Hitman My Real Life in the Cartoon World (84 page)

At Wrestlemania XV in Philadelphia on March 28, Austin pinned Rocky Maivia, now known as The Rock, to win the World Heavyweight title, while Owen and Jeff Jarrett defeated D-Lo Brown and Test to retain the Tag Team belts. The WWF was red hot.

The next day at about noon, I walked into the Air Canada Centre in Toronto for Nitro and there were already a few thousand fans standing on the street in the frigid cold chanting my name. Eric had filled in the booking committee about my Goldberg angle, but, much to my disappointment, Nash and WCW road agent Kevin Sullivan had got to Bill and persuaded him that the angle would kill him off.

I tried to talk Goldberg back into it in the dressing room. “C’mon on, Bill. You’re kidding me? We talked about this, remember? You loved it! Nothing’s changed. You know this will set us up to work after my surgery.”

When I left him, I ran into Nash, who’d now decided he would come down at the end and leave me laying, which made no sense at all.

I went and found Eric in his office. I knew that the ratings success of Wrestlemania XV had to be weighing heavily on his mind, but I still couldn’t believe my ears when he said, “How ’bout this—you go out and tell the fans that you don’t need them anymore!”

In my first WCW refusal, I shook my head: no. “Eric, you hear that sound?” I said. “That’s the sound of thousands of my fans, and only my fans, standing outside on the sidewalk, in the dead of winter, chanting my name. Why would I do that?”

He had another idea: We’d do everything the same, except that Hogan, not Nash, would come down at the end. He’d go to high-five me, but instead he’d double-cross me, jump me and leave me for dead. Dumbfounded, I asked Eric if I was going to work with Hogan instead of Goldberg. He said not until next fall. I asked if Hogan was going to be wrestling Goldberg. He said not anytime soon. I asked him, “Why in God’s name would you fuck up such a great angle with something so stupid and pointless?”

Eric said nervously, “You’ll have to convince Terry. If he says it’s okay, then fine.” Now I knew who was really in charge of WCW.

So I went and found Hulk and asked him. “So why would you come down?”

“I don’t need to come down,” he admitted.

When I relayed Hulk’s response to Eric, he seemed surprised and relieved. Eric wanted me to feed the rumors that I was going back to the WWF, so he told me that after the bit with Goldberg, he wanted me to get on the mic and quit WCW. I had no idea what that would be about, but I agreed.

I felt like a cat in the dark, watching Hogan battling Nash in some kind of power play in which we were all caught in the middle; Eric was clearly in over his head, unable to cope with the warring wolf packs.

As I walked out to my music, there was a commotion going on in the entranceway. Kevin Sullivan was on the floor, frothing at the mouth in a seizure (in the dressing room the next day, he explained that he had miscalculated his GBH dosage). Who could make such stuff up? As I stepped over him, I couldn’t help thinking, It’s a good thing I don’t follow the leaders around here.

I walked out wearing my friend Tie Domi’s Maple Leafs jersey underneath my Hitmen jersey. I knew if Eric had seen it, he’d have made me take it off because he was already terrified that I was going to go over so strong with the Canadian crowd that it would turn Goldberg heel, which was going to happen anyway, no matter what we did. I received a thundering ovation from the crowd, and then on the mic, I accused Goldberg of hiding in his dressing room, biting his fingernails and trembling with fear. While I peeled off my Hitmen jersey to expose the Maple Leafs jersey, declaring Canada

“hockey country,” Eric was frantically running around backstage screaming at Goldberg to get out there before I killed him off. When Goldberg finally got in the ring, snorting like a Brahma bull, I taunted him, begging him to come and get me. When he spear-tackled me, the fans had no idea what was going to happen next. We both lay there without moving for what seemed like an eternity.

Then I rolled him off me, counted him out, stood up, peeled my jersey off and threw it down on his unconscious body revealing the “steel” plate: the whole building came unglued. As Eric requested, I got on the mic and declared, “Hey, WCW, I quit!”

When I got home I actually contemplated quitting for real. It seemed to me that Eric just didn’t have enough wrestling smarts to do his job: He had freaked out backstage because he thought I overshadowed Goldberg, but within hours the angle was being talked about as the best thing WCW

had done in years. It even made the front page of The Toronto Sun, under the headline “HITMAN

QUITS.”

