Hitman My Real Life in the Cartoon World (5 page)

In those days our fans were likely to be farmers, ranchers and laborers who needed to let their aggressions out by watching a form of staged violence. From the early days of pro wrestling, these fans had been educated to believe in the strategies of varying styles and finishing holds. Ruhl’s finish was a basic, boring full nelson, a submission hold that I never saw get over anywhere else. But in Calgary the fans had no doubts—once Ruhl had it on you, you were finished.

The person who puts together the matches and determines their basic content—how long the match will last, who will win and what the storyline will be—is called the booker. Stu had the final say on booking the territory and was always in charge of his wrestlers. When a wrestler got disgruntled or angry, my mom had a way of sweet-talking him back into the fold. At the time, Dave Ruhl was Stu’s “pencil.” He could write guys into the storyline, or just as easily erase them.

Throughout my life in wrestling, I never once saw a script for a pro wrestling match. It was up to the wrestlers to figure out how to tell the story that the booker wanted. The booker only controlled the last three seconds—the finish. Good booking is essential to the success of a promotion, no matter how talented the roster is. Fan enthusiasm is heightened by combining athletic skill with a dramatic story that is exciting and plausible. For fans to willingly suspend their disbelief, they have to think that what they’re watching could be real.

Every week, as Sweet Daddy ridiculed Ruhl, calling him a pig farmer and a chicken plucker, humiliating him by blindsiding him in match after match, eventually leaving a dead chicken tied around his neck, Stu’s business got better. At long last, while Whalen was interviewing Siki, a furious Ruhl hit the ring like a tornado, and the pavilion came unglued, exploding as everyone rose to their feet to watch the pig farmer, goaded beyond reason by the arrogant black pretty boy. Spilling out onto the floor, Ruhl chased after Siki, tore the robe off his back and peppered him with lefts and rights. Stu was in the middle, acting out his part, trying to keep control. Barely noticeable were the two young Hart boys, Dean and I, trailing the action. Dean snatched the sequined robe from the floor as swarms of hands tried to yank it from him; this was Sweet Daddy Siki’s costume, worth more than gold. Whalen declared in his usual nasal near-panic pitch, “There’s absolute bedlam in here.”

The following Monday, Dean brought Siki’s torn-up robe to school, and all the kids clambered over one another just to touch it. Wrestling was cool again—and more importantly so were we.

A month later I had a freckle-faced kid named Brett MacFarlane clamped in a headlock out in the field by the soccer posts at Wildwood School. He was a grade above me and bigger than I was. I still don’t know what his problem was, but he kept making fun of how poor I was, wearing pants with knees that’d been patched so many times that my dad couldn’t patch them anymore. He wouldn’t stop pulling my tail.

Once I had him, I didn’t want to let him go, and he wouldn’t give up even though his face was scarlet.

In the distance I heard the sound of my dad’s car horn. I flashed Dean a worried look. He scanned the street in front of the school. “Keep going, it’s not him.” But we both knew that horn and who was pushing it. I wrenched MacFarlane’s head, ordering him through clenched teeth to give up. “No way,” he fired back. Dean finally made the decision, “We’d better go.” I released the hold, and the two of us took off toward the front of the school. I could hear MacFarlane yelling, calling me a chicken shit. Tears welled up in my eyes, and Dean comforted me. “We both know you had him; don’t worry, Bret.” When my dad asked what happened, Dean said, “Bret got into a fight.”

My dad caught my eye in the rearview mirror. “How’d you do?” I didn’t know what to tell him. He was far more intimidating than that kid. Finally Dean told him that I had the bigger boy, but that we broke it off when he got there.

At home, Dad took me aside to give me some pointers. “First, take ’em down, and never forget this important rule—where the head goes, the body follows. If you find yourself in a real bind, pull him in close, like you’re gonna kiss him, and use your back teeth if you can—bite him right on the tip of the nose. He won’t bother you too much after that.” Then he said, “Just remember who you are, Bret.”

He stroked the top of my head with his hand, and I knew then just how much I loved him.

