Ask 411 Wrestling: Did WWE Stars Know the Benoit Murders were Coming? Insurrextion 2002 Review

WWF Insurrextion 2000 Review

Ask 411 Wrestling: Did WWE Stars Know the Benoit Murders were Coming?

These are all men who had a gigantic impact on the professional wrestling world as a result of making their debuts immediately following Wrestlemania.

Carrying on in that tradition, my name is Ryan Byers, and I’m here in the wake of pro wrestling’s biggest weekend to begin a new era of Ask 411 Wrestling.

Those of you who have read the column for a while might recall me being a semi-regular fill-in for Steve Cook and Mathew Sforcina during their runs on the column, which I believe takes us all the way back to 2007.

Jed Shaffer, your most recent party host for this shindig, had to step aside for reasons that are, quite frankly, unknown to me. As a result, I was called upon to take up the mantle of Ask 411. Some of you might be asking yourselves, “Is this another fill-in run by Byers? Or is he actually sticking around on a permanent basis?”

When Jed gave his notice, I was contacted about taking over the column. My initial reaction was that I should politely decline, because I haven’t written about wrestling for several years now and because I’ve got quite a bit going on in other areas of my life. However, after talking to the powers that be about their vision for the column and other issues, I agreed to give it a shot for what would at least be a test run.

Welcome guys, gals, and gender non-binary pals, to the new Ask 411 Wrestling.

I hope that I get a nice, softball question to start off this debut column. What do you have for me,

This is a strange question and quite touchy but with the whole Chris Benoit event in June 2007, was there any problems with him in his last few matches? Did he get along with MVP in his last matches before his death? Did any backstage personnel have problems with him? Or interviewers, flight attendants that kind of thing? Sorry for the strange question it’s just surreal watching him in his last few matches knowing what happened.

As I’ve said about this column in the past, I feel like the Montreal Screwjob and the Benoit murder-suicide are the two topics that people are going to keep asking about until the end of time. It makes sense, as there are so many angles to both situations and so little about them – particularly the latter – that the average person can wrap their head around.

To go to Connor’s question, there were eleven men who had matches with Chris Benoit in the last month of his life: Edge, Batista, MVP, Mike the Miz, Matt Hardy, Mike Kruel (a developmental star at the time who Benoit wrestled on an OVW show), Bobby Lashley, CM Punk, Elijah Burke, The Count Marquis Von Cor (a.k.a. Monty Brown), and Kevin Thorn.

Of those wrestlers, if Punk, Miz, Hardy, Kruel, Lashley, and Brown have ever commented on Benoit’s final days, I couldn’t find much if any public record of it.

MVP is probably the one person who has been the most adamant about speaking of how great a person he felt that Chris Benoit was before the fateful evening that changed his reputation forever. There are numerous interviews online that you can find in which he talks about his relationship with Benoit, who he considers to be his greatest mentor in the wrestling business. In particular, there’s an episode of the old Ross Report podcast in which he takes a deep dive on the subject. However, he’s not said anything about there being any “hints” of what was to come at the end of Benoit’s life.

Batista’s comments on the subject tend to be relatively brief and also tend to focus on the relationship that he had with Benoit prior to the Edmonton native becoming one of the most infamous murderers of the last fifteen years. In his 2007 autobiography

, the man who would later become Drax the Destroyer mentions that he could not imagine Chris Benoit undertaking the horrible acts that he did, particularly given that he saw Benoit positively interacting with his family on the road about a week before the murders occurred. However,

was released just a few months after the tragedy, so there was not much time for reflection and the comments about Benoit read like a last-minute addition.