When I?got home, I signed a two-year extension to my contract. I hoped it would dispel any fears that I was going back to WWF, which might give WCW the incentive to do better by me—not to mention that $2.5 million a year until 2003 was too good to turn down. Then I?had my surgery.

Davey was in the hospital too, supposedly with a staph infection that had traveled to his spine. I believe he was actually going through withdrawal. I don’t think it helped when WCW, not being able to reach him, FedExed termination papers to his house and Diana brought them right to him in the hospital. What did help was when Owen and Mankind visited him that same afternoon and put him on the phone with Vince, who told Davey that if he got clean, he’d have a job waiting for him. With Davey, though, that was a big if. The WWF was in Calgary for a sold-out non-televised show at the Saddledome on April 17. Owen asked me if I would come down and say hi to all the wrestlers. I decided I would, as a favor to him, but I also needed to do it for myself. I didn’t want to carry around my bitterness anymore.

I spoke to Eric the night before, and he told me to go down to the show, that it would really feed the rumors on the Internet. When I arrived at the back of the Saddledome, Carlo was there to meet me and seemed overly concerned about letting me come backstage. The closer we got to the dressing room, the more I realized that Carlo was the only one who had a problem with it. I was soon surrounded by the smiling faces of Owen, Mankind, Edge, Test and Papa Shango. Even Hunter came out to greet me, with Chyna, who clearly had had radical cosmetic surgery since the last time I’d seen her; she looked drastically altered, reconstructed and beautiful in a ghastly kind of way. I gave a hardy handshake to Ken Shamrock just as agent Jack Lanza waded in with a big smile, flashing a look of annoyance at Carlo, who was still standing around like a useless guard dog. “What the hell?” he said to Carlo. “Of course he can come down. Are you kidding?”

It felt good to see my old friends, and I could tell by the huge smile on Owen’s face that it meant a lot to him that I was there. I was soon pulling my pants down just enough to show them the four-inch incision from my surgery. Then I went to watch Taker’s match, and when the fans glimpsed me in the wings, they began chanting “We want Bret,” over and over. After his match, Taker walked past me grinning and said, “You’re next.”

I noticed Stone Cold playing innocently enough with some black-haired girl’s hand. I couldn’t see her because she was all wrapped up in the curtain, but I assumed this might be a new girlfriend. Like so many of us, Austin had just gone through a divorce. Then Steve noticed me and I noticed that the girl he was playing around with was Diana. She’d dyed her hair. I’d seen Davey do a lot more than flirt, but still, this seemed a bit callous with Davey in the hospital, for whatever reason he was there.

Steve left her to come over and chat with me; we parked ourselves on some equipment boxes, and soon we were talking about our divorces. Then Owen asked me to say hi to Earl, and I had no problem doing that.

Moments later, I stood with The Rock, who told me, “I’ll never forget what you did for me.” He also said that I should come back, that WCW was screwing me over worse than Vince had. Shawn wasn’t wrestling anymore, just playing the role of a commissioner, so he, Taker and Austin were the ones in charge. I shrugged and said, “I don’t think so.”

After the show, I sat with Taker at a bar and we laughed like the long-lost friends that we were. I went home that night feeling better than I had in months, because finally, at least in some sad, small way, I got to say a proper good-bye.

Three days later, on the same day as the Columbine high-school massacre, the Grim Reaper came calling for Rick Rude, who was found dead of a heart attack from an overdose of painkillers. He was forty. I’ll never forget how Rick stood by me after Montreal. Rick was one of those guys who never took his wedding ring off; he’d wrap a piece of white tape around it when he went into the ring. He was the kind of guy who, when you needed someone to back you up, wouldn’t flinch at all. Not for money. Not for anything.

And then, in early May, that crazy lumberjack, Jos The Maniac LeDuc, died. I can’t express how much the constant string of wrestlers’ deaths affected me. They developed drug habits and took such risks with their health, all for what? Just to make the next town? To entertain people? This sort of funeral march happens to most people when they hit their seventies. To me it felt like the casualties of war.

On May 17, I did a bit where I came out of the crowd on The Tonight Show to accept a challenge from Kevin Nash that I come back to WCW in one week to wrestle him. Jay Leno had been part of WCW’s Hog Wild pay-per-view back in July 1998, and he laughed when I pulled out a WCW wrestling card with his picture on it and asked him to sign it.

