Hitman My Real Life in the Cartoon World (58 page)

Just before I flew to New York to testify at the grand jury on September 22, Vince’s lawyers carefully prepped me. One even wrote me a note that read, “If asked about the indictment, *say+ it’s absurd, that after nearly two years of investigating, the Federal Government would indict Vince on an alleged $530 steroid purchase from 1989 when steroids were legal.” Vince’s lawyers encouraged me to be honest, yet they counseled me on what was safe to say. I went into the hearing unafraid to tell the truth and braced for almost anything, but what went on in that room still falls under the legal cone of silence.

Meanwhile, my lawyer, Gord Kirke, crafted a tactful letter to Vince, listing my demands for a better deal, including the rights to my Hitman name. He also reminded me that, should I wish to opt out of my contract, I needed to submit a letter of resignation to Vince by the end of September. If I decided to stay, I could rescind it. Even though I knew it was just legal maneuvering, that awareness didn’t shrink the lump I had in my throat when I signed it. When Vince received it, the whole WWF office erupted into chaos.

After the next TVs, in Glens Falls on October 19, I talked with Vince and Pat at a Holiday Inn bar until 3 a.m. I explained that I’d prefer not to go anywhere, and that all I wanted was a fair deal. I said I’d quit over it, and at last they believed me.

The next day, Vince surprised me with a crazy idea for a storyline. He wanted me to have a falling out with one of my brothers, possibly Bruce. He’d grown jealous of me, so he’d challenge me to a match. I’d take the high road, refusing to fight my own brother out of respect for my parents. Then maybe it would be Owen who would step in and offer to face Bruce instead. Bruce would work against Owen and wipe the floor with him so badly that I’d have to come to Owen’s rescue. The idea was that I’d eventually end up taking Bruce on at WrestleMania X. Then, after all that, Vince would put me with Lex at King of the Ring in June 1994, but he hadn’t made up his mind who’d go over. I felt confident enough that if it came down to a popularity contest between me and Lex, which it likely would, I’d win.

I could imagine how devastated Owen would be to have Bruce beat him so handily. As badly as Bruce needed a shot in the arm, Owen was a better worker, and he really deserved this chance. I suggested that if I had a pretend falling out with any of my brothers, it should be with Owen.

Pat argued that Owen couldn’t handle it, and I suddenly realized that for all these years it was probably Pat who had kept Owen down. I had no idea why, but maybe Pat thought he wasn’t big enough to make a huge impact with the fans. I insisted that Owen could do it, assuming I agreed to any of this. Vince raised his index finger as he ran it through his mind. “Hold on a second, Pat. Maybe he’s right, Owen would be just fine.” I said I’d think about everything and get back to them in a few days.

Afterwards, I told Owen what Vince and Pat had proposed. He actually loved the idea. He reminded me that it was a work, and that this could be the break of his career. Why shouldn’t he be able to make main event money working with me like anybody else? I told him there’d be no turning back.

We’d have to do this old school: no more riding together, hanging out together. Never insult the fans’ intelligence: make them believe it’s real. And, I reminded him, I’d have final say on everything.

On November 7, I flew to WWF headquarters to meet with Vince and Pat. I was happy to see the cartoon I’d given Vince hanging behind his desk. Vince joked that he was worried that I was turning into an Ultimate Warrior. I laughed and said. “No, I’m worried about turning into Tito Santana.” Tito was a hard worker who’d been used up and pushed aside.

Before I signed my contract, I wanted to make sure I had the rights to my Hitman name and the freedom to pursue acting, as Roddy had suggested. I’d recently agreed to let Carlo represent me, and he was bursting at the opportunity to get me into Hollywood. Vince agreed, which was a huge victory for any wrestler at that time. We shook on it, with Vince telling me that he and I had been friends for so long that we didn’t need a contract. Our word was our bond. But days later, Vince sent me a twenty-page agreement. It was even more controlling than the old one, and my lawyer told me I’d be crazy to sign it.

On November 12, J.J. Dillon called to say that Vince had signed off on my revised contract. The thought crossed my mind that a victory over Vince probably meant he’d fuck me somewhere down the road.

