Okay, go ahead and get your geek on.

I haven’t written much else on the Benoit murder-suicide this week because I’m writing about it elsewhere, but simply looking at the progress of the story, a few things are striking:

* The WWE has been incredibly aggressive in their public posture, which is unexpected. They initially released a statement attacking the media for suspecting steroids might have been involved. They then released, of their own accord, a detailed timeline of the affair and the Benoit text messages, which now seems to have disappeared from their website. (Or maybe they’ve just moved it?) Vince McMahon then went on the Today show and walked away from the earlier statement on steroids. As an organization, the company is acting oddly. Why were they so defensive about steroids? Why were they trying to build a timeline proving what they knew and when they knew it?

* Then there’s the Wikipedia story:

Benoit’s Wikipedia entry was altered early Monday to say that the wrestler had missed a match two days earlier because of his wife’s death.

A Wikipedia official, Cary Bass, said Thursday that the entry was made by someone using an Internet protocol address registered in Stamford, Conn., where World Wrestling Entertainment is based. . . .

WWE attorney Jerry McDevitt said that to his knowledge, no one at the WWE knew Nancy Benoit was dead before her body was found Monday afternoon.

(A slightly scary footnote to this is that it was reporters who noticed the Wikipedia change, not the police.)

* And then there’s the not-unexpected steroid subplot, by which we learned that Benoit’s doctor has had his license suspended. Federal officials raided his office on Wednesday night. But I haven’t seen many remarks on this obscure detail about Daniel Benoit:

Needle marks were found in Daniel’s arm, said Fayette County District Attorney Scott Ballard. He said authorities suspect “that the boy had been taking growth hormones for quite some time,” and are hoping to prove that with toxicology. The boy, Ballard said, was diagnosed with a form of dwarfism.

Daniel was found face down on his bed, but authorities said they do not know whether he was sleeping when he was killed. Ballard said authorities believe the child was asphyxiated using a choke hold.

So there you have a wrestler who may have had his 7-year-old son on the juice and who may have used a wrestling move to kill him.

What does this all add up to? This may be wrestling’s perfect storm. If all of these facts bear out as the investigation continues–and maybe they won’t–then I think we may be looking at the end of professional wrestling as we know it.

The logic of this investigation may well propel us to a point where (1) Lawmakers get involved and attempt to clean up the industry and/or the publicly-held WWE comes under enormous pressure to get rid of its majority owners (the McMahon family). At this point, I’d say that both outcomes are possible, and maybe even likely. And judging from the WWE’s behavior in recent days, I suspect that they have a similar read of the situation.

Update: Bruce Hart obviously has bad feelings toward the WWE (and rightly so), but here’s his assessment of Benoit:

“The last time I saw him he was in pretty rough shape mentally,” said Bruce Hart, son of the legendary Stu Hart. “I didn’t know all the details but I knew it wasn’t good. I was not at all shocked (by what happened).

“If I could see and determine that in a few visits, how the hell could they (World Wrestling Entertainment) not have known something was wrong? (In my opinion) I think the WWE needs to re-evaluate what it is doing here.”

Update 2: An anonymous person claiming to be the mystery poster from Stamford, CT, now says that he/she was just speculating about Nancy Benoit’s death and was just passing on rumors he/she had heard/read elsewhere and that it was all just a huge and terrible coincidence.

Maybe this is true. I imagine this is why police have TARU departments.

It’s been hours–days, even–since we’ve visited the ongoing Sony PS3 debacle. So have a look at this:

Namco Bandai, Sega of Japan and Capcom are all shifting their development support to Nintendo’s Wii and DS, according to a report on Variety Asia.

Leading the change in priorities is Namco Bandai, which intends to up its Nintendo output by 109 per cent with a massive 115 titles scheduled for fiscal 2007.

Also backing Nintendo is Sega, which has 49 titles due on the two formats, an increase of 96 per cent. Capcom has 20 titles in development, an increase of 5 per cent, says the survey.

It also clams that the three major publishers are slashing shipments for Sony’s consoles by 30-40 per cent over the coming year.

But Blockbuster is only renting Blu-Ray!

(Too bad Blockbuster is on the fast-track to extinction.)

Update: QED: Blockbuster announces plans to close 282 stores.

Say what you will about Slate, they’re always clever–and this Keith Phipps piece on the blockbusters of 2008 is a perfect example of Slate at its clever best.

Well played!

