Maclean's web exclusive: Bret Hart  talks  about his own concussions and the plight of his fellow wrestlers

They call it "the pop." It's that moment when thousands of fans are jolted screaming to their feet, an involuntary response to some act of unbelievable strength, astounding agility or brute violence. On the football field, the hockey rink, the basketball court -- the pop is the product. Nowhere is it more essential or more lucrative than in pro wrestling. And in the history of the ring, only few could make a crowd pop like Chris Benoit.

For seven years, the Montreal-born, Edmonton-raised "Canadian Crippler" travelled the world as one of the stars of World Wrestling Entertainment. With a superhero physique, Benoit could throw his body around like a gymnast and lift 250-lb. men as if they were toddlers. Night after night he would cap his performance with his signature finale: the diving head-butt. He'd climb to the top turnbuckle, and leap more than 10 feet through the air, crashing down and driving his head into some hapless opponent below.

Of course, wrestling is a circus act -- a "work" as they call it. No one's really supposed to get hurt. But when you pull that stunt as many as 200 nights a year, mistakes happen, and pro wrestling history is littered with men who destroyed their bodies in pursuit of the pop. In 2001, Benoit broke his neck during a match and narrowly avoided permanent paralysis. Over the years, friends and colleagues say, he suffered his share of concussions -- though apparently none were ever reported to the WWE. He was quiet and intense, and never complained. Those who knew him best say he was an entertainer who loved his job, and showed a special generosity to disabled kids. But to the rest of the world, Chris Benoit will forever be remembered as a murderer.

Sometime on the weekend of June 23, 2007, Benoit strangled his wife, Nancy, in their suburban Atlanta home. It appears he then smothered his mentally handicapped, seven-year-old son Daniel. He then placed Bibles next to their bodies, and sometime later he went into his mirrored home gym, and hung himself from a piece of exercise equipment. He left no note. The immediate speculation in the media pinned the blame on steroids -- toxicology results showed Benoit had been taking synthetic testosterone, and in his home police found vast quantities of other chemicals to help maintain his superhuman musculature. Benoit also tested positive for a powerful narcotic painkiller, and the anti-anxiety drug Xanax. That was enough for most: drug-addled muscleman kills family in a fit of steroid-fuelled rage. End of story.

But a group of neurologists in the U.S. saw the reports of the Benoit murder/suicide and suspected there might be another explanation. The doctors, aligned with the non-profit Sports Legacy Institute, had already embarked on an investigation of concussion damage in retired athletes, and had seen a handful of cases of former pro football players who died young after suffering mental breakdowns in their 30s and 40s. Their brains showed microscopic evidence of serious head injuries, most likely suffered over years on the playing field, and they suspected that Benoit might have suffered a similar fate. Sure enough, when they examined Benoit's tissue they found a 40-year-old brain that looked like that of an 85-year-old in advanced stages of Alzheimer's disease, says Dr. Bennet Omalu, who performed the examination.

"The damage we saw does not show up on MRI or CT scans, and it doesn't show on naked-eye examinations, and I believe this is why this disease has been missed for so long," Omalu says. "We have always believed that people generally recover from concussions. But what we're finding is that some people may never really recover from recurrent concussions, just like people don't really recover from exposure to asbestos. The damage is in your tissue."

The U.S. Congress is planning committee hearings into health and safety issues in the WWE, based largely on the long trail of performers who, like Benoit, died young with a cocktail of drugs coursing through their veins. But if Omalu is right about what triggered Chris Benoit's killing spree, the stakes have been raised considerably. It means there are almost certainly others out there, suffering in silence, on a long dangerous spiral into psychosis. More and more, neurologists say it's time to admit that concussions are not just an occupational hazard. They are a matter of life and death -- not only for the sufferer, but for everyone around them as well.

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