Several TNA Stars Featured In E! Special On Chris Benoit Report by TNAWrestlingNews.com Staff on 09/05/2008 at 02:01 PM
Mark Jabroni sent in the following review of E! Canada's "True Hollywood Story" episode on Chris Benoit, which aired on Wednesday night: E! Canada aired an episode of "True Hollywood Story" Wednesday night, centering on the life & career of the late Chris Benoit, which saw WWE Hall of Famers Ted DiBiase & Bret Hart, Christopher Nowinski, Diamond Dallas Page, Chris' father Michael & various notable personalities within wrestling news reporting, running down the details that we all mostly know. The retelling, though, was strangely a little uninformed, when it came some of the specific details about the Crippler's career. Sabu was said to be a 2nd-generation wrestler, when in fact it was his uncle, the Original Sheik {Ed Farhat}, who would've been the only family member who was involved in wrestling. TNA wrestler Kip James was listed as being "Bad Ass" Billy Gunn, his WWF persona {even though he was actually wearing what appeared to be a black leather TNA baseball cap during the short 5-second clip, making whoever wrote up the caption seem like they weren't really on the ball}. In regards to his WCW Heavyweight title win, Benoit was said to have earned the title, then after having won it, was given an offer to jump to WWF, when in fact, as far as I'd always heard, he was given the title by the WCW booking committee as a kind of "dangling carrot" to keep him from accepting an already-issued WWF offer, which he declined to leave the now-defunct promotion to head for greener pastures. New to the story, however, was the existence of a diary, which apparently had rather disturbing entries in it for anybody who knew Chris. As well as a brain specialist stating that, had his condition been caught in time & given some rather extensive rest from the rigours of wrestling, the whole incident could've been completely avoided & all 3 would be alive today. What was fairly certain to all who were interviewed, however, was that it was almost a given that the use of steroids wasn't the sole contributing factor for his actions in June of 2007, but coupled with the brain damage resulting from repeated shots to the head during his professional wrestling career. Then, just as they're just about to hear from the experts to draw their conclusions in the case, the episode replays the previous segment, then plays the ending credits, so I didn't even get to see the end of the show! Watching this episode was sorta like hearing people nowadays saying that "Miami Vice" was a show from the 1970s -- sure, the facts were mostly there, but a little skewed, perhaps to tell a better story.
