Hitman My Real Life in the Cartoon World (12 page)

The next morning we were working out in the weight room at the University of Saskatchewan. It was poorly equipped, but it was the only gym in town. When Jim strolled in, his shades were pushed back on top of his head, and he was wearing a T-shirt and a pair of Stu’s long, black wrestling leotards. He proceeded to stack plates and more plates onto the bench-press rack. I looked at Jake.

“He’s got to be kidding. That’s over five hundred and fifty pounds.”

Jim pulled his shades down, leaned back, slammed the weight up and down three times and then said, “This bench press is bullshit.” And he walked out, leaving everyone stunned.

I’d already heard about his potential for wildness. When Jim was a shot-putter at UCLA, he went berserk one night on alcohol and downers, tore up his motel room, tied some bedsheets together, strapped a fire extinguisher on his back and leaped off the fourth-floor bal-cony like a gorilla, swinging down three floors and crashing through the windows of his coach’s room.

The next day we went south across the border to work in Billings, Montana. On Thursday, the van broke down on the way to Butte, which put us all in a bad mood. Making the five hundred miles back to Calgary on Friday in time for the TV show was a white-knuckle drive, and by the time we got to the dressing room everyone was especially tired and ornery. That all changed when Big Jim walked up to Stu and politely set the record straight: “Stu, I just want you to know that it wasn’t me who was sticking his finger up the cat’s ass!” Stu stood there with a baffled look on his face as a dressing room full of tired guys erupted into laughter.

It was Friday night at the pavilion, March 23, 1979. Jake The Snake would finally face Big Daddy for the North American Championship belt. And Tom, tanned and fit from a working vacation in Hawaii, was going to defend the British Commonwealth belt against me. Hito and Sak had the tag belts up.

And Stu wore a satisfied smile: It was the first sellout of 1979.

This time things were different with Tom and me. Our work was solid, not stiff, and we protected each other with mutual respect. In the dressing room afterwards, Tom smiled as he shook my hand, and for the first time, he thanked me for a match. I also noticed that he was growing thicker, and I’d soon learn he was getting steroids from the Boxing and Wrestling Commission doctor in Edmonton to build muscle on his 170-pound frame.

When Jake beat Ritter for the North American title, the fans really popped, and we knew they would be coming back for more. But the next night at a spot show on a little Native reserve in Wetaskiwin, our North American Champion couldn’t even stand up in the dressing room without grimacing in pain: He’d badly wrenched his knee. It’s always hard to guess how serious a knee injury is or how long it’ll take to heal. Our hopes of breaking even or maybe even making some money centred on the Jake and Ritter angle playing out over several weeks. The look on Stu’s face said it all.

A few days later, Tom pulled me aside in Regina. “You know, we’re going to have to carry things until Jake gets back, so let’s show ’em we can be the main event.” We posed for a Body Press cover shot, each of us holding one end of the belt in mock tug o’ war. To me that meant, I’ll carry my end if you carry yours.

The plan that night was for me to put Dynamite over, with Marty Jones helping him. Then Bruce would come out of nowhere and save me. Together we’d clean house and come back in some tag matches, ultimately leading to a steel cage match with Bruce and Marty. Marty would put Bruce over and then head home to England. It was rare for Tom to screw up a finish, but that night he did.

In a simple dive off the top rope that he should have kicked out on, he didn’t. Wayne had no choice but to raise my hand and declare me the winner. Tom admitted the title change was his fault, and we agreed I’d drop it back to him in a few weeks. I kept it to myself that I was grateful for the twist of fate. Getting a win over The Dynamite Kid was no small thing. The fans considered it a huge upset, and it helped them forget the useless-little-brother image that Steinborn had saddled me with.

Jake stayed out longer than anyone expected. When Bruce picked me up in the van for the weekly drive to Saskatoon, just after Good Friday that year, it had been five weeks since Jake had worked, and he stood in the doorway of my house leaning on his crutches to wave good-bye. We hadn’t gone far when I realized I’d left the Junior Heavyweight belt on the dining-room table, so we went back to get it. As we came up the walk, we could see Jake strolling around my kitchen without so much as a limp, cooking a hearty meal for himself. But when we knocked, he opened the door on crutches with what I now knew was a phoney pained expression on his face. I didn’t confront him about it, just grabbed my belt and left. But we filled Stu in right away. He was none too happy, but he reasoned that it wouldn’t do any good if Jake left town on us and asked us to keep it under our hats.

