Straight from the Hart (37 page)

Bret’s fellow Hart Foundation teammates, Davey Boy, Anvil and Owen, were the first to be dragged into the mess. Even though Davey and Jim were under contract with the WWF and had been happy with how they’d been treated there, they both quit, out of protest for the way Bret had been treated. I was told later that they’d also been promised, by Bret, that Eric Bischoff would pay them more than what they’d been making in the WWF. They should have gotten it all in writing though, as, upon their arrival in the WCW, Bischoff — realizing that they’d burned their bridges with the WWF — suddenly claimed he knew nothing about the figures Bret had told them. Instead he offered them only a fraction of what they’d been expecting.

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Davey Boy and Anvil then asked Bret if he’d go to bat on their behalf, but he pretty much turned his back on them — telling them that they should have gotten it in writing beforehand and that he couldn’t do much for them. They didn’t have much choice except to accept Bischoff ’s bargain basement offer, but were furious about the whole thing.

That seemed to be the catalyst for Davey Boy, who had been having an on-and-off battle with drug addiction, to revert back to drugs, which would cost him not only his career but ultimately his life. Jim “The Anvil” Neidhart would similarly see his career and life turned upside down as well.

Owen, who remained in the WWF, didn’t take the financial hit that Davey and Jim did, but was quite decimated with the strife that ensued. In
Forgiven
by Vince Russo, the WWF booker at the time, Russo said that Owen called him shortly after the Montreal screw job “on the verge of tears” and pleaded with him, “Vince, you’ve got to help me . . . Bret is telling me that if I continue to work for Vince [McMahon] he is going to disown me as a brother.” Unfortunately, that’s pretty much what happened. Bret was steamed at Owen for choosing to remain in the WWF and I’m not sure if they ever resolved things before Owen’s unfortunate death a year and a half later — which is extremely unfortunate and, I’m sure, must have weighed heavy on Bret’s mind, after the accident.

As for Vince McMahon, the jury remains out as to how he came out of the whole fiasco. A while back I was talking to my old friend Mick Foley and he told me that, in his humble opinion, Montreal was the best thing that had ever happened to Vince or the WWF, because it exposed him as a double dealing shyster — which was the impetus for the highly successful “Mr. McMahon” heel persona. That, in turn, led to the WWF’s decision to abandon its family oriented format and opt for the adult oriented, politically incorrect, more violent, hardcore style that, at least for the short term, resulted in a jump at the gates.

While I can see Foley’s point, I’m not sure if I agree with the claim that the Montreal screw job was the best thing that ever happened to the WWF. It’s like suggesting that the Monica Lewinsky charade was the high-water mark of Bill Clinton’s political career.

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As for the other main player in that fiasco, Shawn Michaels, one would be hard pressed to say that his image didn’t suffer as a result. Even though he was one of the best workers of our generation and a surefire Hall of Famer, the whole unseemly affair still tends to tarnish his legacy — kind of like the anabolic allegations against Mark McGwire. I’m sure the Heartbreak Kid regrets ever having been a part of it.

As far as I’m concerned, the biggest casualty of the infamous Montreal screw job has been the wrestling business itself — which was needlessly dragged through the coals and incurred a lot of derision and ridicule as a result. I’m not sure that it’s ever really recovered from it.

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While the WWF’s celebrated Canadian Stampede pay-per-view earlier in the year had been a source of frustration and disappointment for me on a personal level, it had nonetheless been acclaimed as a huge success, which resulted in a great deal of interest in reviving Stampede Wrestling once again.

My dad, my brother Ross and I — who owned the Stampede Wrestling trademark — had been approached many times since we had shut down back in 1989 about starting up the legendary promotion again; however, most of the interested parties didn’t have two cents to rub together. After the Canadian Stampede though, some serious players came around, including former world middleweight boxing champion, Donny Lalonde, world and Olympic curling champion Ed Lukowich and movers and shakers on the Calgary sports and business scene, including Ron Folstad, Trevor Countryman, Joe Paulowicz, Bill Bell and Wendell Wilkes.