31

KANE AND ABEL

IN THE DRESSING ROOM in Niagara Falls in mid-November, I heard that Vince finally had been indicted by the Feds. Then the WWF took another hit when Jerry Lawler was charged with having sex with an underaged girl. My entire Survivor Series match was centered around Lawler and his constant jabs at my family; without him, the match would mean nothing. Lawler was hastily edited out of the weekend TV show, with no explanation given to the fans, and Shawn was thrown in to replace him at Survivor Series.

On November 23, Smith, Bruce, Keith, Wayne, Ross, Georgia and my parents all flew into LaGuardia.

Vince had invited my brothers to have a brawl at the Survivor Series against three masked wrestlers and Lawler—now Shawn would be standing in his place—with Stu managing from the floor, and he thought it best that we have a rehearsal at the WWF’s TV studio in Stamford the day before the pay-per-view. I got the Harts, Shawn and The Knights (the one-time-only name they picked for the masked wrestlers) in the ring to explain how the match would go. Owen gave me a nudge to alert me that Bruce had pulled the biggest and greenest of the Knights aside and was giving him a script the size of Gone With the Wind, with Bruce presumably playing Rhett Butler. I told Bruce the spotlight needed to be on Owen because Survivor Series would be the beginning of Owen’s heel turn on me. After I explained what everybody’s role would be, Bruce went right back to designing the match around himself, and I had to reprimand him in front of everyone. Shawn muttered at him, “If my brother was World Champion and the best in the business, I think I’d quit fucking arguing with him and start listening to him!” There was nothing Bruce could say in response to that. He shut up, but I could tell the reprimand stuck in his craw.

That night at the Boston Garden I had a strange sense of melancholy as Keith, Bruce and Owen got dressed, while Stu sat with Killer Kowalski reminiscing about the old days. We wore Olympic-style singlets with no leggings, my brothers all in black and me, The Captain, in pink. Martha sat in the front row with the rest of the Hart family, holding Oje. Shawn did a superb job carrying the match, though in fairness everyone worked hard. The biggest pop of the night came when Shawn staggered past Stu on the floor and Stu drilled him with one of his big elbow smashes, which Shawn later told me he was honored to take.

Owen was highlighted throughout the match and eliminated two of The Knights, but midway through the match, as planned, he “inadvertently” collided with me on the apron and ended up being the only Hart brother eliminated. After throwing a tantrum he left the ring, only to come out afterwards when we were all celebrating the victory to yank me down off the second rope and give me a hard push. I tried to reason with him that it didn’t matter because we’d won anyway, but he still acted furious.

Walking back to the dressing room with my brothers after that match was a magical moment. We all knew going in that we weren’t expected to have the best match on the card, we were just expected not to have the worst one either. The Hart boys had more than risen to the occasion, and I was proud of my brothers. Stu had a twinkle in his eye.

A week later Owen and I cut promos saying we’d patched everything up and were teaming up at the Royal Rumble to defeat the current WWF tag champs, The Quebecers, who were Jacques Rougeau and Pierre Ouellette. My fans would see this as a conciliatory gesture to keep the peace in my family, one that would put my shot at regaining the World title on hold. Pursuing the tag strap was seen as a voluntary step down.

There was a shot in Honolulu on December 8. Owen and I landed early that morning. There was no sense in getting a hotel room because we were flying out after the show. In a few more weeks we’d be bitter enemies on TV again, so I said, “C’mon, hang out with your big brother and live a bit!”

That day I introduced Owen to my two surfer-dude buddies, Christian and Tate, who offered to show us around. We hiked through a dense tropical forest, clearing a path as we went, until we came upon a gorgeous freshwater pond. Hanging from a thick, heavy branch was a long rope, and soon we were swinging from it and dropping off into the water, all except for Owen. Bobbing in the water I yelled up to him, “It’s okay, Owen, it’s safe.” Grinning, he shook his head. “Nah, I don’t wanna take a chance on getting hurt.”

