Straight from the Hart (3 page)

When my dad first opened his own promotion, the wrestling landscape was different from today’s. Now, there are only two active promotions remaining —

the almighty WWE and the Tennessee-based TNA. Back then there were close to thirty regional promotions or “territories” in operation across Canada and the United States, ranging from big promotions such as Toots Mondt’s New York outfit, Jim Crockett’s sprawling operation in the Carolinas and Aileen Eaton’s Hollywood office, to smaller ones such as Mike London’s Albuquerque promotion and Cowboy Len Hughes’ Halifax operation, which ran only in the summertime.

Being a wrestler was different in those days as well. With over thirty promotions operating full time, there were many more wrestlers plying their trade. Wrestlers rarely stayed in one place for more than a few months at a time and would travel around, like gypsies, from one territory to another —

wherever their services were in demand and where business was good. Because the promoters were regularly in touch with each other, it was obligatory for the wrestlers to maintain a good reputation by honoring their commitments, working hard and behaving themselves. By all accounts, however, there was no shortage of outrageous characters and behind the scenes hijinks, invariably perpetrated
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by pranksters and card-carrying degenerates, like Ted and Vic Christy, Tommy O’Toole, Buddy Rogers, Frankie Murdoch and Paul de Galles.

While the wrestlers were obliged to keep their noses clean, so to speak, the same was the case for promoters. If promoters screwed the boys on their payoffs, failed to honor their commitments or ran a sloppy operation, it didn’t take long for word to spread that their territory wasn’t a good place to work. Although it wasn’t a perfect system, by any means, it nonetheless served its purpose. The

“territories” would be the mode in wrestling for the next several decades —

until the scorched earth onslaught of Vincent the Conqueror in the 1980s.

When my dad was getting his own promotion off the ground in the late

’40s, wrestling was in a period of flux. With the rise of television — which was just coming into vogue at the time — wrestling had enjoyed a resurgence in popularity, with acts like Gorgeous George, lady wrestlers, pseudo Nazis and insidious Japanese villains taking center stage.

During the early stages of the television era, business was good, but many of the promoters began to take shortcuts and cut back on wrestling. They resorted, instead, to gimmicks — freaks, geeks and bullshit — and the business soon became the object of ridicule and derision, especially among traditional sports fans. Making matters worse, many of the cutthroats and shysters masquerading as promoters began stealing each other’s talent, running in each other’s towns and doing whatever they could to undermine each other.

As a result, the business, in general, suffered. With the future of the sport in peril, the promoters of the various territories, my dad included, convened an SOS (save our sport) meeting in St. Louis. The offshoot of that meeting was the formation of a promoters’ cooperative called the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA), which established territorial boundaries and interactive guidelines —

not unlike a wrestling version of the United Nations. My dad later told me that the first meeting reminded him of that scene in the movie
The Godfather
where the heads of all the crime families came together to supposedly work together. While apparently there was no shortage of cutthroats, charlatans and con men among the rank and file of NWA promoters, the NWA nevertheless accomplished its goals of unifying and stabilizing the sport.

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One of the things that helped accomplish that was the NWA’s establishment of a universally recognized world champion who would travel to the different territories, defending his title against the top stars from each circuit. That served to give fans in each territory the perception that the local champions were world-class and, by extension, cast the whole promotion in the same light.

The NWA was fortunate to be blessed with some outstanding champions in those formative years, including the great Lou Thesz, Canada’s revered

“Whipper” Billy Watson, the savvy New Zealander Pat O’Connor and the swaggering “Nature Boy” Buddy Rogers.

While those guys were not only superb athletes and ambassadors who gave the belt prestige and credibility, what made them really special was their innate ability to get whomever they worked with “over,” or make them look like viable contenders, which was key to making member promotions look like legitimate major league operations. In its own way, the establishment of the NWA world title served the same purpose as the Super Bowl or Stanley Cup did for the NFL

or NHL in that it gave a semblance of structure and a common denomination to wrestling — something which would be instrumental in ushering in a period of prosperity and enhanced popularity for pro wrestling, during the ’50s and thereafter.

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I was born in 1951, the second of what would become a twelve member brood.

My brother Smith preceded me by two years. Keith, Wayne, Dean, Ellie, Georgia, Bret, and Alison would follow in the next eight years. Ross, Diana, and the youngest member of the Hart clan, Owen, were children of the sixties.

Figure in the wrestlers who were always around back then and, clearly, Stu and Helen had little time for themselves.

