Chris Benoit thoughts shared from Mercedes

Crap.Don't get me wrong -- I'm not saying I knew him. I didn't. I knew the legend, but the difference was that I watched the whole legend take shape.
There was this kid in high school who was completely obsessed. He lived and breathed weight training. Intense was not the word for it. "Consumed by," more like. Lunch hours, after school, spares, he'd be in the O'Leary weight room, working out as much as he could, sometimes sparring off in combat against any opponents he could find on the blue mats (spread out on concrete! yikes!), schooling himself on several performance styles, from Olympic to Championship. I remember Ross Ongaro, who later became coach of a pro-soccer team called the Edmonton Drillers and then moved on to who-knows-where, hanging around with him.
Of course, I was in a whole different world. I loathed the sports, loathed the weight room, but still, I learned a lot about what was going on. This was a man determined. This was a man who would teach me that success is not lucked into -- it takes every waking moment, every ounce of your energy, and every thought in your head. The only reason that he finished high school was because the Hart family would not take him in and train him if he didn't.
I make him sound scary. He wasn't. Even to a bookish physiophobe like myself, he was the nicest guy. His intensity didn't stretch out past his own body, his own daily routine. This was someone who was disciplined, and who seemed to know how to limit that discipline so that it didn't tread on the lives of others. His world was still open to others who didn't normally fit it, even if they weren't "cool" in the eyes of his peers. I remember him stepping in to get a bunch of his buddies to lay off when they started in on me about my "flood pants." I won't say a whole lot else to glorify him. I shouldn't. There are some acts which, when committed, obliterate all other virtues that the offender may have had.
Perhaps Chris Benoit understood this, when he killed himself, after murdering his wife and son.
I still can't believe it enough to say it. Crap. Even though wrestling wasn't my world (although during the stealth years I'd spent living as a girl in drag, several friends would force me to watch his career unfold on television and in PPVs), I always kept him in mind when I needed to drive myself forward, when I needed to put enough sweat into something to get it done. Even in recent years with transition, I would remind myself because of his career trajectory as an example, that "you have to live and breathe it, you have to live and breathe it," like a mantra. Here I'd thought I'd abandoned all my former idols, only to see that I hadn't, when yet another idol with clay feet has fallen.
Crap.