Behind our house was a carriage house that my dad rented out to an artist, Katie Ohe. She had a studio and barebones living quarters in there, but she traveled a lot for her art and so was often not home. She had a white Volkswagen Beetle that seemed like it was intimidated, being parked among the black-eyed, bloodied Cadillacs all around the yard. One morning it was so cold that my dad loaded everyone up in one car after another and each one sputtered and died as he turned the ignition key. With an exasperated “Christ Almighty,” Stu slammed his fist into windshield after windshield, teeth bared and eyes ablaze, leaving spiderweb cracks in the glass. Finally, he stuffed us into Katie’s Beetle, like so much cord wood, and we all fought to suppress giggles as he ground the gears all the way to school.

In December, my dad realized he couldn’t patch the holes in our jeans anymore and ordered Dean and me to wear pathetic brown Boy Scout shorts to school. It was thirty below zero when we climbed out of the limo, embarrassed as we stood in the cold with our pale white legs. By the end of the week, Stu had rounded up some horrible green pants with elastic in the waist, known to the kids at school as twangs. We might as well have worn a sign: too poor for real pants.

The best place to get warm was at the pavilion on Friday nights. I felt at home there because the other kids were just as poor as I was. Sweet Daddy Siki continued to draw big crowds for my dad for a while, even taking on Terrible Ted, the wrestling bear, one night. But there was never enough money. One day my mom got so angry that she stormed down to the basement and threw a shoe through the window of the room my grandfather Edward lived in. For a reason known only to himself, my grandfather was suing my dad over some property in Edmonton that was never his in the first place, even while Stu was letting him live in our house and knowing that my dad could barely feed and clothe his kids. (When he eventually died, Edward Hart left a small fortune to the Oral Roberts Ministries.)

The bank was forever foreclosing on Hart house, and every time the bank’s FOR SALE sign went up in front of our place, my dad would take it down and hide it.

2

LOVES ME LIKE A ROCK

BY THE SUMMER OF 1967, my parents were more broke than they’d ever been. My dad had to swallow his pride and borrow money from his accountant in order to place an ad in the Calgary Herald to let people know the newly renamed Stampede Wrestling was starting back up for the fall season. On Friday night, September 15, Stu calmly floored the limo down to the pavilion for what very well might have turned out to be both opening and closing week.

Bruce tore open the bundle of programs and there, on the cover, I saw a brooding bullet head atop a muscled frame. He was the answer to our prayers: Archie The Stomper Gouldie.

The Stomper was the best wrestler I ever watched, and he was the one I studied the most. He turned my father’s fortunes around that year, selling out week after week against all kinds of different wrestlers, including Stu himself. But digging ourselves out of the hole took time. That Christmas I didn’t get any presents except for a red plastic bubble-bath gorilla and a small blue plastic American revolutionary soldier. I was hurt until I saw my mom smile and offer us coffee with cream and sugar to dip our chocolate chip cookies in. I named my toys King Kong and Montcalm and played with them for the rest of the day, waiting for the turkey that was roasting in the oven. At least we had that.

Over the next three years, with the help of The Stomper, Stampede Wrestling became cutting edge in Calgary and across Canada, and through TV its popularity spread to far-off places around the world. Most wrestling shows were shot under hokey lighting in TV studios, with a scattering of fans on three benches on each side of the ring. My dad’s live wrestling show, filmed in front of capacity crowds at the pavilion, with Ed Whalen masterfully commentating, made wrestling seem real, gritty, exciting. My parents pulled themselves out of debt, us kids finally had nice clothes, and Stu bought a new big black Cadillac limousine to haul us around in—and, in secret, the chandeliers he’d had his eye on. He hid them from my mom for a while under blankets in the closets.

One night The Stomper attacked Stu, stomping his arm over and over until he broke it. Stomper shouted in a rage that he was going to come and tear our house apart brick by brick and even piledrive my mom! I was really scared—I still hadn’t been smartened up. Stu had to wear a cast, but strangely enough he’d take it off when nobody else was around, or when he was cooking dinner.

The Stomper and Stu show sold out for six straight weeks. And then, one Saturday afternoon, I saw Stomper climb out of his Corvette and come up the back steps. I didn’t know what to do. Mom greeted him with a hug. “Aw, hi, Arch.” She handed him his check. I still wasn’t sure what was going on, but I never viewed wrestling in quite the same way after that.