, Kevin Thorn claimed that he observed memory issues in Benoit when working and travelling with him that he assumes are related to multiple concussions. He recounts a story in which Benoit would order the same thing as him when the two were eating together because Benoit could not recall what was on the restaurant’s menu after reading it, and he also mentions that Benoit would want to call all of their matches in the ring because he had difficulty remembering anything that was prepared in the locker room. (Though, as someone who has spent many hours listening to shoot comments by wrestlers of Benoit’s era and earlier, part of me wonders if this is just a generational difference and the Crippler wanted to call it in the ring because that was just his preferred style of wrestling, as was the case for most competitors until the last decade or so.) One thing that Thorn does not say is that he saw any behavior from Benoit that would lead him to believe that he was in any way going to become violent or that he had any disdain for his family, but, if you believe that Chris Benoit’s deteriorating mental state lead to the murders, this may be some circumstantial evidence.

Elijah Burke is the man who had Chris Benoit’s very last match with him, which is actually available on YouTube:

If you watch the bout, there is absolutely nothing out of the ordinary about it. It’s a standard, by the numbers singles encounter for the era, in which Benoit ultimately wins but tries to let the relative rookie Burke shine along the way.

Interestingly, Burke was also involved in Benoit’s next-to-last televised match, a tag team encounter pitting Benoit and CM Punk against Burke and Monty Brown:

This match is a bit unusual due to the finish, in which referee Scott Armstrong calls for the bell seemingly out of nowhere and no official winner is ever announced. In the days after the match, it was explained that WWE officials had recently been instructed to call matches “like a shoot,” i.e. they were supposed to actually enforce the rules of pro wrestling as though they were real with it being wrestlers’ responsibility to make sure that they didn’t do anything illegal that the official could see. Here, due to apparent miscommunication between Burke and Brown, the illegal man stayed in the ring for more than five seconds, and, due to the “call it like a shoot” directive that existed at the time, Armstrong felt that he had to disqualify the New Breed team.

When the bell is called for, Benoit rushes the ring and hits a series of his signature moves on Burke, ultimately putting him in the sharpshooter while Armstrong attempts to wave it off.

If one were going out of their way to find evidence of Chris Benoit’s deteriorating mental condition, they could point to this and say that he attempted to continue the match after it had already ended and that he was confused or not fully aware of his surroundings. However, it’s just as likely that Benoit, a seasoned veteran of the mat game, knew that the finish sucked and was, as a babyface, trying to make sure that the audience went home happy. Given the two equally plausible scenarios and without any additional information, you can’t really say which of the two it was.

Despite being in the ring with Benoit for those two matches, Burke has not commented on anything being out of the ordinary. In the one

that I came across in which he addressed the Wolverine, Burke did reference some memory issues that seem to corroborate Kevin Thorn’s stories, but he did not note any other problems with Benoit. In fact, he says that Benoit called him the day before the murder-suicide to check in on an injury that Burke was believed to have suffered in that final match.

So, was there any in-ring indication or indications from the road that problems with Chris Benoit were building towards a fever pitch in the last weeks and days of his life?

The answer appears to be no, or, at the very least, the people who would know aren’t talking about it.

who asked this question, which I apologize for, but at least compiling data to answer their question gave me something to do while binge-watching

I’m afraid I have another research-heavy question for you. We always hear in the buildup to Fatal 4-Way title matches in the WWE that the champion has only a 25% chance of retaining. Just going from memory it seems that in these scenarios the champion actually retains the vast majority of the time. So…what percentage of time have champions retained in Fatal-4 ways in WWE history. I thought about having you then compare that number to how often the champion retains in 1-on-1 matches, but that would take you forever. How about in Triple Threat matches? My gut tells me that the champion actually retains more often in Fatal 4-Ways than Triple Threats.

The “champion has a 25% chance of retaining” line has always been one of my pet peeves, because that’s not how probabilities work. It is true that every competitor has a one-in-four opportunity to win if the identity of the winner is determined at random, but that’s not how professional wrestling matches work, either in reality or in kayfabe terms. And, really, if the outcome of every match (or sporting event) truly were random, what would the point in watching be?

Enough of my ranting, though. Let’s answer the question at hand. Even though these statistics also won’t help determine the probability of a wrestler winning a match, they provide for some interesting historical data.