Some of my most vivid childhood memories are of Saturday mornings, when the wrestlers would make the weekly trek up to the Hart House to pick up their paychecks. Our house, as most Calgarians can tell you, was located on an escarpment on the west end of town, overlooking the city. Although we were within the city limits, my dad, who’d grown up on a farm, seemed to think it was perfectly normal to have goats, cows, horses, chickens and turkeys (human and otherwise) wandering around the yard. Combine that with this bizarre procession of midgets, giants, wrestling bears (human and otherwise), nefarious Nazis, conniving commies, insidious Orientals and assorted other misfits and it’s easy to see why most of our neighbors or anyone who happened to be driving by considered us to be some kind of cross between the Beverly Hillbillies and
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the Addams Family — with just a touch of
The Twilight Zone
thrown in for good, or perhaps bad, measure.

Since my dad tended to be terminally disorganized, like I am, the pay envelopes (which were prepared by my poor, beleaguered mother) were very rarely ready on time. As a consequence, the wrestlers were forced to wait downstairs, patiently.

While the boys cooled their heels, my dad would make coffee, bacon, eggs, and pancakes for them. Legend has it that one time one of the animals (I’m not sure if it was supposed to have been a dog, cat, bear or what) defecated on the floor and my dad scooped up the shit with his spatula, discarded it and then turned to whomever he was serving and inquired, “Did you want your eggs over easy?” Over the years, I swear that I must have run into dozens of wrestlers who claimed they were the recipients of said eggs. My dad, of course, used to vehemently deny that he’d ever served up any such offering — as he only served his eggs scrambled.

One of the things that really amazes me now — given today’s open admission that wrestling is a work — is the lengths the wrestlers would go to, back then, to maintain the façade that wrestling was legitimate and not “phony,” as they used to say.

Even though we were the promoter’s kids, all the wrestlers, heels and babyfaces, would arrive in separate vehicles with the heels sequestering themselves in one room, behind closed doors, while the faces would gather in another room.

Although there were never staged brawls or any of that, they always maintained the pretense that they didn’t like each other and would never let their guards down.

Most of the heels were pretty intimidating. I remember being uneasy around the likes of “Mad Dog” Vachon, Skull Murphy, Fritz Von Erich, Sky Hi Lee,

“Iron Mike” DiBiase, the Kalmikoff Brothers and “Bulldog” Brower — all of whom bore striking resemblance to sinister villain types you’d see in the movies.

Two of the most convincing bad guys were Hard Boiled Haggerty and Bob Orton Sr. — both of whom always seemed to be in a rotten mood and would scowl at us whenever they saw us. Funny enough, a few years back I was at this old-time wrestlers’ reunion called Cauliflower Alley in Las Vegas and ran
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into them. Even though I was long since smart to the business, because of my childhood preconceptions I was still somewhat apprehensive and mentioned that to them. They both laughed and told me that I’d just made their day.

In retrospect, I’m not sure if my dad ordered the wrestlers to kayfabe (old carny slang that roughly translates as “be fake”) like that around us, or if that was just the prevailing norm. In any case, as far as we were concerned, wrestling was for real. I can still recall how, if any kids at school had the audacity — as some did — to suggest that wrestling was phony, it was a personal affront and grounds for fighting.

Many a time our school principal — this dour and austere old British fart named Mr. Broadberry — would haul our asses into the office and give us the strap for our school ground altercations. He would then call up my dad on the phone and have him come down to reprimand us for our transgressions. My dad would make out to be displeased with us for our misbehavior, but later at home, he’d give us a pat on the back for having defended the wrestling business.

I remember one time my older brother Smith had this overbearing, big blowhard of a phys. ed. teacher named Mr. Ward, who was always making snide remarks about wrestling, claiming that it was all a sham and that he, himself, could annihilate any of those phony pretenders and that sort of thing. As a result, a lot of kids began also making fun of us and mocking the wrestling business. When my dad got wind of this, he was quite pissed off and one day, he showed up at our school, unannounced, while Ward was conducting an amateur wrestling class and making his usual disparaging remarks about the wrestling business. As Ward was babbling on, my dad casually strolled up to the mat and beckoned him to try him on for size, if wrestlers were all phonies and pushovers, as he’d been alleging.

I doubt that Ward wanted any part of my dad, but since he’d been blowing his own horn so much and was being egged on by the kids, he didn’t have much choice but to accept. In a matter of seconds, my dad had him on the mat in some killer submission hold, screaming like a baby and begging for mercy. After that, we never heard Ward or any of the other kids at school cast any aspersions about wrestling being phony.

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When I think back now on how guys like my dad, Haggerty, Orton and so many others used to go to such inordinate lengths to protect the business, I find it hard to fathom how Vince McMahon could have chosen to so indiscriminately expose it years later.

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