Ring Of Hell

The book, Ring of Hell: The Story of Chris Benoit and the Fall of the Pro Wrestling Industry is quite the title. One hand, you have a book that offers a biography of a person whose entire legacy was washed away on one weekend last year and then, on the other, you have a book that lifts the lid on the profession this person was associated with.

Benoit lived and died for wrestling.

He even murdered his family members for it.

The Benoit biography walks hand-in-hand with the microscopic analysis of the running of professional wrestling throughout the book. Sometimes these stories are intertwined, in other cases they aren't.

The one thing I did realise from Matthew Randazzo's book is that both Benoit and the industry he worked in are screwed up.

I refuse to cast Chris Benoit as an innocent victim in this review but part of me asks the question what could have happened to this man had he picked a different person to become his idol.

It is a well-known fact that Chris Benoit grew up idolising the 'Dynamite Kid' Tom Billington. A small, yet incredibly massive for his size wrestler from England who made his name in Canada and later America.

Benoit patterned his career after this man. A man who is now confined to a wheelchair after excessive use of steroids and painkillers cut his career and health short.

There was a lot of demons in the real Tom Billington, it seems ironic that his number one fan would end up trumping him.

If wrestling didn't help kill Chris Benoit, the concussions, drugs, painkillers, steroids and deaths of his close allies certainly did.

We'll never know what happened last year. The three people who can answer that are no longer living. What this book does offer is realisation that Chris Benoit was dying before every one's eyes and nobody was wise enough to realise that something major was going on in his mind.

It's easy to point the finger and blame wrestling although Randazzo manages to use this book to show how despicable the industry can be.

He details how the Japanes Yakuza handle nearly every event in Japan and that they managed to cover-up a dojo murder of a young wrestler at the hands of one of Japan's biggest stars - Kensuke Sasaki.

That is just one example of the in-depth revelations found in the book. There are tons of ex-WWE writers who have been interviewed in the research for this book. Many of these writers have gone on record with stories that lift the lid on the profession.