McMahon's former wrestlers who died prematurely, and he was the second wrestler to have his brain examined for signs of CTE after death. Martin had the same shocking brain damage as my son. The human skull is not designed to withstand and protect the brain from the abuse the McMahon's insisted their wrestlers endure. Yet, since the late '80s, these are the matches into which the McMahon's have pushed their talent.
News flash: wrestlers have been employing an increasingly “extreme” style of performing well before now, and in places besides the WWE.
Don’t forget that Chris Benoit spent a great deal of his pre-WWE career wrestling between the original WCW, ECW, and Japan - the latter two being notorious for their high impact styles.
Mike Benoit is either grasping at straws here, and/or was part of a smear campaign against the McMahon family. Regardless, it doesn’t change the fact that a woman
(no pun) and innocent child died at his hands.
