Three years later, both men are dead. Guerrero succumbed to heart disease on November 13, 2005. Benoit, however, appears to have taken not only his own life, but those of his wife and 7-year-old son. All three were found dead in their Fayetteville, Georgia home on June 25, 2007.

How could this have happened to two men who were celebrating the zenith of their professional lives less than 40 months ago?

There’s a few reasons I feel compelled to write about this. In the past, I’ve labeled myself an “intellectual redneck”– the rare (I would believe, anyway) kind of person who enjoys both Shakespearean sonnets and professional wrestling, and the whole continuum of entertainment pursuits inbetween. I watched pro wrestling– now euphemized as “sports entertainment,” to acknowledge its scripted, dramatized nature– for many years. I was entertained by it, the same way many a housewife is entertained by Days of Our Lives, et. al.– it’s a male soap opera.

It was after WM20 that my interest waned, however, and I soon stopped watching. Most of my favorite wrestlers had left the company or were no longer actively performing, and I felt, like many, that the overall quality of the product had declined. When I heard the news of Guerrero’s death, I did watch the next broadcast, which was treated as a tribute show. Benoit appeared and broke down in tears on camera while talking about his lost friend. It was obvious this was not acting. If you had followed their careers, and the business, at all, your heart broke for him. It was clear Chris would never be the same.

But I never thought it would end like this. The business, and particularly its largest promotion, World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE, the former WWF)– which employed both men– should take a hard look inward. Yes, these were two troubled individuals, but what role did their profession play in their respective demises? A large one, I feel.

Guerrero fought addictions to both alcohol and painkillers. That’s no surprise in wrestling. Many people have the impression that because wrestling is “fake,” there’s no real pain involved. That assumption is completely ludicrous. Although wrestlers cooperate during matches to try to minimize the risk of serious injury, they have to continually take– in their jargon– “bumps,” which basically means any kind of throw or other move which results in the wrestler’s body (or any part thereof) hitting the mat (or the ropes, turnbuckles, fence around the ring, or concrete floor). A large part of learning how to perform is how to properly fall– usually on your back, spread out so that the impact is dissipated over a large surface area. Injuries inevitably occur, sometimes as a result of a mistake (more often that not made by the wrestler performing the move, not the one taking the bump), and sometimes just in the course of the action. But even if one avoids serious injury, the grind of taking bumps will leave one’s body battered and bruised. Because wrestling has no “off-season,” and wrestlers must perform in matches on a near-daily basis– at least until they are major stars, at which point their load may be reduced to one or two matches a week– the physical grind leaves one in near-constant pain.

So many wrestlers get hooked on painkillers, and alcohol abuse naturally follows as well. These chemicals weakened Eddie’s heart and contributed to his death. But there is another class of controlled substances that are routinely used, and abused, by wrestlers, and many other professional athletes: anabolic steroids. Steroids help in building both muscle strength and mass, and also can help the body heal faster. All those factors are necessities in most sports, but even more pronounced in “sports entertainment,” where it’s a goal not only to be strong, but to look strong.

Unlike some of the musclebound freaks who resemble linebackers in tights, like Batista or the less freakish but still imposing Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Guerrero and especially Benoit were both well under 6 feet tall and weighed more in the 220-230 range. They were better known for their “technical wrestling” ability, in constrast to wrestlers who relied on displaying their raw strength to compensate for a very limited array of moves and relative slowness and stiffness. The epitome of this latter type of wrestler is the most famous one of all, Hulk Hogan. Hogan had very few moves in his arsenal and he was bad at “selling” the ones he could execute, but he became popular for his fervor, charisma, and power, especially when he body-slammed the near-500 lbs. Andre the Giant (though Andre certainly helped). But even at the height of his popularity, Hogan sought ways to help him keep that edge– and turned to steroids.

Quickly, steroids spread through the WWF locker room, from superstars like Hogan to mid-carders trying to improve their stock. But that had already occurred in the NFL and would quickly infiltrate Major League Baseball. The difference in the WWF was the complicity of the management, right up to the owner himself, Vince McMahon. In the late 80s, McMahon was implicated in purchasing and distributing steroids for his employees. The litigation went to federal court, but McMahon managed to wriggle off the hook and escape serious penalty. One would think he and his company would have been scared straight, but, although they worked hard to improve and protect their public image, the steroid abuse continued among wrestlers, whether or not it was officially sanctioned.

