flair meltzer

After the match, one wrestler after another paid me their respects. What touched me the most was
when Earl Hebner said to me, blinking back tears, “If anybody ever says you’re not a total pro, I’ll
punch them in the mouth.”



I’d been overthrown. According to the storyline, I’d suffered a shoulder injury in Backlund’s cross-
face chicken wing and had to be sent home until early January to recover, the longest off-time I’d
had in ten years.



On November 29, in Calgary, there was a press conference announcing the debut of the Calgary
Hitmen. Earlier in the year, legendary NHLers Theo Fleury and Joe Sakic had invited me to co-found a
junior hockey team in Calgary whose coach and general manager would be their one-time mentor
Graham James. Theo thought it would be a good idea to name the team after me, and I thought the
media exposure would more than offset the investment they wanted from me. That day, the logo
was unveiled along with the team colors, which were my ring colors of pink, black and white. The
logo featured a phantomlike hockey player in a goalie mask bursting out of a triangle. Our
celebration that night was diminished by a couple of local sportscasters who hated wrestling, plain
and simple, because they thought it promoted violence. Overlooking all the accomplishments of a
local boy, they declared that I was a horrible role model for a junior hockey team. With the NHL on
strike at the time, I couldn’t help but wonder whether the only reason they ripped on me was
because they needed something to talk about. The story got national exposure, and Don Cherry
defended me on Hockey Night in Canada. Hitmen merchandise flew off the shelves. As Vince so
often proved, sometimes a little controversy can be a good thing.



On Christmas Day at Hart house, I was seated next to my mom at her end of the long dining-room
table. She always had me sit to her right, and then she’d hold my hand. How could I not feel


tranquility about how my life was turning out? I was thrilled to have a hockey team named after me,
and I was on TV in Lonesome Dove, getting paid to play cowboys and Indians, while still flying around
the world playing the role of a hero to millions of kids. Maybe that palm reader in New Orleans was
actually right, and I would become bigger than I ever imagined. As the plates were being cleared, my
mom gazed at me with love and pride.

~~~


On May 17, I did a bit where I came out of the crowd on The Tonight Show to accept a challenge
from Kevin Nash that I come back to WCW in one week to wrestle him. Jay Leno had been part of
WCW’s Hog Wild pay-per-view back in July 1998, and he laughed when I pulled out a WCW wrestling
card with his picture on it and asked him to sign it.



Meanwhile, the Hitmen had won the WHL championship and were set to meet the Ottawa 67s in the
Memorial Cup. Things had improved so much between Julie and me that I invited her, along with
Blade and Dallas, to fly east with me to watch the game. On Sunday afternoon, May 23, 1999, the
Ottawa 67s defeated the Hitmen in a heartbreaking overtime. Julie and I, along with the boys,
stopped in the locker room to congratulate the team on a great season. Even though the team had
lost, that visit was a sweet moment of competitive purity that one only finds in real sports.



I had to rush to make my flight to L.A. for my second live appearance on The Tonight Show the next
day. While I was saying good-bye to Julie and the kids at the airport, we bumped into some of the
mothers of the Hitmen players who were catching a flight back to Calgary. They were still tearful,
and then one of them cracked a tentative smile and said, “Why are we crying? It’s not like somebody
died.”



I connected to my L.A. flight through Toronto, but had no time at the airport to call home. I pictured
the whole Hart clan sitting in Stu’s kitchen watching the nationally televised Memorial Cup final and
feeling the same passion and heartache as me. A couple of hours later, in the air, something
ominous nagged at my heart. It couldn’t be the game. I knew all about the game. Then the cockpit
door opened and the pilot came out, and I just knew that he was looking for me. He handed me a
note that read, “Bret Hart, please call home. Family emergency!”

~~~

Over the next few months, the only joy I got was when I took my parents to watch the real Hitmen,
who were first in the Western Hockey League (WHL) and making another run for the Memorial Cup.
The only time I ever saw my dad forget his broken heart after Owen died was one night when the
Hitmen won a game in overtime, and he rose up to his feet jubilantly clapping as hard as he could.




One time, Stu asked me what it would take to make peace with Ellie and Diana. Maybe it was selfish
of me, but I could only shake my head and tell him sadly, “Out of respect for Owen, I can’t.”