Did you catch the Tim Henman-Carlos Moya match yesterday? Unbelievable. They don’t play tie breaks in the fifth set at the All England Club, and after blowing four match points at 5-4, Henman found himself deadlocked with Moya at 5-5 in the fifth on Monday night. They called the match on account of darkness and emerged ready to decide matters on Tuesday, which is when the action really began.

After a match filled with breaks, Moya and Henman held serve over and over again. Finally, in the 23rd game of the fifth set, Henman faced break point. It might as well have been match point. He dug out an ace. Then, facing another breaker a few moments later, he conjured a second-serve ace. He held.

Henman won the next two points on Moya’s serve, and eventually found himself with a fifth match point. Moya fought it off. Same with the sixth. Then, after his seventh match point and 4 hours and 11 minutes, Tim Henman, 32-years-old, advanced to the second round of his 14th Wimbledon. The score read:

6-3, 1-6, 5-7, 6-2, 13-11

It might have been the match of his life.

Henman is one of those semi-tragic figures in sports. He’s on the short-list of best players of his generation never to win a major and in the four chances where he’s gotten closest–his four semi-final berths at Wimbledon–he seemed overwhelmed by the burden placed on him by his countrymen. Had he been from Finland, he might well have won one of those championships. (Probably in 2001 when he beat Federer in the quarters–Federer having just taken out Sampras in the previous round.)

That said, he’s a fighter and a striver and an old man facing the end of his career. He deserved a win like this.

After noting the fake death of Vince McMahon yesterday, I now see that wrestling great Chris Benoit has died for real. The story is highly disturbing:

Details of the deaths of pro wrestler Chris Benoit, his wife and their 7-year-old son may seem “a little bizarre” when released to the public, a prosecutor said.

Authorities were investigating the deaths at a secluded Fayette County home as a murder-suicide and were not seeking any suspects outside the home. . . .

Investigators believe Benoit, (pronounced ben-WAH,) killed his wife and son over the weekend and then himself sometime Monday. The bodies were found Monday afternoon in three different rooms of the house on Green Meadow Lane, in a subdivision off a gravel road about two miles from Whitewater Country Club. . . .

Ballard told The Associated Press a gun was not used in any of the deaths. But he declined to say how the three died.

“We’re pretty sure we know, but we want to confirm it with the crime lab,” Ballard said early Tuesday. . . .

World Wrestling Entertainment said on its Web site that it asked authorities to check on Benoit and his family after being alerted by friends who received “several curious text messages sent by Benoit early Sunday morning.”

I wonder if, having a real murder in their family will shame the WWE out of continuing with the storyline of the fake murder of Vince McMahon.

Update: I’ve been thinking a little more about how strange the WWE’s decision was to pull Raw last night and run a Chris Benoit “tribute” show instead. I was watching that last night and listening to the announcers lamenting the death of the Benoit family and remembering what a great guy Benoit was, but even as that was happening, it seemed clear from the wire reports that the Man of a Thousand Holds had murdered his wife and child.

I suspect last night’s “tribute” show will disappear down the WWE memory hole pretty quickly–the tape may have been burned right after it aired. But there’s something grotesque about it nonetheless.

Update II: The airbrushing has begun! Less than 12 hours after lionizing Chris Benoit on a Very Special Episode of Raw, the WWE is disappearing him:

In light of the Benoit family tragedy, WWE’s Shopzone merchandise website has pulled all merchandise related to Chris Benoit. Searches for Benoit’s name in the website’s search engine are returned “discontinued.”

Benoit’s name has been removed to the degree that the listing for the DVD of Wrestlemania XX now reads, “Triple H defends his World Heavyweight Championship against Shawn Michaels.”

In case you’re wondering, that Wrestlemania XX match is what they closed the show with last night, calling it Benoit’s greatest moment.

Update III: TMZ now has more details on the murder-suicide.

Totally brilliant.

Of course not. But this is a pretty interesting discussion of what his “death” could mean, financially speaking, for the WWE.

What interests me more is what his death could mean for wrestling creatively. Yes, I know that real wrestling fans watch TNA these days. But the problem with the WWE for the last several years has been the combination of giving up the pretense to realism while at the same time letting the McMahons dominate the storylines. They can’t ever go back from becoming pure “entertainment,” but maybe getting rid of the McMahons (or at least Vince) could liberate the writers. Of course, the McMahons write much of the copy, too, so they probably aren’t going anywhere and this stunt will probably be short-lived. It’s Crash TV all over again.