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Several reports emerged this morning that Chris (Kanyon) Klucsaritis was found dead as the result of an apparent suicide on Friday night. He was 40 years old.
While details are still sketchy, it is believed that he was in New York at the time of his death. A longtime friend reports that a pill bottle and several notes were found close to the body.
Chris worked both as the Kanyon and Mortis characters in WCW and WWE, being involved with the Invasion angle.
Although he retired from wresting at one point, he had returned to the ring again recently and worked a couple of matches this year.
I had the pleasure of working with Chris, when he was part of the AOL Grandstand, back in the days when AOL and wrestling were a hotspot. Chris was one of the nicest and most down to earth people I met in the business. He will be missed.
Chris also wrote "Kanyon's Commentary" which was featured on WrestlingClothesline.com in 2004. You can read them here!
My thoughts are with the family and friends of Chris.
Here are some twitter tributes to Chris Kanyon.
Taz
"Sad to hear about Chris Kanyon RIP. ...thoughts & prayers out to his family."
Shannon Moore
"RIP Chris Kanyon!!!"
Kevin Nash
"R.I.P Chris Kaynon prayers to his family and friends."
Matt Hardy
"Kanyon was always really cool to me.. Hate to hear the sad news. My best goes out to his family & loved one.."
Gregory Helms
"RIP Chris Kanyon. He was a good guy that helped a LOT of people
in this biz. He struggled with a lot of problems though. It's a sad day.
When Kanyon "came out" he texts me with "I'm gay, that
bother you?" My reply, "I'm not, does that bother YOU?"
We laughed & stayed friends. He was unique that's for sure, we'd just
texted a lil bit last week and he spoke again of his ups and downs with
depression. That is a tough struggle!! But at least his struggles are
over. He was a nutcase, good and bad, but I'll miss him nonetheless. RIP
my friend. After being released fr WWE, Kanyon went to Vince & asked
if Vince would do the "You're Fiiiiired" thing. Lol I believe
at the Mania party."
Jim Ross
"Too bad about Chris Kanyon. Troubled, talented guy. Sad."
Ken Anderson
"RIP Chris Kanyon. Hurricane Helms told me a very funny story involving him once. "are you wearing PANTS?!!!!"
Steve Austin
"yes i was sad to hear about chris. very nice guy. way too young to die."
Dixie Carter
"On behalf of everyone at TNA, our deepest sympathies go out to the family of Chris Kanyon."
Bill Goldberg
"Sad to hear about Chris...RIP"
-------
Kanyon gave all to wrestling
By Mike Mooneyham
Sunday, April 18, 2010
“Some birds aren’t meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright. And when they fly away, the part of you that knows it was a sin to lock them up does rejoice.”
Jimmy Mitchell keeps replaying those words over and over in his mind.
It’s a famous quote and part of Morgan Freeman’s closing monologue in the classic movie “The Shawshank Redemption.” They’re also the same prophetic words his longtime friend Chris Kanyon left him with in a conversation that would turn out to be their last.
Kanyon, whose real name was Chris Klucsaritis, was found dead in his Queens, N.Y., apartment on April 2 after apparently taking his own life. Although an official cause of death has not yet been determined, it was reported that an empty bottle of pills was found near his body, along with ominous notes.
Veteran manager Mitchell, better known in wrestling circles as Father James Mitchell and The Sinister Minister, knew Kanyon as well as anyone in the business. The two were friends for 18 years, and Mitchell credits Kanyon with helping him break into the “big leagues” with WCW during the mid-’90s.
Kanyon’s death hit Mitchell hard.
“To say that I’ve been inconsolable at times would be an accurate description. That hit me worse than any of them (wrestling deaths) because Kanyon was a friend — not (just) a wrestling friend. Wrestlers are sort of like actors. Actors work on a set for a few months, and they’re sharing this false emotional and physical intimacy in a movie. They’re best friends on the movie set, but when it’s over, it’s over. Wrestling can be that way. You can run back into people later, and you’re thick as thieves again. But it’s situational. Kanyon was never one of those people. Kanyon was a friend before either one of us was anybody.”
Kanyon had battled depression and bipolar disorder for years, and had threatened suicide on a number of occasions. It was no secret that he had been despondent over no longer being involved in the wrestling business. Friends had become worried.
“The biggest wrestling match he ever had was within his own soul. That about sums it up,” laments Mitchell.
Kanyon’s career in the wrestling business, which spanned from the mid-’90s in WCW to his release by WWE in 2004, was solid and marked by his love for the business and a desire to constantly improve. Veterans like Diamond Dallas Page considered him one of the most underrated and unselfish workers in the profession.
