Hitman My Real Life in the Cartoon World (6 page)

At fourteen, I could better appreciate Clearwater Beach because of the pretty girls from all over the city who came out there to strut their stuff in their bikinis. I was tanned and muscular in cut-offs, with long brown hair. I was scared to get in the water—when I was younger, so-called swimming lessons from Smith and Wayne, during which I had nearly drowned more than once, had pretty much turned me off—but I didn’t hesitate to climb the big tree that leaned against the side of the concession building with some fresh new acquaintance to make out on the roof.

In late July 1971, Bruce and Dean invited me along on a drive to Amarillo, Texas, to visit Dory Funk Jr.

Because Dory Funk Sr. was a respected tough guy, the territory had always featured one of the more realistic fighting styles, and since both Dory Funk Jr. and his younger brother Terry had been World Champions and had learned their stuff there, wrestlers worked hard at keeping it real. The psychology and feel of the Amarillo territory was in many ways similar to that of Calgary, even down to its long, exhausting road trips. I took advantage of the opportunity to study the realistic Amarillo style and get a deeper understanding of what would ultimately become my life. It was also the first time I saw America with my own eyes. I was thrilled to pose with Dean as Bruce snapped a picture of us at the site of Custer’s last stand.

By the time I hit high school that fall, I was determined to study hard, get better grades and make something of myself, but I couldn’t seem to get on track. Dean, Owen and Ross kept me up every night with their talking. I quit the football team after a week because the early-morning practices and the long walk home after the afternoon practices were just too hard on little sleep.

On top of that, my guidance counselor told me that I would never go to university and urged me to spend the rest of high school taking vocational courses. With that, what little motivation I had left went down the drain. The biggest support I received in almost everything came from my mom. She always took time to talk with me, and I realized I had a unique ability to make her laugh. I’d find her in her office after school and tell her about my day. And she always said little things that made me feel that one of these days I would amount to something that would make my parents proud.

For the rest of the year I goofed off academically, but I did join Dean on the wrestling team. I only had three matches. The night before the provincials my mother suggested that Stu give me some pointers. I should have known better. He stretched me for hours and the next morning I was so sore I couldn’t even raise my arms up over my head. I lost so miserably that I considered quitting wrestling entirely.

Smith and Bruce were both pro wrestling now for my dad, but in the spring Bruce separated his shoulder and had to have surgery. I was determined to make the football team when school started in September, so I made a point of running CFCN hill and doing leg presses in the dungeon with Bruce. It clearly bothered him that I’d become stronger in the legs than he was. Bruce and Dean were also more than a little perturbed that I’d grown taller than them. When Dean’s girlfriend once made the mistake of teasing him about it, he decked her.

Meanwhile, Smith had been seeing my old girlfriend, Marla, who was a year younger than I was. In June, she had his baby. The baby girl, Toby, was the first Hart grandchild. But nobody was allowed to know; if word had got out about the illegitimate baby, it would have completely shattered the wholesome image my parents worked so hard to perpetuate. (To this day, no one is quite sure how many kids Smith has fathered.) Stu’s temper and Marla’s dirty mouth were like fire and gasoline. She was basically excommunicated and, after she left, taking the baby with her, Smith assumed no responsibility for the child.

That summer, my grandfather passed on. I knew it was going to be a lot of work to make the football team, so I asked my mom whether I could move into his room in the basement so I could sleep. It was cold, unfinished and unheated, and nobody else wanted it. It became my refuge.

I fondly remember my dad waking me up for my oatmeal and driving me to my early-morning practices with the orange glow of the sun just beginning to rise and Paul Simon’s “Loves Me Like a Rock” playing on the radio. It was during those drives that I finally began to bond with my dad. We’d talk about all kinds of things, his life and his disappointments, in particular Smith, a total sore point because of the baby and because he seemed to screw up every chance my dad gave him to be our leader. It was during these intimate talks that I sensed he saw something in me.

