Randazzo shines glaring light on wrestling culture

The latest pro wrestling book to hit the shelves, "Ring of Hell: The Story of Chris Benoit & The Fall of the Pro Wrestling Industry," is one sure to ruffle some feathers. It's an extremely hard-hitting look at a complex industry in which performers die young, promoters get rich and broken families are the norm.

Unlike some other books of its genre, however, Matthew Randazzo's offering peels back the deeper layers of a nearly impenetrable business that the author describes as its dysfunctional, sadistic underbelly. The book is compelling and controversial, no doubt, and if you're a devotee, it probably will make you cringe at the very least and even question your sanity for being a follower.

Randazzo himself claims to be a longtime fan, but you'll be hard-pressed to find any remotely sympathetic characters in this book. "Ring of Hell" is a heavy-handed indictment of the wrestling business, and the author pulls no punches about it. But he leaves it up to the reader to make his own judgment concerning the book's more startling and scandalous revelations.

Fans of the wrestling business will experience real shock and awe with this knockdown, drag-out page-turner. If the title of the book isn't enough to hook you, the ominous opening quote from the central character surely should do the trick.

"The world (of wrestling) doesn't push you to the depths of darkness. You do. That drives me nuts ... It's not the world of wrestling that drove (troubled wrestlers) to alcohol, the world of wrestling that drove them to drugs. You do that to yourself." — Chris Benoit

The book, appropriately enough, was released on the one-year anniversary of the biggest and most tragic story ever to hit the wrestling business. The industry was shaken like never before when Benoit went on a gruesome weekend killing spree that claimed the lives of his wife, his 7-year-old son and himself.

Randazzo paints a sick and destructive picture of an industry he contends turned Benoit, a seemingly normal and kind family man with unimpeachable character, into what is described as "a brain-damaged, ogre-faced drug addict." The 5-8 Benoit, a small man in a big man's world, was willing to sacrifice his health and his life for a cheap pop. And, if mangling and mutilating his body was the price for fame, so be it. Life without wrestling, it seemed, was no life at all for a man like Chris Benoit.

Randazzo describes in great detail Benoit's obsession with childhood hero "Dynamite Kid" Tom Billington, a performer Bret Hart once called, "pound for pound, the greatest wrestler that ever lived."

While he may have been one of the greats in the ring, the Dynamite Kid was anything but outside of it.

Racked with pain at an early age, Billington compensated by abusing his colleagues, becoming a bully who would make examples out of any weak personality in the locker room. He was an acrobatic high-flyer who thrilled crowds with his daredevil style and risky moves, but lacking the size of a big-money star, he pumped his body with steroids and speed, his weight ballooning from 170 pounds to more than 250.

Benoit was one of the very few wrestlers the roid-raging Billington showed the slightest bit of kindness to. In tribute to Billington, Benoit made his pro debut at age 18 as "Dynamite" Chris Benoit in Stu Hart's Stampede Wrestling promotion, and even began using some of the Kid's trademark moves such as the diving head butt and snap suplex.

It was Billington's influences that helped transform Benoit from an undersized, shy youngster into a driven performer and backstage disciplinarian. Like his wrestling idol, Benoit used abundant amounts of steroids and human growth hormone to enhance his body, embracing a lifestyle of self-destruction in a desperate attempt to overcome his size limitations. Billington's posterior was so scarred from his injections of huge dosages of horse steroids, Randazzo writes, that it could bend a normal syringe without breaking the skin.

The author relates the story that Billington was so disliked that Jacques Rougeau had the Montreal Mafia put out a contract on his life to drive him out of the WWF.

Years of nasty bumps, drug and steroid abuse eventually crippled Billington's career and personal life. His ex-wife Michelle, claimed he once held a shotgun to her head for hours, although Billington later maintained it wasn't loaded. The abuse became so bad that in 1991, while six months pregnant with their third child, she gave Billington a one-way ticket back to his native England.

Abandoned by his family and the business, he returned home a broken man, later losing the use of one of his legs "after competing in human cockfights held in the garages of gamblers." At age 49, destitute and confined to a wheelchair, he is now a footnote in a tragic chapter of wrestling history.

Randazzo also delves into possible reasons behind Benoit's catastrophic mental and physical breakdown, and questions why the pro wrestling lifestyle comes with an occupational mortality rate worse than that of drug dealers.

