Hitman My Real Life in the Cartoon World (68 page)

I fired Shawn into the corner, following closely, and he sprang up and dropped neatly behind me.

The relentless pink soldier turned around as Shawn, in utter desperation, delivered a superkick and caught me square on the jaw. I?went down hard and the crowd roared with excitement as we both struggled to get up from the mat. The big kick was coming. I fought to stand but couldn’t. Shawn waited for me in the corner, stomping a foot in anticipation. I staggered upright and walked right into it, blindly, the superkick connecting like a shotgun blast. I crumpled to the mat. A drained Shawn collapsed on top of me hooking my leg as Earl slowly counted one . . . two . . . three!

The crowd exploded as Shawn’s music played. I couldn’t believe my ears when I heard Shawn angrily tell Earl, “Tell him to get the fuck out of the ring! This is my moment!” I dropped out to the ring floor and left him there on his knees, crying with the belt in his arms. I had firmly placed the torch in that little monster’s hands. But I also knew that no one was going to forget about me. With my head held high, I walked to my waiting Lincoln and burned rubber up the ramp as the credits rolled.

That night after the show, the hotel bar was packed with celebrating fans. I chose to hole up in my room with the kids and enjoy the cold bottles of beer that I had chilling in the sink. I let out a long, silent sigh, knowing that I could leave on a good note. As a character I couldn’t be torn down and used up. I was a free agent in a strong position. Go ahead and see if you can carry the company, Shawn.

A third generation of Hart wrestlers—the adolescent Dallas, Matt, T.J. and Harry, along with five-year-old Blade—pulled the mattresses in my hotel room onto the floor to turn them into wrestling mats. The sight of them with their shirts off getting all sweaty meant the world to me. They stayed up until 4 a.m. eating pizza and wrestling. It made me think of my brother Dean and me as kids.

The next day Owen called me from Raw to tell me that the buzz in the dressing room was that I had real heat with Shawn because I didn’t shake his hand at the end of the match. It didn’t hurt to let some of the boys believe that. I watched the live Raw feeling uneasy in my easy chair as Shawn stood before Vince in the ring saying it was the toughest match he’d ever had. He praised me, closing the page on my chapter, trying to sweep me out of the minds of the fans.

It took a couple of days for Vince and Shawn to phone me. Vince told me how grateful he was, as did Shawn, but I had the feeling that Shawn probably only called because Vince told him it was the right thing to do. In those days Vince was still old school that way.

36

“I’LL NEVER GIVE YOU A REASON TO EVER WANT TO LEAVE”

AFTER MILLIONS OF MILES, I was finally going to be home for a while—except there was little time to settle in. Just five days after WrestleMania XII, I packed my bags again for a seventeen-day tour of Germany: I’d promised Vince I’d work the foreign markets while my face was having a rest in North America, and personally I was regarding it as a grand farewell tour. The big question on everyone’s mind was whether I was going to hang up my boots.

On April 11, Vince hired a camera crew to shoot a heartfelt interview with me on the banks of the Rhine in Bonn. One of Vince’s suits tried to script it, but I ignored him. With a weary, almost fed-up glare, I spoke passionately about how, after all the years on the road, family had become strangers and strangers had become family. It was time for me to change that. The interview was overnighted back to WWF headquarters, and I wondered if they’d even use it, since I hadn’t said what they wanted.

I would have liked to have given Shawn some guidance, but he thought he already knew everything.

The one thing that Shawn had in common with Warrior as the champion was that they both liked to ring Vince up with all their complaints, like two nagging wives. But, unlike Warrior, there was no denying that Shawn had charisma and ability: The only thing stopping him from becoming the phenomenon of his dreams was some patience, maturity and judgment. I know he was waiting for me to put him over to the boys, to say, You’re the man. I would have liked nothing more than to be able to do that, but with his attitude, how could I? I decided that though I wouldn’t stab him in the back, I couldn’t endorse him either. Deep down we both knew there was going to be a showdown between us someday.

