Chris Benoit - Brain Damage
 

I'm not sure if anybody had reported this on here, but it looks like Benoit had some pretty bad brain damage at the time of the double murder/suicide a couple years back. It makes me wonder what guys with multiple concussions like Steve Young, or Troy Aikman are going to be like in their later years. Young suffered 7 concussions while Aikman had ten...scary.

Benoit's Brain Showed Severe Damage From Multiple Concussions, Doctor and Dad Say - ABC News

Probably not bad. Benoit was suffering concussions nightly. Every time he did his headbutt off the top rope it was another concussion. Add in the fact he apparently was taking GHB on a regular basis as well as steroids and he was a shell of a person.

I'd say he had to have had hundreds of concussions in his career without ever taking much time off. Much different then the 7 or 8 from Aikman and Young.

Things like organic brain damage really make me think about things like the soul. As a Christian, I beleive in a soul. But when you see something like brain damage fundamentally changing a person like it did to Benoit . . . it makes me wonder where there is room for said soul.

Who had the over/under for threadjack at 2 posts?

:)

It was actually 2 years ago yesterday.

Brain injuries are definitely not understood very well. But it seems like the extreme effects are still pretty selective. Young and Aikman had more advanced helmets and awareness of these issues then they had decades ago, and we don't see many old Packers from the 60s murdering their families (though we do have the occasional Mike Webster)

Personally, though, I think Benoit was just a weird, violent guy. If he hadn't been a good wrestler nobody would be giving him the benefit of the doubt about the brain injuries causing his actions. I also never understood the commonly cited claim (though not in that article), that Benoit had the brain of an "80-year old Alzhemier's patient". I've never heard of an 80-year old Alzhemier's patient who is able to live independently on the road, in a different city every night, and memorize lines, etc, with nobody noticing that he might be having a little issue with dementia) This isn't a guy who was put out to pasture and committed his crimes years later once he dropped out of society.

Not me. But, I'm not a very good gambler.

I'm confused, you do realize that this was very well known at the time, right? Or more accurately I guess, was a focal point of a lot of discussions about it at the time.

The former wrestler referenced in the article is Chris Nowinski, a Harvard graduate who had a short run with the WWE. He has worked quite a bit in recent years with the research group mentioned in the article, which is the same one that did similar examinations on former Eagle Andre Waters after his suicide and former Steeler Justin Strzelczyk after he died in a car crash after a high speed police chase. In both of those cases, they found similar evidence of CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) or Dementia Pugilistica, a condition named for & first noticed in boxers as far back as 1928.

Yeah, I'm aware of Nowinski. I read the article earlier today and talked about it with some of my old wrestling buddies, and none of them had a clue about the brain damage thing. I know there are a lot of former and current wrestling fans on here...so...

he didnt memorize many FWIW

I don't think anyone is saying concussions = killing your family over the weekend. I think it's just interesting (albeit not very surprising) that he had such a destroyed brain. It would be interesting to run some brain tests on guys like Mick Foley, or Terry Funk. Even younger guys who took some beatting in ECW like The Sandman, Sabu, and Raven.

More likely it would be scary than interesting.

Throw some chemical abuse in with the number of head shots some of those guys took (especially those who were contemporaries of Benoit like the ECW guys) and it's frightening to think what the inside of their head must look like.

I worry about a lot of the ECW guys, like Mahoney, Dreamer, Sandman, New Jack and Sabu. Taking metal chair shots full on without putting an arm up has to have devastating long term effects, not to mention the secondary impact to the head from some of the other bumps they took 2-3 times a week.

I'm going to take a shot in the dark here & guess that they would be considered much more "marks" than "smartmarks" (or "smarks"). I honestly can't imagine anybody who is part of the smarts not being able to do at least a very basic chapter & verse on the Benoit brain injury stuff.

When I say "old wrestling buddies" I mean buddies who used to watch the WWF when it was the WWF. Mid-late 80's up until the late 90's. Some dabbling in ECW before it tried to get too big too fast, but that's it, for the most part at least.

I don't think we've been into wrestling enough in the last decade to be considered any one of those things. We're just old wrestling fans without labels.

