A real U-turn

So the sad Chris Benoit story really took a turn for the worst as the rumblings of a murder-suicide were indeed true and very disturbing. And while the attention now turns to potential "roid rage," it is very interesting to see how the WWE had to switch gears after Monday's tribute show.

As mentioned before, the televised tribute shows for Eddie Guerrero, Owen Hart and Brian Pillman had a slight bit of planning. But more to the point, there wasn't the same mystery over their deaths -- Pillman and Guerrero had heart attacks in their hotel rooms, while Owen had the tragic in-ring accident. At the time the WWE found out about Benoit's death, it was assumed a similar tribute would be in order and could make good use of their extensive tape library. Unfortunately as the evening unfolded, the show turned out to be a bad idea given the news, although in some ways, you did want to have closure on his career.

So the ECW show did go on, with Vince McMahon apologizing once again for how it approached death. But probably once and for all, McMahon's "death" storyline will be trashed for good.

The more interesting aspect of this is how the WWE's Web site has been handling this story. It was obviously the first to the story, although they played it very gingerly for a while, dedicating as much time to tributes and career retrospectives as the news itself. But as the news unfolded, it became a primary go-to source for some of the more grisly details. More telling, all those retrospectives are gone. His WWE.com bio is gone, no merchandise available. The only main reference to him now is the story about his death, although the WWE can't completely delete all history related to him (like it used to do when failing to acknowledge past wrestlers' history in rival promotions for years).

I guess at this point, the show will go on up in Stamford. And unfortunately, Benoit will indeed go down in even worse infamy than almost all the wrestlers who died too soon.