Originally Posted by Jon Ronson (extract)
"It was a really bad idea in terms of brain trauma," he says. "Chris always wanted it to look realistic. He was a very tough individual. He never wanted to take a day off." He pauses. "But it was crazy. The audience can't tell the difference between a blow to the back and a blow to the front. They can't tell if you're hurt or not. I think Chris forgot it's supposed to be a performance."
And, Nowinski believes, these rare blows to the back of the head were the culprits. In the weeks before Benoit killed his family, he says, "there were signs of strange behaviour. He was depressed, becoming paranoid. These are issues we've seen in other athletes who've suffered head traumas."
Nowinski is the author of a book, Head Games, that details stories of professional football players who endured head traumas and subsequently behaved erratically before eventually committing suicide. The NFL player Andre Waters received successive concussions, fell into a depression, and shot himself in the head at his home in Florida. Then there was Justin Strzelczyk, a lineman for the Pittsburgh Steelers, who suffered a series of concussions, retired, spiralled downwards, complained of depression and began hearing voices from "the evil ones". One morning in September 2004 the police spotted him driving at 100mph on the wrong side of a toll road in New York. They gave chase. He crashed into a truck carrying acid and died instantly.
And now there is Chris Benoit. Julian Bailes, a neuropathologist at West Virginia University, studied Benoit's brain tissue and concluded that it "was so severely damaged, it resembled the brain of an 85-year-old Alzheimer's patient". The damage was apparently very similar to that seen in the brain tissue of Waters and Strzelczyk. WWE has dismissed Nowinski's claims as "speculative".
