Hitman My Real Life in the Cartoon World (62 page)

Berlin was the crown of the tour. When I did an autograph session they had to shut down major downtown streets. I signed for more than four hours to keep the peace.

Then it was on to Italy. In Milan, after a barn burner with Owen, I stood on the middle rope in the corner watching him storm down the aisle, turning back to flip me the bird. I nearly burst out laughing as he jammed his thumbs under his armpits and flapped his elbows, shouting, “You’re a chicken!” My music blared as young kids pressed in around the barricades and I high-fived hundreds of eager hands as I made my way down the aisle. I couldn’t help but feel as though my hand had been touched by angels.

The next day the bus drove by the ruins of the Colosseum in Rome, where gladiators had once fought starved and tormented lions, tigers and bears to the death as a form of entertainment. Near the Colosseum hung color posters trumpeting the rivalry between Owen and me. Whatever it was that we were doing certainly made more sense than what they did back then. Who’d have ever thought that two Hart brothers would battle it out in Rome right across from the Colosseum?

Sometimes it was too much for both of us.

33

BIGGER THAN I EVER IMAGINED

IN BALTIMORE for King of the Ring on June 20, the talk in the dressing room was all about Hogan signing with WCW. Turner’s operation had begun taping all its shows from Universal Studios theme park in Orlando. It made for a strange TV audience. The wrestling show was looked at as a free attraction by vacationers who were herded in and out and had to be prompted to cheer and boo because they didn’t have a clue what the story-lines were. But Hogan had already had some positive impact on WCW’s ratings, and there was concern for the financial stability of the WWF. It had settled the big lawsuits and was now staggering from two failed ventures: the WBF and the disastrous launch of a bodybuilding supplement line called ICOPRO. I kept thinking that if only Vince’d find some new talent for me to work with, I could do so much more for him. I was facing Diesel, with Shawn in his corner, so Jim walked out with me, and it was just like old times. I retained the World belt when The Anvil attacked Diesel because Shawn kept on interfering during the match.

Minutes later, The Anvil slammed Razor into a post to help Owen win the King of the Ring tournament—and the fans suddenly realized that The Anvil had only helped me keep the belt so that Owen would have a chance to take it from me later. Just like that, The Anvil was a heel, aligned with Owen. Owen never looked happier than when the huge, purple King of the Ring crown was placed on his head. I just hoped for Jim’s sake, not to mention Ellie’s and their kids’, that his troubles with drugs and booze were over, which he insisted they were.

I had been on the road for twenty-three days straight, and I couldn’t remember ever feeling this tapped out. It wasn’t just me—everyone was wiped. The last three days of the tour were TV tapings in small towns hundreds of miles apart: Bushkill and then Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and finally Ocean City, Maryland. I had to arrive each day by eleven to do promos, media and photo shoots, and then I was expected to work at least twice each night. I almost always finished up well after midnight, when there was no hot water left in the showers. On the night before I was supposed to be in Bushkill, I drove two hundred miles on only a few hours sleep, then caught a morning flight from Toronto to Newark. There to meet me at the airport was the smiling face of Marcy Engelstein, a Bette Midler–like blonde two years younger than me. We’d met after a match back in the 1980s, when I was limping along with a badly sprained ankle and she asked me if I needed help. We fast became close friends and she’d been helping me ever since. When we met she didn’t know anything about wrestling or me, but she quickly took to, and was taken in by, the strange mix of humanity in the wrestling business. I?rode with her to countless towns, which was always a much-appreciated respite as I?was often dead tired. Marcy developed an uncanny ability to accurately analyze my career in ways nobody else could. My trust in her judgment became vital to me and when I wasn’t riding with her, I always called her right after my matches to see how I came across. She’d been flying under Vince’s radar for years, leading a team of diehards who rallied my fan support in every nook and cranny of the world, growing a vast international network of contacts and connections and doing it all before the age of the Internet. Marcy saved my ass lots of times in lots of ways, but on this particular trip I really think she saved my life.

