#2 He was an underdog
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People love to root for the underdog and in the world of professional wrestling, that usually comes in two forms. First, there is the gifted technical wrestler who doesn’t have the mic skills to be a larger than life persona like Hulk Hogan, Randy Savage, Ultimate Warrior and so forth.
Second, there are the smaller framed guys who typically are allowed to flourish in the midcard, but will never reach past the Intercontinental Championship level of reward for their efforts. Chris Benoit was far from the smallest man on the roster, but he certainly wasn’t the same size, nor the same type of performer as the typical main event choices.
In WCW, he was considerably different from Goldberg and Kevin Nash. In WWE, The Undertaker and Triple H appeared to be on a higher tier than he operated from. But whenever someone is talented enough to catch the attention of the crowd despite not being an obvious choice for the company to push, fans tend to latch onto them to give them support.
If it seems like they aren’t going to get to the top without some help from the crowd, but the fans feel they deserve to be pushed, they’ll certainly voice their opinions loud and clear, just as they’ve done with folks like Daniel Bryan and Sami Zayn.
There’s also a certain level of respect the fans have for people who work the independent scene, travel between different companies and work their way up from the bottom rung, which is what Benoit did by wrestling not just in WWE but WCW and ECW among other territories.
Chris Benoit could have easily been a career midcarder, but by being in a position where he wasn’t pushed to the moon too fast, he was able to garner sympathy from the audience that felt he deserved better, making him actually seem even greater in general just because it wasn’t being acknowledged by the powers that be.