As mentioned before, when Guerrero and Benoit jumped off the sinking ship that was World Championship Wrestling (WCW) and signed contracts to join the WWF, they were best known as fast, technically-oriented wrestlers, not power guys. While they retained that style for the most part in their new organization, within a year they had visibly added muscular bulk to their frames. Anyone who watched regularly and attentively began to suspect they were “hitting the juice” to keep up. Steroids weren’t implicated in Guerrero’s heart failure, but they surely had a negative effect on his already impacted health.

Benoit was always known to be a little crazy– at least in the ring, if not legitimately. He visibly displayed and seemed to even be fueled by anger, leading him to perform masochistic maneuvers like diving headbutts off the top rope. If that anger was indeed an element of his personality, steroid use only served to exacerbate it. One way steroids commonly work is by boosting the body’s production and release of testosterone, the male hormone known to be tied to aggression. If Benoit was volatile by nature, he was certainly susceptible to “roid rage.”

But could that lead a man to murder his wife and child and then himself? It’s difficult to conceive, no matter how you try to wrap your mind around it. It’s not as if it all happened in one fit of passion; the evidence suggests that Nancy Benoit died Friday night, Daniel (their son) on Saturday, and Benoit himself sometime Sunday. Nancy was bound before being suffocated. Evidently, both mother and child may have had food poisoning beforehand as well. Both bodies had a copy of the Bible set beside them. The physical evidence suggests deliberation, and likely premeditation– crimes committed in cold blood, not a fit of rage or passion.

WWE now vociferously protests what it terms “sensationalistic reporting” of the whole matter– particularly, the suggestion that it was “roid rage.” This presents a difficult dichotomy. On the one hand, WWE, the business, seeks to protect its image by arguing that there is no evidential link between steroids and these crimes; moreover, there is no proof that Benoit was even using steroids– they didn’t show up in the toxicology report, and he had tested negative on his last company-administered test. On the other side, the humane aspect of everyone reacting to this story, especially those of us who were Benoit fans, makes us want to believe that this man could have only committed these atrocities in a fit of rage, under a chemical influence that had wrested control of his mental faculties. Surely no sane, sober human being, especially not the man we rooted for so long, could do this. But that’s exactly what his former employer wants us to believe– that Chris Benoit was completely in his right mind, and murdered his wife and son in cold blood.

What they’re not saying is that even if these were deliberate, premeditated actions done without any immediate chemical influence, there may still be a causal link between prior steroid use and an alteration and/or deterioation of Benoit’s mental/emotional state. That is to say, that the long-term negative effects of steroid abuse are not only physical, but psychological, which could only be logically expected, considering their hormonal and neurochemical influence. Add to that to a psyche already damaged by the premature loss of one’s best friend and an inherent inclination toward anger and aggression, and the need to stay on top in a very public and competitive business– in recent months, Benoit’s profile in the promotion had declined– and the sum is a volatile mix indeed. Even if he could act in a deliberate way, it does not mean his mind was not permanently altered.

The truly frightening thing is that this could happen again, if the industry does not enact a paradigm shift in philosophy. Simply have a drug-testing policy in place is merely a token effort (ask baseball); it does not fundamentally change how people think. Corporate policy may officially discourage steroid use, but the unspoken culture, from top to bottom, asserts that these substances are necessary to compete. That mentality must be eradicated and transformed. How, I do not know, but the plague of steroids will continue to infest all sports until that happens. Most of the media coverage in this vein of late concerns the imminent hijacking of American sports’ most cherished individual record by a widely-suspected (but still unproven) cheater; but that issue pales trivial in comparison to this profound tragedy.

WWE can choose to bury its head in the sand– at least publicly– if they wish. But by doing so, they do a disservice not only to all their own employees, but to every kid out there who wants to succeed as an athlete one day. They already have the spin machine in overdrive, since they had to abruptly end the ridiculous storyline of “Mr. McMahon”s alleged death– which they were stupid enough to continue even after some real news outlets had reported it as a hoax– by having the very-much-alive McMahon appear on camera Monday night to address the situation of an employee who really died. This is a company notorious for marketing violence and T&A titillation to minors, and now they want to decry the “sensationalism” of the legitimate media in a gasping effort to salvage their image? Hypocrisy, thy name is McMahon.