I kept myself busy doing promotional work for WCW in order to receive half—and then a quarter—
of my salary. According to my contract, they could fire me any time after six weeks if I couldn’t
wrestle. If I did appearances, they kept paying me, but the longer I was out of the ring the less they
paid. Dr. M told me that it’d be at least nine more months before we’d know anything. Despite my
best efforts, it became more clear to me every day that I’d evolved into a wrestling tragedy, just as
I’d feared. Thank God I had thought to take out an insurance policy from Lloyds of London to cover
me.


~~~~

I also got a message from Stu telling me that he and my mom agreed completely with everything I’d
written in my column in that week’s Calgary Sun. I’d written an impassioned piece about the state of
the business and how, when a fan asked me if wrestling is real, I realized that I didn’t even know the
answer to that question anymore! It once bothered me when people thought wrestling was fake,
and now it bothered me that they thought we were really hurting ourselves and one another: The
sad part was that we were! In the column, I wrote that the colossal pulverizing that Goldberg gave
me had been real, and so were Jerry Flynn’s stiff kicks. When The Hitman tried to kill Sycho Sid with
a monster truck, that was fake, but when I careened out of control and nearly crashed my rental car
into the television truck, that was real. I’d written about how my match in Kansas City with Chris
Benoit was the ghost of what wrestling used to be, but what I had always thought it was meant to
be. And I asked myself, in the column, how far I could bend without breaking in order to help WCW
beat Vince McMahon. Maybe I’d gone too far already. Maybe the whole wrestling business was
fucked up now, including me.



I didn’t know when I got up on January 10, 2000, that this would be the day I’d have the very last
match of my twenty-three-year career. My head ached miserably and it was a long drive from State
College to Syracuse, where I caught an early morning flight to Buffalo. I dropped my bags on the
floor at the Avis car rental counter and made small talk with the lady working there. I happened to
glance over my shoulder and caught Nasty Girl poking her head out from behind a cement pillar
across the street. I was tired, fed up and sick of the threat of her doing God-knows-what to me. I
matter-of-factly asked the Avis lady, “Have you ever seen a real-life stalker be-fore?”



She couldn’t help but notice this large girl poking her head out from behind the pillar over my
shoulder, and she began taking me more seriously. “You’re not kidding, are you?”



“No, I’m not.”




She asked me if I’d mind if she called the airport police and I told her that not only would I not mind,
I would greatly appreciate it. Within a few minutes, three policemen showed up and we had a brief
chat. Two of the officers walked me to my car, while one headed over to ask Nasty Girl a few
questions. I drove off to my hotel.



I called Julie when I got to the hotel, and we’d opened up our next round of peace talks when we
were interrupted by a knock at my door. I set the phone down and found one of the policemen I’d
just said good-bye to standing there. He looked a little rattled, and asked me if I’d come make a
statement. Nasty Girl had attacked a cop with a knife. I told Julie I had to go, and I’d explain it all
later.



Sitting at airport police headquarters, I couldn’t help but hear loud wails from a not-too-distant
holding cell, followed by the thuds of Nasty Girl’s powerful kicks. The officers around me kept
shaking their heads in amazement at the sheer power and volume of her rage. An exasperated cop
finally came out of the holding cell, slamming the door behind her. She told her fellow officers, “If
you want her wig off, you’ll have to do it yourselves!” Apparently they’d needed to remove her wig
to check whether she was carrying a concealed weapon in it! The cops then gathered in a circle and
drew matchsticks to see who’d be the lucky one to take the wig off. Finally the cop who’d lost burst
out of Nasty Girl’s cell letting out his best war cry while shaking a long black mane above his head, “I
got it! I got it!” I signed my statement; the policemen whom she’d attacked would ensure that she
didn’t bother me for a while.



When I arrived at the arena for Nitro, I found that Russo had concocted a storyline around me being
forced by Terry Funk to wrestle a title match against my own nWo team member Kevin Nash. I’d
hoped to be off that night, but instead I had to hurry away to buy black skater shorts, new running
shoes and knee pads and change in time to air live clips of me and Kevin getting worked up and
dressing for the match. With my head thick and thumping and that stabbing pain in my neck, I taped
my ankles, wrapped my broken-down knees and smeared my lower back with gobs of Icy Hot. Just
another day in my pain-filled life.



Kevin had read my last Calgary Sun column and told me: “You shouldn’t be too hard on yourself, it’s
not your fault the business is so fucked up.” He promised me we’d take it real easy and then he
surprised me when he said, “The match I had with you back at Survivor in 1995 was the best damn
match I ever had. You’re the best worker this business ever knew. And that’s the God’s honest
truth.” I smiled and thanked him, wondering all the while why Kevin had put so many rocks in my
path at WCW if that was the way he truly felt.




I made my way out to the ring, WCW Champion of the World, with the big gold belt hung on my
shoulder. I felt less than myself in a sleeveless nWo shirt and runners. If I’d been able to foresee the
future, I would have strutted out there in my pink and black tights and my shades, and I’d have
climbed all four turnbuckles taking in the faces of the fans who loved me in those final moments. I
was Humpty Dumpty about to fall and never be put back together again. I’ll forever imagine how it
could have been, with fans, young and old, slowly rising, proudly standing and clapping and waving
signs. In my mind’s eye, I read them: HITMAN YOU WERE THE BEST; WE’LL MISS YOU. But I was the
last one to know that this would be my last dance.



The bell rang, and Kevin and I worked hard and well together. He protected me as best he could. I
chopped him down at the knees, and we let Russo’s silly storyline unfold; it wasn’t long before Kevin
dropped me hard with a punishing sidewalk slam. I was rocked, and the next thing I saw was Arn
Anderson on the floor cracking Kevin across the back with a rubber lead pipe, which was my cue. I
forced myself up to fend Arn off with a steel chair, when suddenly Sycho Sid was behind me. As I
turned, he mistimed his frontal kick, but somehow I still managed to clunk myself on the head with
the chair anyway. Sid snatched me by the throat, hoisted me up over his head with one hand and
held me, then drove me down into the mat with a choke slam. He pulled me right back up and
proceeded to give me his powerbomb. I tucked my chin to protect myself as I?floated to the mat in
slow motion, but I landed flat and hard. Lying on my back staring up at the lights, I saw millions of
tiny silver dots everywhere, a galaxy of stars. Like a TV falling from a high shelf, my tube smashed
and I lay there not moving. I couldn’t help but think, This must be what you see in the seconds
before you die. I thought of Owen and tears filled my eyes. Then I managed to roll out of the ring to
see Terry Funk racing out, brandishing a flaming branding iron and pretending to burn Kevin with it.
By the time I sat down to unlace my boots, I’d already forgotten enough of what had just happened
that I complained only about the pain in my neck.



The next day, in Erie, Pennsylvania, for Thunder, I told Russo again that I was hurt. He replied with a
confident grin that I wasn’t to worry—I didn’t have to wrestle. Instead he had a storyline built
around me turning babyface, appearing to be taken hostage by a hostile nWo, only to swerve
everyone by the end of the show when I’d double-cross Funk and turn heel again. I hated it, but at
that point I’d have done anything not to actually have to wrestle. I was so foggy it didn’t occur to me
that I could have just told them I was hurt and gone home, but maybe I stayed because it had always
been so ingrained in me to keep going no matter what. Besides, Russo was on such thin ice I wanted
to do whatever I could for him. I don’t know why. It was just my nature, I guess. With hindsight, as
soon as I told my WCW bosses I thought I had a concussion, they should have sent me home.



I opened the show coming out in a T-shirt and jeans for a heartfelt in-ring interview. I apologized to
the fans for taking the wrong road and told them I was so disgusted with myself that I didn’t deserve
their respect. The camera cut to a fan holding a sign that read, RESPECT BRET HART! I saw one older
woman in the bleachers cheering and jumping for joy, and I hated the thought of seeing their faces


when I turned heel again at the end of the night. Then I challenged the nWo, and when they came
out, Kevin declared, “Tonight, Hitman, your career will be finished, maybe even your life!”



All through the show there were clips of me being held hostage, choked and bullied with baseball
bats by Nash, Steiner and Jarrett for my disloyalty to the nWo. They even burned some pink tights—
not mine but they said they were—in effigy, setting them alight in a trash can. At the end, I made my
escape, limping out into the ring holding a bat, and I again challenged the nWo to fight me. Seconds
later, we were all taunting one another with bats and chairs. The three-to-one odds were too much
for Terry Funk and a cavalry of WCW babyfaces to take, and they charged the ring to rescue me. I
saw the old lady in the bleachers clapping and cheering like a schoolgirl.



Then Arn tossed a pail of water in my face so everyone could see that my blackened eyes were only
make-up. Unfortunately for Russo, nobody understood it. So I smashed Funk with a rubber bat to
reveal the double-cross. I felt like a total piece of shit as the nWo beat all the baby-faces down with
bats. And my heart filled with shame at the sight of the old woman in the stands now sobbing like a
baby.



On Thursday, January 13, I sat in Dr. Meeuwisse’s office in Calgary, telling him about Goldberg’s
ferocious kick to my neck while he felt around with his fingers. I told him about taking the choke
slam and seeing silver dots. He noticed that I was slurring my words and asked me if I thought I had a
concussion. I told him maybe a slight one. He probed me with questions and then recited some
numbers and asked me to repeat them back to him backwards. I couldn’t. Then he gave me five
random words that he’d ask me to remember in a few minutes. I couldn’t. He studied me, then
asked me again if I thought I had a concussion. I told him again, a slight one.



He asked me what I was taking for my headaches and when I told him, “Four Advils every three
hours,” he shook his head and told me they’d eat a hole in my stomach as he wrote me a proper
prescription.



“I can feel a hole in the back of your neck the size of a quarter.” He felt around the back of my skull.
“This part here feels like hamburger.”



“I have a pay-per-view on Sunday. I’m the main event.”




With a dry smile, he said, “You’re not going anywhere. The problem with people that have
concussions is that you think you’re okay, but you’re not.” He paused and crossed his arms, looking
me in the eye. “I hate to be the one to have to tell you this, but your career is probably over.”



“What happens if I don’t stop?”



“The boxing world likes to pretend that Muhammad Ali’s problems today are all related to
Parkinson’s disease, but the simple truth is Ali kept on boxing after being concussed. All those blows
to the head cost him. You’re no different than him, and I’m sure you don’t want to end up like him. I
don’t want you doing anything. It could take up to a year before we can even determine how bad
this is. No working out, no flying, no watching TV, no listening to loud music.”



“When I call WCW, what should I tell them?”



“You tell them your doctor has diagnosed you with a severe concussion.”



“Yeah, but who are you?” I meant, Why would WCW believe him?



“I’m the chairman of the NHL injury committee. Tell them to call me.”



Driving home, tears came to my eyes as I thought about calling J.J. Dillon with the news. After
twenty-three years, I didn’t want to go out like this. What would I do now?



By that weekend, Vince Russo had been sacked and WCW rewrote their storylines without me; it
was like I had never been there. I had been erased.



I sat home staring blankly at the walls with the TV off and the lights dimmed. I couldn’t even read,
my head hurt so much. Julie was pissed off and wasn’t talking to me again. For comfort, I relied on
the steadfast loyalty of a pug dog named Coombs, which Dallas had given me. He rested his head on
my lap doing his best Jim Neidhart impression with a face that looked even sadder than mine.




I didn’t want to lose myself to brooding, and Dr. Meeuwisse told me to find a hobby. When I was
chosen by Calgary’s Glenbow Museum as one of six guest curators to help design an exhibit paying
tribute to Canadian heroes, I really put my heart into it. One of my choices was Tom Longboat, one
of Canada’s most famous long-distance marathon runners in the early 1900s. My mom surprised me
with a story about how Longboat had run against her father, Harry. “My father impressed upon me
that a mara-thon runner never, ever turns his head to look back,” Helen said. “It’s just not done. It
throws off the timing. But in a big race one day, my father could hear footsteps behind him, always
there, and so, for just a moment, he turned and his gaze was caught by the brown eyes of Tom
Longboat, only a step behind him. Then Longboat edged past him! I don’t know who won the race,
but my father never forgot the speed and grace of that kid or the look in his eye.”



WCW desperately needed me to make a tour of Germany in February: I was the headliner and it was
sold out. I’d only step into the ring to say a few words to the fans. Reluctantly, Dr. M cleared me to
fly, mostly because I was afraid I’d be fired if I didn’t. Duggan, Sting, Knobbs and Liz all reached out
to me with supportive arms. A big, young, white-haired kid from Philadelphia named Jerry Tuite,
who worked as The Wall, insisted on carrying my bags for me. Still, I couldn’t help but see that most
of the other wrestlers didn’t believe I was hurt. When I slurred my words, they grinned at me like I
was putting them on, which hurt because I had never faked an injury in my “real” life or missed a
match on purpose. But there were so many worked injuries in WCW that when somebody got hurt
for real, hardly anybody believed it.



On the bus in Hamburg, I had a talk with Jeff Jarrett, who had been one of Owen’s closest friends. He
told me he was offended when Martha’s lawyers pressed him about any possible philandering Owen
might have been doing, and had refused to even call them back. I told him that they were just doing
their job, checking out every aspect of Owen’s life—and for the sake of Owen’s kids, he needed to
talk to them. He told me how he and Debra McMichael, his valet, had been up next after Owen’s
match in Kansas City and backstage everyone was running around in a panic, as Jeff stood at the
Gorilla position. Owen’s dead body was wheeled past him at the same time as two firm hands
shoved him hard through the curtain, “Go! Go! Go!” He told me he was sorry he went out to the ring
that night and that he bawled his eyes out the whole time, as he did again just telling me about it.



Terry Funk had been listening to us, and now he asked me how my family was doing. I told him how
crazy things had got up at Hart house. Terry knew the Harts pretty well, and he gave it some deep
thought before telling me: “Everybody’s crazy. The whole world’s crazy. You’re crazy. I’m crazy. It’s
all about to what degree you’re crazy.” In my concussed state, Terry made a lot of sense.



Poor Davey was a case in point; he was a shell of his former self and still hooked on morphine. Being
in no shape to wrestle, he hadn’t lasted long in the WWF, but Vince still said he needed him, so he
headed off to a rehab program in Georgia. In answer to my criticisms of the year-end show on
Stampede Wrestling, that involved various non-wrestling members of the Hart family, Bruce ripped


into me on the Stampede Wrestling website for taking shots at Davey in my column. He defended
Davey, saying he was “a damn loyal and trusted trooper of the clan who’d been unjustly maligned
and made to look bad.” Bruce had as much right to express his opinion as I did, but he didn’t know
the truth.



I felt more and more estranged from so many people in my family because nobody stood shoulder to
shoulder with me in defending Martha, except my mom. Keith, Wayne, Alison and Ross all steered
clear of Ellie and Diana, supporting me only from behind the scenes. I understood why Georgia was
on Ellie’s side: she had spent her whole life defending Ellie and turning a blind eye to Ellie’s actions,
and she would never forget Ellie’s support when she went through the loss of her son, Matt.



Struggling with my concussion, I’d begun ducking Martha’s calls: it was too hard to listen to her rant
about how Ellie and Diana were bullying my parents into settling with Vince like a heel tag team.
Martha said, and I agreed, that Diana, Ellie and even Bruce thought that life is like wrestling in that
they can just turn themselves heel and then turn back babyface over Christmas, expecting to be
forgiven.



At the building in Hamburg, Terry Taylor handed me a five-page script and told me I had to cut a heel
promo on my German fans. “I won’t do it!” I said. “Just let me go out and say a few words.” I walked
out to chants of “Owen! Owen!” and explained that I’d suffered a concussion that might end my
career and if I didn’t get another chance I wanted to tell my German fans I’d never forget them. I
talked about how much I loved Owen and how the last match we ever had was right here in
Hamburg. The emotional outpouring from the crowd was powerful enough that it took me a long
time to do my walk-around. When I finally came back through the curtain, Terry Taylor hung his
head, ashamed that he had asked me to rip into fans who loved me so much.



Each night after his hard-core matches, Brian Knobbs came back to the dressing room with a new
ugly gash in his head. I couldn’t help but draw him on the blackboard, showing the progression from
day one of the tour, when he was smiling and happy, to days three and four, looking more bloodied
and battered. In the last drawing, he was in a wheelchair with lumps on his head and the caption
was STARTLING NEW EVIDENCE! PRO WRESTLING IS REAL! Brian laughed and hugged me when he
saw it.



On the last night of the tour, in Leipzig, a four-year-old girl in a white dress climbed into the ring with
flowers, ran up to me and jumped into my arms. She held me tight like she was taking care of me
now. Everybody was crying and chanting for Owen. Every outstretched hand I touched around the
ring empowered me like God’s angels boosting my batteries.




I had one last bus ride with the boys. I have a vague memory of The Wall taking a handful of pills and
of someone shaving his eyebrows. Ric Flair made the mistake of standing in the aisle and when the
driver hit the brakes he took an ugly fall into the stairwell. When he got up, very slowly, I wondered
how much longer he could keep going. I didn’t tempt fate anymore and was happy to have my
seatbelt on, tight.



WCW spared no expense, putting me on the Concorde to rocket to New York City for a toy fair. I was
happy to have the chance to experience such sophisticated speed before they retired it. At the toy
fair I met fellow Calgarian Todd McFarlane, creator of Spawn. I was a big fan of his comics and we
joked about his old Aberhart high school beating Manning in basketball but never in wrestling!



At that convention I saw the coolest Hitman action figures ever created, but nobody would ever see
them. Unbeknownst to anyone, and like the Concorde, WCW was almost out of business.



From the toy fair, I was beamed across America to Las Vegas for a signing at the Nitro Grill. I had
some Hitman dolls in my overhead bag and every few minutes one of them would call out, “Ouch!”
which got me a lot of strange looks for the whole flight. After the signing, I dashed off to make a
flight home, but once we were in the air they announced that all flights were backed up and it didn’t
look like we’d land in Salt Lake City on time to make my connection. My head pounded, and every
time I looked out the window at the clouds below the mountain peaks I thought of heaven and
Owen. Soon my mind wandered to the thought of him lying on the mat like a dying bird after hitting
a car windshield. I thought, I need to get home, Owen. Just then a woman passenger collapsed in the
aisle right beside me, and the flight attendant feverishly worked on her. “We’re losing her,” she
called out to another attendant. A runway was cleared at the Salt Lake City airport so we could land,
the woman was met by para-medics and I raced across the terminal and squeezed through the doors
of my plane home just as they were closing.



That night was a combination of heartbreak and wonder. That’s when I had a most powerful dream
about Owen, who woke me from a deep sleep. He had tears in his eyes and was angry. “What is a
life worth?” he said. “So is that all I’m worth? Fucking kill me and I’m worth $36 million? Is that it?” I
told him, “Owen, it’s not about the money. You know that.” He was also seething about Ellie and
Diana, and I didn’t know how to comfort him as big tears slowly dripped down his cheeks. This
dream haunted me enough that at the time I kept it to myself. But it didn’t surprise me, afterwards,
when the next day Martha told me she had come up with a settlement number for Vince’s law-
yers—$32 million, close enough to my dream to spook me. I haven’t dreamed of Owen since then.



I kept waiting for the headaches to fade and my life to return to normal, but every time I saw Dr. M,
he told me it was going to take time. When I told him I couldn’t feel the hole in my neck, he asked


me to lie on a padded table in his office and told me to relax my head in his hands. As he poked
around, he slipped his finger an inch deep into my neck.



I told him I cried all the time, and asked whether it was normal when even a shaving commercial
could bring me to tears. He looked me in the eyes and said, “You’re gonna start crying right now,
aren’t you?” I instantly blinked back tears, thinking, What the fuck is wrong with me?



Again, he told me it was all part of the concussion: my brain was like the squares on a soccer ball and
the square that triggers pleasure had been bruised. He arranged for all kinds of brain tests with
world-renowned specialists in Toronto and Montreal, and he even sent me to a psychologist. I was
trying to take it easy, but simple things like carrying my groceries, tying my shoes or doing shoulder
checks while I drove only aggravated the never-ending headache from hell. Steak tasted like liver
and my libido disappeared. I was afraid I’d never get better.



I showed up to see my parents every other day, only to get into it with Ellie about Survivor Series yet
again. Diana would join in, screaming at me that everything was my fault because I wouldn’t drop
the belt to Shawn Michaels. Diana, Ellie and even Bruce hated that Paul Jay’s documentary, which
had now been seen all over the world, portrayed me as some kind of Canadian hero: a whole new
audience beyond the wrestling world now respected me for standing up for what was right.



Ellie left me a phone message demanding to know what options my parents had and that someone
needed to enlighten her as to why this was the way things had to go. I wasn’t even sure what she
meant, and it was beyond me to understand why she kept calling me about the lawsuit when our
parents and Martha made all the decisions having to do with it. In her message, Ellie said that she
had no hard feelings and that she and Diana hadn’t done anything wrong. But the truth was,
unbeknownst to anyone at the time, they’d long since faxed Jerry McDivitt at the WWF a copy of
Garry Robb’s entire case file, which my mom had left on her desk. All I ever truly asked of Ellie and
Diana was for them to stop making comments about Owen’s case until we knew what happened. I
kept saying, “Just do what Owen would want you to do,” but they wouldn’t listen. I knew that our
confrontations would ultimately lead to the destruction of the Hart family and thought Vince must
be laughing at how easy it was to play the Harts against one another.



Over the next few months, the only joy I got was when I took my parents to watch the real Hitmen,
who were first in the Western Hockey League (WHL) and making another run for the Memorial Cup.
The only time I ever saw my dad forget his broken heart after Owen died was one night when the
Hitmen won a game in overtime, and he rose up to his feet jubilantly clapping as hard as he could.




One time, Stu asked me what it would take to make peace with Ellie and Diana. Maybe it was selfish
of me, but I could only shake my head and tell him sadly, “Out of respect for Owen, I can’t.”



I kept myself busy doing promotional work for WCW in order to receive half—and then a quarter—
of my salary. According to my contract, they could fire me any time after six weeks if I couldn’t
wrestle. If I did appearances, they kept paying me, but the longer I was out of the ring the less they
paid. Dr. M told me that it’d be at least nine more months before we’d know anything. Despite my
best efforts, it became more clear to me every day that I’d evolved into a wrestling tragedy, just as
I’d feared. Thank God I had thought to take out an insurance policy from Lloyds of London to cover
me.



It made little sense to me, or anyone else, when I was flown to Nitro in Denver on April 10 that year.
But as I was asked, I charged into the ring, bashed Hogan with a chair, and in an act of pathetic
desperation, Hogan juiced big time.



Good guys don’t last long in a wrestling office, especially when times are bad. Soon after that Nitro,
Bill Bush was fired and replaced by Brad Segal, a TV exec who knew even less about the wrestling
business than his predecessors. Bischoff and Russo were back and, ironically, the new storyline
centered around two failed “experts” joining together to save WCW.



By the time I did Thunder in Memphis on May 2, every wrestler knew the WCW ship was sinking. It
didn’t surprise me to spot Lex and Liz openly sipping long-neck beers on the hood of their car at the
back of the building. For some reason, Jarrett was called upon to smash a gimmicked guitar over my
back. Things had got so bad that on May 7, Owen’s birthday, a 150-pound actor named David
Arquette won the WCW World title from Jarrett at the Kemper Arena.



That same day I was home in Calgary. I’d been scheduled to be in Kansas City to be deposed by Jerry
McDivitt, but it was canceled at the last minute, so I drove to Owen’s grave for the first time in a
while. I found myself telling the black marble monument, adorned with flowers and weathered cards
and letters, that it was time for me to pick up the pieces. Just then two jackrabbits hopped right past
me. I wondered if they were brothers. I wondered if Owen’s death was some kind of colossal super
rib that he was subjecting the whole family to in order to expose our shortcomings. It had ruined us
and it would never, ever get better. I told Owen I loved him, that I’d fight to the end for him, and
then broke down hard.



Diana had begun a serious romance with one of Bruce’s novice wrestlers, a young kid named James.
No one could blame her, but it didn’t help things when she phoned Davey to tell him about it while


he was dealing with the worst phase of rehab. He immediately checked himself out and flew home.
There were several explosive clashes between Diana, Davey and Stu at Hart house, including one
where Davey inadvertently knocked Stu down and hurt Stu’s shoulder. The police were called and
Davey made the front page of the Calgary Sun, being led away in handcuffs. Bruce kindly offered
Davey a place to stay.



Before I got hurt, I’d promised to do some appearances to promote a Hitman photo book.
Concussed or not, I did major talk shows where they’d invariably ask me about Owen. Inadvertently,
I became the spokesperson for the rights of wrestlers and the wrongs of the business. I talked of the
need for a wrestlers’ union and wrestling schools, and I condemned the stupidity of backyard
wrestling, a fad where young teens often put one another in the hospital because of real hard-core
matches. I didn’t feel comfortable being the voice of everything negative about the business because
I still had a lot of friends making a living in it, but I still had a lot of passion for my art form. It was
being killed off, and I felt the need to defend it.



A while before, I had taken on Bruce Allen as a manager. In June that year, he told me he’d always
had his doubts that I was hurt. I?was about to leave for Montreal to see Dr. Karen Johnston at McGill
University to take comprehensive brain tests. Concussions are still largely misunderstood, and the
medical world was only starting to see how broad-ranging their effects can be, from symptoms that
last only a few minutes to those that change a person forever. I underwent various brain scans, X-
rays and a functional MRI, which all left my head pounding like a drum.



Some of the tests were at Montreal General Hospital, where I met a young man of about nineteen
by the name of Antoine. His girlfriend spotted me coming through the front door and then she and
his brother loaded Antoine up in his wheelchair and found me in the radiology department. I felt
kind of silly talking to them wearing only a little blue hospital gown and slippers, but Antoine was a
huge fan of mine and was dying of cancer. His girlfriend told me that with three tumors in his brain
he was in a lot of pain. He told me that I was his hero, how he cried after Survivor Series, and that
wrestling wasn’t the same after that. I said, yes, that was the day that wrestling died. Then he spoke
about Owen and broke down crying in his wheelchair, and I changed my mind and thought, No, that
was the day wrestling died.



But all of it seemed irrelevant in the face of the fact that Antoine only had a few days left to live.
He’d bravely accepted it and smiled when he told me the first person he’d look for in heaven would
be Owen. He joked about delivering any messages I might have and I told him, “Just tell Owen I miss
him. Oh . . . and tell him I know it’s him ribbing us all.”




For three nights in a row, I visited Antoine in his hospital room until late in the evenings, talking
about his girlfriend, the world and wrestling. When I told him stories about Owen’s pranks, he
laughed until he cried and it really filled my heart.



Everywhere I went, the people of Montreal apologized for what happened to me with Vince in their
city, but they had nothing to apologize for. Montreal had always been very good to me.



Death and sadness weighed me down, and for no damn reason at all I ended up at a strip bar.
Montreal’s beautiful and skillful nude dancers were without a doubt the best in the world, and I lost
myself in their moves. The boss welcomed me and played Tina Turner’s “Simply the Best” as a
compliment. I smiled at the memory of how Jim and I had hung our tag belts over the perfect breasts
of two French beauties back in our old Hart Foundation days.



A few days later, back in Calgary, I got the call that Antoine had died. I was only privileged to know
him for a short time, but I’ll never forget him.



Ellie and Jim were making headlines of their own, with the police now breaking up their shouting
matches; she had served him with a restraining order. Jim had been hired on by Vince as a talent
scout, and sometimes we’d meet up to drink a few beers and I’d help him fabricate names for the
scouting report he’d send on to Jim Ross. There were many who wondered why I never had any
problems with Jim after Owen’s death. Why would I have had problems? Jim never once made any
comment about Owen’s case, which is all that Martha ever asked of the family.



My mom, who’d only just recovered from a blood clot and an irregular heartbeat, told me that
tragedy and greed were what made some of my siblings react irrationally. To my mind, the Hart
family had turned into The Jerry Springer Show: Davey, whom Bruce had taken in, had just become
involved with Bruce’s wife, Andrea, who’d feuded with Diana for years. Poor Bruce was now having
loud shouting matches with Davey, with the police never far behind.



The stress of it all took its toll on Stu. He was soon hospitalized with pneumonia. Then Davey
overdosed on morphine. Then one of the grandkids accidentally burned Katie’s place behind Hart
house down! Even Lana, the old, crippled pit bull, keeled over dead. The Harts were simply drowning
under waves of grief.



Martha was anxious to put all the heartache behind her and start a charitable foundation in Owen’s
name. Then Ellie admitted in her deposition in the lawsuit that she did, in fact, take legal documents


from my mom and dad and faxed them right to Vince’s lawyers, including the allocation agreement.
No one knew what the ramifications of this would be, and there was concern that the trial could be
delayed because of it.



Of course, this led to another furious meltdown between me and Ellie, especially when my mom
tearfully told me that my dad had given $6,000 of the money I’d given to help them out to Ellie. My
temper got the best of me and I hurled one of Stu’s antique chairs into a wall, shattering it to pieces.



After that blowup, Ellie left me a phone message. “I haven’t done anything, Bret. You won’t get the
satisfaction that you ultimately wanted from Vince over Montreal and a bunch of lawyers are getting
the money. Mom and Dad should be able to get on with their lives. I don’t know what makes you
think that you’re such a genius. Maybe you need to rethink things, Bret. I know it will never be right
between me and you and I don’t really care, but the one I do feel bad about is Martha, but I’m sure
all of this will work out for Martha and I pray to God that it does. I haven’t done anything except
stand my ground and what I said right from the very start, that we should try and work this out,
because the only ones that are going to win are a bunch of lawyers and it’s going to rip the family
apart, and it has. At least you know my point of view and respect it.”



I was asked to show up at Nitro in Las Cruces on August 28, where I saw Bill Goldberg for the first
time since he nearly cut his own arm off breaking that car window. He hugged me and told me how
sorry he was about my concussion. I had no doubt about that—Bill was a good man. Unfortunately,
he’d been pushed too fast and didn’t understand his brute strength.



That night we both followed the insane booking angles: I hit Goldberg with a rubber shovel and
pretended to bury him alive in the New Mexico desert. Maybe he should have been burying me for
real: Dr. M called to tell me the verdict was in. It was official: I’d never wrestle again.



I went home and waited for Dr. Johnston to second Dr. M’s opinion before I said anything to WCW.
As Bob Dylan wrote, It’s when you think you’ve lost everything that you find out you can always lose
a little more. He was so right.



WCW had me show up on September 4 for Dallas Nitro just to slam Goldberg’s head with a cage
door. The following night at Thunder, a WCW angle reduced my very real concussion into a silly
storyline when they had me go face-to-face with Goldberg in the middle of the ring. I was slurring
my words for real, following the script to whine about how he hurt me, when a wave of emotion
came over me as I realized that nobody was getting it: Everyone, including all the fans, thought I was
just acting like I was concussed. Then the big screen played the definitive camera angle of Goldberg’s


foot plowing into my head, one that I’d never seen before. The crowd laughed and jeered me as
Goldberg dressed me down verbally. Afterwards, I felt like a whore as I remembered the devastating
impact of Goldberg’s foot connecting with my head, reinforced by what I’d seen up on the big
screen. And I’d let them exploit it for ratings.



At the end of the month, I returned to Montreal for more brain injury tests. When I was done,
Antoine’s bereaved parents picked me up and had me over for a home-cooked meal.



46



PISSING GOD OFF



I’D BEEN A STEADY HORSE all these years. Since being hurt, I’d done everything WCW asked of me,
yet they’d cut my pay, then cut it again. Now, like a limping circus pony, I waited for the end. It came
on October 19, 2000, when J.J. Dillon called with the bad news. His voice cracked, and I knew it hurt
him to tell me, though I could still feel the stick gently prodding me out the flap at the back of the
circus tent. Twenty-three years and it’s all over.



FedEx delivered my termination letter: “Based on your wrestling incapacity WCW is exercising its
right to terminate your independent contractor agreement effective October 20, 2000. . . . Your
contributions to the wrestling business are highly regarded and we wish you only the best in the
future.”



Then I read a letter I’d just received from a young fan by the name of Rosalie. I’d received thousands
of fan letters over the years, many similar to hers. Maybe it was the timing, but none quite touched
me like this one did:



I’m writing a letter to tell you how much you have meant to me. I want to tell you that you were the
reason I first started watching wrestling and I basically grew up watching you. . . . It’s unbelievable