In Berlin on April 17, the little war between Shawn’s clique and the rest of the talent escalated. They had clearly singled out Chris Candido and his wife, Tammy Fytch, who now played the role of a pretty blond vamp named Sunny. She was the first of the women now known as the WWE Divas, and had become a bigger star than anyone expected when her sexy posters became the hottest-selling WWF merchandise, which didn’t sit well with the clique. The caterers left Sunny a boxed dinner after every show to take with her back to the hotel. One night when she opened it up, she found a pile of human excrement. She was horrified and went home the next morning in tears. I thought, the Mafia leaves its calling card by wrapping a fish up in newspaper, but the clique shits in your dinner.

On this tour, I worked my first matches with Steve Austin. He took a lot of pride in his work, and it meant a lot to me when he told me that he’d like to work with me for the next six months because he’d do nothing but learn from me.

On the flight home I studied my reflection in the lavatory mirror. I sure looked weary and beaten up.

I thought back to the days when I’d watched tired old Paddy Ryan lacing up his boots and had sworn to myself that I’d never stay too long. That wasn’t me. Not yet.

By May 8, I was at the Kuwait Hotel, which was nothing short of a luxury prison, with no entertainment, no nightlife, no women, no rock ’n’ roll and no booze. The highlights of my day were working out in a well-equipped gym at the hotel and watching Larry King.

The sponsors of the five-show tour were wealthy Arabs. One afternoon they took me, Owen and Davey out on a fishing boat, and Davey hooked a three-foot yellow shark. An epic tug-of-war went on for about an hour, like something out of Hemingway, with Davey holding on, drenched in sweat, the veins popping in his arms. When he finally reeled it in, it still had a lot of fight left as it flipped all over the deck. Davey was so impressed with its inexhaustible will to live he insisted it be set free.

Back at the hotel restaurant, I was stirring my coffee and chatting with Razor The Moan, as a lot of the boys now called him. It was the final foreign tour for him and Diesel. Diesel had just put Shawn over clean at In Your House, a match during which Shawn went crashing through a table. How original. Razor told me an interesting tale: The clique had cooked up a plan where he and Diesel were going to take over the top spots in WCW, Shawn would take over the WWF and the clique would rule the entire wrestling business!

A boy of about eleven came over to our table wearing a handmade replica of Razor’s gear, complete with a “gold” chain of cardboard and greased-back hair with a curl on his forehead. I immediately thought of the Israeli kid who’d pedaled his bicycle as hard as he could to keep up with the bus. This boy had been patiently waiting around all morning for Razor’s autograph, and Razor seemed to enjoy making him wait. When Razor got up to leave, he stopped beside the boy as if to finally sign, then hesitated, looking back and forth between me and the boy. Finally he said to me, “I don’t need to sign autographs anymore.” He left that little boy with the saddest look on his face. That was the moment when I lost the little respect I still had for Scott Hall. By day five the boys were getting bored and fidgety. “We know what athletes need!” our Arab hosts told me. “Everything will be there tonight!” With a nod and a wink, they promised us the world: hashish, alcohol and naughty women.

Davey, Austin and I arrived for the party that night with Duke The Dumpster Drose, a raw rookie out of Florida who reminded me of a friendly boxer dog and who had given up work on a law degree to become a wrestler. Of course, there was no hashish, but there was apple-scented tobacco in a big bong. As for alcohol, there was a lone bottle of vodka and some orange juice. And the women?

There was a bevy of beautiful Kuwaitis, but their idea of naughty was that they were dressed American-style in jeans and tops that revealed their shoulders. Middle Eastern music was playing, and the girls did everything they could to get us up dancing, but it wasn’t rock ’n’ roll. Duke finally caved and not long after he got up, I allowed a young woman to entice me to dance, though I actually had my eye on a black-haired beauty with slender curves. Soon enough, Davey and Steve were dancing, too, though we couldn’t stop laughing at what bad dancers we all were. Steve had to be worse than me, and that’s saying something.

Then the woman I’d been hankering after pinched my back when she walked by, teasing me that she was angry that I was dancing with the other girl. I ended up talking with her on the balcony, away from the security chief, who was attempting to keep a close eye on both of us. With the Kuwaiti skyline in the background, she gave me her phone number and agreed to secretly meet me the next day before we went back to the party. A few minutes later one of our Arab hosts pulled out an issue of the WWF magazine in which there appeared a family Christmas portrait of me with Julie and the kids, which he passed around to all the girls. The young woman who had just said she would meet me glanced at the picture, then gave me a dirty look, and rattled off some guttural Arabic that was easy to understand without a translator. Davey, Steve and Duke looked at me as we all burst out laughing.In the end, the tour was a success, drawing close to thirty thousand fans every night.