But that work ethic was built on an insatiable appetite for wrestling and countless hours of training in the gym. Kanyon made a number of stops along the way to the big time, including training with Bobby Bold Eagle at the Lower East Side Wrestling Gym in Manhattan, Afa Anoa’i at The Wild Samoan wrestling school in Pennsylvania and at The Fabulous Moolah’s wrestling camp in Columbia.
It was at Moolah’s school where I first met Chris in 1993. At the time the then 23-year-old was working as a physical therapist at Baptist Medical Center in Columbia and earning nearly $70,000 a year. It was a far cry from what a weekend warrior would be making on the independent wrestling circuit. Maybe enough money for gas back and forth to Columbia, a decent meal and a late-night movie, and that was about it.
But I could tell then that he had a fire in his belly and a love for the profession.
“To quote a friend of mine, ‘Wrestling is a poor man’s trade, but an addiction worse than heroin,’” the 6-4, 230-pounder said in an interview. “No one’s going to go through all this if they don’t love the game ... I’m doing this against my parents’ wishes. If I’m in a wheelchair, I’m not going to be able to be a therapist. But if I never tried it, I’d be on my deathbed kicking myself and saying, ‘You never even went for it.’”
Kanyon also had a deep appreciation for the history of the business, which helped explain why he was training at a school run by Moolah (Lillian Ellison), one of the most celebrated women wrestlers ever and also one of the toughest. Assisted by Mae Young, the two grand ladies of the mat represented nearly a century in the ring at that time.
It was a great learning experience for a youngster like Kanyon, a rugby player at the University of Buffalo, who would swear that a 10-minute wrestling bout was tougher than an entire rugby match.
“Here, you learn a lot about the old school of wrestling,” he said.
He continued to learn about the business, as he had since he was 6 years old, watching every wrestling show he could and studying tapes from as far away as Japan. He seemed destined to be a star.
Kanyon made his first big splash in the business in 1997 as the masked heel Mortis in the James Vandenberg (Mitchell)-managed group called “Blood Runs Cold” during the red-hot Monday Night Wars era. The video-inspired character was eventually dropped, and Kanyon went on to adopt several other gimmicks during his WCW tenure, including a stint as a member of Raven’s Flock, as Chris “Champagne” Kanyon, and as part of the Jersey Triad with Page and the late Bam Bam Bigelow in 1999. He later feuded with Page under the “Positively Kanyon” moniker, playing off the name of DDP’s book, “Positively Page.”
“He was incredible in the ring. He was a great friend. He will be truly missed,” Page said on a video blog. “I love you, bro, God bless you because I’m sure that wherever you are, man, you’re happier than you were here.”
Along the way, he continued to train wrestlers, and even helped younger upstarts such as Billy Kidman into the company.
“The wrestling business owes nobody anything, and if you’re crazy enough to get in it, you’re in the shark tank and don’t be surprised when you get bitten,” says Mitchell. “But he helped so many people get into the business. He hired a bunch of cruiserweights for Eric (Bischoff), and even helped a ton of guys who went on to not accomplish anything. He gave them a place to crash. He fed them. He was just so generous. Guys loved him.”
His workmanship earned him the nickname “the Innovator of Offense,” and along with that billing he came up with his catchphrase of “Who better than Kanyon?” One of the most spectacular moves of the WCW era occurred during a three-tier cage match at the 2000 Slamboree pay-per-view when Kanyon took a bump off the highest cage all the way down to the rampway.
His grasp of wrestling psychology and his ability to put together innovative matches, such as the Dennis Rodman-Karl Malone and Jay Leno bouts on WCW pay-per-views, caught the attention of company brass who began to utilize his talents. He served as a stunt coordinator in an NBC movie on the life of Jesse Ventura after Ventura was elected governor of Minnesota in 1998, and WCW boss Eric Bischoff sent him to Los Angeles to help out in the filming of the movie “Ready to Rumble” starring David Arquette. He stood in as a double for the wrestling spots of Oliver Platt’s character in the film, and was listed as a coordinator in the credits.
His wrestling career, however, began to fall apart after being released by WWE. He had enjoyed early success in the company, rejoining Page as part of a WCW invasion angle and defeating The Acolytes Protection Agency (Ron Simmons and John Layfield) for the WWE tag-team title in 2001, but the push didn’t last. A number of injuries and trips back to the developmental facility at OVW eventually led to his release in 2004.
Kanyon, still looking for a gimmick that would get him noticed, made rather dubious headlines later that year when he publicly announced he was gay. According to Kanyon, he had informed officials in Ohio Valley Wrestling that he was gay, and shortly thereafter was told to dress like Boy George in a skit with The Undertaker, before being fired. He claims he fell out of favor because the company knew he was gay.