how much of the Hitman character helped shape the person I am today. . . . I saw how you never,
ever gave up. . . . What I learned from The Hitman was to work hard, to never give up and most
importantly to have confidence in yourself. Those beliefs may sound corny but when you are a ten-
year-old kid growing up in a broken home where you are constantly being told how worthless you
are those beliefs can be a positive thing. I remember looking in the mirror as a teenager and saying,
Rosalie, you are the best there is, the best there was and the best there ever will be and don’t let
anyone tell you otherwise. . . .




I’m in third-year university, studying chemical engineering right now. . . . The Hitman was the
catalyst that has got me where I am today. . . . I heard somewhere that celebrities shouldn’t be a
child’s hero, that heroes should be people who are real. Well, sometimes the people in a child’s life
can’t be heroes. The child may have to look else-where. I’m not ashamed to say that you were my
hero. It just breaks my heart to hear the rumors about you retiring soon. I don’t want to believe it
because I don’t want to let you go. I have been watching you wrestle for as long as I can remember
and it’ll be so strange when you’re gone. Seeing you retire, letting you go, would be like saying good-
bye to a very dear friend who I will never know if I will see again. . . .



I plan to make enough money one day to buy a house. I’ll hang my framed autographed picture of
you and when friends and family come over I’ll tell them about you. How much I respect you and
when I’m old and gray I will still remember you and I’ll tell my grandkids how you were my hero.
Wrestling will never be the same without you but on a positive side, I wish you all the happiness in
the world. You will always hold a special place in my heart. Yours Truly, Rosalie



On November 3, an elated Martha called to tell me that, after the many bumps in the road caused
by Ellie, she had settled with Vince. I have to admit I was more than a little hurt when she told me
she couldn’t tell me the amount because she’d sworn an oath not to reveal it. When I asked her if
she ever found out exactly what happened and who was responsible for Owen’s death, she meekly
offered up, “He just fell.”



The more we talked, the more disappointed I became, especially when I remembered what she said
in her eulogy. “There will be a day of reckoning and this is my final promise to Owen. I won’t let him
down.”



I asked her if she and the lawyers at least tried to get back my photo and video archives from Vince.
She told me Pam Fischer said the issue wasn’t important enough even to bring up. When I hung up
the phone, I called Marcy; she’d just heard the news through her media contacts that Martha settled
for $18 million.



The next morning I read Martha’s comments about the Harts in the paper. “These people worked
against me . . . I am removing myself and my children from the family. I carry the last name, but I’m
not related to them anymore. People need to know that Owen was a white sheep in a black family.”




After that, she called me again, and I told her point blank that I felt she’d completely used me and I
didn’t appreciate the way she painted us all with the same brush. I couldn’t see why Martha had to
hurt my whole family. While she’d been quick to praise me, she was quite venomous to my mother,
who’d stood by her throughout all the family struggles. It didn’t seem to matter to Martha that
Owen was my mother’s son. When Martha started to cry I forgave her, because I knew she felt she
had no choice but to settle after Ellie had derailed the case, but what she had said was not about the
money ended up being about the money.



Just before Christmas I was called to testify in a court proceeding on Smith’s behalf. Over the years
he’d fathered an unknown number of kids by different mothers, none of whom he took
responsibility for. But he wanted custody of Chad, whose mother had died, and whom he was relying
on Stu and Helen to raise. They were getting on in years and after twelve kids of their own, and
forty-something grandchildren, they were burned out. My con-science told me it was more
important to be a good uncle than a good brother, and sadly I couldn’t endorse Smith as a
responsible father. Smith took this as an unforgivable be-trayal. So now I had one more estranged
sibling out to get me. Christmas that year was probably the worst one my mother ever lived through:
Everyone seemed hell-bent on making my ailing parents sorry they ever had twelve kids. Bruce had
his problems; Davey, who was still with Andrea, managed to score more headlines when he
supposedly made death threats to Diana. I, of course, had serious heat with Ellie, Diana, Bruce and
now Smith. Ellie saw fit to blame the meltdown in the family on me, telling the media that she
believed it was more important to me to make life unpleasant for Vince McMahon than to be loyal
to them.



Then Carlo called to give me the big news that he had personally structured a WWF takeover of
WCW. He laughed at how Vince got the organization, including the entire film library of not only
WCW, but the NWA, for just half a million. I didn’t let on to Carlo how much it bothered me that
Vince now owned every inch of footage of my career, with the exception of Stampede Wrestling. But
the wrestling war that broke out in 1984 was finally over, and for all intents and purposes Vince now
monopolized the business.



The Governor General’s office called on Valentine’s Day with the much-needed good news that Stu
would be invested as a Member of the Order of Canada on May 31. My mom wanted me to
accompany them to Ottawa for the ceremony, but when Stu’s pneumonia landed him back in the
hospital for much of April, we wondered if he’d be able to make it. I did my best to avoid any more
confrontations with opposing family members. I’d spent the winter coming back from my
concussion, watching Blade play hockey; I also started working on this book. Ever since I’d gone to
work for the WWF I’d carried a tape recorder with me all over the world, recording a diary of my life.
I just kept thinking, This will make a hell of a book some-day, and it seemed to me that the time had
come.






One night I had a dream that I had WWF’s current World Champion, Kurt Angle, in a tight headlock.
In the dream, I asked myself if it was really happening, and to figure out if it was real or not, I stared
at the sweat dripping off his head and then focused on the blue fabric of the ring canvas. In my
dream I concluded it was not a dream, and when I woke up, for the first and only time I really missed
working.



Carlo invited me to the WWF show in Calgary on May 28. I told him I’d like to meet Kurt Angle and
Brock Lesner, but I wasn’t comfortable going to Raw so close to the second anniversary of Owen’s
death. Why the WWF insisted on running shows in Calgary each May I’ll never know. It infuriated
Martha and lit a fuse to the powder keg at Hart house.



Carlo knew I was still extremely sensitive about what Vince had done to me, but he passed on the
message that Vince wanted me to know that he didn’t hate me: If I wanted to come down to the
show he’d be more than happy to shake my hand. But the problem wasn’t him hating me anymore—
it was me hating him. Aside from sticking it in my eye every chance he got, he’d destroyed the
harmony of the Hart family, for which I was being blamed.



Carlo then asked me about Stu’s health, saying that Ellie, Diana and Bruce desperately wanted Stu to
be on TV to show the world that the Hart family had made peace with the WWF. He said that they
had requested five hundred free tickets to the show—they didn’t get them, of course—and didn’t
seem to see the absurdity of the situation. As soon as I hung up the phone, I drove down to Stu’s. I
was relieved when he told me through gritted teeth that he didn’t want to go to Raw, but that he
was being made to go.



“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, and I’ll be here to make sure of it!” I said. But
Ellie, Diana and Bruce were more than determined to see that Stu should go. Meanwhile, in another
chapter of our public soap opera, Martha told the media that she would be deeply offended if any of
the family went to the WWF show, which only put added pressure on my parents to fix something
that couldn’t be fixed.



May 28, 2001. If the show is to start in the evening, the talent usually arrives at the building in the
afternoon. When I got to Stu’s house at ten that morning, I thought I was in more than enough time
to spare him from going to the Calgary Raw. But I was too late: Ellie and Bruce had dragged him off
at eight o’clock in the morning. I’d hear later that Diana and Bruce wheeled him into Vince’s office
like a battering ram, then commenced a heated argument over who could make their pitch to Vince
first. But Vince was so busy with TV, he soon had them cleared out of his office.




As upset as I was, I told my mom that it would do Stu good to see the boys in the dressing room. But
I thought it would break my heart if they paraded him out on Raw—the public would think that Stu
had forgiven Vince for everything.



I didn’t go down to the Saddledome. Tears came to my eyes as I watched the opening of the live
show at home on TV: there was a clearly tired, deflated and demoralized Stu sitting in the front row
with Ellie, Diana, Georgia, Bruce and Smith, who grinned as he held up a big sign that read, HA HA
BRET.



At the end of the show, Vince stuck his big, fat, salty thumb in my eye as far as he could by
reenacting the Survivor Series screwjob finish, in Calgary, right in front of my father, as he played the
corrupt promoter who rang the bell as Benoit had Stone Cold in my sharp-shooter. I drove down to
Stu’s and burst into my mom’s bedroom. Rage filled me as I denounced every single one of them for
doing this to me—I was through with them all. I didn’t know how to forgive any of them. I stomped
down the stairs and took both Owen’s and my childhood photos off the wall, leaving two white
dusty blanks. I slammed the kitchen door as I left and burned rubber out of the yard, feeling every
bit as betrayed as I did the day Vince ordered poor Mark Yeaton to ring the bell.





The next morning, Bruce drove an eighty-six-year-old Stu three hours north to the Smackdown
taping in Edmonton and put him through the whole thing again. Both Benoit and Jericho called me,
concerned about Stu’s health and state of exhaustion.



Even though I’d looked forward to going to Ottawa to see Stu receive the Order of Canada, I was so
offended by everything that had happened I chose not to go. As a result, I missed something that I
had my heart set on. By June, I realized how it was wrong to punish my parents for being used by my
brothers and sisters. Stu and Helen were both broken-hearted by my absence so, after a couple of
weeks, I showed up and put the pictures back up on the wall. Then I went upstairs and wrapped my
arms around my mom and, as I felt her shake with emotion, I silently loathed my brothers and sisters
for doing this to her. I felt so sorry for all of us. I couldn’t help but feel as though I was free-falling
into a bottomless pit of despair. If I’d had to write a will, it would have been a few lines, but if I’d had
to write a suicide note, it would have been a thousand pages long.



Throughout that summer, whenever I pulled into Stu’s yard, Ellie and Diana would race out of the
house and flee in their cars. But in a lot of little ways, I told myself, things hadn’t changed too much.
There was always a ring full of grandkids wrestling out in the yard, dogs and cats everywhere, a fresh
pot of tea and five or ten young wannabe wrestlers taking bumps in the dungeon.




On a hot July afternoon, I opened my car door, my sidekick Coombs jumped out and together we
went in search of my mom. I followed his snorts all the way into her office and gave her a big hug.
She was never that crazy about dogs, but her mother, Gah-Gah, absolutely adored pugs. I soon had
her laughing, and telling me stories. One of her favorites was about the time I lost my hug. One of
her childhood friends from New York, who went by the name Little Helen (because she was even
tinier than my mom, which wasn’t that easy to be), came to visit when I was about three. She was
getting hugs from everybody, but when it came to my turn, I was too shy to hug a stranger. She
jokingly asked, “Where’s my hug?” My eyes got big and I told her, “I lost it.” For the whole week she
was there, I pretended I was still looking for it. Luckily for her I found it on her last day!



Despite these attempts to cheer her up, I could tell my mom was really upset. Finally she told me
that she’d read a draft of a tell-all book that Diana had coming out soon. Diana had got Stu to write
the foreword without him reading the manuscript. My mom was so upset because, unbeknownst to
Stu, he had endorsed a book that trashed his own family. She was trying desperately to cheer herself
up, thinking of the reunion she was about to have with her sisters in California. I was thinking, Diana,
what have you done?



In September, I went to Australia to promote a tour for a fellow named Andrew McManus who had a
new wrestling outfit called WWA. He asked me to help put them on the map by playing a non-
wrestling role as their figurehead Commissioner. I enjoyed helping out the smaller promotions
whenever I could, as a way of giving back to the business that’d given me so much. It did give me the
opportunity to visit Australia, though; I’d never been there before, and I was having a great time.



My concussion was finally beginning to clear, though I still wasn’t allowed to lift weights or do any
other form of exercise. On September 12, 2001, in Australia I’d just done a live night-time talk show
with a host named Rove and was thrilled with how it had gone. I headed back to my hotel room and
met some of the wrestlers from the tour in the elevator. They told me somebody had flown an
airplane into one of the towers of the World Trade Center. When I got to my room I watched in
horror, with the rest of the world, as the second plane hit. I stared at the TV all night with a deep
sadness that heaped itself on the pain and hurt I already carried around.



I loved New York. She’d been good to me. I always thought of the New York skyline as a beautiful girl
smiling at me. Now she had broken teeth; they’d really done a job on her. It was still hard for me to
imagine a horror and sorrow beyond Owen, and I wondered what he’d have thought. I thought of
home and how devastated my mom would be watching this on TV. She and Stu still remembered the
impact of Pearl Harbor, and how out of that catastrophe and the war that followed, they met and
fell in love on a beach on Long Island, New York.




Being in Australia made it all so surreal, as if it wasn’t surreal enough already. I was stranded in
Melbourne until there were flights to take me back to North America. I remember walking over to
the Melbourne Aquarium, where I watched sharks and stingrays float over my head in giant glass
tanks.



I couldn’t help thinking that if anything ever happened to me, I’d still want it known that I wouldn’t
change anything about my life. A voice in my head kept telling me to live and live and live.



When I finally got back to Calgary, a week late, I learned that my poor mom had been delayed at LAX
for an entire day because of the heightened security, and that her diabetes medicine had been in her
checked luggage. The way I see it, Osama bin Laden also caused my mother’s death. After getting
home exhausted, she collapsed into a coma that she never really came out of. Poor Stu was
distraught over not calling an ambulance for my mother as soon as she got sick. I don’t think he ever
got over that. He had been too weak and disabled to pick her frail body up from the floor.



Diana’s book came out at the same time. The opening paragraph described Davey drugging and
sodomizing her, and it went downhill from there. Diana told ridiculous stories about there being a
wrestling alligator in the basement, about her friendship with André The Giant and her stardom in
the WWF. She even ripped into close family friends such as Ed Whalen, saying he was no good at his
job and stole Stu’s thunder. When Diana hit the talk shows promoting her book, even the affable
Mike Bullard, who referred to me as a Canadian hero, treated her with sarcasm. When I realized how
truly clueless Diana was about the way people were reacting, I actually felt sorry for her. I’d later
hear that Diana was misled by the woman who actually wrote the book, and embroidered Diana’s
stories. Was I to assume that Diana was not even capable of reading her own book to approve its
release?



Meanwhile in the ICU, my mom’s baby sister, my aunt Diana, told my sister she didn’t appreciate
some of the remarks in the book. My sister snapped back at her, “My mother never even liked you!”
Meanwhile, thirty feet away, my poor mom lingered on.



For days, the doctors pulled every trick in the book to bring her back to life. She suffered
immeasurably with IV tubes in her arms and a respirator tube down her throat. She finally came out
of it just enough to breathe on her own, barely. Too weak to talk, she could only squeeze my hand.
One time she came around enough to faintly whisper, “How’s Coombs?”




I knew she had to be hating all this, and was surely cursing the doctors for keeping her alive. At
three-thirty in the morning of November 4, 2001, with Stu holding her hand, she slipped away and
found the peace she so long deserved. At that very moment I was lying awake in bed. I said out loud,
“I’m so sorry, Mom, that the light grew so dim at the end.” I felt a soft breeze sweep over me and I
just knew it was my mom saying good-bye.



Only weeks after Ed Whalen gave a heartfelt eulogy at my mom’s funeral, he also passed away.



In January 2002, Tie Domi came to town for a game and we headed up to Hart house to visit my dad.
Tie was a compact man with a head that looked like it was chiseled out of granite; he was generally
regarded as the toughest guy in hockey. I called Stu to let him know we were coming, and when we
got there, he was waiting for us all alone in his spot at the head of the dining-room table. Tie was
dressed in a nice, neat suit. As we approached, Stu turned, stared at him and said, “You got an
interesting head on ya.” We all burst out laughing. If anybody had seen a lot of strange heads, it was
Stu.



A few minutes later, Stu had Tie bent back over the table, trying to show him how he could pull
another player in close and stick his chin into the guy’s eye socket and trip him backwards on the ice.
Stu had Tie half twisted up with cat hair all over his nice slacks. After about an hour, I finally got Tie
out of there. He told me later that the move Stu showed him would probably work in a hockey fight,
if he dared take a chance on it.



On February 27, Carlo called me wanting me to do a trade-off: If I’d referee at Wrestlemania XVIII,
Vince would give me some pictures to use for this book. This was only the latest in a constant stream
of attempts to get me back on Vince’s TV shows. It was damage control; in the end, even guys who’d
left on the worst possible terms always went back to Vince. I did want a truce with Vince, but I also
wanted a public apology, one that Carlo told me I’d never get. I thought of my nephews, Harry and
Ted, and even T.J. Wilson, who all dreamed about someday wrestling in the big time. I didn’t want
my animosity toward Vince to jeopardize everything they dreamed of, but I had no intention of
showing up at Wrestlemania as a referee. I told Carlo all I really wanted was a meeting with Vince to
clear the air between us.



The following day Carlo and Bruce Allen got me on a conference call and did their best to bully me
into believing that it would be in my best interest to referee at Wrestlemania. They set up a meeting
in New York City a few days later, but when I was packing to leave, Carlo called to say that if I wasn’t
going to agree to do Wrestlemania I shouldn’t bother to show up—I’d only be wasting his and
Vince’s time. I asked him to tell me if he truly thought that refereeing at Wrestlemania was the right


thing for me to do. He thought he had the hook in my lip as he went on about how this would be
fantastic for me. Now I knew he was nothing but a company man. I refused.



On May 18 that year, the Grim Reaper of wrestling took Davey. He was vacationing in Invermere,
British Columbia, with Andrea and died in his sleep of a heart attack at the age of thirty-nine. Andrea
was Davey’s girl at the end, even though she and Bruce were still married.



There were two funerals for Davey. Diana called to ask me to give a eulogy at the one she organized
and I agreed, but first I attended the service Andrea put together. Poor Andrea was crying hard, and
I was glad I made it there for her. I saw some of the old Stampede crew, including Ben Bassarab, who
was one of Davey’s closest mates, and his new wife, who was also very nice. But Bad News, Gerry
Morrow and Gamma Singh snubbed me. They were all down and out, working security jobs
together: None of them even talked to me. What did I ever do to them? I asked myself, and then I
knew—I didn’t go broke.



Diana timed her memorial service for Davey for May 29, the same day the WWF was in town. Vince,
Hogan and others came. Ellie, who spoke just before me, ripped into poor Andrea with a vengeance.
Wrong place, wrong time, awkward silence. Eventually one of the funeral home staff eased her away
from the podium. I rose to clean up her mess and to give Davey a fitting send-off, which left both
Harry and his baby sister Georgia smiling with tears in their eyes. I loved Davey like a brother. His
biggest mistake was letting bad people influence his innocent heart. I spoke of how I remembered
him best as that shy, handsome kid with the big dimples.



I’m sorry, Bax, I thought, I should have been there for ya.



When I arrived at Hart house after the service, I was simmering with a lot of pent-up emotion. It was
extremely hot in the kitchen. When I asked my dad how he felt, he told me he was tired and he
didn’t feel up to going to the WWF show. But then Ellie came in, and I could tell by the way he
pursed his lips that she was dragging him down to the show.



I told Ellie, “He’s tired. Clearly, he doesn’t want to go. Look at him.”



She snapped that Vince had invited him, like that was more important than his health.




In a flash, we had broken into a vicious yelling match, where I ripped into her for embarrassing the
whole family at Davey’s funeral. “We were supposed to pay our respects, not take shots,” I said.
Soon my sister Georgia and Ellie’s eldest daughter, Jenny, took up for Ellie and while I was arguing
with them, Ellie dragged Stu down the steps and zoomed off.



I felt terrible about the fight, realizing that the stress of everything was getting to me. Harry, now a
strapping six-foot-five with Davey’s dimples, came up to me then, thanked me for my words at the
funeral.



I was carrying around anger, torment, regret and grief like a big bag of heavy rocks.



I’d been asked to dress like Mordecai Richler’s character The Hooded Fang and deliver a monologue
from his children’s book, Jacob Two-Two and the Hooded Fang, on a CBC special celebrating Richler’s
life. On Thursday, June 20, I brought Julie to Montreal with me for the show. I was happy to be part
of a cast including Richard Dreyfuss, Montreal Canadiens legend Jean Beliveau and several
prominent stage and literary notables, but I’d let myself get really worried about how I’d do. I still
had a thick, fuzzy head and concentration problems, and this show was live to tape. I studied the
script for weeks.



I slipped a black wrestling mask over my head. When I looked in the mirror, it seemed like I was
living my dream of working a crowd as my childhood cartoon wrestling character The Cool Cool
Killer—or close enough anyway. Despite a last-second glitch with my mic as I walked on stage, I
carried the role off. Halfway through my monologue I pulled off my mask and got a pleasant pop of
recognition from the crowd. I bowed, and my smile was a dead giveaway of how proud I was of
myself. Maybe my concussion was finally behind me.



Afterwards, I got slaps on the back from Dreyfuss and Beliveau. To top off the evening, I had a
terrific time wining and dining Julie in old Montreal.



I flew home carefree and raring to go. This performance was going to mark my turnaround. I was
going to get back on my feet, be me again, train and get my body back. Just maybe I could finally
break free and clear of the heartaches and headaches of the last five years.



A day later, Julie was furious with me again. Jim had called me while I was riding my bike and he
rode downtown to meet me. It was a beautiful, hot Saturday afternoon and we stopped to wet our
whistles and catch up with each other. He had a big gut now, and a long red goatee. Both of us still


agonized over Davey’s death. It was like our lives had become this cartoon show, except in this
cartoon all the characters were being killed off for real. Jim was drinking harder than ever and I was
in the mood to celebrate after doing The Hooded Fang, so the beer went down easy. It was a long
uphill ride back home, and it felt good sweating out the alcohol. But I was two hours late for dinner
with Julie, and that was all it took to derail the progress we had been making.



On Monday, June 24, I woke up determined to make some serious changes. I called my divorce
lawyer, who joked about my divorce taking the longest amount of time in the history of divorce
negotiations. I told him I wanted to put the divorce papers through immediately. I’d had enough of
the back-and-forth game with Julie. While I was at it, I didn’t like how Bruce Allen had sided with
Carlo, talking to him behind my back about how they could get me to take part in WrestleMania XVIII
when he was supposed to be representing my best interests. So I penned Bruce a handwritten fax
letting him know that I didn’t need him any longer.



Since it was another beautiful sunny morning, I decided to ride my bike to the gym. I stopped at a
bike shop to see if they could repair my helmet because one of my kids had monkeyed around with
the clasp on the chin strap. They didn’t have a piece to fix it and offered to sell me a new helmet
instead. I decided to take my chances for one day.



Just before noon I was pedaling nice and easy along the Bow River. I realized I needed to relieve
myself, so I veered off the bike path. I was coasting slowly toward a clump of trees when my front
tire dropped into a grass-covered hole nearly stopping me cold. I bounced out, but the bike was off
balance when the back tire hit the same hole. The bike wobbled and then tipped, sending me
tumbling sideways. I got my hands up to protect myself, and I remember thinking that I didn’t want
to break my sunglasses or the cellphone in my pocket.



I tucked and rolled on the hard grassy field. The thought crossed my mind that anyone watching
would probably get a good laugh. The second my head hit the ground, I’d be sorry for the rest of my
life that I ever hit that hole.



I thought I’d get up red-faced and dust myself off. I was wrong. I lay there groaning and badly
winded, writhing around in terrible agony like a speared fish. I saw those same silver dots again, but
this time only in my left eye and they moved toward a cone-shaped point. For several minutes I
couldn’t get up. I desperately grabbed clumps of prickles to pull myself up to my knees and then
struggled to do a right-legged squat to get to my feet. Using my bike for support I stood there,
thinking, What the fuck happened to me?




A man jogged past and yelled to ask if I was okay. I waved him off, but seconds later I realized that
my left arm was hanging by my side and refused to work. I finally grabbed my left hand with my right
one and placed it on the handlebar, but it fell off and just hung there. With my weight on my right
leg, I leaned my chest on the seat and, with my right hand, I somehow maneuvered my bike back to
that damn hole and stared at it, unable to comprehend what had happened. I couldn’t believe that
fucking hole had done this to me!



I tried to swing my left leg over the bike and keep going because I didn’t want to be late for my work
out, but I fell over in an embarrassing heap. As I lay there sweating and drooling, taking in the smell
of fresh-cut grass, the sun beat down on me as dragonflies and bumblebees buzzed by. I managed to
reach Jade on my cellphone, only to find that my tongue and lips weren’t working right and my
speech was slurred. Having no idea what I was talking about, Jade put Julie on the phone. As best I
could I explained what had happened and that I was a few feet from a little hill where we had sat
down to read paperback novels one time.



About ten minutes later, Julie and Beans were racing up to me. I told them I was okay, that I’d just
banged my head. “Just get me out of here!” Julie didn’t tell me that the pupil of my left eye was big
and black. I told them to pull me up to my feet and we’d all just walk to the car, but at my first step
we all fell over. A roller blader raced off to call 911 while a nurse from Toronto who happened to be
jogging by splashed me with cold water and told me to stay awake.



Soon paramedics were strapping me into a cervical collar. Beans rode with me in the ambulance
while Julie followed behind in the car. I wondered what I did to piss off God.



Hours later, at the Foothills ICU, the nurses were trying to persuade me that I’d feel better if I peed.
Every hour on the hour, they’d come by to tell me that if I didn’t pee soon, they’d have no choice but
to insert a catheter. I assured them they’d have to kill me first. I could hear them tell the same story
to some guy behind the curtain in the bed next to me. He finally gave them permission, and his
blood-curdling screams sounded as if they were amputating his leg with no anesthetic. The poor guy
died the next morning.



I have blurry memories of Julie and my kids gathered around me, and of Blade holding my hand in
tears telling me, “You’re the best dad there ever was!”



At one point, a Dr. Watson showed up and asked me if I could move my fingers and toes. It took
every ounce of strength I had to ever so faintly twitch the very tips of my toes and fingers. Dr.
Watson flashed me a hopeful look, saying, “That’s a really good sign.”




I was wheeled away for an angiogram, where they rammed an ice-cold golf-ball-sized camera on a
tube the size of a garden hose down my throat. My gag reflex was so extreme they ended up
sedating me. When I came to, they did an MRI, using some sort of dye that I can only describe as
making my head feel like my veins and arteries were carrying gasoline and some-body had lit a
match. My ears got so hot that I thought they were going to melt off. On top of everything, I could
barely breathe from the unrelenting pain in my back.



At three in the morning, Dr. Watson showed me the images of my brain. Pointing out a small jelly-
bean-shaped spot on top of my head, he told me I had suffered a stroke. I wasn’t quite sure what the
ramifications of having a stroke were. Dr. Watson explained that nobody could make any promises
about how much I’d recover, but if I was lucky and I worked very hard, I might get some of my
mobility back.



But he told me that they couldn’t give me the miracle drug TPA because they feared my brain was
hemorrhaging. If they’d only known sooner that my stroke had been caused by a clot, TPA would
have blasted through it and I might very well have got up and walked out of there.



In the wee hours of the morning, a kind young nurse finally wheeled me into a shower. I cried like a
baby out of gratitude as this sweet girl washed me clean. It’d been about sixteen hours since I pulled
off the bike path to relieve myself, and with the water running, I pissed for a very long time.



47



GOING HOME SONG



AFTER MY STROKE, I woke up every day feeling sorry for myself, even though I knew I was lucky to
be alive.



I was a wreck. I couldn’t whistle anymore so when the nurses doted over me, I hummed “Amazing
Grace” in my head. My smile curved south on the left side and stayed that way, a cracked sneer. My
left eye was stuck wide open, and my vision was poor. I couldn’t stop having emotional meltdowns.
Everything made me cry as I struggled every day to find my way back to where I had been. It got to
be downright embarrassing, until I found out that emotional instability was common for stroke
patients and that everyone on the ward was crying all the time.




I remembered when Shawn Michaels said he lost his smile. Well, I had lost my smile, my ability to
wink, and I was paralyzed on the entire left side of my body. At first, I kept waiting to make a
Hitman-style comeback, but after about four days I asked Dr. Watson if I better get used to the idea
that I wasn’t just going to walk out of there. He told me I wouldn’t be going anywhere for a long
time. But I still didn’t realize what I was dealing with.



I watched the Mordecai Richler special from my hospital bed, and seeing my big smile at the end, so
relieved and happy to have beaten my concussion, when only a week later I would be paralyzed by a
stroke, made me remember Vince’s comment: “Life’s not fair.”



I couldn’t pick up a toothpick. I choked all the time because my lips and tongue were only half
working. I was told that the best part of my recovery would come in the first six months and that the
first three were critical.



On July 1, Canada’s first Olympic gold medalist in wrestling, my friend Daniel Igali, and his coach,
Dave McKay, came to visit me. Just as I was being loaded into the ambulance in the park, Daniel had
been leaving me a phone message inviting me to dinner with him, Kofi Annan and the African
leaders who were attending a G8 summit in Kananaskis, near Calgary. Daniel was kind enough to
wheel me down to the basement, where I sat parked in my wretched wheelchair listening to a sweet
old gal named Miriam, also a stroke patient, telling me she was sure I was going to beat this thing.



My brother Bruce showed up unannounced in my room with a TV news camera crew. Luckily I was
spared the humiliation of being seen at my lowest point because I was out of the room at a rehab
session. After that episode, I made a short list of friends and family who I was comfortable seeing
and gave Marcy the unenviable task of enforcing it; those who couldn’t get in blamed her. She
coordinated a uniformed security team that was posted at my door 24/7 and I felt safe knowing I
was protected.



Ellie tried to use Stu to get in to see me, but was told by a guard that she wasn’t on the list. Ellie then
led Stu to believe that I didn’t want to see him either, and she took him home. That evening Keith
called to tell me how much this had upset Stu, and I was furious. I don’t think Ellie could have done
anything more hurtful at that time to me, and to Stu. Knowing how upset I was, first thing the next
morning Marcy picked Stu up at Hart house and brought him to see me. When she wheeled him into
the room, I used every ounce of strength I had to stand up out of my wheelchair and take three or
four unsteady steps toward him to squeeze his big, fat hand. He smiled so huge he got tears in his
eyes.




One day, after coming back from exhausting physio, I was slumped in bed ready for a nap when my
phone rang. I couldn’t have been more flustered at hearing Vince’s voice. He gave me some kind
words of encouragement while I resisted the urge to slam the phone down. My voice cracked as I
struggled to tell him that I really wanted to clear the air with him, and that one of the most
important things to me was that I didn’t want my career to be erased.



We talked about resurrecting that anthology of my career that didn’t happen because of Survivor
Series and about the idea that maybe someday I’d be inducted into the WWF Hall of Fame. When I
finally set the phone down, I broke down into tears because I realized at that very moment I’d just
dropped one of the heaviest rocks I’d been carrying around.



Every morning, Julie brought me breakfast and a coffee. She helped me in ways I can never forget. I
would never have recovered as well without her love and support.



After Julie left, my orderly would come to get me for physio again. As he wheeled me down the hall
past my fellow patients, all of whom couldn’t stop crying, I’d have to remind myself that today I was
going to gain some ground.



One morning, in the elevator going down, I couldn’t help staring at a handsome little boy of about
nine or ten. He was in a wheelchair with bloody, bandaged stumps where his legs used to be. Gaunt
and sad, he wore a ball cap covering his bald head.



In seconds, I had flashed back to all the girls and all the places I’d seen, how the world had been
mine. I had my doubts that this poor little guy would ever get his driver’s licence or make love to a
first girlfriend. The ride was only a few floors and I pulled my ball cap down over my face to hide my
tears. The courage that flickered in his brooding eyes made me feel ashamed that I ever felt sorry for
myself. It woke something up inside me.



After that elevator ride with that child, I prayed for my life. I slowly came back, one heart beat at a
time. Time to be the hero I always pretended to be.



Eleven months later I was in Australia.




It was May 20, 2003, and the fourth anniversary of Owen’s death was a few days away. I was glad to
get the hell out of Calgary because May was such a depressing month for me. It’d been a long year.
Not to mention Calgary’s infamous weather, teasing a spring that was much closer to winter. The
wet cold sapped my energy because it made my muscles stiff and it was much harder for me to get
around. It’d been a long year.