The one real boost to the territory, and to overall morale, at this time was the return of the Kiwis, Crazy Nick and Sweet William, later known as the Bushwhackers in the WWF. The two New Zealanders, who’d worked the Stampede territory back in 1975, came to help Stu out for six weeks and make a few bucks. Tom teamed up with them, and together they took on me, Bruce and Keith in some tremendous six-man tag matches. The Kiwis were brilliant as heels. They came across as lunatics, with their bleached-blond hair, dark beards, missing teeth and bug eyes twitching every which way. They called great spots for me, and I surprised myself by being able to do everything they called. Crazy Nick once complimented me in front of all the boys in the dressing room, “You’re by far the best one of the Hart kids, mate!”

Meanwhile, Stu put subtle pressure on Jake to get back in the ring, allowing him to believe that coming back would be valiant and courageous. Wrestlers often portray promoters as scoundrels, but here was a good example of it being the other way around. Jake finally decided to come back to work in May, on the Kiwis’ last day. They rode in his car with him, and when they passed us in the van, both Crazy Nick and Sweet William had their butt cheeks pressed to the side windows: a full moon in broad daylight. Not to be outdone, we passed them a few minutes later with a wide assortment of big hairy asses stuck to the van windows. Several miles later, Jake overtook us again.

This time the trunk popped open and there was Crazy Nick bent over on his knees, with Sweet William pretending to shag him from behind. The crazy Kiwis made wrestling fun, and I was sorry to see them go.

The boys had become family to me. New brothers showed up all the time, forming just as real a bond, in some cases even more so. Just as suddenly, they’d move on to the next territory, and I never knew if or when I’d see them again. There were way too many good-byes for a bunch of big-hearted brutes, so we just said, See ya, somewhere down the road.

Dynamite and I worked with each other regularly now, and even skeptical fans were convinced our rivalry was a shoot. We were young, fast and seriously intent, right down to our facials. We were always adding new moves spliced with long, flowing high spots. We’d build higher and higher, climaxing with a finish that was always fresh and believable. The wrestling business had grown stagnant, with most wrestlers repeating the same old tired routines from one territory to the next.

Tom and I each had a unique, diversified background, and that’s how we set ourselves apart from other wrestlers. In order to get the Junior belt back on Tom in our return match, and to give the fans something different, we decided to do the match in rounds, like in boxing, which was the way wrestling matches played out in England. I came up with a wild finish that I ran by Tom, playing it in our heads like a movie. We found that we both had the rare ability to visualize a match way before we ever did it.

Tom, staying heel, made a point of having shoving matches and punchups with various fans, only to be restrained by Stu and security. So the fans really wanted me to teach him a lesson. We were tied at one fall a piece. I was pacing in my corner between rounds, like I was going to kill him. Dynamite sat on his stool, looking totally knackered, with J.R. Foley sponging him down. At the bell, J.R. took a bucket of water and threw it in Dynamite’s face as a last desperate attempt to revive him. I came charging in, lifting Dynamite off the ground with an elbow smash as the fans cheered me on. I ran him across the ring to the opposite corner and bounced his head off the turnbuckle. “Be careful, it’s slippery,” he said. I spun him around and threw him back toward the far corner. He reversed and I slipped magnificently on the water, sliding under the corner rope, wrapping my back around the steel post. The crowd cringed at the realism. Tom dragged me promptly to the middle of the ring and twisted me up in a vicious-looking one-legged crab. I submitted instantly, pounding my hands on the mat in agony. As some of the wrestlers and the ushers crowded in to help me, Tom was strapping on the junior belt. Not even Tom knew whether I was really hurt. I squinted into the scared face of fourteen-year-old Owen, who’d been sitting with Tommy Carr at ringside. “You okay, Bret?” he whispered softly.

With my mouth hidden by my forearm, I reassured him. “Yeah, how’d it look?”

Owen sighed. “It looked like he killed you.”