In order to make this project a bit more manageable, I focused on pay per view matches for what I consider to be a WWE “world title,” those being the original WWF/WWE Championship (including all of the variant names it’s had over the years), the current WWE Universal Championship, and the World Heavyweight Championship that existed between 2002 and 2013. This might not *exactly* answer the question that was posed, but it gives us a decent enough sample to work with.

The earliest triple threat match for a world championship held on PPV took place at Breakdown 1998, where the Undertaker and Kane simultaneously pinned Steve Austin in a result that lead to Austin’s WWF Championship being vacated. Since there was no winner, we’re throwing that one out of the analysis. However, since it took place, a world championship has been defended in a triple threat 38 more times on WWE PPV. The champion has retained his title in 24 of those matches, and a new titleholder has been crowned in the remaining 14 bouts. Doing some simple division tells us that this means the champion has held on to his belt 36.8% of the time, which is surprisingly close to the 33.3% probability of retaining that WWE would have you believe exists.

Switching to the fatal four way, there have only been 14 world title matches in that format on WWE PPV, which I found to be a surprisingly low number. Across those 14 matches, despite the “25%” hype, the champion has actually retained on TEN occasions, a whopping 71.4% of the time.

So, if past events predicts the probability of future events (which they don’t), you’re much safer being a champion defending in a fatal four way than you are being a champion defending in a triple threat, despite the extra opponent.

And, since I had to compile it anyway to run the numbers, here is a listing of all of those three-and-four way PPV world championship matches over the years.