Benoit is unflatteringly portrayed as a self-mutilating wrestling junkie who always put business first, thereby earning the respect and admiration of his colleagues, and a favorite of wrestling's hardcore following that struggled to reconcile, in the wake of his grisly murders, that he had been such a "good worker" but apparently such a bad person.

The "Canadian Crippler," with his no-nonsense approach to wrestling and his tunnel-visioned, all-consuming love for the business, is depicted, perhaps unfairly, as a sadist to young wrestlers and, more accurately, as a maso-chist to himself. Stunted both physically and emotionally, the real Chris Benoit popped pills, shot up steroids and sacrificed his health to make a living in the ultimate con game, according to the book.

It was better to risk death than to miss dates, as Benoit proved in 2001, when he wrestled for three weeks with partial paralysis and a broken neck. What Benoit perceived as a noble calling became an unbridled and unhealthy passion.

It's no surprise that Benoit's close circle of friends, for the most part, ultimately met tragic ends in their obsessive attempts to achieve — and hold on to — success in the business. Benoit watched colleagues like the talented but out-of-control Brian Pillman and the good-natured, kind-hearted Eddie Guerrero suffer premature deaths after attempting to push their bodies harder than physically possible. Benoit, however, learned no lessons. And while the book revolves around Benoit and his addiction to a career that ultimately led to tragedy, it covers a lot more ground than just his story.

Hilarious at points, depressing at times and shockingly salacious, "Ring of Hell" ($25.95, Phoenix Books) goes behind the curtain of a secretive world that is portrayed as a psychotic, bizarre subculture. The intense, ruthlessly compelling 341-page read is well-written and well-researched, as Randazzo scoured through volumes of newsletters, books, transcripts and shoot videos, in addition to conducting countless interviews with former WWE writers, some of whom obviously had left the company with bridges burning behind them.

While the narrative provides the reader with some level of backstage access, that inside look should be tempered for the sake of fairness and balance, since most of the highly-placed sources seem more than willing to dish on their former employer.

At points, the book comes across as a true crime story, which shouldn't be too surprising since Randazzo, the son of two corporate attorneys, was born to one of New Orleans' oldest and most colorful Sicilian families and has expertise in organized crime and political corruption.

It's that background that gives Randazzo a unique perspective on his revealing take on a mob-run Japanese wrestling industry in which verbal and sexual abuse run rampant, and where beatings in its "hell camp" training regimens were so brutal and severe that sometimes they were fatal.

It was in Japan's dojo system during the '80s, the author theorizes, that Benoit evolved from tortured trainee to backstage bully. Benoit was, in fact, the product of warped and twisted training grounds such as the infamous Hart family Dungeon in Canada and the Japanese dojos. It was a demeaning, nightmarish system designed to reward the strong and break the weak.

A virtual outsider with no vested interest in the business he's writing about, Randazzo plays no favorites, and very few main characters escape the wrath of his poisonous pen.

He describes old-school wrestling star and former WCW boss Ole Anderson as a cruel and close-minded ogre who "made Bill Watts look like Barack Obama." And those were his good points.

Even the charismatic Dusty Rhodes, who also once ran the now-defunct WCW, isn't spared. Rhodes, now part of WWE's creative team, is described as "morbidly obese, boring in the ring, and ugly as an inbred pig farmer, but he was one hell of an interview, a lisping, jive-dropping, yarn-spinning BS artist who convinced the fans that he was the homely physical embodiment of the American Dream."

Randazzo's investigative expose is an engaging read that's bound to create controversy in wrestling circles. There are tales of sordid behavior, sexual improprieties, and 'dysfunctional and exploitative' work environments. The language is coarse and colorful, and the author takes no prisoners as he shines a glaring light on the culture of the wrestling industry and uncovers some hidden — and inconvenient — truths along the way.

--Old School Championship Wrestling will present a show tonight at Weekend's Pub, 428 Redbank Road, Goose Creek. Main event is former WWE star Al Snow vs. Malachi plus a tag-team tournament. Bell time is 6 p.m. Adult admission is $8; kids 12 and under $5. For more information, visit www.oscwonline.com or call 743-4800.

Reach Mike Mooneyham at (843) 937-5517 or mooneyham@postandcourier.com. For wrestling updates during the week, call The Post and Courier Info Line at (843) 937-6000, ext. 3090.