I was flattered, but told the prospective investors that one of the main reasons we’d been forced to shut down before was that the WWF was always raiding our talent and that if this was going to work, we needed to establish some kind of working agreement — kind of like the type of relationship a triple-A baseball team might have with a major league team, so that if the WWF was taking our
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stars, they had to subsidize us and also augment our cards with established stars and that type of thing.

I spoke to my brother Owen, who was still working for the WWF, and asked him to extend some feelers on our behalf. He called me back and said that the WWF had no desire to be giving handouts to anyone just wanting to start up a wrestling promotion, but that if we were able to show we were legit by getting the promotion up and running first, they might be interested in coming onboard.

That wasn’t exactly the news I’d been hoping to hear, but I could see where they were coming from and took that back to the investors, who decided to proceed.

Ross and I spent the fall and winter of 1998 preparing for the re-launch of the new Stampede Wrestling, lining up television, lining up towns and training new recruits down in the Dungeon. We had our pilot television show on the new A-Channel in February and the reviews were generally favorable — so much so that the network gave us the thumbs-up for a weekly television slot on Saturday afternoons, commencing in May. It was precisely the news we’d been hoping for.

When we opened up the promotion, full-time in May 1999, our gates that first week were good. Our young talent — in particular, my nephew Harry Smith (son of Davey Boy, now wrestling in the WWE as David Hart Smith), my niece Natalya Neidhart, T. J. Wilson (now Tyson Kidd in the WWE), Robbie Dicks, “Quick Kick” Kirk Melnyk, “Principal” Dick Pound and the Calgary Stampeders’ captain, Marvin Pope — all elicited rave reviews, which was quite encouraging.

On Sunday morning, May 23 — the day after our first week of shows — my brother Owen called me, long distance from Kansas City, to see how the shows had gone. When I related that the shows had all gone extremely well, Owen said he was pleased and was now quite confident he could pitch the WWF to come onboard. He told me that he’d be talking to Vince McMahon later that night — after the pay-per-views they were having. He would run it by him and get back to me when he was in Calgary later that week.

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The big item on the agenda for most people in our family on May 23 was the final of the Memorial Cup tournament for national junior hockey supremacy between the Ottawa 67’s and the Calgary Hitmen — of which my brother Bret was part owner. The game was a thriller, going into overtime, before the Hitmen lost in overtime — which was kind of a downer, but wouldn’t compare to what transpired later on that day.

After the hockey game, we headed up to my parents’ place for Sunday dinner

— a weekly ritual among most in the family. Dinner that evening was my mother’s spaghetti, which was a family favorite. Just after our usual meet and greet we sat down to dinner in the dining room when the phone rang. Someone

— I think it was my sister Alison — went back into the kitchen to answer it. A few seconds later, I heard this ear-piercing shriek and she staggered back into the dining room, ashen faced, and gasped, “Owen’s dead!” When we pressed her for details, she said she didn’t have any, other than he’d been injured from a fall and had been pronounced dead in the ring at the show in Kansas City. As you can imagine, the scene at the dinner table was suddenly completely insane, with everyone trying to wrap their heads around what had happened. I was sitting beside my mother at the far end of the table and she
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was weeping inconsolably, while, at the other end of the table, my dad was just staring ahead, impassively. For some reason — perhaps it was wishful thinking

— I kept telling myself that it must be a work: some kind of contrived fake death scene, which the WWF has, on occasion, pulled. As I surveyed everyone at the table crying though, I was half pissed off that they hadn’t at least chosen to let us know beforehand.

The first time it began to dawn on me that it might not be a work and that he actually was dead was when Tammi Christopher — the sports reporter from CFCN television and a family friend — showed up at the house, teary eyed and confirmed that it was no work. My initial reaction was of sadness and disbelief, but after I’d been appraised at how he’d been killed — on some silly entrance stunt from the ceiling of the arena — I was steamed.

After commiserating with Tammi, we all headed over to Owen’s house —

which was only about five minutes away — to offer our condolences and to do what we could to comfort his wife, Martha. As you can imagine, she was beside herself with sorrow, but when we endeavored to extend our sympathy, she was extremely cold and also seemed half angry. She made a point of telling my parents how much she’d always hated the wrestling business and that Owen had never really wanted to be in it either but had been pushed into it by our family and that he had been looking forward to getting out of it.