It was just a tad more than four years ago when I had the journalistic version of a “Texas Steel Cage” match with World Wrestling Entertainment chief Vince McMahon. On a set inside WWE headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut, I sparred hard with McMahon about the alarming number of deaths of pro wrestlers around the world since 1997 - more than 60 age 45 and under - from drug overdoses, heart attacks, car accidents, suicides, and everything in between…a rate 400 percent higher than normal.

Now in the wake of the shocking murder-suicide saga of Chris Benoit, the mainstream media have, for the most part, taken a predictable path. The yabber-dabber in print and television focused on “‘roid rage,” whether or not Benoit was under the influence of steroids when he killed his wife and seven-year-old son before hanging himself. The inevitable answer for this unspeakable tragedy, I dare say, will eventually fall much closer to “The Life.”

Beyond my smack down with McMahon (or up as the case was with Vince and my interview notes) the piece Tim Walker, Andrew Bennett and I put together for Real Sports in June of 2003 was far more about the lifestyle wrestlers must endure to insure they stay on top — an endless cycle of travel, steroids, pain, pills and, along the way, virtually non-stop partying.

By the time Del Wilkes ended his 11-year run as the All-American superhero “The Patriot” in 1998, he told me he’d spent the last six years of his career “jacked up on pills, if not coke,” taking as many as hundred pain pills a day.

“At the time,” Wilkes said, “I thought it was perfectly normal because everyone else around me was doing it.”

“How many guys are we talking about?” I said.

“If there were ten guys sitting in a dressing room, I would say seven or eight were probably living the same way.”

Living the same Life.

It’s easy to point fingers in the direction of McMahon and his multi-billion entertainment goliath and say he bears some responsibility. Especially given the fact that at the time we did our story at least 15 of the 60 some wrestlers who died worked at one time or another for his organization - either as bona fide stars or talent under development, a charge Vince firmly and rather angrily denied, then and now. But there is no question the lines pro wrestlers must cross to get BIG, stay BIG, dull the PAIN, go to sleep, wake up, work out, get up, come down, play a pivotal part.

Chris Benoit may have killed himself (and others). But no matter the official cause of death, in the end he was just one more victim of “The Life.”