WWE officials maintained that Kanyon was let go because his contract had ended and his character had run its course.
Kanyon tried to get back into wrestling by dubbing himself “the first openly gay wrestler.” But that goal never materialized, and little interest was ever shown.
“He just didn’t come out. He wanted to make a big deal of being the first openly gay wrestler,” says Mitchell. “By 2004, that was old news. The world had changed. Nobody cared that he was gay.”
Kanyon related his story to several hundred Northern Kentucky University students as part of National Coming Out Day in 2006. He discussed dealing with depression and what it was like for him coming out as a professional wrestler. He also told the gathering that he had “never been happier.”
You’re afraid to come out of the closet,” said Kanyon, who was diagnosed with manic depression in 2004. “I didn’t even realize how much of a relief it would be. I thought, ‘I will get rid of the fear, I will get rid of the paranoia,’ just by taking that one step coming out.”
He told the group that it took years to bring him to the point of revealing that he was gay. He said he also tried to overdose on sleeping pills but didn’t take enough. “I thought, ‘What the hell have you done to yourself?’” he said.
The publicity he did receive garnered Kanyon some appearances on the Howard Stern radio show.
“He (Stern) treated Kanyon like a star,” says Mitchell. “I asked him if he knew how many wrestlers would give their right arm to get that kind of mainstream publicity. But he would just wind up getting depressed. He’d get bookings, and he’d no-show them. He’d tell promoters that he was too depressed.”
Mitchell says Kanyon even wanted to start a wrestling school, but because of the nature of his illness, he couldn’t implement that project or others.
“It was a tragic thing,” says Mitchell. “It was almost like watching someone you love with Alzheimer’s. It was similar to that because he had so many friends, but he got to where he would shut them out.”
An attempted return to work in physical therapy also didn’t work out.
“He simply couldn’t function after wrestling,” says Mitchell. “He tried to go back to his old job as a physical therapist. His salary back in the day as a physical therapist paid for his house, his car, his rent, his utilities. He had no expenses. Most wrestlers in WWE probably weren’t clearing what he made back in 1992. But when he tried to go back to that after WWE, it lasted about two weeks. Eighteen years had passed, and he couldn’t deal with somebody telling him he was five minutes late. He just couldn’t adjust.”
Mitchell says his friend increasingly came up with ideas that either made little sense or had little chance of succeeding. Still, he says, he’d listen.
“I would try to counsel him that these ideas wouldn’t work and they were really bad political moves. And he’d get really angry because he was manic. But he was my friend. What was I going to do? He would implement them, and they’d backfire, and he’d get depressed again.”
Mitchell says Kanyon was showing signs of depression before he left the business.
“Many of the personal difficulties Kanyon revealed to the public in recent years had been shared with me long ago,” says Mitchell. “I was honored that, out of his many friends, he chose to initially confide in me.”
Wrestling had become all-consuming for Kanyon, and when he finally realized it was over, he couldn’t deal with it, says Mitchell.
“He had an artist’s temperament, and wrestling was the palate he painted with. It was his canvas. And when he couldn’t do it, that was it. It was like a singer who woke up one morning and couldn’t sing. So once he got out of the business, that’s when he started really going off the deep end. And all that crazy stuff and publicity stunts you’d hear about in the grapevine over the years, that was him in the middle of full-blown, mad-scientist mania. As long as he had wrestling, even if he wasn’t happy in wrestling, he still had to get up and be at the airport, he had a schedule, he had things to do.”
Mitchell says he told Kanyon early on that he was too nice of a guy to be involved in the wrestling business.
“He was honest, generous to a fault, loyal, and had an incredible degree of personal integrity. He stood up for deserving underdogs, regardless of what it may have cost him, because he innately felt it was the right thing to do.”
Mitchell, who was recommended to WCW by Kanyon, says he once told his friend that he felt guilty because he would never be able to return the favor. In typical Kanyon fashion, he told Mitchell that he didn’t expect him to because “that’s what friends are supposed to do.”
The bond between the two remained unbreakable, says Mitchell, and now he’s left to ponder what might have been.
Could he have done anything to prevent this tragedy? Were there words he could have used to make his friend feel differently?
Mitchell says Kanyon confided to him many years ago about difficulties he was confronting in his personal life.
“Chris dealt with a level of internal torment most people will never be able to grasp. To see someone I cared for experiencing that kind of ongoing anguish was painful beyond description at times, yet insignificant compared to what he endured.”
Kanyon was very careful during his wrestling days, says Mitchell, to not tip the boys off that he was gay.