~~~

Back at home, things were not good. For eighteen years, I’d yearned to be home. Now that I was
home more, Julie and I found that we were leading completely different lives. We had a lousy
Christmas and barely even spoke to each other. She served a beautiful Christmas dinner on paper
plates. The kids were too consumed with all their presents to notice her gesture, which only
deepened her already dark mood. The truth was that none of us wanted to piss her off any further. I
was dragging my heart around over what Vince had done to me, and Julie snapped at me to get over
it. She was also threatening to divorce me again.



I surrounded myself with my sadness—I missed my old friends, the fans, all kinds of people from the
WWF circuit, from hotels, gyms, restaurants, clubs, arenas and airports. I had also lost track of my
old loves, some of whom I missed terribly, but the truth was I didn’t want them to see me this way. I
was hurt, vulnerable, changed: I had lost faith in the world. Bischoff wasn’t going to ask me to
wrestle until late January 1998, and I couldn’t do any weight training because of my broken hand. I
kept in shape through that unseasonably warm, brown Christmas in Calgary by riding my bike all
over town.



I’d barely seen Owen or spoken with him since Survivor Series. On Boxing Day, up at Hart house, he
seemed surprised when I greeted him warmly. He told me the WWF was only getting worse, with DX
getting more vulgar every week, not to mention Sable, a sensuous valet, walking out topless for a
Fully Loaded bikini match with painted-on black handprints to cover her breasts. When he asked me
again whether I was mad at him, I told him again that we could never let the fucked-up crazy
business get between us. With the money Vince was paying him, Owen said, he was thinking about
building a big house on some land just across from Clearwater Beach. I told him just to do whatever
it took to survive and to take care of his wife and kids.



“In three years when our contracts are up,” I said, “we’ll sit on each other’s back decks and laugh
about all this shit.”



Stu and Helen celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary that New Year’s Eve under the pall of the
Montreal screwjob. Sipping tea in the kitchen, we reminisced about how happy and different
everything was back at the Stampede show in July. What happened? I think 1997 was the weirdest
year of my entire life.



My debut at Starrcade ’97 in December had been anything but brilliant. Eric told me my storyline
was going to be about how I saved WCW by helping Sting win back the title from Hogan, which
called for me to confront the referee after he made a fast count on Sting. In true WCW fashion, the
referee forgot what he was supposed to do for real and made a normal count, but that didn’t stop


me from knocking him out cold and declaring myself the new referee. Sting resumed the match and
beat Hogan seconds later. If I thought things were going to get better for me from there on in, I was
sadly mistaken.



My fans tuned into WCW for a while, but according to the mail I received and the opionions of the
fans I ran into in person, they had a hard time following the incoherent story-lines—and so did I. In
comparison, the WWF was well organized; usually Vince’s storyboards were done months in
advance. I also noticed a stark contrast between WCW’s agents and Vince’s. With the exception of
Dusty Rhodes and Paul Orndorff, none of Eric’s men had ever drawn a dime in the business. It was
like having an NFL team run by a bunch of high-school coaches.



WCW took a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants approach to live TV. Nitro was three hours of high-flying
matches mixed with live interviews starring Hollywood Hogan and the nWo, with Eric playing the
part of a crooked promoter, just like Vince was doing. Many times, the ideas for the interviews were
dreamed up just seconds before the befuddled wrestler had to walk out and deliver his lines, and
they often contradicted whatever weak storylines were in place. Eric reminded me of a guy with a
hundred birds pecking on his head all day long. Still, WCW was doing incredible business.



I tried my best to keep a low profile even though most of the boys wanted to pick my brain and hear
all about what happened between me and Vince. After so many years of being at home in the
dressing room and a leader, I was guarded and not so trusting. Hogan seemed to be the rock here,
with waves constantly lapping up to him.



Hennig, Rude and Duggan looked out for me like big brothers. Scott Hall and Kevin Nash were
plotting and scheming, trying to pull me to their side to help them get rid of Hogan. Every-where,
there were little factions of backstabbers. Many of the WCW boys despised Flair, especially Hall,
Nash, Macho, the Steiners and Hogan. The only guys who didn’t stir up shit were the Mexicans and
some of the young talent—Chris Benoit was having some of the best matches in the business at that
time with Booker T. Some of the best talent were the smaller wrestlers, such as Eddie Guerrero and
Dean Malenko, both second generation, and young Billy Kidman, who reminded me a lot of myself
when I was starting out. These were the unsung heroes of WCW, and they worked really hard at
keeping everything going.



When I packed my bag to leave my house on January 23, 1998, for my first WCW pay-per-view
match, against Ric Flair, Blade was the only one to wish me good luck.




I was worried about how Flair would work with me—with my still-injured hand, I needed to keep a
close eye on him. Flair appeared to be trying to get along in this den of wolves and multiple wolf
packs, but as hard as he tried, nobody liked him except his old cronies, such as Kevin Sullivan, Arn
Anderson, J.J. Dillon and Mongo McMichael. Hogan took every opportunity to try to stir me up about
Flair, but I said nothing. I let Ric do the match his way, even letting him chop me to his heart’s
content as he tried to show me how good he really was. I offered no resistance in what was, as usual
with Flair, twenty minutes of nonstop non-psychology.



On January 25, Vince’s mother, Juanita, passed away. She’d always been nice to me, and so, despite
everything, I sent a card of condolence to Vince’s house. I didn’t expect a reply, and I never got one.



I couldn’t find any way to be at peace with what I had. When a soul gets bigger than a mind can
comprehend, it becomes easy to give up on trust and judgment. I heard two voices in my head,
talking loud and fast, contradicting each other. Go left! Go right! Look out! I now measured time by
how many more trips I’d have to take before I could say, “Fuck you, I’m going home” to the whole
business—whatever “going home” meant. Would the day ever really come when I could walk away
and not be another wrestling tragedy? I was forty-one now, and Harley Race was right about getting
to the point where you were feeling every damn one of those bumps. My knees were running on
borrowed time and so was the rest of me. I’d do whatever they asked, yet I’d be careful and work
safe. Pedro Morales had told me, “There are only three things in this business—you, you and you.”
What he meant was that at this stage of the game it was imperative to protect myself, especially in
the ring. So I did my job and waited for a much-anticipated storyline between me and Hogan to
start. A Hitman-Hogan match clearly had the potential to be the biggest match of all time.
Meanwhile, back in the WWF, Vince converted Papa Shango from a gangsta into a pimp, whose line
was “Pimpin’ ain’t easy!” Raw was becoming more about bra-and-panty Jell-O matches than about
wrestling, with Jerry Lawler’s commentaries going on about all the girls showing their puppies.



Still, the hype about Tyson refereeing the main event title match between Shawn and Austin at
Wrestlemania XIV ignited the WWF into a roaring fire. The fire that Vince tried to put out, but
couldn’t, though, was the one raging in the hearts of my fans. At the Wrestlemania XIV press
conference, a fan angrily shouted at Shawn, “You screwed Bret!” until he was dragged away. Shawn
had to realize that screwing me would haunt him for the rest of his life; more than it would haunt
me, which is saying a lot.



I was more than eager to see Shawn drop the belt to Stone Cold, whose character had become a
gun-waving, beer-guzzling antihero perfectly suited to punishing the prima donna asshole who
screwed over Bret Hart.




I often reflected on the five of us who had started out so long ago, galloping free like wild stallions:
Dynamite, Davey, Jim, Owen and me. Dynamite was now stuck in his wheelchair, drunk and bitter,
everything gone. It seemed to me that now Davey was falling lame like Dynamite, his drug problems
getting worse, and Jim wasn’t much better. Despite my broken heart, I was strong and free, and still
at the front of the herd along with Owen. I fantasized that my brother and I were literally stallions,
lathered with sweat, galloping up a Rocky Mountain foothill, steam coming out of our nostrils in
snorts. We reach a ledge wide enough to stop, where two clear paths lead in two different
directions, and we stare at one another with eagerness and apprehension, long tails swishing. Which
way should we go? The dark horse shakes his head, then carefully picks his way south up the
cliffside. The palomino prances to and fro, wanting to follow, but then takes the path to the north,
and they part ways forever.



A lot of pro wrestling’s old horses were falling away or dying off. Britain’s Big Daddy Crabtree had
died in 1997, Loch Ness was failing and then the legendary wrestler BoBo Brazil died at seventy-
three. But the Grim Reaper of wrestling wanted more young bones too. On February 15, 1998, a
drunken Louie Spicolli downed twenty-six Somas and died at the age of twenty-seven, drowning in
his own vomit. The sad thing was that more guys were worried about drug testing being introduced
as a result than about dying like Louie did, or like Brian Pillman had. Eric Bischoff was pissed off after
the news hit the dressing room about Louie, and said to me: “Man, these guys are just getting
dressed and nobody gives a shit.”



Dave Meltzer wrote a scathing piece about how Louie’s death should finally be the wake-up call for
all wrestlers, but nobody was listening. The industry was too caught up with stunts such as Shawn
Michaels jerking off a wiener on camera as Hunter wore a SUCK THE COOK T-shirt.



Vince appeared on Off The Record, a Canadian sports talk show, where he claimed that before I left,
I’d become a real pain in the ass with a bad attitude; that I was disruptive in the dressing room; that I
was breaking down physically; and that I was starting to miss dates. I guess that last one was my
thanks for having shown up at Omaha Raw in a wheelchair only five days after surgery. But the
determined interviewer, Mi-chael Landsberg, finally got Vince to admit, after considerable
squirming, that he had lied to me.



Owen had become the Intercontinental Champion, and was working with Hunter and Rock, while I
was working with Hennig and Rude. Then Shawn came down with another “career-ending” injury,
four days before the lead-in pay-per-view for Wrestlemania XIV. Now he wouldn’t have to put Steve
over. I just shook my head. In the end, Wrestlemania XIV was a huge success, but it took Vince right
up until match time to coax Shawn into dropping the belt to Austin. (On another note, Earl Hebner
wasn’t at WrestleMania at all, having been hospitalized with a brain aneurysm that could easily have
been fatal. When I called to wish him a speedy recovery, he broke down on the phone.)




In the face of relentless competition from Vince, Eric Bischoff seemed to be burning out, and as a
result, the disorganization at the WCW was getting worse. Though the house shows were still selling
out, by March his TV ratings were beginning to slip. The WWF had figured out that the way to beat
WCW was to get raunchier and sleazier every week. Vince’s shock TV pushed the envelope of what
the censors would allow, and Bischoff looked more lost and confused every day: He had to put out a
product that fit within Ted Turner’s squeaky-clean guidelines, and Vince knew it. Maybe it’s a good
thing that Eric couldn’t go that way, even if he’d wanted to. I liked Eric and often offered him ideas. I
don’t know if it was pride or politics that made him shoot them down one by one; his own angles
rarely made sense. They’d fly me to TVs—paying for first-class air fare, hotel and a lux-ury car—only
to leave me off the show. At the end of the day, in the WWF I got screwed for money, while in WCW
I got paid well enough for so little output that I felt a bit too much like a whore.



I saw a rough cut of Paul’s documentary, which was set to air in the fall, and now I understood what
he’d been trying to tell me: The story of what had really happened to me in Montreal was going to
be told, and it would be a vindication.



Eric had me turn heel by double-crossing Sting and revealing that, all along, I was part of the nWo.
Vince’s radical new direction was as brilliant in the ratings war as Eric’s was weak. Aside from Stone
Cold being one of the most popular TV characters in the world, Sable, Taker, Mankind and Rock were
all coming into their own. On April 13, Austin wrestled McMahon to a DQ on Raw (because of
interference from Mick Foley as Dude Love), the WWF shot out in front and never looked back. The
ratings war was essentially over. I was the greatest weapon Eric had at that time, and why he never
deployed me, I’ll never know.



With my marriage and my career both falling apart, I felt darkness from all sides. I kept to myself
more than ever, which wasn’t a good thing. One day Julie summoned all the kids into the living
room, against my protests, and told them we were divorcing. She then asked them to pick who they
wanted to live with. The kids and I had been through this before, but when seven-year-old Blade
broke into tears and cried, “I’m going with Dad!” it hit a powerful nerve in me. It had been six
months since Vince had broken my heart, and neither Julie nor I knew how to fix it. This time I took
Julie at her word. We officially separated on May 15, 1998.



Meanwhile, Stu and Helen had their own misery to deal with, being in a deep financial hole. I gave
them $70,000 to get them through, making them promise me they’d use the money for themselves
and not for those Harts who always had their hands out.




On May 17, I worked a good hard match with Macho at the Slamboree pay-per-view in Worcester,
and that set up a tag match: me and Hogan versus Piper and Macho at the Great American Bash in
Baltimore, which was a month away.



Death took yet another wrestler on June 2. The Junk Yard Dog, Sylvester Ritter, fell asleep at the
wheel and rolled his car. He was forty-five.



I was worried about Davey, who told me that he and Diana were on the rocks too. He again confided
to me that he needed help with his drug problem. I went to Eric on his behalf, and Eric said that if
Davey got help, he didn’t have to worry, his job would be secure. Sadly, even though Davey freely
admitted he needed help, he wasn’t yet ready to accept it.



At the Great American Bash, Macho and I cut a good pace, but Roddy and Hogan showed their age.
Hogan was starting to remind me of Giant Baba, who was old, phony and uncoordinated, but whose
fans loved him anyway. The whole storyline didn’t make sense to me, or to the fans, but to Eric and
Hogan it was all great work. My heel character had become a deranged, angry bad guy. My fans
didn’t like him, and neither did I. My original following was now outnumbered by a new breed of
fans, who were like cartoon characters themselves. I couldn’t remember the last time I saw younger
kids or a family at ringside. Even The New York Times proclaimed that pro wrestling was no longer
suitable for kids.



On July 20, I won the U.S. title in Salt Lake City when I beat up Diamond Dallas Page with a steel
chair. Page was a close friend of Eric’s, a scruffy, wiry older rookie who resembled a Scottie dog. He
was playing the part of an old veteran, even though he’d only been wrestling a few years. He was a
good hand who was always trying to improve. We had a kind of chemistry and got on well in and out
of the ring.



I’d brought Blade with me to Salt Lake City, and he sat watching the monitor in the dressing room as
Scott Hall took some kind of phony-looking bump into a TV production trailer while wrestling Kevin
Nash. Minutes later, when Scott walked in, my eight-year-old son called out, “Hey, Razor, that was
pathetic,” cracking up the whole dressing room. During these sad and empty days, the only real joy
in my life was Blade.



On August 4, I boarded a plane home after a Nitro in Denver and was happy to find Owen in the seat
next to mine, smiling as if he’d been waiting for me. For the next couple of hours, we talked about
the state of the business. He was disgusted by a recent angle on Raw that featured wrestler Val
Venis and special guest John Wayne Bobbitt, where Venis put his penis out on a chopping block.


Owen didn’t like the guns, sleazy sex and female fans taking their tops off in the audience. He told
me he wanted to resurrect his old Blue Blazer character just to change things up: Perhaps becoming
a masked superhero was a way to avoid involvement with the vulgar aspects of the show.



I had just moved, alone, into an old stone ranch house planted on the edge of a hill in the west end
of Calgary, overlooking the Rocky Mountains; because I had to travel so much, it made the most
sense for the all the kids to live with Julie. I took the opportunity to invite Owen to come over to see
my new place as well as watch a rough cut of Paul’s documentary, now titled Wrestling with
Shadows. I was worried that my dad came across as too harsh in the doc when I talked about him
often stretching me hard enough to pop the blood vessels in my eyes and about my life passing
before my eyes while he smothered me in various submission holds. I wanted Owen’s honest advice
because the last thing I wanted to do was hurt my dad, and I was relieved when he told me not to
worry because it was all true. The thing that upset Owen was when, in the documentary, I compared
losing to Shawn with blowing my brains out. My brother admonished me, reminding me,“We always
said there’s nothing in wrestling worth dying for.”



The next day I got a script to do a Disney series called Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, in which I’d play
myself. There was also a part for a Hart brother and I got Owen the job so we could spend some
time together. Owen couldn’t have been happier.



I lost the U.S. title to Lex Luger on August 10, only to win it back from him three days later. Titles
didn’t mean anything anymore; they changed hands almost as many times as the WCW senselessly
turned me from heel to babyface. At that time, Eric was pinning his ratings hopes on the return of
The Ultimate Warrior. But within days, Warrior tore a biceps muscle and that was the beginning of
the end for him, not that he could’ve been Eric’s savior anyway.



I’d given Eric and Hogan advance dubs of Paul’s documentary, and they both called to tell me they
loved it. I thought perhaps it would encourage Eric to keep me baby-face, seeing as how wrestling
fans would soon see me looking like a real hero in Paul’s movie. I was baffled when Eric wasted Hart
versus Hogan on a free match at Nitro, on September 28, throwing away a guaranteed moneymaker
that the fans had been waiting years for. The plan, in my view, was insane. He wanted me to turn
babyface during an in-ring interview, challenge Hogan, then get injured and have Sting take my
place. When Sting twisted Hogan into his scorpion death lock, I would limp back out and double-
cross Sting by DDTing him headfirst into the mat, turning heel again. To turn me heel at this point
was so stupid it felt like sabotage.



Then I heard the news that my old pal Jim Duggan had kidney cancer, which only added to the
weight I was carrying around. My divorce had also turned into a War of the Roses.




Julie and I had monumental fights, over money, over whose friends were on whose side, over . . .
everything basically. And then we would make up. We went through this cycle over and over again. I
couldn’t take the up-down, push-pull anymore and sank into a deep depression. On October 11,
while riding with The Giant from Milwaukee to Chicago, I found myself wishing I was dead. But then,
when Paul Wight actually started to pull out to pass—in front of a speeding semi truck—I heard
myself shouting, “Stop!” When both our heart rates had slowed again, the big guy looked over at me
and said, “Thanks for saving my life tonight.”



I worked Halloween Havoc with Sting in Las Vegas, retaining the U.S. title by beating him senseless
with a baseball bat that was actually made of foam.



I could rarely bear to watch Raw anymore but checked it out to see Owen’s new turn as The Blue
Blazer. I understood what Owen was talking about when I saw Vince McMahon appear to piss
himself in the ring on live TV after Stone Cold pressed a .38 special to his head. With the WWF
ratings going through the roof, Sable appeared in the highest-selling Playboy magazine of all time
and Stone Cold was on the cover of Rolling Stone.



That November, Jesse The Body Ventura surprised political pundits when he was elected governor of
Minnesota. Dave Meltzer wrote, “Pro wrestling is more real and more phony than people can
imagine.” The simple truth was that wrestling had never been more widely acceptable to the
mainstream than it was that year. But it felt to me that I kept spiraling down, in my own estimation
and in my fans’ eyes too.



On November 9, a year after the Montreal screwjob, I thought I finally had my chance to show Eric
what I was worth when I worked the Nassau Coliseum, wrestling in New York for the first time since
coming to WCW. To my complete dismay, I had a meaningless match with Konan and did a run-in
during the last few seconds of the show. But I refrained from complaining: Eric had just given Davey
more time off to get his act together, though he’d had to let Jim go because he was clumsily missing
shots—not showing up for work.



The high point of the whole year was the premiere of Paul’s documentary at a gala in Toronto. After
watching it with the audience, I got a standing ovation. A week later, I sat with Stu and the rest of
the Hart family at the IMAX theater in Calgary, where once again the audience got to its feet to
cheer me. That felt especially good, because halfway through the screening, Bruce abruptly dragged
his kids out because of how Stu was portrayed. But Stu told me he liked it, which was a great relief.
Afterwards, I fielded questions from the audience, and I saw a warm smile on Owen’s face when I
said the only thing I missed about the WWF was him.




New Year’s Eve, 1998. I had no idea when I bought my new house that the view would be like an
ever-changing painting every day. I was alone and had my music cranked while looking out my
kitchen window at a family of deer digging up fallen crab apples beneath a blanket of snow.



I eased myself into a more comfortable position on a huge round couch, where I could stare out at
the distant lights of Calgary. I’d dropped the U.S. title again, to Dallas Page in Phoenix on November
22. The next day I worked a Nitro match in Grand Rapids, Michigan, against pintsized Dean Malenko,
a second-generation wrestler who was a good, capable worker, although his style reminded me of
Cirque du Soleil—it was a little too rehearsed. When Malenko went for a standing suplex on me, I
went up for him effortlessly in the air, straight as two dinner forks stuck together. Instead of taking
me back for a simple back bump, Malenko decided to walk me the short distance to the corner, but
he didn’t have the size or strength and dropped me full-weight, crotching me and tearing my groin. I
don’t even know how I was able to bring myself to finish the match. I was in too much pain even to
tell Dean how pissed off I was at him. Even worse, he dressed fast and left without acknowledging
that he hurt me, or that he was sorry. As well regarded as little Malenko was, I lost respect for him as
a professional that day. I could barely walk, let alone wrestle, yet Eric had me win back the U.S. title
from Page in Chattanooga a week later, with a lame finish where The Giant helped me. As ridiculous
as the storyline was, at least The Giant did do all the work.



I also managed to do another appearance on Mad TV in December, in a sketch about The Hitman
becoming Jesse Ventura’s lieutenant-governor and getting too physical at a press conference, where
I’d rough up the cast before stomping off the set. The funniest bit came at the end of the show when
I decked the heavy-set Will Sasso with a plastic chair, twisted him into a sharpshooter and fled. He
followed me back to my dressing room, with a camera crew in tow, asking me what my problem
was. I jumped him from behind, pulled his shirt over his head and appeared to beat him senseless.
The show went off the air with cast members attending to Will, who actually got a bloody nose in all
the excitement. As ole J.R. Foley used to say, “I never, erm, touched him.”

As the millennium came to a close, I was relieved that 1999 was over. What a horrible year for me
and all the Harts. At least Bill Bush called me at home to thank me for all I was doing. He asked me
how long I could keep going and I told him: “I still have a few good years left.”


Tom and Davey were galloping ahead of me as Julie was pulling away too. I studied the cracks on the
ceiling long enough that they began to form abstract pictures, but it was when I closed my eyes that
the real picture came into focus. I had endured enough with Julie. If it wasn’t for Jade, and the baby
on the way, I’d have given up by now. Acceptance of that truth, sad as it was, helped me to collect
myself.


