Let's talk about Chris Benoit since not a lot of people are willing to do so. Chris Benoit can easily be labelled as one of the best if not the best professional wrestler of the modern era. However as most of us know, Benoit is not remembered for his wrestling talent for most.

Let's talk about his career exclusively. If I remember correctly Chris started wrestling at 18 and was trained by Stu Hart at the Hart Dungeon wrestling school. Stu Hart being from the famous Canadian wrestling family that produced Bret and Owen Hart.

So Chris Benoit in his entire life had been a wrestler. Chris Jericho his close friend said Chris had never had a job in anything else - he always wrestled. In 1986 he went to Japan to wrestle for New Japan Pro-Wrestling (NJPW) and the thing about NJPW is that if you're...

...wrestling with them, you've clearly got a lot of talent. The NJPW dojo training is tough and long before you can be considered to be allowed into the ring you can expect to be doing menial tasks like cleaning. Here is some dojo footage from the 70s:

Chris did well for himself in Japan, honing his wrestling craft, adopting his "Pegasus Kid" gimmick, winning the IWGP Junior Heavyweight Championship, and also meeting Black Tiger - who most of you will know as Eddie Guerrero.

It was around about this time that Chris started to adopt the moves that he was known for such as the diving headbutt he took from his idol The Dynamite Kid whom he grew up watching. I'm not sure exactly when he starts using the Crippler Crossface but I think it was WWE era.

He then wrestled briefly with World Championship Wrestling (WCW) in 1992 before going over to Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW) in 1993. During his time in ECW Chris became known as The Crippler, mostly due to him accidentally breaking Sabu's neck

He also won the ECW Tag Team Championship alongside Dean Malenko, another wrestler who would end up a close friend to Chris Benoit. Chris would then return to WCW in 1995.w

During his time in WCW, the WCW booker Kevin Sullivan ended up writing a plotline involving his wife Nancy (ring name Woman) having an affair with Chris and what started as an affair for a wrestling storyline developed into a real one. Things got tense between Benoit and...

...Sullivan backstage especially as Kevin Sullivan and Nancy divorced before Nancy would go on to marry Chris in the year 2000. Sullivan blamed Chris for the deterioration of his marriage.

Now the thing with WCW was that often, the most favoured wrestlers were the bigger and taller guys. Chris was billed in at 5'10" and given the added inches onto wrestlers' billed heights he was probably standing at maybe 5'7" or 5'8". You can kinda tell in photos of him.

Chris won the WCW Tag Team Championship alongside Dean Malenko and even won the WCW World Heavyweight Championship but was ultimately unhappy with the company and in 2000 he, along with his friends Eddie Guerrero, Dean Malenko, and Perry Saturn left WCW for...

...the World Wrestling Federation (WWF, later becomes WWE). Upon their arrival the four form The Radicalz stable. Benoit, Malenko, and Saturn had already been in a WCW stable together called The Revolution. It was in the WWE where Chris arguably received most of his fame...

...teaming up with his Chris Jericho as well as going on to win the Tag Team Championship, Intercontinental Championship, United States Championship, and of course his biggest achievement - the World Heavyweight Championship in 2004. Chris had an extensive amount of wrestling...

...experience and had achieved so much despite not being the biggest or the tallest but he worked hard and you can see that in footage of him in the ring. Even wrestlers who worked with him will tell you that he was fantastically skilled and some will agree that he was one...

...of the greats. But of course, the last 48 hours or so of his life will carry far more weight when people hear his name than his in-ring work will. Regardless, I felt like it would be nice to focus on his phenomenal talent for once.

Maybe I will make a thread on the events surrounding his death but it's not for this thread.