At the Calgary Stampede parade that July, André the Giant, Harley Race and a hand-ful of midgets piled into several convertibles to get maximum exposure. André had been born with acromegaly. At seven-foot-four, he reminded me of a huge mound of rocks; his protruding jaw and forehead, topped off with a big Afro, added to his unique appeal.

Harley was one of the legit tough guys in wrestling and one of the best bump-takers of all time. He was born with tendons twice as strong as a normal man’s, his hands were like Vise-Grips and he enjoyed bringing blowhards to their knees. Harley lived hard, drank hard and had survived countless near-fatal car wrecks. He had a steel plate in his forehead and another piece of metal pinning his forearm together. Nobody commanded more respect within the wrestling business than Harley, especially from the Hart family. And the respect went both ways. Nobody but my dad could ask the great champions to show up for a parade at 5:45 a.m. and have them happy to oblige.

That night the pavilion was packed. With all the extra overhead, airfares, hotels and name attractions, Stu would lose money, as usual, but he was content to put on a great show for the fans.

I stood by the back doors watching the midgets go into their finish when some guy came strolling through the front gates with a chimpanzee cradling his neck. He walked up the aisle toward the ring just as the midget Cowboy Lang launched into his comeback. I wondered whether the guy with the chimp was part of their match. He let the chimp off on the apron and into the ring as all four midgets were running every which way. The chimp joined in like he’d done it a thousand times before. They fell together in a pile of little legs and arms, with the chimp on top screeching and jumping up and down. Sandy Scott dove down to the pile for the one . . . two . . . three as the crowd exploded in laughter. I shook my head, amazed that they got a chimp to do all that.

Back in the dressing room, the boys were still laughing when li’l Cowboy Lang came in, slammed the door and angrily hopped on one leg as he pulled his cowboy boot off and threw it as hard as he could against the wall.

“What’s the matter, Cowboy?” I asked.

“The goddamn monkey fucked the finish!”

Turned out the guy was the handler of the chimp from the TV show B.J. and the Bear. A friend of André’s, he’d just stopped by to say hello. I didn’t have the heart to tell Cowboy it was one of the funniest things I’d ever seen. Cowboy just couldn’t understand that midget wrestling was supposed to be funny. He was tired of being laughed at and wanted to be taken as seriously as the rest of us.

“Hey, boss,” André said, “you’re much bigger now.” André called everyone boss, and I was flattered he remembered me. “Not as big as you are,” I said and shook his huge hand. André always had a couple of bottles of red wine close by as he dressed for his match. He was the man to beat in the twelve-man battle royal, a match in which all the wrestlers try to throw one another over the top rope; the last man standing wins. André’s gimmick was that he never lost battle royals.

By the time I wrestled Dynamite, the crowd was tired after having watched so many matches, but we gave them all we had, every high spot, every bump we knew, ending with a double disqualification or DQ. When we came back to the dressing room, Hito was the first to say,

“Fantastic. This one I never see. No joke.” Tom and I both beamed with pride.

Then Harley came up to us. “You two had a great match, but if you go on taking all those bumps, you’ll both end up in wheelchairs.” With a smirk, Tom said, “You’re one to talk, yo’ old fook,” and we all had a good laugh.

The next morning the crew would be heading to Montana, and there were enough wrestlers that I could have a rare couple of days off. I have no idea how I ended up with Smith, driving André to the Calgary airport. His original flight had been canceled, which was fine with André, as he didn’t mind missing a sold-out show in Butte to have a couple of days off either. But Smith had found a seat on another flight: The problem was that the plane took off in twenty-two minutes, and the airport was forty minutes away. I was in the passenger seat when we picked André up at the hotel, and he squashed himself into the back, rightly protesting, “I’ll never make it, boss.” Smith stubbornly replied, “We can still give it a try!”

That’s when I buckled my seatbelt. Smith drove like an absolute lunatic at speeds in excess of a hundred miles per hour through city traffic. We made the sharp curve into the airport with the speedometer pinned and the car tilted up on two wheels, a hair’s breadth away from careening forty feet down off the elevated departure ramp! My yell was drowned out by André’s loud roar. When we screeched to a stop, Andre, his big eyes bulging out of his head, was about to explode. I watched my brother march him into the terminal, thanking God I was alive.