The following night I fell asleep next to Dallas in his bed, only to be woken by an angry little voice
calling out in the dark, “Dad! Dad! Dad!” It was Blade. Julie and I reached him at the same time, at
the top of the big stairs. He’d noticed I wasn’t in my bed and thought I’d left like I always did. I felt a
pang in my heart hearing him crying out for me. His tears stopped as soon as I scooped him up, and
as I held him close I felt his heart beating fast. But on Christmas Day I was gone again.



On December 30, Roddy pulled me aside at the building in Bangor to tell me that he had some big
news: Vince had told him that I’d be losing the IC belt to Jacques Rougeau, who now cartooned as
The Mountie (the real RCMP had threatened to charge him with impersonating an officer, which
grabbed a few headlines across Canada). My heart sank into the pit of my stomach as Roddy
explained the angle: I’d supposedly come down with the flu, and despite gallantly trying to defend
the IC belt against The Mountie, he’d beat me for it. Then Roddy would fill in for me two days later
at the Royal Rumble, challenging The Mountie to an IC title match, and Roddy would win. After that,
he’d drop the IC belt back to me at WrestleMania VIII. Roddy said he was giving me advance warning
so I’d be prepared when Vince told me at the next TVs.



I hauled my stomach out of my boots: Yes, I was losing the belt, but if Roddy put me over at
WrestleMania VIII, it would be the biggest thing to ever happen to me.



The big contest coming up at the Royal Rumble would be Ric Flair against Macho Man. Flair had
been working around the United States against Hogan, still wearing WCW’s World Title belt and
calling himself the real World Champion. To this day I don’t know why Flair didn’t have more
consideration for his old colleagues still struggling in WCW. For Vince it was a chance to stick his
thumb in the eye of Ted Turner, but Flair had to know how much the use of their belt would hurt his
former wrestler colleagues at the WCW. Vince decided that the winner of Royal Rumble 1992 would
automatically become WWF world champion, and the boys assumed it was Flair whom Vince had
pinned his hopes on to carry the territory, at least until the WWF’s legal woes cooled off. I thought
that if Flair won our belt, it would give too much credibility to WCW. The wrestling talent in the two


outfits was comparable, but Vince’s camera crew and post-production work were light-years ahead
of WCW’s—which is saying something, because WCW did have Turner Broadcasting behind it.



A week later, Vince finally told me about his plan for me to lose the IC belt and win it back. He also
said that sometime in the fall I’d drop it to Shawn Michaels. He asked me whether I had any problem
with that and I told him, no, that I had a lot of respect for Shawn. Thanks to Roddy’s heads-up, I was
able to tell Vince that his plan for me sounded terrific. He seemed relieved.



So, on January 17, in Springfield, Massachusetts, I walked out to the ring looking as sick as I could
and dropped the IC belt to The Mountie. Despite knowing where it was all leading, I flew home
feeling dejected about missing Royal Rumble and the payoff that would have come with it. My only
consolation was a rare weekend off.



As if all the bad press about steroids in the WWF wasn’t enough, now allegations began to emerge
about gay management preying on vulnerable teenaged boys in the ring crew. At one time or
another most of us had seen Terry Garvin hanging around these young men, but none of us knew
what, if anything, went on behind Garvin’s closed door. Then a former member of the ring crew,
Tom Cole, came forward in the San Diego Union-Tribune with the alleged details. Vince was doing all
he could to contain the scandal.



On February 16, we worked at Long Island’s Nassau Coliseum. Jim wasn’t expecting that there’d be a
drug test, but there was. All evening long he stalled Chief and the pecker checkers by saying he was
simply unable to pee. He also refused to put over one of The Beverley Brothers, a new team, and left
the building that night having never taken the test. Vince was already pissed off with Jim because he
hadn’t paid him back for footing the legal bill in the U.S. Air suit, despite winning a big settlement.
The next day at Tampa TVs, Jim was summoned to see an irritable Vince, who curtly fired him. Jim
slammed the door behind him and went looking for Chief. When he found him, he grabbed a TV
monitor and hurled it at Chief’s head like a shot put. When Chief ducked, it hit a WWF television
director in the leg. Then Jim burned rubber out of the parking lot.



With Jim gone, they threw Owen together with Koko B. Ware (who had been hired back after his
European misadventures) and renamed the team High Energy. Despite it being a lame idea, Owen
stayed upbeat and full of that supposed high energy as he and Koko tried to get over as best they
could. On the bright side, Martha gave birth to a baby boy. They named him Oje, which was Owen’s
nickname when he was a baby.




On March 4, as a result of the allegations of sexual misconduct, Pat Patterson, Terry Garvin and Mel
Phillips all resigned, though none of them admitted to having done anything wrong. Vince and Bruno
Sammartino ended up de-bating the whole sorry mess on Larry King Live. It was too late to nail that
closet door shut, and all sorts of people who’d ever had any kind of a falling out with Vince suddenly
brought out their own stories of sexual improprieties.



If I was looking for a vote of confidence, I got it at the HoJo’s in Boston—from Harley Race. The WCW
was in town, and as both crews of wrestlers hung out in the bar that night, the WCW boys hovered
around the WWF ring rats like they were in paradise.



Harley had found his footing again as a heel manager to a colossal, red-headed monster of a man
named Vader, who wore a red leather mask that looked more like a jockstrap. Vader was now WCW
World Champion and one of the biggest names in Japan too. I admired Harley, having battled back
from divorce, intestinal surgery, a bad boating accident and bankruptcy to land a good contract with
WCW. I was grateful when he pulled me aside, ordered me a beer—he no longer drank—and asked
me whether I had plans to leave Vince any time soon. I told him I’d be crazy to leave now, especially
since WCW hadn’t been very professional in their dealings with me thus far. Still I sat listening
quietly as Harley told me of WCW’s plans to make a serious run at Vince, using Turner’s money. The
timing was perfect, he said, for me to land a big fat contract: “Bret, you’re the best damn worker in
the business now.” That was an amazing thing for a man as respected as Harley to say. I told him I’d
keep his idea in mind, but the weird thing was that I was actually beginning to sympathize with Vince
a little.



Vince had been as cold and ruthless as a man could be, and it was now as though his harsh
treatment of his wrestlers had finally caught up with him. I’d been in the WWF for seven-and-a-half
years, and in all that time I’d never seen Vince have anything whatsoever to do with what Terry
Garvin and Mel Phillips were now suspected of. And the crippling accusations that he “pushed”
steroids on his wrestlers seemed opportunistic. Vince made it clear that he liked his wrestlers to
have good physiques, but that how you went about achieving that was your own decision. It seemed
to me that all Vince was guilty of was looking the other way, but in that regard he didn’t seem any
different than the owner of any major sports franchise, or the Olympic committee, for that matter.



And Vince was the man who had brought pro wrestling out of smoky halls and small arenas and
made it into family entertainment that crossed age, economic, gender and national boundaries. We
were now heroes, with our own action figures. Not only was it good for the fans but, even with the
merciless schedule and being treated as a disposable commodity, the life I led now beat nickel-and-
dime payoffs and traveling packed like a sardine in a frigid van with the sting of fresh gig marks
carved into my forehead. If Vince went down, where would any of us be then? Sure, there were a lot
of legitimate gripes, but I wished the energy that went into concocting far-fetched accusations could
have gone into solving some real issues.




I spent my four days off drawing a poster-sized montage of every WWF wrestler I could think of as a
special send-off gift for Hulk. By all indications he’d be riding into the sunset after WrestleMania VIII,
heading for Hollywood. With his reputation as a hero to kids severely damaged and a ton of money
in the bank, I didn’t think he’d be back. Hogan off steroids would leave him looking much too mortal.
To me Hulk, like Vince, had taken the business to its highest peaks, and seeing Hulk fading out
without any glory seemed wrong.



Stu, Helen, Georgia, Julie and all the kids came to Indianapolis for WrestleMania VIII. Julie bitched
constantly once she arrived, trying her hardest to ruin the entire experience for me. The higher my
career went the more my marriage bottomed out: Julie acted as if she resented my popularity. The
night before WrestleMania VIII we wound up in a bar near the hotel with my red-headed Italian fan-
turned-friend Carlo, who’d come down from Toronto. Vince’s son Shane walked in—he was on the
road doing various jobs, setting up the ring and refereeing, learning the business so that someday he
could take over the reins from his dad. I’d always done my best to watch out for him, and he liked
me for it. As he approached, a startled Julie jolted toward me. When he greeted me with a
handshake, I smiled and said, “Let me introduce you to my wife.” Shane turned beet red. There was
an awkward silence. Julie seemed furious—and I had no idea why. Carlo whispered, “He just goosed
Julie big time!” Obviously Shane hadn’t had a clue who she was. Shane quickly took a stool at the
other end of the bar. I was inclined to forget it, but when I looked over at him, I noticed he was
studying me with puzzled defiance. I thought, Okay, he knows I know what he did and thinks that
since his daddy owns me, I won’t do anything. He was wrong.



Because it was the night before a big match, I wasn’t drinking. And Julie’s foul mood had made me
even more testy. I slammed my boss’s kid against the wall, telling him through clenched teeth that if
he ever touched my wife again, I’d rip his head off. I never would have hurt him, but I had to let him
know I wasn’t afraid of who he was. Then Carlo pried me away, Shane still protesting his innocence.



The next day all the Harts crammed into a black stretch limo to go to my big match with Roddy. Stu
was up front with my mom, and all of the rest of us were squeezed in back as fans screamed and
surrounded the car. Blade, who was wearing a black miniature version of my ring jacket, looked like
a tiny replica of me and was laughing hard as he slapped his little hands on the window. Beans told
me she didn’t want “Rolly Pepper” to hurt me. She never liked watching me get beat up. Jade was
nine now and still riding herd on Dallas, who was at that age where he was starting to suspect that
wrestling might not be real. I hoped they could forgive me, someday, for being gone so much. As the
limo pulled away everybody was as excited as I was about my big match with Roddy—except for
Julie.




Backstage at the Hoosier Dome, I passed around the drawing I’d done for Hulk and made sure every
wrestler signed it before I gave it to him. Hulk loved it. I wondered whether he’d ever be back.



As I put on my gear, it dawned on me that I didn’t get nervous for matches anymore. Even this one,
where Roddy and I had planned that we were going to go against Vince’s policy just this once. I was
going to get a little juice: our babyface match desperately needed it if we were going to steal the
show. In a toilet stall I carefully snipped and taped up my blade. With 68,000 fans in attendance and
hundreds of thousands more watching at home on pay-per-view with VCRs going, four WWF
cameras, not to mention all the wrestlers, I’d have to be a real pro to make the blood look
accidental.



When Roddy and I came nose to nose in the ring for the opening stare down, I had to look away or
else I’d have cracked up. We’d worked a shoot, and the fans believed this match would be like no
other, especially since The Hitman and Roddy Piper had never really worked before.



The story built slowly, the wily veteran and the hungry kid giving no quarter. When the time was
right the ref stopped me and told me to fix my loose shoelace. While I leaned over to tuck it into my
boot, Roddy blindsided me with a fist to the face, and I crumpled to the mat, covering up to spit the
blade out of my mouth. Roddy kicked me several times in the face, never touching me. I cut a one-
inch slice right over my right eyebrow, deep enough to convince all the boys afterwards that it was
the real deal or risk being exposed. At first the blood was barely noticeable, but soon my face was a
mess.



Soon enough, a crazed Piper had knocked the referee down and stood over me holding the ring bell
high over his head as he prepared to brain me like a seal hunter delivering the final blow. He
hesitated while I groped and clawed my way to my knees. With my head covered in blood, I gave
Roddy my baby-seal eyes. Roddy expertly milked it. Feigning a change of heart, he seemed to come
to his senses just long enough to toss the bell out to the timekeeper in disgust. Pulling me to my
feet, he blasted me with a punch. I leaned and swung back at him with a desperate, wild blow that
he easily ducked under as he clamped me in his finishing move, the sleeper. The captivated crowd
was hanging on every move. I spun toward the corner flailing for the top rope, but my escape was
just out of grasp and I began to sink. Supported by Roddy I jumped up and kicked off the top corner
pad, knocking us both backwards with all my weight, crashing on top of Roddy, who couldn’t use his
arms to break his fall. It had to hurt, the way we landed with a thud!



I rolled backwards holding his elbows tight. Piper was pinned beautifully. The ref came back to life
on cue for the one . . . two . . . three! With the crowd cheering loudly, Roddy gave me a hug, and I


told him, “Thanks, cuz, I’ll never forget what you did for me today!” Roddy said, “I love ya, brother,”
and buckled the IC belt around my waist.



Now for the real work.



I came through the curtain pretending to be concerned that I was going to need stitches. Chief,
Lanza and a bunch of the boys gathered around me to see how bad it was. Chief brushed my hair
away. “Maybe a stitch, Bret, but you’ll be all right.” Roddy was there, concerned, apologizing, and
we both knew we’d fooled them all.



Little did we know that Flair and Randy, who went on right after us, had secretly planned to get juice
too. Flair was so obvious as he cut himself repeatedly that when he came back with several long,
bloody cat scratches on his forehead, an angry Vince fined them each $500 for blading. He never
said a word to me because he thought that mine was legit.



After WrestleMania VIII came three long days of TVs. My match with Piper not only stole the show,
but many felt it saved the pay-per-view altogether. And so began my second reign as IC champion.



Four days later I was in Munich. I loved being back in Germany! As I rode on the bus down cobbled
streets I listened to my Walkman thinking about how in 1936 Hitler watched in disgust as the black
American runner Jesse Owens sprinted to win the gold medal at the Berlin Olympics. I thought back
to 1981 and my old Hanover days, with Jim, when I was the biggest loser of the tournament. Well,
Axel Dieter, you old pimp, take a look at me now!



Fans were pounding on the sides of the bus for blocks before we finally pulled up to the back of the
arena, where an even bigger crowd excitedly waited for us. Owen had told me I was really big in
Germany, and judging by all the signs being held up, it appeared to be true. When I stepped off the
bus girls screamed and cried uncontrollably, some even fainting.



In the dressing room Chief told me I was the opening match. I argued that I was the Intercontinental
champion and that as I understood it I was very popular in Germany so it was therefore crazy for me
to be first match. But Chief had his orders, so I did go out first. I think I made my point though. As
soon as I came out, my music blaring, the sell-out crowd exploded. Teenaged girls overran barricades
and leaped past security guards, who were helpless to stop them; they literally knocked me down,
hugging and kissing me. I’d never seen or heard anything like it, not even for Hogan at the height of
all his glory. Hulkamania was a phenomenon, but the reaction I got was more like Beatlemania! It


wasn’t just teenaged girls, there were older women too, and even men and boys reached out to me.
Flowers flew at me from everywhere, and boxes of chocolates, wrapped gifts, and lots and lots of
teddy bears! I gently pulled myself up, smeared with lipstick, and made my way through the crowd
to the ring. I did my strut to all four sides, and the crowd exploded each time. When I dropped down
to give my shades to a little girl, thousands of people sighed, ahhh.



As I got set to take on Dino Bravo, he said, “You’re over, brother.” They cheered for every move. As I
sold, they chanted my name so loudly that I could barely hear myself think. When I beat Bravo, the
place came totally unglued.



Leaving the building was another frenetic scene. An astounded Chief met me at the top of the ramp,
“You were right, Stu. They love you! I’ve never seen anything like that—ever!” That night the hotel
was overrun with Hitman fans, many of whom had camped out in the lobby.



In Dortmund it was worse, if that’s any way to say it. I loved it!



The only other wrestler to get a huge response was The Undertaker, who was greeted everywhere
we went by hundreds of kids dressed in black with rings under their eyes.



Then we stormed the U.K. In London, Birmingham, Sheffield and Glasgow the reception was as
incredible as in Germany. As I’d predicted, Vince had stumbled onto a gold mine. American wrestling
was huge in Europe, and all the WWF wrestlers were household names.



27



“LISTEN TO ME, AND I’LL CARRY YOU”



MAYBE IT WAS HAVING had a steady diet of adulation that caused me to stick my head up a little
higher than I normally would when Vince called a meeting at TVs at the end of April. If anyone had
anything they wanted to say, Vince offered, we should feel free to speak up. After a number of
minor questions were posed, I put up my hand. Steroids had aided a lot of wrestlers in recuperating
from injuries, I said, and now that we were all clean, maybe Vince could consider giving us a lighter
schedule. Many of us were on the road three hundred days a year, and, in the dressing room,


complaints about the grueling pace were constant. Vince got annoyed at me and said, “If you can’t
handle it, then maybe you should consider doing something else.”



“You told us to speak our minds, so that’s what I’m doing.”



Vince scowled across the room. “You’re the only one complaining,” he said. The unspoken reality in
the room was that we were all working so hard for a lot less; Vince’s beloved World Bodybuilding
Federation was fast becoming a financial disaster, kept alive only by the proceeds from the WWF.



I looked around and asked, “Okay, everybody, who has a complaint about the schedule?” and raised
my hand. Only Hawk and Knobbs raised theirs in support. The rest of the boys stared at their feet. I
lowered my hand. All we ever did was complain, but it seems only to one another.



Typically, after the meeting, various wrestlers thanked me for speaking up, explaining that they
hadn’t joined in because they were scared to lose their jobs, as they had good reason to be. A lot of
the steroid freaks were now missing from the roster, the latest casualty being Davey Boy, who had
just that day got a six-week suspension for testing positive for steroids.



That night, while being interviewed by Mean Gene Okerlund, I did one of my first shoot interviews,
in which the real Bret Hart talked through the Hitman character. “For all the times my father’s been
in my corner and for all the times that he’s backed me up,” I said, “I want to dedicate my IC title win
to my dad. Happy seventy-seventh birthday! This is for you!” Bending reality into my storylines was
becoming a trademark of mine.



The birthday party was held a few days late, on May 5, so that Owen and I could make it. Ellie was up
from Florida to surprise Stu, and they hadn’t seen each other in a while. There was such joy in Stu’s
eyes when Ellie walked in.



If the stories were right, back in Tampa, Jim had a serious cocaine problem and was blowing all the
money he’d won from his lawsuit, riding around on his brand-new Ninja motorcycle with what was
left of his riches stuffed into his fanny pack. An exasperated Ellie had finally left him to his own
undoing.

wo days after the wedding, things got bleaker. Wayne had quit in disgust over the disorganization,
and Ross had stepped in to drive the van on a long, rainy, miserable trip through northern Alberta.
The crew was late as usual, and Ross put the pedal to the metal despite desperate pleas from the


boys to slow down. The van hydroplaned; he lost control and veered head-on into an oncoming car,
sending Davey crashing through the windshield. Davey needed eighty stitches in his head. I think the
only reason he didn’t die was because of his thick, powerful neck. He was left with permanent vision
problems and neck pain. Karl Moffat injured his knee, which ultimately cut short his budding career.
I really think if Moffat hadn’t got hurt, he would have gone a long way in the business. Also injured
was Chris Benoit, but he managed to recover fully. Ross was devastated.

Jim and I went on early in what was really a call to go out and kick the show into high gear. The Nasty
Boys headed out with Jimmy Hart, who was wearing a spray-painted motorcycle helmet as
protection from us. Our music played and off we went, the pink tassels on our epaulets swinging as


we high-fived fans on our way to the ring. I pulled open my jacket to expose the shiny gold belt that
had meant so much to me once upon a time. But now I was galloping beyond that. Beware the dark
horse!


These matches with us would turn out to be some of André’s last great moments in the ring. André
seemed pained, sad and longing for the good old days. He was pale and sickly, and many of us
wondered whether he was trying to drink himself to death. Haku carried the load for him, but he still
loved going out and working. He made a point of making Jim and me look strong: selling, tying
himself in the ropes, even letting me do a sunset flip on him. Afterwards, I’d draw our matches on
the blackboard for André. His ass, as big as a piano, teetering above me, was a funny but scary vision
that few people ever got to see! It was strongly rumored he’d be done after the big Japan tour that
was coming up right after WrestleMania VI, on which I was also booked.



On January 16, 1991, fighting began in the Persian Gulf. Three days later, at the Royal Rumble,
Slaughter dethroned Warrior for the WWF World title. The angle felt eerie to most of us in the
dressing room. Some of us debated whether wrestling was too much of a cartoon to make light of
something as serious as war, especially one where the U.S. was bracing for a high body count. Yet,
most of the wrestlers had faith in Vince, since he’d always had an uncanny sense of giving the public
just what they wanted and his gambles always seemed to pay off. And Vince had a vision of more
than 100,000 fans coming out to WrestleMania VII at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum to watch
the WWF’s real American hero, Hulk Hogan, give that traitor Slaughter what he had coming. The
WWF even asked Slaughter to burn the American flag, but he flat-out refused: He had enough heat
as it was. He had received death threats, and there were bomb scares at the buildings he worked in.


On November 18, Vince phoned to tell me he’d just fired Warrior and that, unfortunately, Davey was
going to be next. He wanted to tell me first so I could prepare for any backlash that might happen as
a result. He said that Warrior and Davey had been receiving shipments of growth hormone from a
dealer in the U.K. who’d just been busted. Vince was so under the gun that he fired them both
immediately. The fanciful vision I’d had of me twisting Warrior into the sharpshooter and him
screaming uncle at WrestleMania IX vanished forever. After so many wrestlers had lain down to
make him a star, Warrior would never return the favor. As for Davey, he was out of work and trying
to get on with WCW.


Another friend gone.



I worked hard in the Survivor Series and surprised myself by being pleased that I got raves in the
Wrestling Observer Newsletter for being the best performer. (Dave Meltzer wrote, “Hart was
fantastic.”) This was long before the Internet, and the sheets were the way fans, and even
promoters, got their info about the business. But I had a problem with anyone who wasn’t in the
business writing about it as if they knew what they were talking about. I’ve always maintained that
the only way to really know who is a great worker and who isn’t is to have wrestled him. My usual
attitude was that Meltzer, and others, were making a living off other people’s sweat and broken
bones by exposing a business they really had no part of. But then I’d come home to find my mom


reading the sheets with Stu. Promoters were so tight-lipped that the only way anyone in the
business could learn anything about what was going on in other territories—and sometimes even in
their own territory—was from someone outside the business. That was the ultimate irony: Most
wrestlers hated the sheets, but they were the first to flock around if someone brought one into the
dressing room.


Ric still managed to mess up the timing for every fall. I was furious when Dave Meltzer wrote in The
Wrestling Observer that Flair had carried me for the whole match when it was, in fact, the other way
around.



There were some interesting moments at Royal Rumble later that month in Sacramento. Lex Luger
was a former WCW wrestler whom Vince brought into his World Bodybuilding Federation, and then
lured to the WWF by promising him the moon. It wasn’t working out so well. Luger was now called
The Narcissist and, before every match, had to pose in front of a full-length mirror in the middle of
the ring, tassels hanging from his white trunks. Although he was in fabulous shape and he was
steroid-free, he looked small in the ring. To the fans, his new, conceited persona was as
uninteresting as the faltering WBF. During Lex’s routine streams of people headed to the concession
stands.

