Chris Benoit's Father Reads CHRIS & NANCY, Offers Some Corrections

Mike Benoit, Chris’s father, emailed “a few notes” from his initial read of CHRIS & NANCY:

* Chris Benoit was 5 feet, 10½ inches tall, Mike said – not 5-8, as I stated in the book.

* It is not accurate to call Chris “scrawny” before he lifted weights: “Chris played football from the age of 8 and was a quarterback until his third year of high school. His last two years of high school were played at defensive end because of his strength and speed.”

* Nancy’s birthday was May 17, not May 21.

* “Chris was trained in Edmonton by Mike Hammer and one of Stampede’s refs who also happen to be a Royal Canadian Mounted police officer. His training in Calgary was about three months long on weekends only, prior to him starting with Stampede. The two people responsible for his training in Calgary were Jerry Moreau and the Cuban. Both Jerry and the Cuban worked for Stu at that time. This whole tale about Stu Hart sounds great but is not factual.”

Dave Meltzer, publisher of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter and my source for Chris’s dimensions, said, “I think everyone in wrestling adds two inches to their height. Maybe wearing boots he was 5-10½ but in tennis shoes we were the same height and I’m not close to 5-10½.”

On Chris’s supposed training in the infamous Stu Hart “dungeon” – not a topic covered in any depth in CHRIS & NANCY – Meltzer said, “Yeah, Stu really didn’t train people. He may have worked with him a little but the training in the dungeon is more talk than reality.”

The last word goes to Mike Benoit: “I don’t care what Meltzer says. I know how tall my kid was.”


Irv Muchnick