Stomper left us in June 1969 after a new British wrestler named Billy Robinson, who was a noted shooter, tried to get cute with him in the ring. At the Stampede supercard that summer, I watched Robinson work with the newly crowned NWA champion, Dory Funk Jr. I watched their every move, two of the greatest, blending both the American and British styles together in a match that was ahead of its time. But what stands out in my mind the most about that Stampede week was holding my breath as my dad wrestled a Bengal tiger. I’ll never forget how, only days later, we were all watching The Untamed World and the voice-over told us that a tiger could break the neck of a yak with one swipe of its mighty paw. My mom slapped Stu hard on the arm with her own paw, and it was right around that time that my dad nicknamed my mom Tiger Belle.

When my dad opened back up the next September without The Stomper, his ace heel, business was horrible right up until Christmas Day. Then Stu lucked out, bringing in a three-hundred-pound black school janitor out of Windsor, Ontario, who called himself Abdullah The Butcher and was billed as hailing from Khartoum. I watched this monster, unlike any I’d ever seen in wrestling, sell out week after week telling violent, bloody stories. Around the house, we called him Abbie.

Abbie jumped Stu one night at the pavilion, and my brother Smith bravely came to his rescue. Abbie quickly decked Smith, leaving him out cold with blood pouring everywhere. Ed Whalen actually received a letter from Idi Amin inviting him, Abdullah and the entire cast and crew to perform in Uganda. It wasn’t hard for me to envision Idi Amin getting off on Abdullah The Butcher biting the bloody forehead of Dave Ruhl!

In March 1971, Stu persuaded The Stomper to come back to the territory to battle Abdullah in what was billed as the fight of the century. It was a feud that gave Stu the biggest gate so far in the history of the company but, unfortunately, Archie and Abdullah had a titanic clash of egos and only fought once.

That year, I was in Grade 8, and Georgia was being teased by bullies from the Grade 9 in-crowd about how she dressed and about how fake her dad and wrestling were. They goaded her relentlessly, often to the point of tears. One day during lunch hour one of my dad’s Cadillacs pulled up to the front of Vincent Massey Junior High and out jumped Bruce and Dean.

Dean was a tough little scrapper, the first Hart to win the city high-school amateur wrestling championship. The big bully of the in-crowd tried to flee the scene, but Georgia pointed him out.

Dean grabbed him, took him down and taught him a lesson.

Out of the mob that pressed in for a closer look came Brett MacFarlane, the same bully I had released from a headlock back in Grade 3. He tried to start up with me, but Bruce gave him a shove.

Then, like a bunch of victorious gangsters, we climbed into the Cadillac and sped home for lunch.

My best friend from school was Dean Wilkinson, a skinny blond kid with glasses nick-named Wilk, who often came home for lunch with me. That day when we got back after lunch, Brett MacFarlane, backed up by four or five of his Grade 9 buddies, challenged me to a fight out in the alley after school. I accepted. All afternoon, while my classmates looked at me with sympathetic eyes, I thought about how I could beat this kid. The words of my friend Mike Bracko echoed in my head: “Yer gonna get killed!” If there had been tickets, they would have sold out: Everyone wanted to cheer for the underdog.

When the bell sounded at three-thirty, I walked out of the school visualizing what was going to happen, just like I would do later before my pro wrestling matches. A few girls pleaded with me not to fight. My science teacher, Mr. Daniels, wished me luck. I peeled off my green tank top to “ooh”s from the crowd gathered in the teachers’ parking lot. We went to an alley just off the school grounds, and the fight was on.

I knew I couldn’t box, but I could wrestle. I began throwing high, wild punches, and MacFarlane put his fists up, just as I expected. At the right moment I dove for his legs and took him to the ground, getting behind him and clamping on a sleeper hold as hard as I could. I would have choked him out right there, but a kid from senior high made me break it. When we got to our feet again, I stuck with my plan, throwing high punches and then wrestling him to the ground, pinning him with my knees on his shoulders. I remembered the way he’d made fun of how poor I was, and I rained fists into his face, not stopping until he gave up not once, but twice.

All the kids who, just minutes before, were so sure I was going to lose hoisted me on their shoulders.

I’ll never forget watching Brett MacFarlane run down the street crying with his head down.

About that time I had my first girlfriend, Marla, a cute blonde I met at the matches. We’d sit in the stands together, but her catcalls were so dirty and vulgar that fans down front would look up at us in disgust. I had no choice but to stop seeing her.