At the hotel, someone pointed out to me that Dave Meltzer was lurking about in the lobby, reluctant
to come into the bar. Eventually, my mom introduced me to him. Meltzer was very polite and a bit
nervous as I glared at him. I whispered to her afterwards, “He’s no friend of mine, Mom.”



On January 26, I flew out to Las Vegas with Vince, Pat and all the top boys to kick off the hype for
WrestleMania IX with a huge press conference. Afterwards, Vince and Pat said that I had come
across as humble and that was exactly what they were looking for to help project a wholesome
image now that it was almost certain Vince would be indicted by the Feds.


When I set my bag down in the dressing room at Madison Square Garden on March 20, The
Wrestling Observer was being passed around. Even before I got the belt back, Dave Meltzer was
predicting that my days as champion were numbered. I’d been in New York for a few days already
doing media and appearances, and with two big matches, it was going to be a long day. I had the


heavy responsibility of opening and closing the pay-per-view in what was expected to be the biggest
grossing show of the year.


I showed up for Raw in Louisville, Kentucky, on July 24, where I was booked against Hakushi again. I
liked him enough to have established him as a serious heel, but, unfortunately, because of his kindly
nature, everyone who had worked with him since had made a point of eating him up. He seemed
relieved to see me and got real serious when I explained that we’d just have to go out and show
them all over again. I put together a match filled with all the aerial moves we thought were too risky
to do at our In Your House match. Midway through it, I was on the floor when Hakushi hit the far
ropes and did a cartwheel, a handspring and then back-somersaulted over the top rope, spinning
right on top of me in what Dave Meltzer aptly described as the first space flying tiger drop ever seen
in the United States. With one kick out after another, we tore the house down until I suplexed him
standing off the top and twisted him in the sharpshooter. The Louisville Gardens came unglued.



Back in the dressing room, Owen stood with a bunch of the other wrestlers clapping as he said,
staccato, “The best there is! The best there was! The best there ever will be!”



Davey Boy double-crossed Lex and turned heel. Undertaker was, once again, called upon to work a
miracle, this time with Mabel, who had won the King of the Ring crown. And Bob Backlund was
running for president of the United States. Not really, but they had a lot of people actually believing
that he was a candidate!



As an offshoot to my on-and-off feud with Lawler, the storyline continued that his mouth had
become infected from my toes so I was now to wrestle his dentist, Dr. Isaac Yankem, at SummerSlam
in August. Yankem was actually a curly-haired, broad-shouldered six-foot-eight rookie named Glen
Jacobs, who’d only just started working Lawler’s Memphis territory. He later became known as Kane.
I found it hard to get excited about working the cartoon storylines that Vince had for me, especially a
September In Your House match I was supposed to have with Pierre LaFitte because he stole my ring
jacket. I did my best to make these lame angles fly.



The night after Evansville TVs, at Mattingly’s, a sports bar owned by the New York Yankees, Taker sat
with me and confided that he didn’t trust Shawn. While I’d been away, the clique had been prancing
around acting like their shit didn’t stink.



Our attention turned to a disturbance at the far end of the bar. Shawn had made some kind of a
racial slur, and the situation was escalating because Razor stepped in and head-butted a black guy.


When I got back to the dressing room, the commission doctor declared, “It’s a cut from the stairs!”
as he put five stitches in my head. Dave Meltzer described it as “yet another five-star performance.”
Slowly, I was earning Meltzer’s respect. And I was proud of the fact that Meltzer and all the other
wrestling fans could never say for sure that I bladed intentionally.




After the TVs the next day, a bunch of us were up in Curt’s room drinking beers. Razor had taken a
handful of Somas and wilted in a slow-motion sit-up; soon he was floating off to dreamland while
the rest of us sat around telling war stories. Mabel was really bummed out, having taken some heat
for collapsing on Taker while delivering an elbow drop, shattering Taker’s eye socket. Luckily, Taker
would be able to work around it as long as he wore a protective purple mask, resembling something
out of Phantom of the Opera. Curt sang my praises while denouncing the clique to The 1-2-3 Kid.
Staring at Razor, Curt rummaged through his toilet bag, hit the switch on an electric shaver and
casually buzzed off Razor’s right eyebrow. Kid took up for Scott as Curt menaced the other eyebrow:
“Don’t do it, Curt, c’mon!” At first Curt heeded Kid, but when we all thought he’d forgotten, he
suddenly blurted out, “Fuck you, Kid.” He hit the switch and shaved off Razor’s left eyebrow. Razor
never budged, only managing a dreamy smile.



35



THE SNAKES ARE DOCILE



BY JANUARY 1996, Vince was looking high and low for talent. Just in time for the Royal Rumble he
brought in four-hundred-pound Vader, who had quit WCW after being thumped good by Paul
Orndorff in a dressing room argument. Even Jake The Snake slithered back. He’d left the business to
find God, vowing never to return, and when he reappeared in the dressing room, he seemed
weathered and humbled. He was broke and divorced and still appeared on Sunday morning
evangelical shows to tell everyone who would listen how Jesus helped him beat his cocaine
addiction. I was happy to see the arrival of Steve Austin, now called The Ringmaster, with Ted
DiBiase as his manager.


I marched out to my music wearing jeans, shades and a tight gray T-shirt and was interviewed by Jim
Ross in the ring. The first thing I did in this completely unscripted live interview was thank Eric
Bischoff for treating me with respect and making me such a great offer. I regretted that I hadn’t had
a chance to call him and that Eric was about to find out that I had just resigned with Vince along with
the rest of the world. Mind you, I referred to Eric only as an unnamed rival because, to that point,
neither organization had uttered the name of the other on their TV shows—but the fans knew
exactly who and what I was talking about. (Dave Meltzer had put out such an accurate account of my
contract negotiations in the October 14, 1996, Wrestling Observer that I was sure it was all coming
from an insider from one or both organizations.) I spoke about not being greedy for money, but
being greedy for respect and about how much soul searching I’d done. But when it came right down
to it, I owed everything I’d ever done and everything I planned on doing to my WWF fans. “I’ll be in
the WWF forever!” I proclaimed. I said I wanted wrestling fans all over the world to have somebody
they could look up to, somebody who didn’t dance and pose for girlie books: “Shawn Michaels will
never be as tough as me. He’ll never be as smart as me. And that is why I’ve accepted the challenge
to face the best wrestler in the WWF, Stone Cold Steve Austin!” For the first time in months, while I
was on the air, Vince got the ratings he was looking for.



37



EVERYONE AROUND THE WORLD HATES AMERICANS



WHILE I’D BEEN GONE, Steve Austin had really flourished as a heel. By Survivor Series ’96 on
November 17, he’d become such a good heel he was starting to turn babyface—the fans loved him!
This was something he wanted to avoid because his heel run still had plenty of steam. He had such a
great look for a heel, with a bald head and menacing eyes that burned a hole through you. He wore
simple black trunks with black boots and came across like a real bad-ass son of a bitch. His promos
were intense: His Texas talk and ornery look gave him a unique magnetism.



As I headed past Taker, he smiled and said, “Helluva match, man, not a chance in hell me and Sid are
ever gonna top that!” He said this respectfully, from one worker to another. I was numb with pride
as I waded into my fellow wrestlers to handshakes and praise. When Steve came in, we shook hands
as he beamed, all the while pretending to be up-set about his cut head.



In The Wrestling Observer, Dave Meltzer wrote, “It was expected to be a one-man show. And
fortunately for the name WrestleMania, the one man delivered to match of the year caliber. . . Hart
and Steve Austin more than saved the show with a match phenomenal in work rate, intensity and
telling the story.”



The next day Vince pulled me into his office as soon as I got to the Rockford Civic Center and asked
me whether Steve and I had taken it upon ourselves to get juice. Steve had denied it. So did I. Vince
never said another word to me about it.



I worked TVs every week, ripping into America. Being a heel was fun, but I really feared where this
was leading. The fans were so pissed off that I couldn’t even hear myself talk when I did my in-ring
interviews (though I couldn’t have been more pleased when Meltzer wrote that my interviews were
the best in the business all year).




The Hart Foundation wore black leather jackets like mine, except for Pillman, who wore a black
leather vest—the jackets served as protection from the constant barrage of dangerous objects! We
were having such a successful and creative run that I even went to Vince one more time to see about
bringing Bruce in as a heel World Junior Heavyweight Champion, the chance that Bruce had been
waiting for all his life. Vince seemed to like the idea of revealing yet another secret member of The
Foundation, which was really just the WWF’s version of what Bischoff was doing with the nWo.

Before Raw was off the air, Vince was hyping the inside story of a backstage brawl between me and
Shawn for sale to fans on his 900 number.



My scuffle with Shawn was the talk of the business. Meltzer wrote that I’d always been professional,
and questioned the reasoning behind Shawn’s claim that he couldn’t trust or work with The Hart
Foundation. Jack Lanza told me that Vince had known a real physical confrontation was coming
before I did, because Shawn had told him he was going to punch me out as far back as May, at the
Evansville Raw, but I couldn’t tell if Jack was just trying to stir me up. I tried to put it all out of my
mind, including Vince’s talk about reneging on the financial terms of our contract, and did my best to
heal up for the July In Your House, which was going to be in Calgary. I had two good distractions:
Paul Jay and his High Road Productions crew arrived and began shooting the documentary on me.
And the Calgary Flames wanted to buy The Hitmen. I knew a hockey organization such as the Flames
were best suited to manage the team, and so I agreed to sell it



On July 3, Shawn agreed to come back: It’s not like he had any choice—Vince had threatened to stop
his $15,000-a-week paychecks. I hoped the little bastard would finally straighten up, but I was
thrown for a loop when Vince told me that Shawn was going to guest referee my SummerSlam
match with Taker at the Meadowlands on August 3. Shawn would turn heel on Taker, costing him
the belt. Though I’d finally get another stint as champion, a sour feeling ran through me: as heels
we’d be in direct competition with each other again.



One warm, beautiful night, Blade got upset while I was putting him to bed and started stomping
around slamming doors. I finally picked him up and put him in his bed and told him to go to sleep. I
was downstairs again chatting with Julie when Blade wandered defiantly past me wearing a Shawn
Michaels T-shirt, hat and heart-shaped glasses, opening and closing his red leather-gloved fist. Julie
and I struggled not to laugh. I coolly said to Blade, “What are you supposed to be?” He put on his
most serious face and said, “I’m with the clique.” Then he broke into a big grin and said, “Nah, I’m
just buggin’ ya, Dad!”


On April 11 Vader made the mistake of going bonkers on Good Morning Kuwait. He and Taker were
appearing together on the show and had been warned in advance that the host was going to ask
them the predictable question about pro wrestling: Is it fake? Taker diplomatically answered that
wrestling is entertainment with athleticism thrown in. But Vader had worked a lot in Japan, where
pro wrestling was still taken very seriously as a shoot, and where wrestlers put a scare into talk-show
hosts all the time. So Vader grabbed the host by his tie and threw him down backward over some
chairs and a table, swearing that such questions were “bullshit!” He was immediately hauled off to
jail, and threatened with three months’ incarceration, mostly because it was illegal in Kuwait to
swear on TV. Despite Vince’s efforts to get Vader out, for a time the authorities wouldn’t budge.
They finally settled on house arrest at the hotel. When I finally saw Vader again, he looked like a big,
bad dog who tore up the fence. As much as the business had changed in the twelve years since the
David Schultz and John Stossel fiasco, some things never change.



On my second-to-last night of the tour, I carried a Kuwait national flag out to my match with Taker,
which was being taped to air on TV back home. I ducked under him, like I’d done so many times
before, but caught my boot in the canvas and felt something snap in my right knee, like a small fan
belt breaking. I limped slightly for the rest of the match and right through to the following night,
when the vocal crowd popped as I defeated Stone Cold in the final to win the Kuwaiti Cup.



When I got back home, I was gratified to read in The Wrestling Observer on April 21:



“Reality break, folks. It goes without saying that in the ring Michaels did a super job in 1996 . . .
however, let’s not rewrite history to say Shawn’s reign was Hogan-like from a business standpoint,
because nothing could be further from the truth. TV ratings collapsed in June of 1996 on Shawn’s
watch, not Bret’s, and reached company all time lows for the rest of the year. Not just Monday night
ratings due to Nitro—ratings across the board. Syndication died. Shawn’s work in the ring can’t be
denied . . . but the buy rates fell through his reign and it was during Shawn’s reign, for the first time
in a decade that WWF in both ppv and TV ratings fell to no. 2 in the U.S. And when it came to house
shows, while WWF had a strong year in 1996, its best months were February and March and who
was champion at that point? The summer was good but there was a serious decline in the fall, at
which point Vince threw everything he could to get Bret back, including promising him the belt. Let’s
not forget that there were numerous cases of Michaels throwing unprofessional hissy fits
throughout his title reign in the ring.”




I was still deeply hurt and pissed off though—and had no idea what to do about it.



39



“NO MATTER WHAT HAPPENS, I’M LOYAL TO YOU”



WHEN I GOT HOME TO CALGARY, my doctor told me that my sore knee was serious: I needed
surgery. They would have to do a scope and then shave the bone down in my knee, which could
keep me out of action for up to six months. Even though I was protected by my contract in case of
injury, I called Vince to let him know I’d do my best to be back as soon as possible. The week the
surgery was scheduled I was supposed to do an In Your House match with Sid, but Vince told me Sid
was injured too. He desperately needed me to do the match with Stone Cold instead, or the pay-per-
view was in danger of bombing. Looking back now, I wonder about myself and my desire to please
him at significant cost to myself: it couldn’t have been all about being worried about my livelihood.





Without hesitating I told him I’d schedule the surgery for after the show. In less than a minute we
formulated a new storyline in which Steve and I would carry our war through In Your House and
onto Raw the next night, where we’d square off in a street fight. Steve would “injure” my knee,
putting me out of commission. I’d have the surgery and do my best to get back for King of the Ring in
June. As an incentive, Vince promised that if I came back in time, Shawn would put me over at King
of the Ring. It was quite a thing to throw out to me, considering that Shawn and I hadn’t sorted
things out yet.



Vince told me he was grateful for my dedication and that he, too, was fed up with Shawn. But he
was reluctant to discipline him, maybe out of fear that Shawn would end up in WCW with his old
pals in the clique. For my part I offered to sit down with Shawn man to man and bury the hatchet,
for the good of the company. I hung up the phone relieved that everything seemed sal-vageable and
that my position was still solid.



During my match with Stone Cold on the April 20In Your House pay-per-view from Rochester, New
York, no fan could tell that my knee was blown. In a nice irony I viciously worked Steve’s knee, even
ripping off his knee brace and bashing his unprotected joint with a chair. When I finally softened him
up enough to go for the sharpshooter, I intentionally stepped through backward so he could reverse
it. Steve managed to reach back and find his knee brace and crack me over the head with it, gouging
a deep, two-inch cut in the top of my head. I fell back and my momentum flipped Steve perfectly up
to his feet so he could step right into the sharpshooter. Feeling my scalp with my fingers I knew I’d


need stitches, and the last thing Steve and I needed right now was another bloody match. Luckily the
blood caked in my thick hair and was unnoticeable. By the end of it, Owen and Davey hit the ring to
make the save, and I limped back to the dressing room leaning on their shoulders, which set the
stage for a big blow-off the next night on Raw in Binghamton.



The first thing I did when I got to the Broome County Veterans Memorial Arena on April 21 was ask
Shawn to talk with me in private out by the ring, as a handful of technicians did sound checks. I told
him I wanted peace. I didn’t lay everything on him as being his fault, and listened without protest as
he told me that morale among the boys was better when he was champion than when I was. I
almost felt sad for him: he didn’t seem to have a clue how wrong he was. Shawn said that his recent
animosity toward me stemmed from my remarks about his knee, which he maintained was really
hurt. What was I to make of that? Every-body in the dressing room was skeptical about his injury. So
I referred to my own hurt knee, and conceded that it was hard to tell from the outside just how
damaged a knee was.



Once again, we agreed that going forward, we would clear any negative comments with each other
before putting them out there for the public to hear, and we’d work together as professionally as we
always had, aiming for King of the Ring in June, if I could make it back by then. We shook hands and I
felt good that we were back in sync.



The street fight with Stone Cold on Raw built up like a showdown at the O.K. Corral. That night I
sacrificed all I had for Vince and his company, determined to turn my knee injury into a positive.
Even though Steve and I had fought it out numerous times before, I’d never been the despised one
before: The crowd was as bad-tempered as a pack of vicious dogs. Coins bounced off my sore,
stitched-up head as I headed out to the ring in blue jeans, a blue T-shirt and Doc Marten boots. It
was impossible to wear a knee wrap under the jeans, so I went out without knee protection.



Now the reluctant hero, Stone Cold paced the ring in his black AUSTIN 3:16 T-shirt and jeans, only to
be pounced on by Owen and Davey at the sound of the bell. Shawn came to Steve’s rescue, cleaning
house all the way back to the dressing room, leaving me to deliver an intense shit-kicking to Steve,
during which I methodically placed his ankle through the back of a steel chair and climbed up to the
top turnbuckle. When I jumped off, Steve moved and I made out that I injured my knee when I
landed. Of course, Steve promptly slammed my unprotected knees with the chair. We’d forgotten to
calculate for no knee wrap: the damage and the pain were very real. It has given me pause to think
that the knee problems I’ve suffered ever since were severely aggravated by this one angle on this
one night. Then Steve twisted me into a sharpshooter and cinched it in until The New Hart
Foundation, now including Brian Pillman, barged past several referees and agents to make the save. I
was delicately placed on a gurney and stretchered out to a waiting ambulance with Owen and Davey
shouting and pleading for the attendants to be careful as the camera crew followed us. I could hear
Owen yell, “Watch his knee! Get ’im to a hospital!” with such emotion that I almost cracked up.

A lot of pro wrestling’s old horses were falling away or dying off. Britain’s Big Daddy Crabtree had
died in 1997, Loch Ness was failing and then the legendary wrestler BoBo Brazil died at seventy-
three. But the Grim Reaper of wrestling wanted more young bones too. On February 15, 1998, a
drunken Louie Spicolli downed twenty-six Somas and died at the age of twenty-seven, drowning in
his own vomit. The sad thing was that more guys were worried about drug testing being introduced
as a result than about dying like Louie did, or like Brian Pillman had. Eric Bischoff was pissed off after
the news hit the dressing room about Louie, and said to me: “Man, these guys are just getting
dressed and nobody gives a shit.”



Dave Meltzer wrote a scathing piece about how Louie’s death should finally be the wake-up call for
all wrestlers, but nobody was listening. The industry was too caught up with stunts such as Shawn
Michaels jerking off a wiener on camera as Hunter wore a SUCK THE COOK T-shirt.

As I walked past the marble and bronze statues of Le Jardin des Fontaines Pétrifiantes, I was
remembering our first night, in London. The televised special went well enough. After all, England
had its wrestling fans, and it was a rarity for them to see the likes of Hulk and André: We were just
beginning to get over big in the U.K. I couldn’t help but see a glimpse of the future and the past
when Rollerball Rocco and a bunch of the English boys dropped their bags in the dressing room. Pat
had hired them to work the opening dark match. Rollerball’s Black Tiger gimmick had long since died
in Japan, and now he and the other lads toiled endlessly for a few quid, crisscrossing the U.K. riding
four to a car. In the WWF dressing room they wore envious expressions that reminded me of pack
horses who suddenly found themselves corralled with groomed Clydesdales.The Brits were
awestruck as André lumbered past. To them he might as well have been a brontosaurus.




Roller’s face lit up when Hulk came into the dressing room. They’d been good buddies in Japan and
Roller had no doubt bragged to everybody that he and Hulk were friends. But that was millions of
dollars ago; sadly, Hulk barely remembered him. The dejection on Roller’s face was pitiful, and at the
same time, I felt empathy for Hogan. So much had changed for all of us.

