Straight from the Hart (13 page)

— well, I never had any great desire to sing the blues, but I sure as hell would pay my dues.

In any case, when I got back from Hanover, my dad had hired this new booker named Dick Steinborn: he came with a reputation as one of the sharpest minds in the business. The first time I met Steinborn, he smiled and informed me that, based on television tapes he’d watched and from what he’d heard from other wrestlers, he saw a lot of untapped potential and wanted to give me a big babyface push.

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♥
BRUCE HART
♥

In a matter of weeks, I was going over guys I’d never dreamed of going over and was soon being hailed as the hottest face in the territory. Funny thing, even though I’d done jobs the past number of years, most of the fans seemed to have either forgotten that or didn’t care — something guys who have trepidations about doing a job, or two, or one hundred should keep in mind.

What I found to be really weird was that a few years back, I would have been thrilled to win a match, much less go over every night, but instead I was almost oblivious to everything. Most of the time, I was almost entirely on “auto pilot.” When I went into the ring, I usually had no idea whatsoever of what I was doing, but somehow everything would go fine. In fact, I found myself doing crazy, high-risk things I’d never have dreamed of doing before, throwing caution to the wind. In retrospect, I suspect that I may have had some half-assed death wish.

In any case, whatever I was doing seemed to get over. After the matches, most of the wrestlers and even my dad seemed astonished at the things I was doing in the ring and would be giving me high fives, complimenting me on my ass-kicking performances and expressing amazement at my transformation —

all of which was cool, I suppose, but I was pretty much numb to everything they were saying.

Funny enough — or, in reality, not so funny — after the roar of the crowd and all of that had subsided and I was back at my place again, alone, the dark cloud would return and I’d return to a state of living hell, often wondering if I’d make it through the night. A while back, when I heard about Heath Ledger, who gave an Oscar-winning performance in
The Dark Knight
but was so messed up while filming that he could barely function and, sadly, didn’t live to enjoy the fruits of his labors, I found myself able to relate implicitly.

Christmas was probably the toughest stretch of all. With everyone else in the throes of the joyous festive season, I was close to going down for the count, but I put on my game face so I wouldn’t drag everyone else down.

The week after the holidays, my brother Keith and I were coming back from Helena, Montana. We’d had some shows over the holidays and even though I’d been endeavoring to keep my problems to myself I’m sure that he and most of my family sensed I was in a bad state and were trying to help. As we were
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♥
STRAIGHT FROM THE HART
♥

driving back, Keith pulled out a joint and passed it to me. I’d always been pretty anti-drugs before, but I was willing to try anything as a possible means of escape and had a few tokes. I’m not sure if the joint was laced with something or what, but before long both Keith and I were in this kind of paranoid high.

We were flying and freaking out that we were going to crash and burn.

We were so terrified that we had to pull over to the side of the road for a few hours and even after that, we had this slow, white knuckle drive back. We kind of look back on that now and laugh, but at the time, it was damn scary.

In its own way though, it was a blessing in disguise, as it completely turned me against drugs.

Since then, I’ve unfortunately seen countless contemporaries — who may well have been battling similar demons — choose to use drugs as a means of escape, only to find them a road to ruin. As far as I’m concerned, being high, especially when you’re in a depressed state, is like driving down a steep, dark, winding road with no headlights or brakes. It’s a surefire recipe for disaster.

Not long after that, my brothers Dean and Ross, my sister Ellie and Dynamite told me that they were planning a mid-winter Hawaiian vacation and invited me along. I initially declined, but they persisted and I finally agreed to join them.

At the time, Dynamite and I were the two top babyfaces in the territory.

In order to account for our disappearance, booker Dick Steinborn suggested a story line that entailed Dynamite — who’d been tag teaming with me quite a bit — enlisting the help of a British heel who’d recently arrived to do a heel double cross. The offshoot was that I’d be “injured” and out of action for the next month, while Dynamite, who would turn heel, would be suspended.

I told Steinborn I was game for whatever, so we shot the angle, and as Steinborn had predicted, it got a super hot reaction — making me a martyr, as I supposedly wound up being ambulanced to the hospital, while Dynamite, who’d been one of our most popular babyfaces, suddenly was transformed into the most hated heel in the territory.

I’m not sure if any of you have seen that John Candy/Steve Martin movie
Planes,
Trains and Automobiles
, but our Hawaiian vacation was a lot like that; almost everything that could go wrong, went wrong. As soon as we arrived, we
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♥
BRUCE HART
♥

found that our travel agent had somehow screwed up our hotel reservations and instead of having separate rooms, we found ourselves all crammed into one room in a second rate dump. That was just the start of our adventure.