1. Royal Rumble 2005 – JBL def. Big Show & Kurt Angle to RETAIN the WWE Championship

2. Royal Rumble 2012 – Daniel Bryan def. Big Show & Mark Henry to RETAIN the World Heavyweight Title

3. Royal Rumble 2015 – Brock Lesnar def. John Cena & Seth Rollins to RETAIN the WWE Title

4. Royal Rumble 2018 – Brock Lesnar def. Braun Strowman & Kane to RETAIN the WWE Universal Title

5. Wrestlemania XXIV – Randy Orton def. John Cena & HHH to RETAIN the WWE Title

6. Backlash 2004 – Chris Benoit def. Shawn Michaels & HHH to RETAIN the World Heavyweight Title

7. Backlash 2006 – John Cena def. HHH & Edge to RETAIN the WWE Title

8. Summerslam 2000 – The Rock def. HHH & Kurt Angle to RETAIN the WWF Title

9. Summerslam 2012 – CM Punk def. John Cena & Big Show to RETAIN the WWE Title

10. TLC 2011 – CM Punk def. Mike the Miz & Alberto Del Rio to RETAIN the WWE Title

11. Survivor Series 2009 – The Undertaker def. Big Show & Chris Jericho to RETAIN the World Heavyweight Title

12. Survivor Series 2009 – John Cena def. HHH & Shawn Michaels to RETAIN the WWE Title

13. Survivor Series 2012 – CM Punk def. The Ryback & John Cena to RETAIN the WWE Title

14. Battleground 2016 – Dean Ambrose def. Seth Rollins & Roman Reigns to RETAIN the WWE Title

15. Cyber Sunday 2006 – Booker T. def. Big Show & John Cena to RETAIN the World Heavyweight Title

16. Great American Bash 2007 – The Great Khali def. Batista & Kane to RETAIN the World Heavyweight Title

17. Night of Champions 2009 – Randy Orton def. HHH & John Cena to RETAIN the WWE Title

18. No Mercy 2001 – Steve Austin def. Kurt Angle & Rob Van Dam to RETAIN the WWF Title

19. No Mercy 2016 – AJ Styles def. John Cena & Dean Ambrose to RETAIN the WWE Title Insurrextion 2002 Review

20. No Way Out 2012 – CM Punk def. Daniel Bryan & Kane to RETAIN the WWE Title

21. Taboo Tuesday 2005 – John Cena def. Shawn Michaels & Kurt Angle to RETAIN the WWE Title

22. Vengeance 2005 – John Cena def. Christian & Chris Jericho to RETAIN the WWE Title

23. Insurrextion 2000 – The Rock def. Shane McMahon & HHH to RETAIN the WWF Title

24. No Mercy 1999 – Steve Austin def. The Undertaker & HHH to RETAIN the WWF Title

1. Wrestlemania XX – Chris Benoit def. Triple H & Shawn Michaels to WIN the World Heavyweight Title

2. Wrestlemania XXII – Rey Misterio Jr. def. Kurt Angle & Randy Orton to WIN the World Heavyweight Title

3. Wrestlemania XXV – John Cena def. Edge & Big Show to WIN the World Heavyweight Title

4. Wrestlemania XXX – Daniel Bryan def. Batista & Randy Orton to WIN the WWE Title

5. Wrestlemania XXXI – Seth Rollins def. Brock Lesnar & Roman Reigns to WIN the WWE Title

6. Extreme Rules 2011 – John Cena def. The Miz & Johnny Nitro to WIN the WWE Title

7. Summerslam 1999 – Mankind def. HHH & Steve Austin to WIN the WWF Title

8. Survivor Series 1999 – Big Show def. HHH & The Rock to WIN The WWF Title

9. Survivor Series 2008 – Edge def. HHH & Vladimir Kozlov to WIN the WWE Title

10. Armageddon 2003 – HHH def. Goldberg & Kane to WIN the World Heavyweight Title

11. Armageddon 2007 – Edge def. The Undertaker & Batista to WIN the World Heavyweight Title

12. Armageddon 2008 – Jeff Hardy def. HHH & Edge to WIN the WWE Title

13. Vengeance 2002 – The Rock def. Kurt Angle & The Undertaker to WIN the WWE Title

14. Vengeance 2003 – Kurt Angle def. Brock Lesnar & Big Show to WIN the WWE Title

1. Wrestlemania 2000 – Triple H def. Mick Foley, Big Show, & The Rock to RETAIN the WWF Title

2. Backlash 2007 – John Cena def. Shawn Michaels, Randy Orton, & Edge to RETAIN the WWE Title

3. Summerslam 2017 – Brock Lesnar def. Roman Reigns, Braun Strowman, & Samoa Joe to RETAIN the WWE Universal title

4. Armageddon 2004 – JBL def. The Undertaker, Eddie Guerrero, & Booker T to RETAIN the WWE Title

5. Battleground 2014 – John Cena def. Roman Reigns, Kane, & Randy Orton to RETAIN the WWE Title

6. Bragging Rights 2009 – The Undertaker def. Batista, Rey Misterio Jr., & CM Punk to RETAIN the World Heavyweight Title

7. No Mercy 2006 – Booker T. def. Batista, Fit Finlay, & Bobby Lashley to RETAIN the World Heavyweight Title

8. Payback 2015 – Seth Rollins def. Randy Orton, Dean Ambrose, 8. Payback 2015 – Seth Rollins def. Randy Orton Insurrextion 2002 Review

9. Unforgiven 2000 – The Rock def. Chris Benoit, The Undertaker, & Kane to RETAIN the WWF Title

10. Rebellion 2000 – Kurt Angle def. Rikishi, Steve Austin, & The Rock to RETAIN the WWF Title

1. Backlash 2008 – HHH def. Randy Orton, JBL, & John Cena to WIN the WWE Title

Insurrextion 2002 Review , Rey Misterio Jr., & Alberto Del Rio to WIN the World Heavyweight Title

3. Fatal Four Way 2010: Sheamus def. John Cena, Edge, & Randy Orton to WIN the WWE Title

4. Fatal Four Way 2010: Rey Misterio Jr. def. Jack Swagger, Big Show, & CM Punk to WIN the World Heavyweight Title

Entrance music is always a popular topic around these parts, and

1) How much influence do wrestlers have in their entrance music? Are they allowed to suggest music from bands they like or have some input? Or are they just flat-out told “Here’s your music, go wrestle!”

2) Still on entrance music – which wrestler has gone the longest without changing their entrance theme? My first thoughts were HBK, Y2J and Hogan (not counting Undertaker as he has changed it several times over the years before going back to more-or-less the original).