With Vince’s trial only days away, we weren’t expecting him to be at the Bushkill taping, so we were surprised when he walked in, his neck in a soft brace following recent surgery. I was about to take on The 1-2-3 Kid, who was pacing around nervously. It was a big match for him, but I also knew it was important to someone else, a ten-year-old named Jason, pale and thin, clutching a Hitman teddy bear under his arm. Even cancer couldn’t take away his smile as I draped the belt over his narrow shoulders. When I told him I’d dedicate my match to him, he excitedly coached me to beat Kid but not to beat him too bad. We posed for pictures, and I signed his shades. I’d been told that Jason wasn’t expected to see next week. When I said good-bye to him, he hugged me tight. Later I showed a Polaroid photo of him to The Kid, as an exercise in keeping our perspective.

The enthusiastic, small-town crowd knew there was little chance that The 1-2-3 Kid could take the belt from me. I rocked Kid with some of the best lifters I’d ever thrown, and he took them beautifully. After only a few minutes the crowd was in awe and kept cheering like crazy—right up until Kid climbed to the top turnbuckle and went for a drop kick. I caught his feet in mid-air and stepped into the sharpshooter. He tapped out instantly and I was crouched down beside him, helping him, as the crowd applauded both of us. This was the true art of wrestling: no cheer and boo signs needed here. When the match was over, Vince smiled and thanked me for being the hardest working wrestler in the business, and Jim was stunned to hear him. Jim was only just starting to realize that I wasn’t just one of the top guys, I was the top guy.

It struck me as odd when Pat told me that my next big angle would be with Bob Backlund, who’d first won the WWWF World title back in 1978. The new marketing angle of the WWF was that we were the new generation, whereas WCW was the retirement league. I did my job, heading off to Ocean City, where I scored a clean win over Backlund in a classic old-school match. But when I went to shake his hand, the normally good-natured Bob flipped out and cracked me across the face with a stiff slap. Then he pounced on me and locked me into his cross-faced chicken wing, a serious shoot hold that was every bit as painful as it looked. After several long minutes a hysterical Bob had to be pried off me by agents and referees. As I lay writhing in the ring like a twisted-up old coat hanger, Backlund stared at his hands as if even he couldn’t believe he’d just gone nuts: He played his role perfectly.

I still had one last match to do with Owen, at the end of the night. And I was not looking forward to the five-hour drive in the dark that’d get me back to Newark in time to catch an early flight home. As Joey Morella checked my hands and gave me instructions at the beginning of the match, he suddenly said, “I don’t know how you do it. You’re the best worker I’ve ever seen, brother, I mean it!”

Afterwards, when he was leaving with Harvey Whippleman, I called out to him to be careful driving home. I was so burned out I could barely keep my eyes open, so Marcy took the wheel and got me to the airport on time.

I slept all the way home on the plane. The phone was ringing as I walked into my house. It was Marcy, who could barely get out the words to tell me that on the same road we’d traveled, Joey had fallen asleep at the wheel and veered into a ditch. He was killed instantly and Harvey Whippleman was badly injured (he eventually recovered). People would accuse Vince of causing the deaths of many wrestlers over the years in various ways, but I can say that Joey was most certainly a victim of the WWF’s Killer Kalendar. It could just as easily have been any one of us.

Julie was coming with me for a tour of the Far East, including the Phillipines, Hong Kong and Singapore. After a wild all-night flight on July 14—after which the wrestlers were banned from flying Cathay Pacific Airlines—Julie was amazed by the frenzied reception that greeted the wrestlers when we cleared customs. It was the first time she became aware of the magnitude of my crazy day-to-day life on the road.

The bus ride to the hotel was an eye-opening series of contrasts that neither of us was prepared for.

Gardeners manicured lush green lawns of palatial homes that seemed to flash by in an instant, only to be replaced by countless cardboard shacks in which poverty-stricken families barely existed.

At the hotel, we were ushered to a huge suite that had a balcony with an oceanfront view, revealing a rundown plaza over which hung a pall of thick smog that stuck to everything in the hot, humid air.

The following day, Julie and I went for a stroll along the beach, but we were taken aback by the numbers of beggars and drug addicts, many of whom sniffed glue from plastic Baggies while they pleaded with us for spare change. A murky-green tide washed slime and garbage up at our feet, and one desperate Filipina woman tried to sell me what appeared to be her ten-year-old daughter for some quick sex. To escape the beggars and drug addicts, I paid $80 for a horse-and-buggy ride so we could see the sights, but the road was lined with street people and prostitutes. The driver whipped a small, emaciated black pony until I finally insisted he let us off. I figured the poor horse was about to drop dead as it panted and wheezed, with white froth and snot hanging from its nose.