On our first day at the beach, Dynamite and Ellie, who’d been advised by some sun-worshipper to use coconut oil for a really awesome tan, suffered third degree burns. The sunburns were so severe that for several days they could barely walk. Not long after, Dynamite, Ross and I were walking home from some bar late at night and encountered this girl, in apparent dire distress, screaming hysterically as some guy was assaulting her. Dynamite and I endeavored to come to her aid, but the guy whipped out a switchblade. We were able to disarm him though and he ended up getting the living shit kicked out of him; all the while, this skanky bimbo that had been screaming for help was screaming and swearing at us — for assaulting her pimp. Dynamite told her to make up her fucking mind.

When we arrived back at our hotel later, we found that someone had broken into our room and stolen most of our money. Since none of us had any plastic at that time, we were forced to nickel and dime it and by the end of the trip we were half starving and running on fumes.

A couple of days before we were supposed to return, my brother Ross contracted a staph infection. An ingrown nose hair got so infected that he looked like something out of
Planet of the Apes
. It was so bad that he wound up in hospital on an intravenous drip. He nearly died.

In its own messed up way though, all the stress and aggravation served to take my mind off my own emotional problems and by the time I got back, I found that I somehow had extricated myself from the emotional quicksand I’d been mired in. I was back on a relatively even keel; it was almost a miracle. It’s been said that what doesn’t kill you will only make you stronger and that proved to be the case for me — and later on, when I was faced with some pretty serious adversity, I was able to deal with it, because I’d already been to hell and back.

One of the other important lessons I learned from that whole ordeal was that all you can do in life is to concern yourself with the here and now and not incur undue stress by dwelling on what you could or should have done in the past, or by trying to figure out what might happen down the road. Putting it another
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♥
STRAIGHT FROM THE HART
♥

way, I’d like to relate something my son, Bruce Jr., once told me that sums it up best: “Yesterday’s history and tomorrow’s a mystery, but today is a gift — which is why it’s called the present.” Amen. Since then, my philosophy’s been to live, love, laugh, enjoy the ride, occasionally raise a little hell — and let the chips fall where they may.

As far as trying to explain the meaning of life or some kind of reason behind its mysteries, I’ve arrived at the conclusion that, as some jabroney poet once lamented, Ours is not to reason why; ours is but to do and die. In wrestling terms, I guess that might mean that we weren’t meant to be smartened up in life and that, for all intents and purposes, we’re supposed to remain marks — which is, when you stop and think about it, a lot more fun, anyway. Call me a mark if you want, but there’s no damn way that life can all be a work or some kind of mere coincidence. Anybody who’s inclined to disagree need only take a look at a mother cuddling her newborn, or see the sun rising on a clear day, or have some girl who takes your breath away smile at you. There’s no way that could all be an accident or coincidence; by that token, I guess you can call me a mark, and I’m more than happy to remain one.

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When I returned from Hawaii, I was surprised and disappointed to find that Tricky Dick Steinborn had been canned — reportedly because he, Keith and Bret weren’t in agreement on schematics. Bret — who’d only been working a few months himself — and Keith were now handling the book.

They had me work with heel Marty Jones on my first night back, in a cage match. The angle we’d shot before I left had been pretty hot and we ended up selling out in short order. Our match went well. That same night, Keith, for reasons known only to him, saw fit to bring Larry Lane back and had him work in a babyface vs. babyface tag against Bret and himself. They had a sixty minute broadway (time limit draw), which from a technical point of view wasn’t bad, but since there was no heat or background story, it wound up kind of flat.

That didn’t stop my dad from paying Lane more than double what Marty and I got that night. Jones, like Dynamite, was a bit of a hothead; he blew a gasket and caught the first plane back to England. Perhaps I should have been pissed too, but at that stage I was happy just to be on the right side of the grass.

With Jones out of the picture, I worked with Dynamite the next week and we turned away close to a thousand fans. It was a barnburner of a match, which exceeded all expectations. Even though he was barely twenty, Dynamite had
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♥
STRAIGHT FROM THE HART
♥

developed into one of the best workers in the business and was only getting better.

I’ve often been asked what made Dynamite so special. Well, first, he was a phenomenal athlete, remarkably adaptable to virtually any style or format —

be it British, North American, or Japanese. What really set him apart was his timing: he seemed to have this innate ability to know precisely when to do things. Beyond that, like all the truly great workers, he was capable of making damn near anyone he worked with look good — in many cases, better than they ever dreamed of looking — myself included.

Even though business remained steady throughout the spring and into summer, there was a fair bit of friction between Bret and Keith. They couldn’t seem to agree on methodology and were bickering over who was in charge.

Things finally boiled over one night in Calgary when they argued over some finish and ended up getting into an altercation in the dressing room with my dad having to pull them apart.

My dad then decided to go another direction and hired this crusty old veteran named Art Nelson. Nelson had worked for us back in the early ’60s, and since then had made the rounds in a few territories in the States, including Amarillo.

The first week that Art was in town, he notified Dynamite and me that he’d never done much business with smaller guys working on top. He pretty much indicated that we’d be relegated to undercard status, as would Keith and Bret —