My right knee would never survive Japan. I realized that if I wanted to feed my family, I needed to
heal and fast: I’d have to take steroids. This was one of the most difficult decisions I ever made. I
called Tom, and within minutes he showed up at my house armed with two loaded needles, one for
each butt cheek. Later on that night I lay shivering in a fever, running to the bathroom with diarrhea
and vomiting. It turned out the steroids were from a veterinarian and were meant for horses. Tom
got sick too.


~~~

Owen, now under a mask and cape as The Blue Blazer, worked with Curt Hennig, who was fast
becoming the best wrestler in the company. Owen had recovered from his injury; he anticipated an
action-packed match with Curt, but they were only allotted eight minutes. Curt was good enough to
give Owen more than his fair share; he respected both me and Owen for our workmanship.




I managed to get Randy and Liz to watch Jade, who totally idolized Liz. A couple of female fans I
knew from the area had taken Jade to a beauty salon and had her hair all done up and got her a
fancy dress so that she looked just like her idol. My match went fine. Afterwards I stood with Jade in
the back watching Hogan win the World Heavyweight belt back from Randy. When it was over I
knocked on Randy’s door and told him and Liz that I thought he’d been a great champion. He and Liz
had worked hard for all of us.

Just before he quit, I remember Owen and me driving through Eugene, Oregon. I couldn’t help but
read the glaring words radiating from a huge billboard: “The wages of sin are death!” I thought
about Julie back home. Lately she’d become paranoid about being “alone” in the house, even though
the place was full of people, including a live-in nanny and handyman. Julie’s moods were up and
down, and she had recently checked herself into a hospital with severe chest pains. The doctors told
her it was all in her head and released her. I was worried about her, but I had my own chest pains—
of a different sort: that petite, redheaded hairdresser from Boston; that melt-in-your-mouth blond
corporal from the Wisconsin National Guard; the knockout Budweiser girl from Baltimore. I was such
a bad dog that I wondered whether I’d end up in heaven or in hell. I smiled at the vision of a place
where a guy like Owen would be dressed in white, playing checkers, while another guy gently
plucked a harp. This was a sharp contrast to another vision, where a devil with a face oddly similar to
Jim’s, wearing red tights, sets aside a pitch fork, pulls on his beard and pounds nails into my head
like in that Hellraiser movie.


The following day, I had a long meeting with Vince at Madison Square Garden. While I thanked him
for my WrestleMania IX payout, I told him I felt frustrated with the direction I was going in. Lex was
never going to get over, especially with The Wrestling Observer ripping him apart for his mechanical
work rate. In Vince’s usual evasive way, he switched trains on me, telling me that he needed both
Owen and me to work a couple of shots down in Memphis for Jerry Lawler’s struggling Mid-South
promotion. I pointed out that Vince had refused to allow me to help my father when Stu was in the
same situation, saying he couldn’t afford for me to get hurt. Vince assured me that if Owen or I were
injured in any way he’d take care of us as though we were working for him. I only agreed because I
needed Lawler to work with me at -SummerSlam.

Stu loved to talk about the tough guys of the business. In his opinion, Haku, Earthquake and The
Steiners were the toughest guys around right now. He told me he liked the promos Owen and I were
doing, and I could see that the fan in him was eager to see his sons take center stage at
WrestleMania X. The talk eventually turned to whether Vince would go to jail. My parents were
concerned about what would happen to him and how it would affect me and Owen. I told them that
Vince was too clever to wind up behind bars, and that when I had called him about his indictment,
he had sounded in good spirits, optimistic even.

I felt like I was being carried by a strong current in a fast river. With Owen and me headlining,
Anaheim, San Jose, Chicago and New York did the best house show business since the glory days of
Hulkamania. We were each making $7,000 to $10,000 a week. Even Martha stopped hating wrestling
for a while.

The next day the bus drove by the ruins of the Colosseum in Rome, where gladiators had once
fought starved and tormented lions, tigers and bears to the death as a form of entertainment. Near
the Colosseum hung color posters trumpeting the rivalry between Owen and me. Whatever it was


that we were doing certainly made more sense than what they did back then. Who’d have ever
thought that two Hart brothers would battle it out in Rome right across from the Colosseum?
Sometimes it was too much for both of us.

August 29 in Chicago. SummerSlam ’94 was the inaugural event for the brand-new United Center,
and twenty-three thousand tickets sold out in hours. The entire Hart family was there except for
Keith and Alison, and all of them were going to be involved in the storyline of the cage match
between Owen and me, which the WWF had told us was going to be our last match together. We
knew the match itself was going to be easy, despite the fact that we couldn’t chance any blood
because the latest ticks on Vince’s hide were citizen groups lobbying to censor TV violence. Vince
was forced to remove anything even remotely violent or he risked losing his time slots. Besides,
neither Owen nor I wanted to put my poor mother through a match where two of her sons were
covered with blood. Our only option was to make as many dramatic near-escapes as we could.



Owen came through the cage door looking cut in his black singlet and tore straight into me. For the
next thirty minutes we brawled up and down, back and forth, until finally Owen made a last escape
over the cage. I climbed up to the top and managed to catch him by the hair and pull him back
inside. I suplexed him standing off the top corner; falling backward, I held him safe and secure. Then
I tried to escape, but Owen caught me by one foot, dragged me back and twisted me into the


sharpshooter. I’ll never forget the pride I felt when I heard the crowd pop even without the blood. I
slowly reversed the sharpshooter as Owen frantically fought his way to the ropes.



Below us, sitting behind Bruce, was Jim, who was doing a great job looking like a school bully
slouched at his desk. Owen and I climbed over the top to the outside. Owen discreetly braced a leg
through the bars as I gave him one last bash into the cage, and he fell back, hanging upside-down, as
I dropped to the floor. The crowd exploded. Right on cue Jim jumped over the railing and took Davey
out from behind with a clothesline, while Davey purposely flipped Diana over the railing to get her
involved. They thought this was clever, but it infuriated me and Owen. Jim and Owen worked me
over inside the cage until Davey peeled off his shirt and led my brothers in a charge over the top to
rescue me. Jim and Owen made a quick getaway, and while I was being helped out I looked up to see
an amused Smith straddling the top of the cage, posing and flexing his muscles. When it was all over,
it was hailed as the greatest cage match of all time, which it certainly wasn’t, but it was surely the
best one without blood.

At the end of September a match between Owen and me, once again billed by the WWF as the last
we would ever do together, was supposed to be the highlight of the debut of yet another of Vince’s
TV shows. But my broken pelvis clicked with each step. I confided to Owen that I was hurt and that
not only could I not take any bumps, I wasn’t sure I could work at all. Owen told me not to worry,
that he’d do all the work. The match turned out to be a ballet of two brothers who really loved each


other. After we pushed off, Owen slapped me, spinning my head: Sweat flew, but he barely even
touched me. The slap sound came from Owen slapping his own thigh. We worked like this until we
eventually wound up in some kind of a leg lock, which looked painful, but was as comfortable as
crossing our feet watching TV. I sold it like crazy while Owen pretended to press against my knee
with his boot. We took the match higher and higher, totally faking every move, while the crowd,
Vince and all the boys in the back marveled at how intense it was. Finally Owen appeared to have
me beat as he climbed the top rope. Then Davey tripped him up, causing Owen to lose his footing
and crotch himself on the top rope. Owen writhed in mock agony as I slid over him, hooking his leg
gently. “Thank you, brother,” I said. It was the most pain-free match I ever had.



That October I was back in Calgary with time off to work on Lonesome Dove. Despite early-morning
set calls and the freezing cold, I was having more fun doing the show than I could ever remember.
Being picked up before dawn for sunrise drives out to the set was a peaceful way to wake up; there
was wildlife everywhere, even a huge, antler-less moose who loped alongside the van, framed by a
backdrop of snow-covered Rockies rising out of early-morning mist. The days were long, but I was
happy with my scenes, especially one where I brawled in a saloon, slamming a cowboy across a
table, when, bang, I got shot, or squibbed, and fake blood oozed out of my shoulder. No retakes in
wrestling, I thought, before going absolutely nuts on everybody in the saloon—and they loved it. In
fact, they wrote me in for the season finale to be shot in early December.

A few minutes later, Owen and I stood talking privately in the hall outside Vince’s office. Owen had
real concerns that Diana would come off looking bad as a mother and a parent and make the whole
family look bad. Then we noticed Diana eavesdropping from around the corner. When we all went to
Vince’s office to talk about it, Diana ignored our warnings. Her very first words to Vince were, “I’ll do
whatever you tell me to do, Vince.” She so infuriated me and Owen that we shot the whole idea
down in front of Vince, who decided it would be best to leave her out of things until Davey’s
upcoming assault trial was finished.

The sponsors of the five-show tour were wealthy Arabs. One afternoon they took me, Owen and
Davey out on a fishing boat, and Davey hooked a three-foot yellow shark. An epic tug-of-war went
on for about an hour, like something out of Hemingway, with Davey holding on, drenched in sweat,
the veins popping in his arms. When he finally reeled it in, it still had a lot of fight left as it flipped all
over the deck. Davey was so impressed with its inexhaustible will to live he insisted it be set free.

~~~

TVs were now every third Monday and Tuesday. On the other Mondays of the month, Vince added a
show called Monday Night Raw, which would alternate between live and taped matches. The
concept for Monday Night Raw was that it would be at the same venue each week, a historic 3,500-
seat theater within walking distance of Madison Square Garden called the Manhattan Center. In
January 1993 alone, the WWF produced something like fourteen hours of TV and a major pay-per-
view. For the shows that didn’t air live, commentary was overdubbed in a number of languages at
the WWF’s slick in-house production facility in Connecticut and beamed via satellite to networks
worldwide. That’s not to mention the forty-two towns run that month with two teams of wrestlers
for the house shows. This schedule became normal. They published it for fans in the monthly WWF
magazine under the banner “Killer Kalendar”—and that’s what it was.



On January 9, 1993, I had to do another return match with Flair at the Boston Garden, billed as a
one-hour marathon match; it was the first show of a weekend of back-to-back double shots. I’d
come up with a good finish that I ran by Vince, but when I told Flair he began telling me what we
were going to do instead. I finally cut him off and, with regret, dressed him down in front of several
wrestlers. “Ric, I’m the champion and this is how it’s going to go.” He dropped his jaw, turned red
and sat on a bench saying, “You’re the champ.”



Ric still managed to mess up the timing for every fall. I was furious when Dave Meltzer wrote in The
Wrestling Observer that Flair had carried me for the whole match when it was, in fact, the other way
around.



There were some interesting moments at Royal Rumble later that month in Sacramento. Lex Luger
was a former WCW wrestler whom Vince brought into his World Bodybuilding Federation, and then
lured to the WWF by promising him the moon. It wasn’t working out so well. Luger was now called
The Narcissist and, before every match, had to pose in front of a full-length mirror in the middle of
the ring, tassels hanging from his white trunks. Although he was in fabulous shape and he was
steroid-free, he looked small in the ring. To the fans, his new, conceited persona was as
uninteresting as the faltering WBF. During Lex’s routine streams of people headed to the concession
stands.



That night Shawn was defending the IC belt against Marty Jannetty, who showed up drunk and
unkempt from an all-nighter. Wasted, Marty fumbled and stumbled his way through the match, but,
much to his credit, the fans never noticed. Vince fired him as soon as he got out of the ring.



A new arrival to WWF was Memphis promoter and wrestler Jerry The King Lawler. He was Honky
Tonk’s second cousin and had a similar build: soft and pudgy, with not a muscle on him. Lawler had a


lot of heat with various wrestlers who’d worked for him over the years; to get even, several of them
took the time to shit in his crown and left it for him to find in the showers.



I was glad to see former WWF World Champion Bob Backlund return for the battle royal. I’d never
forgotten how, when I was in Japan in the early 1980s, he’d bought beer for all the boys on the bus.
The mark in me got off watching Flair and Backlund, two very different legends from the old school,
working in the Rumble. Bob was as clean-cut as they came, whereas Flair loved to walk on the wild
side—they were two of the longest-reigning champions of my era, from two different territories.



It was hard for anyone to complain about who they were working with after watching poor
Undertaker carry Giant Gonzales, a seven-foot-six, very affable Argentinean who couldn’t work at all.
He was so skinny they couldn’t put him in trunks; instead he had to wear a ridiculous looking flesh-
colored unitard with muscles airbrushed all over it.



As for my match with Razor Ramon, he was still so green I called everything. I was afraid that Scott
could break my neck with his finish, The Razor’s Edge, a move where he’d press you up by the
armpits and then fall forward, dropping you right on your neck. Instead I came up with a clever way
to get out of it by dropping behind him and backsliding him for a pin fall. It turned out to be an up-
and-down fight until I came up with the sharpshooter out of nowhere and he submitted. When I was
handed the belt I saw Stu and Helen standing in the front row clapping.



And Yoko had won the rumble, so now he’d be the heel to face me at WrestleMania IX in Las Vegas
in early April.



At the hotel, someone pointed out to me that Dave Meltzer was lurking about in the lobby, reluctant
to come into the bar. Eventually, my mom introduced me to him. Meltzer was very polite and a bit
nervous as I glared at him. I whispered to her afterwards, “He’s no friend of mine, Mom.”



On January 26, I flew out to Las Vegas with Vince, Pat and all the top boys to kick off the hype for
WrestleMania IX with a huge press conference. Afterwards, Vince and Pat said that I had come
across as humble and that was exactly what they were looking for to help project a wholesome
image now that it was almost certain Vince would be indicted by the Feds.



I managed to get home for one day before dashing off to Madison Square Garden, and was
saddened to hear that André had died. He’d flown to France for his father’s funeral only to be found
dead in his hotel room the morning after. I pictured him walking through the Pearly Gates with a big


smile on his face, for once not having to duck, saying, “Hello, boss!” There would never be another
giant like André.



The last time I’d been in Europe I wouldn’t have believed it possible that I’d be returning as World
Champion. On February 1, I arrived in Manchester, and Knobbs rang my room to tell me that he’d
tracked down Dynamite. He’d phoned him to say he was coming over and invited me and Chief to go
along with him as a surprise. Tom and The Nasty Boys had toured together in Japan a few years back.
Knobbs and Sags had been charmed enough by him to allow him to use the tops of their heads as
ashtrays while they rode the bus.



We found Tom’s flat in a miserable, graffiti-stained ghetto on the outskirts of the city. The windows
were boarded up and the charred remains of a car were smoldering out front. He answered the door
in a T-shirt and blue jeans looking James Dean normal, with a V-shaped physique. It was the first
time I’d seen him steroid-free since I’d known him.



“Fookin’ niggers did it,” he said, pointing at the car as he invited us in.



Tom took a seat on a shredded old couch, moving slowly as he eased his way into it, smoking a
cigarette. He rudely referred to his girlfriend, Joanne, as a daft stupid cunt enough times that it
embarrassed everyone except him, and she looked shell-shocked by his behavior. Chief’s face gave
away his disappointment and disgust. When Knobbs innocently blurted out that I was the champ,
Tom nodded and replied, “Intercontinental, right?”



“No, Dyno, he’s the World Champion now. He’s got the big belt.”



When I won the World Championship, I recall thinking, I’d love to see the look on Dynamite’s face
when he finds out. I got to see it now. His first expression was one of disbelief and shock. Then, for
only a moment, he seemed happy, like it confirmed his own greatness in some way. No sooner had I
begun to see that he was maybe even proud of me, then his face turned sour: his look said, This is
what things could have been like for me if I hadn’t become so broke and broken. Then, briefly,
optimism seemed to wash over him: maybe somehow I could help him? But as the thought formed,
he lifted his chin, indignant, his pride hurt—he didn’t want anything from me or anyone else.



While we were there, people drove by and threw things at his house, which, he explained, is why the
windows were all boarded up. Tom was finding out that there was a heavy price for his bigotry. He
still had a real sore spot about Davey, and for that I couldn’t totally blame him. Davey had


trademarked The British Bulldog name before Tom or even Vince, and now he refused to let Tom—
the original British Bulldog—use his own ring name to make a living.



In the car on the way back to the hotel, Chief said he regretted that we’d gone to see him. Dynamite
was one of his favorites, and now his memories would be forever ruined.



Tom showed up at the hotel that night. He’d thought things over a bit and was now blown away by
my position and desperate for any kind of a lifeline from me. I’d already been talking to Chief and
Vince about trying to do something for him. But when I told Tom, he shook his head. “Nah, I’ll never
go back.” I left him in the bar with Knobbs and Sags, where he was soon crying in his beer. All our
hearts went out to him. Dynamite was hard to love, but we did, and it was heartbreaking to see the
best worker I ever knew finally reveal his inner agony at the mistakes he’d made and how things had
ended up for him.



After the show on February 6, we all drank at Cookies, a rock ’n’ roll bar in Frankfurt that was always
packed with Fräulein. I somehow ended up in Bammer’s room with two large German girls, and by 5
a.m. I was suplexing and Russian leg-sweeping one of them on the giant bed. I liked to think of it as
training for my Mania match with Yokozuna. Then Bam Bam elected to pick the bigger one up over
his back and give her a Samoan drop onto the bed. There was a loud crack as the bed frame broke;
all we could do was laugh as he sat on his ass with the bed collapsed all around him. Bammer had
been through a lot of ups and downs, but he had a great attitude now. We’d been working almost
every night having fantastic matches.



After the final show of the tour, we bussed it to Düsseldorf and would head home in the morning.
That night Taker, Papa and I said farewell to Flair in the bar, it being his last day before he’d go back
to WCW. After our last match, in Dortmund, Ric had clasped my hand and said, “My friend, you are
truly a great worker.” I’d decided that Vince was right when he said that Flair wasn’t ruining our
matches on purpose. He was just from a different era, when all the spots were called in the ring, and
he was the one calling them.



Later that night, seeing that Flair’s door was open, I knocked, and he invited me in, waving me to sit
down while he finished a phone call with some bigwig from WCW. Ric spoke highly of me and my
work and described my popularity in Europe as being like Elvis. He also said some kind words about
Taker. The way Ric put us all over just might come in handy one day.



On February 18, I heard that Kerry Von Erich had committed suicide—shot himself in the heart. Left
a note that said he was joining his brothers in heaven. Owen and I were deeply saddened, but who


could be surprised? As the son of a wrestling promoter, Kerry never found it easy living up to the
hopes and expectations put before him. I’ve always thought that despite the closeness of the Von
Erich boys, they were still so competitive that they thought topping one another with this final exit
was the ultimate act of bravado.


I remembered my mom telling me about the first Von Erich son who’d died. Little Jackie Jr. had
played with Smith and Bruce back in the late 1950s when Fritz worked for Stu under his born name,
Jack Adkisson. A few weeks later, the Adkissons were living in Buffalo, where Fritz was wrestling, and
Jackie was electrocuted by a power line at a trailer park. I also couldn’t forget that cold day in
February 1984, when Dynamite, Davey and I were working over in Japan and heard that Kerry’s older
brother, David, who was in Japan working for Baba’s promotion, had just died of a drug overdose.
The same thing took Mike Von Erich on April 12, 1987. He was high when he zipped himself inside a
sleeping bag that he filled with rocks and rolled himself out of a small boat and drowned. And the
youngest brother, Chris, had shot himself on September 12, 1991.



I just wished there had been something I could have done to help Kerry. We all did.



On February 22, Owen and I flew to Texas for Kerry’s funeral, held in the local Baptist church. Fritz
and Doris had recently divorced, but they put on a unified front, stoic in their acceptance. Of their six
sons, only Kevin remained. I could see that it meant a lot to Fritz that two of Stu’s boys were there.



When they lowered Kerry’s casket into the earth, I couldn’t help but think, We’ll see you at the
gates, brother.



When I read my booking sheets, I realized I’d see Hulk at TVs in North Charleston, South Carolina, on
March 8. Even though he’d been making the odd appearance on various shows since December, I
hadn’t laid eyes on him since WrestleMania VIII, when I’d given him his drawing. I really thought
he’d be proud of me, so when I pulled up to the back of the arena, I went looking for him. I didn’t
have to look far. He was standing chatting with Beefcake, leaning against the wall on the ramp. His
appearance had changed drastically: He looked like a lean old walrus. He was tanned and wore red
spandex tights, big white boots and a bandana covering his balding head. I approached with a huge
smile and my hand extended in friendship. Hogan gave me a dismissive nod and wouldn’t shake my
hand. I withdrew it and walked away. I figured that because I was champion now, he saw me as the
competition. Hulkamania had run so wild that it had burned itself out like a grass fire, and here I
was, one of the new, brightly colored flowers popping up to haunt him.

I had a bad flu when I worked SummerSlam ’93, but there’s no such thing as too sick for a pay-per-
view. Everything was centered around Lex and Yoko’s American hero angle. Undertaker was
expected to carry Giant Gonzales again, and like with so many horrible workers he’d been saddled
with, he made a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. As for me, the Hart family had now been written into
my storyline. My mom and dad had been in the audience at Monday Night Raw, and Lawler took to
ridiculing them with a series of one-liners: “Hey, Stu, I heard you wrestled when the Dead Sea was
only sick!” By the end of it, my mom pretended to be in tears. Even Stu’s legit knee surgery was said
to be the result of Lawler having shoved Stu in the stairwell as he was leaving the building.