On the walk back to the hotel we stepped over discarded syringes and maneuvered our way past street people who were shooting up, or sitting naked, or fornicating, as sad-eyed kids sniffed glue to make it all go away. A warm sprinkle of polluted rain pissed down on the whole wretched mess, but even a downpour of biblical proportions couldn’t have begun to wash this place clean. Back at the hotel I looked out the window and saw rising up from this cesspool an inordinately large number of Catholic church spires that, despite the grime that was everywhere, were immaculately kept.

That night we all bused to the other end of Manila for the first of two shows in as many days. It was pouring rain as the bus made its way through bustling streets. We were paralyzed by the sight of such widespread human degradation: It actually made what we’d seen around the hotel seem tame.

Expensive cars zoomed by the poor. No matter what direction I looked, I could see people hiking up their dresses and pulling down their pants to urinate and defecate wherever they pleased. Manila reminded me of a backstage toilet in Poughkeepsie after three days of TV tapings. It seemed to me that there were police everywhere who were just as helpless as anyone else to do anything about it.

Both shows were completely sold out and the enthusiastic fans seemed to love every bit of them. I had a tremendous fan base in the Philippines, and the letters they’d written to me over the years told me that there were good and decent people there, but I don’t know how they managed to keep their heads above the squalor. I felt a renewed gratitude to people who devote their lives to environmental and humanitarian causes in an effort to keep the whole planet from turning into a living hell.

Hong Kong was a different story. We stayed at an Omni hotel located right next door to a Planet Hollywood, where we were given free drinks all night, every night, because celebrities rarely got out that way. Hong Kong was the land of Rolexes, silk suits and knockoffs. Julie and I went shopping and visited pagodas, Buddhist temples and markets where the stink of fresh fish hung in the air and ducks hung from hooks, which didn’t seem so bad after Manila.

Backstage, the agents announced that Vince was acquitted of all charges. Now he could turn his attention to fighting off the onslaught from Ted Turner and WCW. I had no doubt that Vince would set things right, and I was eager to help him.

When I looked at Vince’s roster, I didn’t see anyone who could unseat me as champion, unless he had a new star somewhere under wraps. Also, it would take a couple of months to build someone up. Still I had a strong hunch Vince would head into winter with a new champion. Vince was growing desperate for fresh talent, but there were few wrestlers left to bring in or bring back. I mentioned that Chris Benoit and Stunning Steve Austin might be available, both of whom were working for a brash, upstart outfit called Extreme Championship Wrestling.

ECW was based out of a bingo hall in Philly and was fast becoming the number-three player in the business. Their TV shows aired in only a few markets, but they were starting to have an impact and, in my view, not a good one. They prided themselves on what they called hard-core wrestling, the bloodier the better, with wrestlers who purposely hurt each other to get a pop. Alternative music was big at the time, so ECW billed itself as alternative wrestling. For wrestlers who couldn’t get into WWF or WCW, they were another option.

At TVs in Cincinnati in early August, I learned what I already suspected. Vince was indeed thinking of a new champion and was toying with the idea of putting the belt on Bob Backlund. I argued that this was not something Vince should do. I liked and respected Bob, but he wouldn’t be able to carry the house shows. The idea also didn’t mesh well with Vince’s slick, humorous new generation promotional campaign. Backlund was older than Hulk Hogan and just a little younger than Ric Flair.

But that night I went to sleep happy because a friend of mine named Mitch Ackerman, who was with Disney studios, had come up with a line on an acting gig for me that I was really looking forward to.

On August 23, I met with Steven North, the producer of a TV series filming near Calgary called Lonesome Dove, based on the critically acclaimed book and miniseries by Larry McMurtry. They were going to start on a script for me right away.

August 29 in Chicago. SummerSlam ’94 was the inaugural event for the brand-new United Center, and twenty-three thousand tickets sold out in hours. The entire Hart family was there except for Keith and Alison, and all of them were going to be involved in the storyline of the cage match between Owen and me, which the WWF had told us was going to be our last match together. We knew the match itself was going to be easy, despite the fact that we couldn’t chance any blood because the latest ticks on Vince’s hide were citizen groups lobbying to censor TV violence. Vince was forced to remove anything even remotely violent or he risked losing his time slots. Besides, neither Owen nor I wanted to put my poor mother through a match where two of her sons were covered with blood. Our only option was to make as many dramatic near-escapes as we could.