“He was everybody’s best friend. People used to crash with him all the time. He basically ran a hotel for wayward wrestlers. And he always used to wonder what these people were going to do if they found out he was gay. He would run all that stuff through his head. He never would confide to anybody, and that led to some convoluted cover stories.”
Mitchell says, to the best of his knowledge, there was never a “significant other” in Kanyon’s life.
“The saddest thing, for 40 years, he never, ever once had a romantic relationship. What we take for granted as a basic mammalian need ... he never experienced. Even though he had all these friends, he was very lonely in that way. It’s just terribly sad.”
Mitchell says Kanyon had become more and more isolated. He’d sometimes call several times a day, for hours, “then he’d just wear himself out and disappear again.” His mood swings were worsening.
“It was as if he’d dropped off the face of the earth,” says Mitchell. “You’d find out that he did in fact try to kill himself without telling anybody about it. That’s when you knew it was getting serious. He previously had told a number of people about wanting to kill himself, but those were cries for help. When you don’t make an announcement of it, you know it’s serious.”
Kanyon’s financial reserves also had taken a hit. He had once owned a home in Atlanta, dubbed “Club Kanyon” because of the expansive, recreational nature of the sprawling property, and a beach house in Clearwater, Fla. But in recent years, with a dwindling money supply and no major job prospects on the horizon, he moved back to Queens, N.Y., to take over an apartment owned by his parents.
Mitchell said he knew the end was near after their last meeting on Jan. 30 when he went to New York to manage Kanyon on a show promoted by former ECW star Mikey Whipwreck. He also immediately noticed that Kanyon’s OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) had kicked back in.
“He was taking up the entire dressing room floor stacking and restacking and unstacking 8x10’s.”
While Kanyon had a number of issues, neither drug addiction nor alcoholism were on the list, says Mitchell.
“Unlike most people I’ve ever known who had issues like that, he didn’t self-medicate with drugs and alcohol. He wasn’t a drug guy and he wasn’t an alcoholic. His drug was wrestling. It brought him peace.”
Mitchell wishes he could come to terms with the loss of his friend. Kanyon was only 40 years old, and so had so much left to offer.
“This got worse for me over a period of days. He would be the closest friend I’ve ever lost. I’m feeling this real hole. It was like a family member died. But he was like family. Something like this changes your life. It’s put me in some real funks.”
Mitchell also wonders how Kanyon’s life might have turned out had he not followed the path of pro wrestling.
“Perhaps he could have pursued the kind of relationship he always wanted. Perhaps he could have moved to another city with a traveling job. He could have gone to a place where it was accepted and lived happily ever after. But he was so bitten by the wrestling bug. And wrestling can be a macho immature business. It’s junior high school. These are grown men who pull ribs on people. There are treehouse rules. For a guy who had so much integrity, it had to be rough.”
“I wish he was still with us in this great big dysfunctional wrestling family,” Mick Foley wrote on his MySpace account. “Kanyon, unfortunately, was a guy who gave a lot more to wrestling than wrestling gave to him in return.”
Robert McLearen, one of his closest friends outside the business, told The Wrestling Observer that Kanyon had been “in a really bad place for the last few years.”
“He would spend weeks, sometimes even months, in bed,” said McLearen. “Last month he had what he described as his worst bout ever with depression. He had been struggling for as long as I’ve known him, and for him to say that, I knew it had to be bad. He was finally able to pull out of that to the point where he could function. He tried therapy, medications, nothing really worked anymore.”
“The last time I saw Kanyon in person he told me that he planned to leave us. It was a matter of ‘when,’ not ‘if,’” said Mitchell. “He wasn’t sad. He wasn’t angry. If nothing else, he seemed to be at peace with himself. As I had done countless times before over the years, I tried to convince him that he had plenty to live for and listed all of the people who loved him and would be devastated by his passing. He told me that I was being selfish because I was more worried about my own pain than his. He said that he had no control over wrestling politics or his mental health, but the one thing he could control was his own existence. He felt no one had the right to insist that he go on living when he found doing so to be unbearable.”
He knew he was seeing his friend for the final time when he summed up his feelings by quoting those lines from ‘The Shawshank Redemption.”
Now that he’s gone, those words have a profound and surprisingly comforting resonance, says Mitchell.
“All I could do was to give Kanyon a tearful hug and thank him for being such a truly wonderful friend. Kanyon left Freeman’s final two lines off of the quote he shared with me that night. I can think of no better way to describe the void his absence has left in my life than to close with them.”
“But still, the place you live in is that much more drab and empty that they’re gone. I guess I just miss my friend.”
Mike Mooneyham can be reached by phone at (843) 937-5517 or by e-mail
at mooneyham@postandcourier.com.