Regarding wrestlers’ selection of their entrance music, whether they have any input appears to be one of those things that differs from wrestler to wrestler, era to era, and promotion to promotion. If you’re an independent wrestler on small-time shows, chances are good that you’re picking your own track, and, in some companies, you might even be responsible for making sure that the sound guy has a copy of the song that you want to use. If you’re in the big leagues, you likely have less control, particularly if your gimmick is something that the promotion created for you as opposed to something that you’ve brought along from your work elsewhere in the world.

However, even within the world of WWE, there are some wrestlers who get to have a say in what they enter to. For example, I recall hearing an interview several years ago with Rob Naylor, who spent several years as a “creative assistant” in NXT. Naylor was in the promotion at the time that the Wyatt Family gimmick was being developed, and he told the story of how he, with feedback from the man who would become Bray Wyatt, searched a database of available music and came across the ditty that WWE ultimately purchased to use as the Family’s theme song. So, Wyatt was rather hands on with that selection.

Moving along to part two of the question, this is another one that is a little bit difficult to pin down. People have different criteria for what counts as the same theme song. For many folks, the song is considered the same if it’s the same basic music. Others count it as a “new theme” if there’s the slightest adjustment to the beat or the tempo, which is why some sources list Chris Jericho as having twelve different themes in WWE alone, while others claim he has only had two or three.

You also have the question of how exactly to count the time a wrestler has spent with a theme. Are we looking for uninterrupted time with the same song or cumulative time? In other words, how do you treat the situation in which a wrestler has a theme song, changes it for a couple of years, and then goes back to the original?

Because of these variables, I think we have to answer this question in generalities as opposed to giving hard and fast figures, but we’ll do the best we can.

The three examples that Noel gives in his question are pretty solid contenders. Hulk Hogan first started using “Real American” in 1985, and he continued to use it through 2015 when he last parted ways with WWE. However, in the interim, he also had his runs in WCW and TNA, when he used alternative music, and he also had a spell in the WWF in 2002 when he exclusively used the nWo theme before turning face and going back to the red and yellow.

Chris Jericho debuted with the WWF in 1999 and, with minor variations, has used “Break the Walls Down” for most of the intervening 18 years, though he did temporarily switch to a Saliva song called “King of My World” in 2003 and used “Judas” by Fozzy for his appearance earlier this year with New Japan Pro Wrestling.

Shawn Michaels’ “Sexy Boy” made its debut in 1992 with Sensational Sherri providing the vocals, and he’s kept it as his theme to present day, though obviously he took over the singing duties himself after about a year. There’s not much more to say than that.

Assuming that you don’t want to count their various breaks and jumps to other promotions, that’s 33 years of Hogan being associated with “Real American,” 26 years of HBK being associated with “Sexy Boy,” and 18 years of Jericho being associated with “Walls.”

But what about a few names that Noel didn’t think of?

Ric Flair might actually be the iron man in terms on consistent theme music, though it’s a little bit difficult to place the exact year when he began using the “Dawn” movement of the classical music piece “Also sprach Zarathustra” (a.k.a. the theme from

) as his signature tune. However, it is believed to have been at some point in the 1970s, though at that juncture there were still several promotions in which entrance music was not used for wrestlers at all, so Flair wasn’t using it everywhere. Whenever he may have started using it, “Dawn” has remained Flair’s go-to tune for somewhere around 40 years at this point. The only lapse in his use of the song that I can recall would be his 1991 to 1993 WWF run, during which the Fed stuck him with a theme that they produced which captured the same general mood as “Dawn,” though it was a decidedly different song. Even TNA let Flair utilize a version of “Dawn,” though it was a track cranked out on a single electric guitar as opposed to being the classic arrangement.