Meanwhile, the Hitmen had won the WHL championship and were set to meet the Ottawa 67s in the Memorial Cup. Things had improved so much between Julie and me that I invited her, along with Blade and Dallas, to fly east with me to watch the game. On Sunday afternoon, May 23, 1999, the Ottawa 67s defeated the Hitmen in a heartbreaking overtime. Julie and I, along with the boys, stopped in the locker room to congratulate the team on a great season. Even though the team had lost, that visit was a sweet moment of competitive purity that one only finds in real sports.

I had to rush to make my flight to L.A. for my second live appearance on The Tonight Show the next day. While I was saying good-bye to Julie and the kids at the airport, we bumped into some of the mothers of the Hitmen players who were catching a flight back to Calgary. They were still tearful, and then one of them cracked a tentative smile and said, “Why are we crying? It’s not like somebody died.”

I connected to my L.A. flight through Toronto, but had no time at the airport to call home. I pictured the whole Hart clan sitting in Stu’s kitchen watching the nationally televised Memorial Cup final and feeling the same passion and heartache as me. A couple of hours later, in the air, something ominous nagged at my heart. It couldn’t be the game. I knew all about the game. Then the cockpit door opened and the pilot came out, and I just knew that he was looking for me. He handed me a note that read, “Bret Hart, please call home. Family emergency!”

I tried every phone in the first-class cabin, but as luck would have it, the only one that worked was next to the only other passenger in the compartment. At first I got nothing but busy signals. So I checked my voice mail to find a frantic message from Carlo asking me to call him right away. I knew at that moment that someone had died.

When I reached him, Carlo kept asking, “Are you sitting down?”

“I’m on a plane, of course I’m sitting. What happened?”

“Don’t be alarmed. Don’t get mad. I don’t know how to tell you this. Are you sitting down?”

I was getting annoyed. “Just spit it out.”

“Owen’s dead. He got killed doing some kind of stunt in the ring.”

I felt like my chest caved in. Carlo didn’t have the facts yet, but all he knew for sure was that Owen was gone.

43

“IF I GAVE YOU MY LIFE, WOULD YOU DROP IT?”

THE NEXT DAYS ARE ALL IMAGES smeared together. I couldn’t get back to Calgary until about five a.m. the next morning, and when I got home I went to bed. I hadn’t slept at all since hearing the news, and I didn’t want to show up at Hart house until I’d had a little rest—I wanted my parents to be able to lean on me. I couldn’t shake the thought from my mind: What happened to you, my little Oje?

The night before, a somber Jim Ross sat at the announcers’ table at the Over The Edge pay-per-view in Kansas City with the cameras on the crowd, not daring to reveal what was happening in the ring to the live audience watching around the world. “This is as real as real can get,” he said. “The Blue Blazer, known as Owen Hart, was going to make a very spectacular superhero-like entrance.

Something went terribly wrong . . . this is not a wrestling angle . . . this is not part of the story . . .”

Hanging from a cable off a catwalk up in the rafters of the arena, Owen suddenly fell seventy-eight feet to the ring, smashing chest-first across the ropes, about a foot from a turnbuckle, bouncing hard onto his back toward the middle of the ring. He lay there for several minutes turning blue while paramedics worked feverishly on him, to no avail.

I pulled into Stu’s yard at around eleven that morning. Hart house never looked so sad. Dean’s old, crippled pit bull, Lana, was the first to greet me, her tail whacking my car door. I thought to myself that Owen would have laughed at the notion that the old dog outlived both Dean and him.

A swarm of reporters surrounded me as I made my way up the back porch steps. Stu was sitting at the head of the diningroom table going through pictures of Owen. I reached out for his big hand, and put my other hand on his shoulder. In the living room, grandkids were huddled together in little groups softly crying while various members of the family were giving interviews. My mom politely excused herself from a group of reporters to give me a big hug, crying as she held me tight. The story of Owen’s fatal fall was covered by news outlets worldwide, all of which were asking if pro wrestling had gone too far.

When Owen had been dying in Kansas City, Martha had been home packing for the big move into their new dream house, across the road from what used to be Clearwater Beach. Leaving the media circus at Hart house, I drove over to see her. I was amazed by her composure. She had already called a lawyer friend of hers by the name of Pam Fischer to seek legal advice. I watched the news with Martha and there, on camera, was Davey, looking much better than he had in a long while. I couldn’t believe it when Davey said that Owen’s death was just an accident, and that it was nobody’s fault.