Hitman My Real Life in the Cartoon World (28 page)

That’s how I found myself being told the news that Julie and I now had a son on a grimy gas station pay phone in Red Deer. Dallas Jeffrey Hart was born on August 11, 1984.

About a week later, Tom and I flew east and spent all day backstage at the Hamilton Civic Center watching WWF wrestlers go about their routine at a TV taping. We’d been required to be at the building by 11 a.m. and found out that TV tapings were an all-day affair. We weren’t allowed to leave until after the matches were over, just before midnight. The WWF provided no food, there were no nearby restaurants, and we got hungry. Wrestlers wandered by: Superfly Jimmy Snuka, Roddy Piper, Greg Valentine, Adrian Adonis, Tito Santana.

Large sound-proof panels served to partition off an area where the wrestlers took turns churning out their TV promos, doing the same sixty-second spot for dozens of different markets, just changing the name of the local arena or town. Although I’d gotten better on the mic, I cringed when I heard how precise and intense the WWF wrestlers were with their promos. The New York territory was infamous for its walk ’n’ talk, and these were some of the best mic men in the business. I knew I was in trouble. This would be sink or swim.

Jay Strongbow, better known as Chief, approached us with his hands behind his back and his lower lip jutting out, to set up our TV tag match. Chief was a heavy-set Italian, now in his mid-fifties, who had got away with wrestling as an American Indian for years. These days Chief was an agent, a foreman, who carried out the boss’s orders. I was relieved when he told me to lose the Buddy The Heartthrob gimmick; we’d be going with Bret Hart.

From the way Chief sized Tom up, it was clear that his reputation had preceded him. He told Tom to take the fall however he wanted, alerting us to make sure the tag match, including intros, was less than four minutes long.

Vince McMahon, whom Chief referred to as The Emperor, waved Tom and me over. Vince was six-foot-two, combed his hair straight back, and was wearing white running shoes and a red suit jacket with padded shoulders; to me, The Emperor looked more like Big Boy from the hamburger chain.

Giant men, ripped and cut, tanned and oiled, passed by vying for his attention. I had no choice but to accept the undeniable truth that he had the power to change my life forever, for better or worse.

Tom, never much of a conversationalist, replied with a grunt when Vince complimented him on his muscled look. Then, glancing at me, Vince said dryly, “I like my wrestlers to spend a lot of time in the gym. I’m looking forward to your match.” I hoped he understood that I had just come off knee surgery. Then Chief called him away.

My first WWF match turned out to be a disaster. I wasn’t accustomed to guzzling a jobber, working such a short match. I’d been off for so long that I was rusty, and as I slammed the jobber, my knee gave out. Tom, who was perched on the top corner, groaned because I slammed him facing the wrong way. I had to go back and pull the jobber around by his legs. Tom rolled his eyes and frowned at me just before he launched into a perfect dive.

I was horrible. And I knew it.

Vince met us when we came back. He didn’t even look at me as he said, “Nice work, Dynamite!”

The WWF tapings lasted two days, during which they got three weekends of TV in the can. In Poughkeepsie, New York, Hulk Hogan and David Schultz greeted Tom and me with big smiles. They appeared to be the best of pals, kidding each other and play wrestling. Tom and I sat watching as their friendly tussle escalated into a full-blown scrap, with Schultz cinched up in a front face lock. For forty-five minutes at least, they overturned furniture and got nasty rug burns on their knees and elbows, until Hogan won when a seething Schultz gave up. And that was the moment their friendship ended.

I was in another four-minute match, this time singles, and I had a much better outing, doing a perfect pile driver. But when I came through the curtain, Chief met me with a perturbed look and said, “That’s Orndorff’s finish! Don’t use it again!”

At the end of the night, Tom and I each got paid U.S.$50. The day before we’d got Cdn.$75. Even the biggest stars were only paid this token sum for TV, since the WWF felt the wrestlers should be grateful for the exposure. Dynamite grumbled to me that he didn’t fly all that way to get paid fifty bucks. He told Stu to tell the WWF to go fuck themselves. He didn’t need it; he and Davey had Japan.