Sticking with the classic music theme, Randy Savage started using “Pomp and Circumstance” as a theme no later than Wrestlemania II in 1986. (At the time of his WWF debut in 1985, he was without theme music, which was still common for wrestlers at that point.) Savage continued to use a version of that song for the rest of his WWF tenure and on through to WCW and even for the two appearances that he had in TNA in 2004, though late in his WCW run he did temporarily change over to a house-produced track referred to as “What Up, Mach?” That would be 18 years with, more or less, the same theme music.

One wrestler that I feel fans often leave out of this conversation is Booker T. The theme song most commonly associated with Booker originated as a piece of stock production music called “Rap Sheet” produced by two musicians named Rene de Wal and Didier Leglise. Book started entering to the song when he was still part of Harlem Heat in WCW in 1993, and he’s carried it through to today, though it has been sped up and slowed down slightly over the years, and there have also been some drops of his catchphrases mixed in. That’s 25 years of “Rap Sheet,” though it did have some breaks, including during a WCW angle in 2000 in which Booker lost the rights to the music to Stevie Ray and Big T (Ahmed Johnson), the man’s run as King Booker, and his time in TNA, where a sound-alike was employed.

Again, you could calculate these numbers a variety of different ways, but it seems difficult to argue that Flair doesn’t have the record almost regardless of how you slice it. The other gentlemen mentioned above also have to be contenders, but what say you, comment section? Are there any other longstanding theme songs that you can come up with?

is being haunted by a mysterious, long-haired figure:

Who is the long haired guy that is always sitting mid front row at WWE PPV and TV tapings? He is there with some older lady. Is he some random rich person that travels to all these events or is he related to someone high up in the company, like Kevin Dunn?

His name is Simon. The older woman with him is reported to be his mother, Alice.

If there he has some actual connection to WWE, it’s not been disclosed in any venue that I can find. It appears that he is just a super-fan who has the means to allow him to score primo seats at many pro wrestling events.

Interestingly, John isn’t the only one to pick up on Simon’s presence and start asking questions about him. In fact, I’d even go so far as saying that it’s fair to call Simon a bit of a meme in online wrestling circles.

For example, there is a YouTuber who has assembled a

consisting of nothing but clips of Simon and Alice attending various events. There’s also this very similar

to try to get answers about the raven-haired ringsider and his vaguely Carol Kane-looking mother.

Of course, recognizable pro wrestling superfans are nothing new. WWE even got in on the act a few years ago and published this list of

, though it’s a mix of folks who gained notoriety from showing up for many times over the years (like Vladimir, perhaps the original “celebrity” fan) and some who were involved in one particularly memorable moment (e.g. Angry Miz Girl).

Recognizable fans aren’t just a recent phenomenon in major wrestling promotions, though. Indies have had them as well, with the infamous Green Lantern Fan and his stopwatch drawing the ire of fans at Ring of Honor and other northeast independent shows in the mid-to-late 2000s.

This even goes back many decades to the era when wrestling was a strictly regional affair. In the northeast in the 1950s, heels were terrorized by

, an older female fan who gained her name because she would attempt to stick the wrestlers that she didn’t like with one of the several inch long pins that would be used to affix a hat to a lady’s hair in that era.

Similarly, beginning in the 1950s when wrestling was filmed at the local television station in Dayton, Ohio, crowds were entertained by the antics of local fan “Bouncing” Beulah Boshears, who would often get close enough to the ring that she would pound the mat during matches. At some point in her life, Beulah moved to the Knoxville, Tennessee area, where she was a fixture at shows throughout the 1990s. She is visible during many Smoky Mountain Wrestling cards, and Jim Cornette still speaks fondly of her. Beulah’s biggest moment of national fame came when she squared off against Hollywood Hulk Hogan on the December 1, 1997 edition of WCW Monday Nitro, which was broadcast from Knoxville.

And, there it is, a video of one of the biggest stars in wrestling history threatening to strike a granny, which I posted because I went off on a weird tangent about famous wrestling fans that was only loosely related to the question asked of me.

If that’s not a fitting way to end this first installment of Ask 411 Wrestling’s new era, I don’t know what is.

Should you like to get in on the action and ask a question, feel free to send it to

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