Straight from the Hart (36 page)

In case my esteemed colleagues — McMahon, Russo and whomever else

— think otherwise, I’d like to point out that by no means was Bret the first champion in the history of the business who wasn’t exactly thrilled about dropping a strap. In fact, in all my years in wrestling, I can’t honestly recall anyone who, when they were asked to drop a belt, jumped for joy, gave a high five, did cartwheels or celebrated. Being asked to lose a belt is a blow to one’s ego and can easily be construed as a form of rejection — like your girlfriend telling you she’s dumping you for someone else, or a football coach benching some once-vaunted veteran quarterback, like Brett Favre, for some hotshot new gunslinger, like Aaron Rodgers.

When I was booking our promotion for my dad, there were countless occasions when I had to break it to some recalcitrant, egocentric champion, such as David Schultz, “Rotten” Ron Starr or, for that matter, Bret, himself, that the office needed them to drop their title. It was never, as I recall, met with unbridled joy, but I was usually able to get them to oblige and I never had to resort to any of the sleazy, cloak and dagger type treachery that I saw in Montreal. As a rule, “ushering the skunk out of the parlor” — as my dad used to refer to getting reluctant prima donna to lose his title — is, frankly, nowhere near as difficult or complicated as McMahon and Russo tend to make it out to be. A bit of diplomacy goes a long way — such as thanking the outgoing champion for having done an awesome job with the strap (even if he didn’t), and keeping the door open for down the road opportunities. I’ve also found that honesty, as they say, is the best policy. It’s advisable to be forthright and to the point if you want a guy to lose a belt. Don’t mince words, beat around the bush or evade the issue. Tell them straight up what you have in mind and why.

As I said before, while very few of them are thrilled to be informed you want them to do the job, most professionals understand it’s all just part of the job description — like your boss asking you to perform some arduous task at work. Rarely will anyone who was worthy of being champion in the first place give you any grief over such a request. If, for some reason, a champion is still
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adamant in his refusal to oblige your request — which sometimes does happen

— at that point you need to come up with an alternative course of action.

There are all kinds of quick fix options that will work in a pinch. For example, you can concoct some supposed story about how the champion was made to forfeit his title — because he wouldn’t honor some purported contractual obligation; or, you can announce that the champion was stripped of his title for having violated some ostensible sanction. I’ve never been a big fan of taking that type of dubious escape route, but if all else fails, it’s still a hell of a lot better than the type of embarrassing and messy bull crap the WWF inflicted on the fans in Montreal.

As for my brother Bret’s part in the whole shoddy affair, it pains me to say that he has nothing to be proud of either for the way he handled things. In any other sport, if a star player had refused to do what his coach/manager/boss had requested, then hawked a loogie in his face (in front of millions of fans on television) and then violently assaulted him afterwards in the dressing room, you can bet your ass that the player would have been universally condemned, fined and likely expelled permanently. Can you imagine the public outcry, for example, if A-Rod hawked a big wet one in Joe Torre’s face in the dugout during the World Series; or if Roger Clemens punched out George Steinbrenner in the locker room; or if Terrell Owens had put the boots to Bill Parcells on the sidelines, during their tumultuous tenure together with the Cowboys? Hell, I remember a few years back when Latrell Sprewell accosted his Golden State Warriors’ coach, P. J. Carlesimo (nowhere near as seriously, I might add, as Bret’s assault on Vince). Sprewell, who at the time was considered one of the NBA’s most charismatic and dynamic young stars, was suspended for a year, fined hundreds of thousands of dollars and his image never recovered.

I’m sure that if something similar had transpired in our promotion and some hotheaded superstar — like, say, “Bad News” Allen — was made to lose a title against his wishes and had subsequently put the boots to my father as a result, that Bret would have been among the first and most vehement to denounce him. It should be noted that within the wrestling fraternity there is a code of ethics, as far as titles or championships go. For example, when the promotion (be it the WWF or whoever else) puts a belt on a guy, it’s implicitly understood
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from the get-go that whenever the promotion wants that guy to drop the belt —

to whomever, whenever and wherever — that wrestler will endeavor to oblige them, to the best of his ability, without any hassles, qualms or reservations. It was that way when Ric Flair dropped to strap to Bret in Saskatoon; when Hulk Hogan put over Ultimate Warrior; when the great Buddy Rogers put over then virtual unknown Bruno Sammartino and so on and so forth.

It should also be pointed out that when a champion does drop a belt to his successor, whoever that might be, that he shouldn’t merely be “losing” to the other guy or letting the other guy beat him, but he should be striving to do his utmost to make the other guy look like a veritable world beater — the old “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” credo. All things considered, it’s better for everyone — the new champion, the outgoing one and, most importantly, for the business.