Of course, there were still times when our relationship was complex, even volatile. One night during football season, I was watching The Merv Griffin Show with my mom, and Ellie wouldn’t stop whistling a jingle from a TV commercial. When I asked her to quit it, she whistled as loudly as she could until even my mom became annoyed and told her to stop. Ellie flew into a rage, smashed a dish on the kitchen floor and tore into my mom for taking my side.

Seconds later, Stu stomped down the stairs and tackled me to the floor, mauling me like he’d done countless times before. After several minutes of my mom screaming in his ear that I’d done nothing wrong, he let up and got off me. I went down to my room in the basement and punched the walls, promising myself I would never let him do that to me again. Stu, Ellie and my mom carried on arguing noisily and then I heard a knock on my door. My dad had come to apologize to me. It was the last time he ever laid a finger on me.

That fall, Stampede Wrestling became interesting again with the arrival of a masked British wrestler called Kendo Nagasaki, who bore an uncanny resemblance to The Cool Cool Killer, one of the imaginary wrestling characters I liked to draw. I was no longer selling programs; I’d grown big enough to join Wayne as a bouncer at the front door. I was girlcrazy, bursting with testosterone. I’d grown up, probably too fast.

My brothers had taught me all there was to know about sex before I knew the truth about Santa Claus. Smith had a movie projector and showed hard-core porn flicks on the wall of the attic bedroom. Young trollops at the wrestling matches, many of whom I’d known since I was little, eagerly opened my eyes to what I’d seen playing out on the attic wall. By the time I was sixteen, I was sneaking them down the dungeon steps at night and into my little lair, where I lost my virginity to a cute, dark-haired, blue-eyed ring rat named Sheila. On weekends I’d cruise down to Victoria Park in my dad’s van along with several buddies, with Steve Miller playing on the radio, singing about the midnight toker getting some lovin’ on the run. Three or four ring rats would climb in, and we’d head out to Clearwater Beach. Heads bobbed up and down in every seat. With Smith’s example in front of my eyes, I was always careful not to get anyone pregnant.

Once the football season ended, wrestling started. Dean had graduated from high school and was still the only Hart kid to ever win a wrestling medal at the city championships, two years earlier. I decided it was my responsibility to pick up where Dean left off. Though he was always working and never got to see a match, I knew my involvement in amateur wrestling made my dad happy. That year all I could think about was winning a gold medal. With the help of an injured teammate by the name of Brian Hatt, who motivated me to train hard, I burned off ten pounds to drop to under 145

pounds—and a lower weight class, where I stood a better chance of winning.

The Friday night of the city championships was the first time that I didn’t go to the matches at the pavilion. My dad gave me an encouraging pat on the back as he was leaving, but I sensed he didn’t think I could win. I beat everyone in my weight class, including Bob Eklund, who would eventually become the Canadian National Amateur Wrestling Champion. I carried on winning into the second day of the tournament. When my brother Keith showed up that Saturday afternoon to give me a ride home, he didn’t hide his surprise that I’d won. On the way, we spotted Stu filling up at the usual gas station for the weekly Saturday drive to the show in Edmonton. We stopped, and when I got out of the car, he asked, looking ready to be disappointed, “How’d you do?” I opened my hand, showed him my gold medal and said, “I won.” His face lit up like I’d never seen it before. He may even have had tears in his eyes. And maybe I did too.

One week later I competed for the provincial championships. While collapsing on top of my opponent in a double-leg takedown, I managed to break my collarbone on his jaw. My season ended with no provincial medal. I don’t know who was more disappointed, me or my dad.

Ellie, Georgia and I had all just got our driver’s licences. Georgia’s boy-friend had a car, so that left Ellie and me vying for the use of Stu’s old gold Brougham. As a reward for winning the city championships, my dad gave me full use of it, which infuriated Ellie to no end.

I remember the first day I ever saw that car, parked in the backyard, shiny and new. Eight years and hundreds of thousands of miles later, Stu handed me the keys and said, “Go ahead, but don’t drive it like Smith!” Smith was responsible for the death of far too many of the Cadillacs scattered like tombstones in the yard. If only those cars could talk, they’d tell horrific stories of Stampede Wrestling’s giants and midgets, strongmen and freaks, packed in like sardines, racing down western highways in what was usually a hellish ride. It didn’t matter to me that the Brougham now shuddered at what it’d been through. I was seventeen, and the car got me to the movies with my first serious girlfriend, Sue McClelland, who had long blond hair and blue eyes, was an honors student and also one of the best athletes in the city. Just having her on my arm gave me all the confidence in the world.

