Muchnick, Irvin. Chris & Nancy: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death, The Ultimate Historical Edition. ECW Books, 2021. Pp. 280. $26.95 CAD paperback.

Reviewed by Łukasz Muniowski

Chris Benoit was my favorite wrestler.

Chris Benoit murdered his wife and son, and then took his own life.

These two truths seem impossible to reconcile, with the former overshadowing the latter. Fond memories of the “Canadian Crippler” beating bigger and stronger opponents in the ring fade in light of what happened during the last weekend of June 2007. Irvin Muchnick’s book, Chris & Nancy: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death, softens the blow, exposing Benoit as an addict, control freak and, at least at times, chauvinist. The author explains the wrestler’s actions through the culture of the WWE, which he puts in the context of the 2016 US presidential election. The reason? The close ties between the WWE’s Vince and Linda McMahon and Donald Trump; Linda McMahon remains a prominent figure in the Republican Party.

The biggest bombshell when the book originally came out (2009) was that the WWE knew that Benoit killed his family before airing a tribute to him. Wrestlers were shown crying on the screen and giving personal testimonies about their relationship with Chris Benoit. A day later, McMahon apologized, explaining he did not know the whole story and promising to never again mention the wrestler’s name during official programming. Muchnik gives exhaustive evidence to support his accusation, which makes Chris & Nancy a book about the investigation and the immediate consequences of the murders, rather than about the couple, whose relationship is presented as unhappy, fragile and, for lack of a better word, toxic, from the very start.

Benoit was a single-minded individual, obsessed with wrestling since the age of 13. If the topic of conversation did not concern wrestling, he zoned out. In order to make it in wrestling, the 5-foot-8 Canadian “gassed himself to the gills on steroids, because if a small man could find a small opening in the big time, it was still just a small opening, and you still needed to meet a minimum size threshold” (p. 58). Another thing that Muchnick exposes is the way wrestlers were conditioned to protect the business. In the early days, it was through kayfabe, sticking to the characters they were portraying in the ring. But Muchnick mentions the habit of flushing the performance enhancing drugs of a dead wrestler as something that came as second nature to the co-workers who found Benoit. In Benoit’s case, the drugs were left in the open, as if the wrestler wanted the people to see what one of the top performers needed to be on just to stay on that level. 

As proven by Benoit’s case, it was not sustainable. So as much as I loved to watch Benoit perform, learning about the drugs that he used––soma, hydrocodone, Xanax, Ambien, naproxen, Zoloft––to soften the effects of the PEDs on his mood, I have to say it was not worth it. And everybody involved in the case would probably say the same. 

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Łukasz Muniowski recieved his Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of Warsaw. He is the author of Three-Pointer! A 40-Year NBA History (McFarland, 2020), Narrating the NBA: Representations of Leading Players after the Michael Jordan Era (Lexington, 2021),and The Sixth Man: A History of the NBA Off the Bench (McFarland, 2021).