I'm sure those guys are going to at least some kind of memory/cognition issues soon (if they don't already). I don't expect any of them to murder their familes though. That's something else entirely.

Nah, you've got labels, you just don't realize it ;)

On a serious note, I don't think anybody expected Benoit to either.

On a lighter note, and really my very first thought when reading this, "I assume you're excluding New Jack from this statement" ;)

Haha. Well unfortunately I think New Jack is just a jail sentence/found doa waiting to happen. What would be an interesting topic of conversation...

Is New Jack more dangerous because he is a wrestler, or less dangerous? From all of the interviews I've seen done with him, he seems to be very drawn towards violence just in general. I wonder if the fact that he's had the "it's ok to be violent" avenue in his life that is professional wrestling has helped him, or only spurred it along.

A wrestler from the old days that comes to mind that seems to (at least publicly) have some glaring mental issues is The Sheik.

He has substance abuse issues, for sure. I've never been able to figure out though, if the crazy rambling thing was a gimmick. I mean that's the only reason he gets booked for stuff now.

You mean when it was actually good.

I don't think I've got any doubt society is better off because he found a legal outlet for some of his tendencies.

I actually kind of sort of know several people who know him and have had this conversation with them. They were pretty well unanimous that he's so naturally violent that he borders on being batshit crazy.

Exactly. Unfortunately all of my professional interests haved gone to crap since the late 90's. The Orioles, the 49ers, and Pro Wrestling.

Thank god for women, video games, career advancement, and pron. Not in that particular order either.

New Jack has a reality show he's shopping where he does his bounty hunting in the ghetto. Apparently people who have seen it say it's utterly fascinating and centers around he and his Jewish lawyer. They say it's hilarious yet frightening.

Guys, dunno if you realize or not, but "The Sheik" and "Iron Sheik" are two entirely different people. Seems like your talking about the iron variety of it, but im not sure. Just wanted to point that out.

Also, the level of discource in any modern tragedy is really low right now. It seems all tragedy is more social porn than anything, and the main focus is always to find a majority-accepted culprit to blame, i.e. wrestling in Benoit's case.

It goes beyond that too. School shootings = video games, rapes = porn, it's always there. There might be a social function to it, help people get closure or whatnot - but that also says a lot about our society. You really shouldnt need closure if people you didnt know die. It also might just be our general interest in social porn. I dont know.

Shit man, Benoit was a fucked up individual. Thats the end of it. It almost makes me angry that people try to blame this amount of fucked-uppedness on brain damage. A shitload of people have concussions. Its just a social scapegoat to make people somehow feel better, as they have someone to blame.

I do realize im not really adding to the conversation, just maybe thinking if a lot of you guys see it the same way.

Of course, if he hadn't been a good wrestler he wouldn't have had the brain injuries.

Personally, I don't think discussing brain injuries to athletes is about accessing blame but more about preventing it from happening again. At least, that's what I hope it is about.

As far as killing your family, no not all brain injuries are going to cause this; sometimes they kill themselves, become homeless, get dementia ect. So far, all scary stuff and not stuff I'd like to see people suffer with. I'm not sure of a good way to protect wrestling from brain injuries and still keep the sport popular though. That's a real discussion.

At the risk of geeking out too much, the Iron Sheik has far surpassed the national fame (even mainstream fame) of the original Sheik. In fact, Ed Farhat is usually referred to as the "Original Sheik", to distinguish from the more famous Sheik. So I think "The Sheik" is an acceptable short form for The Iron Sheik.

Probably becomes an age/era thing. Safe to say I'm above the knowledge curve of the average person, at least around the curve for the average middle-aged smartmark, but I'll use the context to figure out which one is being referred to with the short form. I'd probably opt for the longer version in a discussion about wrestlers in general but be fine with the shorter form if the context is TIS's era.

I thought it was Ed Farhat at first too and I guess it is an age thing, then I realized you were talking present tense and Farhat is dead. He will always the "The Shiek" to me though, few could generate pure crowd heat like that man.

I know it's been mentioned, but you do realize that on the Opie and Anthony show, The Iron Sheik pissed himself during the interview and had no idea. I'll spare you the picture.