In the fall of 1974, I was doing fine playing varsity football until the new coach, Dale Parsons, learned that I was Stu Hart’s kid. Parsons despised pro wrestling and from that point on he never played me again. Even in the last game of the season, when it looked unlikely that we would make the playoffs, Parsons played everyone but me.

Despite being undefeated all season in amateur wrestling, I had a less than stellar performance in both the city and the provincial championships and was soundly outpointed by Bob Eklund. A lousy school year was capped off when my English teacher failed me by 1 percent because she didn’t think I was doing my own work. I was, but she’d had Dean in her class, and she knew that he’d got an older brother to do his assignments, so she assumed I was doing the same thing. Failing English meant I would have to go back to school for another semester in the fall.

That summer, Sue and I broke up, basically because her mother felt I wasn’t worthy of her. All I could do was accept it and move on. I got a summer job bending rebar at Russell Steel. It was hard work, but I was saving up to buy a car of my own: Dean had offered to sell me his Eldorado convertible.

Dean had decided he was a rock music promoter and had brought some bands out to Clearwater Beach, but it had rained nearly every weekend. He couldn’t afford to pay the musicians, so he wrote bad checks. One of the many pissed-off bands that never got paid burned the place to the ground.

Stu couldn’t afford to rebuild it, and had no choice but to sell the beach for a fraction of what it was worth: He had to pay his wrestlers. (Today that land is worth well over $125 million, and is the site of pricey estate homes.)

I gave Dean $1,500 for the Eldorado, but he never gave me the car, and my dad never did anything about it. When I confronted Dean, he burst out laughing and told me not to worry, he’d pay me back. He never did. It broke my heart. What made it even worse was that times were hard enough for my dad that he needed the old beat-up Brougham back for his own use. I ended up walking home from school all winter while Dean drove right past me with a different girl each time. I was never close with Dean after that.

I figured I’d make the best of being stuck in school for an extra half-year by playing senior football, but Coach Parsons kicked me off the team at the first practice. My dad went to straighten things out with him, but unfortunately Parsons disliked Stu even more than me.

But Parsons couldn’t stop me from wrestling. Our team had no real coach; the teacher in charge didn’t know the ins and outs. Then I found out that in the city championships I would have to wrestle a blind teammate named Larry Rinke, who was loved by the media even though he’d already been eliminated. Some coaches decided that Larry should wrestle me so that if he won and I lost, one of their wrestlers could go to the provincials instead of me. This was decided even though the mats had already been rolled up and parents, students, coaches and wrestlers were milling about waiting for the medals to be handed out. For our match, one mat was unrolled, and a lone spotlight shone down on it, reminding me of the ring at the pavilion. For the first time, I strode out like a heel pro wrestler, to a chorus of boos. Of course Larry got a thunderous babyface ovation. I came to life and beat him in forty seconds.

The following week, on the bus ride to Camrose, Alberta, for the provincials, I took considerable razzing from the entire Calgary contingent about how phony pro wrestling is. I redeemed myself by beating two good wrestlers from Edmonton in the best amateur wrestling matches I ever had. But my coveted gold medal was a disappointment to me, a flimsy coin from the tourist bureau that said nothing about wrestling. Then Coach Parsons excluded the wrestling team from the school sports dinner because it was only a club, not a sport. Amateur wrestling, I concluded, was a pursuit with little appreciation and even less reward.

3

LEARNING THE ART

IN FEBRUARY 1976, I finally got my English credits, grabbed my diploma and got the hell out of high school. With all my older brothers now involved in Stampede Wrestling, it would have been the most natural thing in the world for me to work for my dad, but I didn’t want that life. I always had quite an imagination, and the little wheels in my head never stopped turning. I thought the only wheels that turned for my dad were the ones on the road.