On the Sunday night of the August long weekend, I bent over the crib, gazing at Dallas. He had big beautiful eyes, not one hair on his head and his mom’s mouth. Things were no better between Julie and me.

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.

Davey, who’d been charged for hip-tossing that Calgary cop, was panicking about the possibility that he’d be deported as a result, and rather suddenly announced that he and Di would be getting married in October. All this time, no one had any clue of the huge decision my father was in the process of making—to sell or not to sell. On Friday, September 6, Stu finally let it slip that he had sold to Vince, and that this would be the final taping of the Stampede Wrestling TV show.

Bruce was beyond livid: Stu and Helen had kept him out of the loop. His grief and fear came out as fury, and he refused to work. He even tried to rally the boys to boycott the show. It’s been said that Stu sold Stampede Wrestling because he felt he owed it to my mom to get out of the business with a retirement nest egg, but what he told me, more than once over the years, is that the biggest reason he sold was because he just couldn’t tolerate the way Bruce ran things.

After the last TV taping, we went on the road for a week, winding up at the Edmonton Fieldhouse on September 15, 1984, for a final cage match. Most of the boys spent the week drowning their fears of uncertain futures in beer.

There I was, climbing the steel mesh of the cage with a ghastly long gash in my forehead. I was mad, glad and sad that it was all over. I was teamed, with an equally inebriated Dynamite, against Rotten Ron Starr and Bad News. Everyone bled except News.

Rotten Ron, with his red Afro and Southern drawl, was as creepy a wrestler as there ever was. Fans would spit on him, and he’d catch it in his own mouth, swallow and smile. I happily planted a boot into Rotten Ron’s face. Dynamite had fought free from Bad News, and together we made our escape up the sides of the cage, climbing over the top, barely out of the clawing grasp of the heels. We could see the faces of fans, who had seen us through so much. Halfway down the outside of the cage, we dropped to the floor to an explosion of joy drenched in sadness.

I wobbled back to the dressing room, numb. I said my final good-byes to Karl Moffat, the Japs and, in particular, The Cuban. So many of Stu’s crew were good hands, but with Vince McMahon in the ascendant, it was the dawn of the age of steroid freaks.

Although I was under no illusions about my chances of success in the WWF, at least I had a new job.

And I was concerned about what would become of them all.

Hito. For him it was over, and he knew it. But he smiled like an old cat, and I couldn’t help but feel that he still had a few lives left; he’d land on his feet somewhere.

Ross. Wayne. Nothing.

But aside from Bruce, nobody was angry. How could they be? Stu had been losing a lot of money for a long time but still paying their wages, and they all knew it.

When fans who had been with us since 1948, through all the highs and lows of the Calgary territory, tuned in the next week to see the show, it had simply vanished, and Vince’s show was on instead.

Something uniquely vaudevillian was lost forever.

For me, it was a thin line between love and hate. I wouldn’t miss the endless white lines, the bad weather, the physical pain and the loneliness, but I’d miss the boys, the fans and the towns. As the van rocked and rolled down the highway back to Calgary, J.R. and the boys harmonized through one last rendition of “Hang down your head, Tom Dooley, hang down your head and cry. Hang down your head, Tom Dooley, poor boy you’re bound to die.”

I was unsure whether it was the beginning of the end, or the end of my beginning.

PART TWO

THE FOUNDATION

16

PAYING MY DUES IN THE WWF

Just before I started full-time with the WWF, I did a quick tour in Japan: I was skeptical about all the promises George Scott had made about what the WWF had in store for me and wanted to have some kind of safety net. I worked hard on the tour and earned another six weeks in Japan to start in February 1985.

On October 22, I wrote Julie a letter from Nagita about how I was feeling about my present and my future:

. . . these past months have been hard on me and I’m quite confused—physically, mentally and emotionally drained. I feel like a wounded animal stuck with spears, staggering around aimlessly. . . .

I keep going on like there is nothing wrong. Sooner or later I will break. I want to break, to let it go in an agonizing wail—but I just can’t seem to let it out. I knew that my dad’s business could end. I actually used to look forward to it. Yet twenty-seven years of my life just went out like a match.

Suddenly, I find myself poisoning myself with steroids just to maintain a foothold and it doesn’t mean a damn thing.