An hour or so later we hiked up to the saltwater pool in Diamond Head, Christian and Tate lugging a cooler of beer and a bucket of KFC. I took three strides and jumped into the pool. I kept calling Owen to come in, but he was so cautious that he wouldn’t. I finally coaxed him out and we straddled the pool wall like a horse, while big, warm, salty waves washed over us. Hanging by our arms we looked out at the blue Pacific as little crabs scurried over the rocks. A pensive Owen said, “There are some at home who don’t understand how hard you’ve worked to get this far. They think Vince just hands you everything on a silver platter. They’re so envious of you and me!” I knew full well that the business had saved us and that if we were back home with the rest of them, we’d likely be sinking fast. I told Owen I’d do what I could to get Jim and Davey hired back. Davey quit WCW after he had been extradited back to Canada to deal with the assault charge stemming from his bar fight. And Jim had already blown the $380,000 from U.S. Air.

“Someday we’ll come back here with our kids and hang off this spot and remember this moment,” I said as I leaned against the rocks with a beautiful red ball of sun blazing above the blue ocean. “To hell with the diet, Owen, you only live once!” The beer from the cooler was ice cold, and we devoured the last pieces of fried chicken.

Blade, Beans and I managed to track down several invisible monsters who were holed up in my bedroom. Kicking open the door to an explosion of giggles and imaginary bullets, I crashed onto the king-sized bed but, like always, I wasn’t going to make it. As Beans put bandages on me, Blade dribbled some water into my mouth from a make-believe canteen, tongue stuck out in concentration. My dying scene was interrupted when Julie called out that we were going to be late.

For the first time since becoming a wrestler, I got to celebrate an uninterrupted Christmas Day at home. As we walked into the kitchen at Hart house for another Christmas dinner, Stu and Helen were quietly watching TV as barking dogs and hissing cats wove their way through a maze of legs—

people and chairs. An excited stampede of nieces and nephews raced in to greet us. Our three eldest disappeared upstairs to play dolls or down to the dungeon to play wrestle. Life at Hart house hadn’t changed much.

Stu lit the stove and put on the tea kettle. “How’s tough guy?” he gruffly asked Blade, who was struggling to hold on to Bertie the cat. Then we sat sipping tea while the various lean novice wrestlers that Stu was schooling hung around doing chores and marking out at the same time. “Karl, dawling, would you let the dog out?” my mom said as she smiled at me. Karl was one of the famous LeDuc clan out of Montreal, and Stu and Helen had just let him move in. They always had a meal and a place to sleep for any lost, out-of-luck wrestler wannabe.

It wasn’t long before we gravitated to talking about wrestling, my mom pretending to make her usual fuss: not that again. Stu immediately barreled into a story about how, way back in the 1930s, this old shooter, Reb Russell, of similar size and personality as Dynamite, had been in a hotel room in Newark one night when a couple of “black fellas” climbed up the fire escape, came through his window and held him up with a straight razor. Old Reb tore into both of them, with one of them slashing his back as he choked the other one out. Stu said that Reb had prevailed in the end, tossing both thieves off the fire escape to the pavement below.

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.

That Christmas I received the best presents in the world: memories of the holidays to keep forever. I played road hockey with Dallas. Dallas also dressed Blade up to look like Razor Ramon. In his fake toy gold neck chains, with a greasy curl on his forehead, Blade announced, “Say hello to the bad guy!”

Sometimes I’d push the living-room couches against the wall and wrestle Dallas and Blade, and before long Jade and Beans would join in, and it would go until I let all four of them pin me. Then there was seeing Beans through losing her front tooth, and a much appreciated one-on-one conversation with Jade, now almost eleven, who looked so tall and slender that my eyes welled up as I asked her not to grow up too fast.

At least this time when I packed my bags my heart was full. I’d had a great Christmas and things seemed to be back in alignment between me and Julie.

Every week Vince held on to the belief that Lex would still get over, even though my popularity only seemed to climb higher. It didn’t help Lex’s cause when the fans voted me the most popular superstar in the WWF. These were my last great days as a babyface hero working in America.

In the days leading up to Royal Rumble ’94, Owen and I enjoyed our last rides together. On January 12, 1994, at TVs in Florence, South Carolina, Owen and I were paired up against The Steiners for a special home video match. The Steiners were generally happy gorillas, but they’d left a successful career in WCW for Vince’s promise of even bigger money, which hadn’t materialized. Rick and Scott were impressively built, both outstanding NCAA wrestlers out of Michigan. Rick, the older of the two, was generally more easygoing. He wore amateur wrestling headgear over his short black hair and kept a stubbled beard. Scotty had a mean streak a mile wide, but only if you gave him reason.