As I said before, I found it hard to believe that Bret was giving the WWF

all these supposedly extenuating reasons why he wouldn’t or couldn’t drop the strap to Shawn — including the fact that he hated Shawn’s guts, or that Shawn wasn’t worthy of wearing the belt or that he didn’t like the idea of having to lose in his native Canada, among other excuses. If there’s any truth to any of that scuttlebutt, it doesn’t say much for Bret’s sense of professional ethics. Sure, it would be great, I agree, if you only had to do jobs for guys you admired or respected and if you only had to lose in some out of the way locale — like Antarctica, with no television coverage — but that’s unfortunately not how it works. If the office wants a guy to drop a strap to whomever, whenever and wherever, that’s entirely their call — not the wrestler’s. Anything else would be uncivilized!

Not to be facetious, but I’ve often wondered if Bret’s being put up on a proverbial pedestal, as “the best there is, the best there was and the best there ever will be,” may have perverted his perceptions. However, as one who happened to grow up in the wrestling business, he, of all people, should have been able to implicitly understand that dropping a belt is just part of the damn job description — nothing more, nothing less. I’m puzzled and, frankly, amazed that he could have ever gotten to the point where he would be so out of touch with the basic tenets of the employee/employer working relationship that he
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felt he could call the shots like that. In a lot of ways, the whole convoluted charade is akin to Dr. Frankenstein (Vinnie Mac) creating this increasingly uncontrollable monster (Bret), who, ultimately, turns on his master and wreaks havoc.

Not to digress, but not long after the Montreal maelstrom, I was talking with this renowned mountain climber named Laurie Skreslet, who happens to be the first Canadian to have scaled to the summit of Mount Everest. In sharing perspectives with him, he related that while he was hailed as a conquering hero afterward and received all kinds of newspaper, television, magazine recognition, movie offers and whatnot, he would never have even been able to come close to reaching the summit or basking in the glory afterwards without the selfless contributions of everyone else on the expedition — the sherpas, the guides, the technical support staff, the base camp minions and the people who financed the whole operation. Skreslet, to his credit, was gracious enough to emphasize that though he, personally, had received the lion’s share of fame and acclaim, his epic achievement was, indeed, a team effort all the way.

That got me to thinking about our sport — where the highest mountain one can climb is to win the WWF title. Just as my friend Skreslet would never have come close to reaching the “top of the world” without the selfless sacrifice of all the others, the same holds true for Bret’s ascending to the top of the wrestling world. By that token, if it hadn’t been for former champions — like Hogan, Flair, Sammartino and Backlund — all of whom had expended their blood, sweat and tears to make the belt so revered; and promoters and visionaries like Toots Mondt and the McMahons, who had conceived of the belt in the first place; not to mention the countless others who had contributed along the way, including people like my father, fellow workers (be they superstars or lowly jobbers), bookers, referees, television commentators, trainers, friends, supporters, wives and whomever else (most of whom have never received any credit — nor, for that matter, ever sought any either), my beloved bro would never have even come close to scaling wrestling’s hallowed summit.

In choosing to conduct himself in the self-serving and narrow-minded manner in which he did — by punching out the guy who had placed his faith and trust in him by putting the belt around his waist in the first place (regardless
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of whether he was a saint or not), and then proceeding to subsequently drag the whole business through the mud afterwards — Bret wasn’t merely hurting McMahon, the WWF or Shawn Michaels, he was showing disrespect and disregard for the entire industry. By that token, he was letting all of his aforementioned “teammates” down as well. In the quaint vernacular of my kids,

“that ain’t cool, bro!”

During one of his pre-game sermons, the legendary football coach, Vince Lombardi, once pointed out to his world champion Green Bay Packers that there is no “I”
in the word “team.” After all the time Bret spent being schooled in my dad’s Dungeon, that’s one spelling lesson my brother should never have been needed to be taught, if you catch my drift.

A few days after the Montreal travesty, I was at my dad’s Dungeon, readying to conduct a training session and my father, as he often did, descended the basement stairs to observe the workout. While we were waiting for the trainees to arrive, I was curious as to how he felt about the Montreal screw job and sought his opinion. Stu, who had dedicated over seventy years of his life to the wrestling business and whose roots traced all the way back to its founder, Farmer Burns, frowned somewhat pensively and ruefully remarked that it was a shame that neither Bret nor Vince had been willing to put aside their own self-serving agendas and do what was best for the business — which, he duly noted, had made both of them rich and famous. He then pointed solemnly to a sign above the doorway to the storied Dungeon, where a virtual who’s who of wrestling legends had broken into the sport and shook his head. I glanced at the tattered and faded handwritten sign. Paraphrasing President John F. Kennedy, it read: “Ask not what wrestling can do for you but, instead, ask what you can do for wrestling.”

My dad paused — perhaps for me to reflect on what I’d read and then remarked, in his own, inimitable style, that if more people, including Bret and Vince, had upheld that simple credo, the wrestling business would be in a hell of a lot better shape than it is today.

Well put, Dad. I couldn’t agree more.

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When the smoke had cleared after Montreal, Bret appeared to have come out of it in pretty good shape, or so one would think. When he went to WCW, he had a contract that paid him considerably more than he’d been making in the WWF and the whole thing had made him a martyr, which served to enhance his marketability. Unfortunately though, Bret couldn’t seem to get over the whole thing and, as a result, the Montreal screw job would come to exact a heavy toll — not just on him but on so many others, as well.