I’m proud of myself. I believe I am (I was) a great wrestler, but . . . was I really any good? My career is nowhere. It makes me sad to see Tom and Davey so huge over here while after five tours here I’m still a nobody. What hurts the most is that if it wasn’t for my dad the promoter I wouldn’t have made it at all.

I know you’ve heard all this before but you need to understand, it hurts me, maybe a little, maybe a lot. It just hasn’t hit me yet. I keep thinking that there must be more to life than pro wrestling and someday I might need to prove that to myself.

I flew into Calgary from Tokyo on a Thursday afternoon, just in time for my WWF debut on its first ever swing through Western Canada. Julie brought Jade and Dallas to meet me at the airport, but the joy was short-lived. The next day I hid my travel bag on the porch and slipped out of Jade’s sight so she wouldn’t see me leave. Gone again.

The WWF show was an eye opener. I was instantly relegated to opening-match status—I was no longer a big fish in a little pond. The crowd at the Saddledome was small and unenthusiastic. It was as disheartening to them as it was to the Stampede wrestlers they’d passionately supported to see us now reduced to fodder for the WWF crew. After years of fast-paced, realistic wrestling, the fans didn’t immediately warm to the WWF’s slower, showier style. Even at the first show, it was apparent that the WWF was going to have a tough time becoming accepted in Calgary.

For the next four days I traveled through familiar territory with an unfamiliar crew. No more vans.

Now I was flying on commercial jets with a band of vagabonds who often behaved like children. They thought they were really bad, but they didn’t have nothin’ on the boys in the van—except for Adrian Adonis that is! He’d have fit right in. Food fights, spitballs and pranks. (I suspected right away that he’d get along great with Jim Neidhart.)

I knew a few of the guys from Japan and Toronto: S.D. Jones, Quick Draw McGraw, Greg Valentine. I was happy to see Dave Schultz. André was lacing up his size-twenty-two boots when I went to shake his hand, but he still wouldn’t look at me.

On my last day on the Western Canada leg, I straddled a chair in the dressing room in Winnipeg to talk with Dr. D (Dave Schultz). For some reason, Angelo Mosca decided to get on me about Bruce killing Stu’s territory with a heel ref. I was surprised and more than a little grateful when Schultz told him to shut his mouth. Later, Schultz pulled me aside and said, “You don’t ever need to take any shit from these guys, Brit. You’re as good a worker as anyone they got! Work on your mic skills, but as a worker, there’s not anyone ’round here can tell you a thing.”

After the matches I ate at the hotel restaurant, where I found Quick Draw, my roommate for the night, face down in a plate of food. He’d overdone it with the Placidyl again. I helped him to our room and kept an eye on him during the night.

The first road trip I took in the United States for the WWF began in Columbus, Ohio, on November 14, 1984. I’d long ago lost my driver’s license because of the speed limits I’d had to break to get the Stampede crew to my father’s towns on time, and I still had no credit card, so there I was at the airport hanging around hoping I’d run into some of the boys. Eventually I caught a cab to the Ohio Center, where I, once again, had to persuade a security guard to let me into the building.

I was very early, but I didn’t know where else to go. I crashed out on a wooden table in the empty dressing room, with a baseball cap pulled down over my face and my bag as a pillow. I was startled awake by some guy who looked like Barney Rubble pulling on my toe, asking who I was and what I was doing there.

I sat up and told him I was Stu Hart’s kid.

“You don’t have a match, but we can throw you in the battle royal. I’m Pat Patterson, the agent.”

I’d certainly heard of Pat Patterson and his tag partner, Ray Stevens, considered by many to be the best tag team of the 1970s. Pat was famous for his bumps and his ring psychology, and he’d only recently retired. Behind the scenes, he was also famous for being gay and not caring whether the wrestlers knew.

The WWF was simultaneously running three towns a night with different crews. Pat was a road agent now, like Chief Jay Strongbow. He ran the dressing room, posted the lineup and, after getting his orders from Vince and George, he often had the unenviable task of giving the wrestlers their finishes. At that time, the assigned finishes were based largely on seniority, of which I had none, so I didn’t expect anything great. It was all part of paying my dues in the WWF.