Owen and Bruce sat in the front row, representing the Hart family, dressed in their finest Western
wear. Owen was bummed out because he’d just learned he’d been rejected by the fire department.
His dream of a happy home life was put on hold, and again wrestling was all he had.


~~~

As Vince’s new champion, I was counted on to fill Hulk’s shoes. Being a successful World Champion
requires more than just being the best worker, and in fact, sometimes the best World Champions
aren’t the best workers—Hogan and Warrior being the prime examples. Although I had a massive
grassroots following, I didn’t have the level of promo skills or charisma of Hogan. I wasn’t six-foot-
eight with twenty-four-inch arms. Strangely, it worked to my advantage. My athletic physique was as
realistic as my wrestling, and Vince, in the midst of the steroid scandal, was doing his best to turn his
business around based on my believability. If anything, I was the perfect contrast to Hogan,
especially for fans who were sick of his all too familiar act. I was recognized for being an artist and a
storyteller. If Hogan was the Elvis of wrestling, I was the Robert De Niro.



Vince needed me to steer clear of any and all trouble, and he was counting on the fact that I could
work a four-star match with almost anyone. The days when the WWF was stocked with the best
lineup of heels in the business to get Hogan and Warrior over were gone. Now almost all of the great
heels that Vince had invested so much TV time in had disappeared from the WWF under the harsh
light of the steroid scandal, and some were now riding high in WCW.



Soon enough, I was launched on return bouts with Flair, who seemed bent on sabotaging our
matches. I wasn’t sure whether he was doing it accidentally or on purpose, but he was never there
for me on my comeback and seemed to bungle the finish every night. I began to refer to Ric’s ring
style as full blast, non-stop non-psychology. He made things up on the spot and did them whether
they made sense or not. As a technician Flair was one of the best, but I was baffled by how little he
really knew about building a great match. And I was even more baffled by how this went undetected
by fans and sheet writers, who continued to worship him.



On November 18, Vince phoned to tell me he’d just fired Warrior and that, unfortunately, Davey was
going to be next. He wanted to tell me first so I could prepare for any backlash that might happen as
a result. He said that Warrior and Davey had been receiving shipments of growth hormone from a
dealer in the U.K. who’d just been busted. Vince was so under the gun that he fired them both
immediately. The fanciful vision I’d had of me twisting Warrior into the sharpshooter and him
screaming uncle at WrestleMania IX vanished forever. After so many wrestlers had lain down to
make him a star, Warrior would never return the favor. As for Davey, he was out of work and trying
to get on with WCW.




Taker and I knew we were being heavily relied on to be the new leaders. Vince also pinned his hopes
on Shawn, who was beginning to blossom into an obnoxious pretty boy heel who took great bumps,
comparable only to Perfect or Dynamite. He was a tag team wrestler finally finding his niche as a
singles performer. I fondly remember Shawn praising me the night I won the belt and telling me how
grateful he was that I had finally opened the door for the smaller yet better workers who never got a
break. “Guys like us!” He smiled and slapped me on the back.



Vince was building six-foot-seven Scott Hall as a takeoff on Al Pacino’s Scarface character. He cut
promos with an obviously put-on Cuban accent and a toothpick dangling from his lip until he flicked
it away. His neck was adorned with fake gold chains and a tacky razor medallion, his unshaven face
was framed by long, greasy black hair and one casual curl carefully positioned to hang right down
the middle of his forehead. Hall was well built but still green. On Curt’s suggestion he was dubbed
Razor Ramon. Since Vince was dangerously low on heels, Razor was mega-pushed to the top and set
to work with me in January at Royal Rumble 1993. Another potential top heel was Yokozuna, a huge
Samoan named Rodney Anoa’i, whom Vince billed as a legit sumo wrestler and passed off as
Japanese. Mr. Fuji was his manager. Last but not least was The Beast from the East, Bam Bam
Bigelow, with his tattooed head. He’d departed a while back only to reappear with a much-improved
attitude. He couldn’t have come at a better time.



I desperately hoped Vince could build some of these heels for me as soon as possible.



On November 25, after a long match at Survivor Series in Richfield, Ohio, I caught Shawn Michaels by
the ankles as he was coming off the top rope with a flying drop kick and put him into the
sharpshooter to retain the World title at my first pay-per-view as champion. Shawn confessed to me
that he wasn’t in working shape to go a long match, so I paced the match a lot slower than I would
have liked, as a favor to him. Vince said the match was right on the money, which was all I needed to
know.



In Montreal, in early December, Pat brought me and Ric together and diplomatically told Flair to
start trying harder. Ric was as obliging as ever before we got into the ring, but the match turned out
exactly the same—maybe this was just how he worked. Then Ric apologized to me for our matches
not being better, explaining that he was simply burned out and was dealing with family problems. I
wanted to believe him, so I did. He would be leaving soon, anyway.



On December 14, at Green Bay TVs, Vince pumped my hand and slapped me on the back as he
closed his office door. Then he said, “I thought you should know Hogan’s coming back, but he’ll have
nothing to do with my plans for you and the belt. He’ll only be working tags with Beefcake for a short
time as a favor, to help promote a movie he’s got coming out.”




I pictured Hulk shaking his head, with a big grin on his face, maybe a little relieved that the belt was
on me instead of Warrior, or worse. I thought he’d be glad to see it on someone who’d at least
worked hard for it, someone who respected and protected the business. I still had such respect for
Hogan that if Vince had asked me to step back and hand him the belt, it would have been fine by me.



Vince had his problems to deal with in Green Bay. For the past six months, he had been building
Kevin Wacholz as a psycho-killer ex-con named Nailz. Kevin cornered Vince in his office and
screamed at him for fifteen minutes about all the lies he’d been told. His yelling got so loud I had
goose bumps up my back as I listened from down the hall. Suddenly there was a loud crash—Nailz
had knocked Vince over in his chair, choking him violently, until Lanza, Slaughter and a swarm of
agents teamed up to pull him off. Nailz walked out and immediately called the police and accused
Vince of making a sexual advance to him. Vince was charged with sexual assault (the charges were
dropped shortly thereafter). Some of the boys actually admired Nailz for snatching Vince and then
covering his tracks well enough not to get charged himself. The last thing Vince wanted was yet
another scandal. The FBI was about to indict him for receiving steroids through the mail from the
convicted doctor, the WBF was sinking fast and his wrestling empire was on shaky legs too. I wanted
to come through for him: Only days earlier he’d said to me that he hadn’t always done right by his
wrestlers but that starting with me he was going to change all that.



On my Christmas break, Julie and I celebrated what had to be the best year of my life. It appeared
that we might actually succeed after all: the house, the kids, the dream. It all looked so nice through
my rose-colored glasses. But there I was leaving on Christmas Day again. When my bags were
packed and set by the door later that night, Blade came down in his pajamas and said, “Can I come
to the ’port, Dad?”



Boy I’d sure miss him. He was already two and a half. I picked him up and said, “You can come if you
promise me that you won’t cry when I leave.” He nodded and scampered away to put on his winter
boots.



It was midnight when Julie and Blade dropped me off. We had a long hug and then a few short tight
ones and a few good kisses. Blade said he wouldn’t cry—and he didn’t.



I took my seat up in first class next to Owen, who had been upgraded for the flight, and who wore
the same heartbroken expression as I did. In a few hours we’d be sleeping on the airport floor in
Toronto, with our bags for pillows, waiting to connect to another flight to work back-to-back double
shots.




TVs were now every third Monday and Tuesday. On the other Mondays of the month, Vince added a
show called Monday Night Raw, which would alternate between live and taped matches. The
concept for Monday Night Raw was that it would be at the same venue each week, a historic 3,500-
seat theater within walking distance of Madison Square Garden called the Manhattan Center. In
January 1993 alone, the WWF produced something like fourteen hours of TV and a major pay-per-
view. For the shows that didn’t air live, commentary was overdubbed in a number of languages at
the WWF’s slick in-house production facility in Connecticut and beamed via satellite to networks
worldwide. That’s not to mention the forty-two towns run that month with two teams of wrestlers
for the house shows. This schedule became normal. They published it for fans in the monthly WWF
magazine under the banner “Killer Kalendar”—and that’s what it was.



On January 9, 1993, I had to do another return match with Flair at the Boston Garden, billed as a
one-hour marathon match; it was the first show of a weekend of back-to-back double shots. I’d
come up with a good finish that I ran by Vince, but when I told Flair he began telling me what we
were going to do instead. I finally cut him off and, with regret, dressed him down in front of several
wrestlers. “Ric, I’m the champion and this is how it’s going to go.” He dropped his jaw, turned red
and sat on a bench saying, “You’re the champ.”



Ric still managed to mess up the timing for every fall. I was furious when Dave Meltzer wrote in The
Wrestling Observer that Flair had carried me for the whole match when it was, in fact, the other way
around.



There were some interesting moments at Royal Rumble later that month in Sacramento. Lex Luger
was a former WCW wrestler whom Vince brought into his World Bodybuilding Federation, and then
lured to the WWF by promising him the moon. It wasn’t working out so well. Luger was now called
The Narcissist and, before every match, had to pose in front of a full-length mirror in the middle of
the ring, tassels hanging from his white trunks. Although he was in fabulous shape and he was
steroid-free, he looked small in the ring. To the fans, his new, conceited persona was as
uninteresting as the faltering WBF. During Lex’s routine streams of people headed to the concession
stands.



That night Shawn was defending the IC belt against Marty Jannetty, who showed up drunk and
unkempt from an all-nighter. Wasted, Marty fumbled and stumbled his way through the match, but,
much to his credit, the fans never noticed. Vince fired him as soon as he got out of the ring.



A new arrival to WWF was Memphis promoter and wrestler Jerry The King Lawler. He was Honky
Tonk’s second cousin and had a similar build: soft and pudgy, with not a muscle on him. Lawler had a


lot of heat with various wrestlers who’d worked for him over the years; to get even, several of them
took the time to shit in his crown and left it for him to find in the showers.



I was glad to see former WWF World Champion Bob Backlund return for the battle royal. I’d never
forgotten how, when I was in Japan in the early 1980s, he’d bought beer for all the boys on the bus.
The mark in me got off watching Flair and Backlund, two very different legends from the old school,
working in the Rumble. Bob was as clean-cut as they came, whereas Flair loved to walk on the wild
side—they were two of the longest-reigning champions of my era, from two different territories.



It was hard for anyone to complain about who they were working with after watching poor
Undertaker carry Giant Gonzales, a seven-foot-six, very affable Argentinean who couldn’t work at all.
He was so skinny they couldn’t put him in trunks; instead he had to wear a ridiculous looking flesh-
colored unitard with muscles airbrushed all over it.



As for my match with Razor Ramon, he was still so green I called everything. I was afraid that Scott
could break my neck with his finish, The Razor’s Edge, a move where he’d press you up by the
armpits and then fall forward, dropping you right on your neck. Instead I came up with a clever way
to get out of it by dropping behind him and backsliding him for a pin fall. It turned out to be an up-
and-down fight until I came up with the sharpshooter out of nowhere and he submitted. When I was
handed the belt I saw Stu and Helen standing in the front row clapping.



And Yoko had won the rumble, so now he’d be the heel to face me at WrestleMania IX in Las Vegas
in early April.



At the hotel, someone pointed out to me that Dave Meltzer was lurking about in the lobby, reluctant
to come into the bar. Eventually, my mom introduced me to him. Meltzer was very polite and a bit
nervous as I glared at him. I whispered to her afterwards, “He’s no friend of mine, Mom.”



On January 26, I flew out to Las Vegas with Vince, Pat and all the top boys to kick off the hype for
WrestleMania IX with a huge press conference. Afterwards, Vince and Pat said that I had come
across as humble and that was exactly what they were looking for to help project a wholesome
image now that it was almost certain Vince would be indicted by the Feds.



I managed to get home for one day before dashing off to Madison Square Garden, and was
saddened to hear that André had died. He’d flown to France for his father’s funeral only to be found
dead in his hotel room the morning after. I pictured him walking through the Pearly Gates with a big


smile on his face, for once not having to duck, saying, “Hello, boss!” There would never be another
giant like André.



The last time I’d been in Europe I wouldn’t have believed it possible that I’d be returning as World
Champion. On February 1, I arrived in Manchester, and Knobbs rang my room to tell me that he’d
tracked down Dynamite. He’d phoned him to say he was coming over and invited me and Chief to go
along with him as a surprise. Tom and The Nasty Boys had toured together in Japan a few years back.
Knobbs and Sags had been charmed enough by him to allow him to use the tops of their heads as
ashtrays while they rode the bus.



We found Tom’s flat in a miserable, graffiti-stained ghetto on the outskirts of the city. The windows
were boarded up and the charred remains of a car were smoldering out front. He answered the door
in a T-shirt and blue jeans looking James Dean normal, with a V-shaped physique. It was the first
time I’d seen him steroid-free since I’d known him.



“Fookin’ niggers did it,” he said, pointing at the car as he invited us in.



Tom took a seat on a shredded old couch, moving slowly as he eased his way into it, smoking a
cigarette. He rudely referred to his girlfriend, Joanne, as a daft stupid cunt enough times that it
embarrassed everyone except him, and she looked shell-shocked by his behavior. Chief’s face gave
away his disappointment and disgust. When Knobbs innocently blurted out that I was the champ,
Tom nodded and replied, “Intercontinental, right?”



“No, Dyno, he’s the World Champion now. He’s got the big belt.”



When I won the World Championship, I recall thinking, I’d love to see the look on Dynamite’s face
when he finds out. I got to see it now. His first expression was one of disbelief and shock. Then, for
only a moment, he seemed happy, like it confirmed his own greatness in some way. No sooner had I
begun to see that he was maybe even proud of me, then his face turned sour: his look said, This is
what things could have been like for me if I hadn’t become so broke and broken. Then, briefly,
optimism seemed to wash over him: maybe somehow I could help him? But as the thought formed,
he lifted his chin, indignant, his pride hurt—he didn’t want anything from me or anyone else.



While we were there, people drove by and threw things at his house, which, he explained, is why the
windows were all boarded up. Tom was finding out that there was a heavy price for his bigotry. He
still had a real sore spot about Davey, and for that I couldn’t totally blame him. Davey had


trademarked The British Bulldog name before Tom or even Vince, and now he refused to let Tom—
the original British Bulldog—use his own ring name to make a living.



In the car on the way back to the hotel, Chief said he regretted that we’d gone to see him. Dynamite
was one of his favorites, and now his memories would be forever ruined.



Tom showed up at the hotel that night. He’d thought things over a bit and was now blown away by
my position and desperate for any kind of a lifeline from me. I’d already been talking to Chief and
Vince about trying to do something for him. But when I told Tom, he shook his head. “Nah, I’ll never
go back.” I left him in the bar with Knobbs and Sags, where he was soon crying in his beer. All our
hearts went out to him. Dynamite was hard to love, but we did, and it was heartbreaking to see the
best worker I ever knew finally reveal his inner agony at the mistakes he’d made and how things had
ended up for him.



After the show on February 6, we all drank at Cookies, a rock ’n’ roll bar in Frankfurt that was always
packed with Fräulein. I somehow ended up in Bammer’s room with two large German girls, and by 5
a.m. I was suplexing and Russian leg-sweeping one of them on the giant bed. I liked to think of it as
training for my Mania match with Yokozuna. Then Bam Bam elected to pick the bigger one up over
his back and give her a Samoan drop onto the bed. There was a loud crack as the bed frame broke;
all we could do was laugh as he sat on his ass with the bed collapsed all around him. Bammer had
been through a lot of ups and downs, but he had a great attitude now. We’d been working almost
every night having fantastic matches.



After the final show of the tour, we bussed it to Düsseldorf and would head home in the morning.
That night Taker, Papa and I said farewell to Flair in the bar, it being his last day before he’d go back
to WCW. After our last match, in Dortmund, Ric had clasped my hand and said, “My friend, you are
truly a great worker.” I’d decided that Vince was right when he said that Flair wasn’t ruining our
matches on purpose. He was just from a different era, when all the spots were called in the ring, and
he was the one calling them.



Later that night, seeing that Flair’s door was open, I knocked, and he invited me in, waving me to sit
down while he finished a phone call with some bigwig from WCW. Ric spoke highly of me and my
work and described my popularity in Europe as being like Elvis. He also said some kind words about
Taker. The way Ric put us all over just might come in handy one day.



On February 18, I heard that Kerry Von Erich had committed suicide—shot himself in the heart. Left
a note that said he was joining his brothers in heaven. Owen and I were deeply saddened, but who


could be surprised? As the son of a wrestling promoter, Kerry never found it easy living up to the
hopes and expectations put before him. I’ve always thought that despite the closeness of the Von
Erich boys, they were still so competitive that they thought topping one another with this final exit
was the ultimate act of bravado.



I remembered my mom telling me about the first Von Erich son who’d died. Little Jackie Jr. had
played with Smith and Bruce back in the late 1950s when Fritz worked for Stu under his born name,
Jack Adkisson. A few weeks later, the Adkissons were living in Buffalo, where Fritz was wrestling, and
Jackie was electrocuted by a power line at a trailer park. I also couldn’t forget that cold day in
February 1984, when Dynamite, Davey and I were working over in Japan and heard that Kerry’s older
brother, David, who was in Japan working for Baba’s promotion, had just died of a drug overdose.
The same thing took Mike Von Erich on April 12, 1987. He was high when he zipped himself inside a
sleeping bag that he filled with rocks and rolled himself out of a small boat and drowned. And the
youngest brother, Chris, had shot himself on September 12, 1991.



I just wished there had been something I could have done to help Kerry. We all did.



On February 22, Owen and I flew to Texas for Kerry’s funeral, held in the local Baptist church. Fritz
and Doris had recently divorced, but they put on a unified front, stoic in their acceptance. Of their six
sons, only Kevin remained. I could see that it meant a lot to Fritz that two of Stu’s boys were there.



When they lowered Kerry’s casket into the earth, I couldn’t help but think, We’ll see you at the
gates, brother.



When I read my booking sheets, I realized I’d see Hulk at TVs in North Charleston, South Carolina, on
March 8. Even though he’d been making the odd appearance on various shows since December, I
hadn’t laid eyes on him since WrestleMania VIII, when I’d given him his drawing. I really thought
he’d be proud of me, so when I pulled up to the back of the arena, I went looking for him. I didn’t
have to look far. He was standing chatting with Beefcake, leaning against the wall on the ramp. His
appearance had changed drastically: He looked like a lean old walrus. He was tanned and wore red
spandex tights, big white boots and a bandana covering his balding head. I approached with a huge
smile and my hand extended in friendship. Hogan gave me a dismissive nod and wouldn’t shake my
hand. I withdrew it and walked away. I figured that because I was champion now, he saw me as the
competition. Hulkamania had run so wild that it had burned itself out like a grass fire, and here I
was, one of the new, brightly colored flowers popping up to haunt him.




The day only got worse. Owen was getting a push, working with Bam Bam. While springing up to the
top rope for a back somersault, he slipped coming down and tore a ligament in his knee, injuring
himself so badly that instead of being given a push, he was pulled out of the ring and taken to the
hospital. He was expected to be out for a long time.



The only positive thing that happened was that I managed to talk Yoko into lying on the dressing-
room floor where, much to his surprise, I crouched down atop his twisted thick calves and was
actually able to put on the sharpshooter. I didn’t picture beating him with it, but none of the fans
would think it would be possible for me to turn him over; the move had the potential to be a great
spot for WrestleMania IX. Vince was having him destroy all his opponents, and I was shaping up to
be a huge underdog.



Wrestlers’ deaths continued to come in threes. After André and Kerry, the boys openly wondered
who’d be next. It was Dino Bravo, only forty-four years old.



On March 10, Dino was found dead in his home near Montreal. He’d been shot seventeen times, so
that the precise shots formed a circle in the back of his skull. Rumor was that he had double-crossed
the Mafia in the trafficking of contraband cigarettes. A nervous Dino had recently confided to close
friends that his days were numbered.



On April 2, 1993, I brought Stu and Helen with me to Vegas for WrestleMania IX, where my mom
was also going to have a family reunion with her four sisters. Stu beamed at once again finding
himself the center of the sisters’ attentions, as he had been when he first fell in love with all of them
in the 1940s in Long Beach, New York. I left them to reminisce and went to my room just in time to
answer a call from Vince, who asked me to come to his suite to talk. I knocked on his door and he
answered it with that goofy grin. We sat down, and Vince said, “This is what I want to do. I want you
to drop the belt to Yoko tomorrow.”



This was not what I had expected. I sat there dumbstruck as he went on to explain how Fuji would
screw me by throwing salt in my face, blinding me. After Yoko was handed the belt, Hogan would
rush to my aid and in some kind of roundabout way Hogan would end up winning the belt from Yoko
right then and there!



Like I was handing Vince my sword, I told him I appreciated everything he did for me and I’d do
whatever he wanted.




Vince said, “Don’t get bitter. I still have big plans for you.” Sound bites flashed through my mind of
Vince assuring me that I was the long-term champion, and not to worry about Hogan, who still
hadn’t even spoken to me yet.



As I stood up to leave, I asked, “Did you take the belt from me because I didn’t do a good enough
job?”



“Of course not! I’m just going in a different direction. It’s still onwards and upwards for you. Nothing
is going to change too much for you.”



I was totally crushed



As I lay in bed that night, the more I thought about what Vince had in mind for Hogan, the more I felt
that it would completely backfire on both of them. The hokey finish would stink, maybe not
immediately, but in the weeks to come my fans, who were the biggest contingent in Vince’s paying
audience at that time, would gag on it. There was something different about my fans. They really
believed in me as a person.



By the time I got to the dressing room the following afternoon, word that I was losing the title had
leaked out to the boys. Most of them were quiet and some were angry. The Nasty Boys, Shawn,
Taker and several others expressed their utter disappointment. Knowing I was losing the belt didn’t
stop me from planning on having a great match. I went over everything with Yoko and designed the
match so that all the best moves were left for the final minute.



Hulk arrived with his entourage: his wife, manager, Beefcake and Jimmy Hart. Clearly he’d been in
the know all along, probably from the first day he came back. Now he was suddenly acting like my
long-lost old pal and wearing a big smile that rightfully belonged to me.



During our match, it was hot and dry in the desert heat, but a cool breeze made it impossible to
work up a healthy sweat. An exhausted Yoko stampeded like a runaway elephant, short-changing me
on my comeback and editing out all my best spots. I was furious that he would take it upon himself
to go home on his own. That’s how I came to find myself crouched low, desperately hanging on to
Yoko’s two massive calves in the sharpshooter, fighting with every ounce of strength not to let go.
Fuji was caught off guard by the sudden ending, and it took him forever to find, unwrap, and throw a
packet of what was actually baby powder into my eyes, supposedly blinding me. I fell back as Yoko
hooked my leg and Hebner counted one . . . two . . . three. Right on cue, Hogan hit the ring


protesting the injustice that had been done to me, and Earl put on that classic expression of utter
stupidity that all pro wrestling refs wear when convenient. As I feigned blindness Hogan helped me
out of the ring.



Fuji stayed in the ring, absurdly challenging Hogan to a title match with Yoko right then and there.
Yoko was still teetering from exhaustion and looking for a second wind that wasn’t there. Hogan
blinked in astonishment at his sudden good fortune. As scripted, with my face buried in the crook of
my arm, I waved him to avenge my loss. “Go get ’em, Hulk!”



I was really thinking, Go ahead, Hogan, take from me what I worked so hard to get. We’ll see just
how long you last! Hogan was champion again without even having a match—and before I’d even
made it backstage. He simply ducked the powder Fuji threw in his face, clotheslined Fuji and
dropped his big leg on Yoko. I could hear the one . . . two . . . three, the roar of the crowd and
Hogan’s music thumping. I couldn’t help but stare at the TV monitor watching Hogan work the
crowd with the same old posing routine, a hand behind the ear, shaking the World belt in the air as if
to say it belonged to him all along.



A few minutes later, Hogan came up to me excited and happy and said, “Thank you, brother. I won’t
forget it. I’ll be happy to return the favor.”



I looked my old friend in the eye and said, “I’m going to remember that, Terry.”



As for Yoko, I was always a little pissed off at him for going home on me and not letting me show
Vince, Hogan and everyone else that we could tear the house down without their bullshit finish.
Even so, it was the best match that Yoko ever had.



29



“BROTHER, YOU DON’T KNOW THE WHOLE STORY!”



BARCELONA, APRIL 24, 1993. One man’s sunset is another man’s dawn.




The past ten days touring Europe had been a boost to my pained, empty heart. I sat on a small
balcony outside my hotel window seven floors up, listening to my Walkman and looking out over
rooftops, church spires and steeples as a huge red sun drifted below the horizon. I’d come to know
the distinctive smells of many cities and as I inhaled deeply, I decided that Barcelona’s could be
called Mediterranean melange. I’d been working hard with Bam Bam, and I was content knowing
that our match that aired live across all of Spain that night had been excellent. The Barcelona
twilight melted into night until the only glow in the sky was from a silver crescent moon and a few
twinkling stars. My mind drifted to a hazy memory of Brussels, the first night of the tour, standing
drunk on a corner with Bam Bam at four in the morning listening to some street musicians.



From Brussels we went to London, where I realized by the size of the crowd waiting for me at the
airport that losing the belt hadn’t swayed my faithful fans one bit. I was more over than before. I
laughed to myself as I remembered doing a morning talk show in London where I was supposed to
promote a new WWF album featuring a sappy song I’d recorded months earlier. As horrible as it
was, with a little production magic, it miraculously reached number four on the U.K. music charts.
Talk about a one-hit wonder.



A stuffy older man and woman hosted the talk show, and they had no clue who I was. They seemed
skeptical when I told them that more than eighty thousand wrestling fans had filled Wembley
Stadium to see us the previous summer. They droned on about whether or not wrestling was really a
sport at all. I admit to being tired and cranky, and I was even less amused when some pear-shaped
bloke in a red devil outfit joined us on the set and kept poking me in the stomach with a cheesy
plastic pitchfork while I did my best to respond to their uninformed questions. During a short
commercial break, I jerked his plastic pitchfork and told the startled devil that if he poked me one
more time I’d shove the pitchfork up his ass!



The most interesting part of the tour had been Belfast, where the dreary streets looked tired and
downtrodden, British soldiers with machine guns stationed on many corners. We’d stayed at the
Europa, whose claim to fame is that it’s the most bombed hotel in the world. As I checked in I was
approached by a timid taxi driver who mentioned that his two boys were my biggest fans; he offered
to give me a free tour of the real Belfast. Soon we were driving past political murals. As he showed
me various bombed-out sites, we talked some. His name was Sean, he was thirty-four, but he looked
ten years older. We passed the cemetery where only a few months before, at an IRA funeral,
mourners attacked and brutally killed some spying Ulster loyalists who were in the wrong place at
the wrong time. Sean gave me an Irish Catholic history of Belfast and drove me to killer triangle
streets, which, he explained, were intersections where kills could be made from three different
angles and where people were randomly murdered all the time in the crossfire. It gave me pause
when he said, “It’s not so bad. Nothing like America!”