Beyond the boy whom Razor Ramon brushed off, what I remember most about the trip was when our hosts showed us burned, gutted homes and buildings where handfuls of Kuwaitis stood up to Saddam Hussein’s army.

I did manage to get Julie a couple of white-gold rings encrusted with diamonds, more promise rings, but the only promise I was trying hard to keep anymore was to come home in one piece.

Carlo called me to tell me about the clique’s last WWF show together at Madison Square Garden on May 19. After Shawn beat Diesel in a cage match, the two sworn enemies embraced in the ring, much to the confusion of the crowd. They were soon joined by Razor and Hunter, and then all four stood on the turnbuckles giving the fans the clique hand sign in what they thought was a glorious send-off.

Vince had already left the Garden; when he found out what they had pulled, he was livid. Backstage, the agents and the boys were up in arms, and rightfully so: They thought Vince should have nipped such behavior in the bud. Vince reprimanded all four of them, levying $2,500 fines, and he ordered Shawn and Hunter to apologize to their fellow wrestlers. The other three had no excuse, but Shawn should have known this wasn’t something the champion should do.

There were other things I thought a champion should never do. Young boys were now dressing up like Shawn, the same as they did for me, Razor, Taker and others. The problem was that someone decided it would be cute to invite them into the ring every night to do Shawn’s Chippendale dance with him. It rankled many of us, not to mention a lot of the fans, to see impressionable boys imitating Shawn’s striptease. I’d known him as a person who respected the business, and the wrestlers and fans, upon whose shoulders we stood. But that person seemed to be gone.

Also, with the grueling schedule of the champion, Shawn’s drug problems escalated to the point where referee Tim White, André the Giant’s long-time babysitter, was now given the responsibility of driving Shawn around and carrying his bags. Shawn was finding out that it was harder than he may have thought to go out there and blow them away every night, and do it without getting hurt.

The physical and emotional weight brought out the worst in him, and he became increasingly bad tempered. No champion since Hogan had his own dressing room, but now Shawn reverted back to the days when the champion felt the need to elevate himself above the rest of the boys.

And at no time in the past had the need for a strong and cagey champion been so urgent. When Hall and Nash appeared on WCW’s Nitro as The Outsiders, it caused quite a sensation for the fans.

Vince’s way of retaliating was to turn Dr. Isaac Yankem into the new Diesel and an unskilled Rick Bogner, from Calgary, into Razor Ramon. It was Vince’s way of saying that he created them and he still owned them. WCW’s brash new boss, Eric Bischoff, countered with the best and conceivably the only great idea he would ever come up with: Every week former WWF wrestlers joined the new World order, or nWo, pretending to be an invading faction set on taking over WCW. The storyline implied that maybe the nWo wrestlers had been sent by Vince to subvert the opposition. The angle was done with an edge just real enough that a lot of the fans were open to the possibility that the nWo would somehow bring WCW crashing down. It kept them tuning in. On June 10, 1996, Nitro toppled Raw from the number-one spot, and stayed on top, week after week, for the next two years.

That same day, the WWF fired Louie Spicolli because of his drug problems and hired Brian Pillman, who was recovering from a Humvee accident in which he nearly lost a foot. He was in a lot of pain, and that pain would soon lead to his own drug problems. The one bright spot was that Yoko had finally been ordered to the fat farm at Duke University, which I really hoped would save his life.

Meanwhile I tried to figure out a routine that included more than just wrestling and all the psychodramas playing out in Vince’s world. So far, the acting had been slow going. And, in truth, my heart just wasn’t in it. I was finally home, and was consumed with the idea of making up for lost time with Julie, but she went out most nights and didn’t return until long after I’d gone to sleep. Most of the time, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I remembered when my dad first got out of the business: My mom seemed to forget all about him. I wondered whether Julie and I had grown apart, but then had to admit that we’d never really even had the chance to be together in the first place.