Straight from the Hart (42 page)

On the morning of October 14, I happened to be teaching near the Rockyview Hospital and found I had a spare in the last period of the morning, so I decided to drop in to see him. I’d been up to visit a few times since he was admitted but on previous occasions, he’d been occupied with nurses, doctors or other visitors, so I hadn’t really had much of a chance to talk with him. This time around though, he was all by himself, having just finished his breakfast. When I arrived, he was sitting in a chair, gazing out the window on a glorious autumn day, with the sun illuminating the Elbow River Valley and the majestic Rocky Mountains in the horizon. My dad seemed pleased to see me and beckoned me
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BRUCE HART
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to pull up a chair. He then passed me a copy of
Sports Illustrated
that he’d been reading and asked me to check out this article on pro wrestling.

The article, which was entitled “In Need of a Fix,” with a sub-heading suggesting that “Vince McMahon’s once mighty wrestling empire is on the ropes.” To support that contention, the article cited that annual revenue was down $31 million; that WWE stock had dropped sixty-three percent in the last three years, while ratings for
RAW
and
SmackDown!
had been falling just as fast. In summary, it declared that “wrestling has rarely been this sickly” and then posed the sobering rhetorical question, “Is this how it ends — not with a twenty-first century heir to Gorgeous George, but with a fake gay wedding ceremony and two women wrestlers kissing in mid-ring while an announcer gushes about hot lesbian action?”

By no means was this the first time I’d seen a major magazine or newspaper take potshots at wrestling. In fact, during the boom era of Hulkamania, it was fairly common to see magazines like
Time
or
Sports Illustrated
take swipes at the wrestling business — for being rigged, politically incorrect or for pushing the boundaries of good taste. What I found most disconcerting about this article was that
Sports Illustrated
was almost feeling sorry for the poor, pathetic wrestling business — almost in anticipation of its imminent demise, kind of like when some famous person who is terminally ill and on his last legs (John Wayne and Henry Fonda, during their farewell appearances at the Academy Awards come to mind) is being paraded and put over for the last time.

I mentioned that to my dad and he said he felt exactly the same. In those last years — perhaps because he was getting on in years and was increasingly hard of hearing — a lot of people tended to think my dad was becoming a bit senile or beginning to slip, but that morning, he was lucid and clear thinking, as he began his dissertation on the wrestling business.

Gazing out the window to collect his thoughts, he told me that when he first broke into the wrestling business back in New York in the 1940s, wrestlers were accorded the same respect as other athletes of renown and recalled having rubbed shoulders with icons from the New York sports scene, including Jack Dempsey, Joe DiMaggio, Babe Ruth and Jesse Owens as well as heavyweights
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from the entertainment spectrum, such as Frank Sinatra and Humphrey Bogart

— all of whom, he said, treated the wrestlers as equals.

Since a lot of people had attributed wrestling’s demise to Vince McMahon’s ill-conceived decision to expose the business (divulging that it was a work), I queried as to whether my dad felt that had been part of the problem. I was somewhat surprised when he replied that while he hadn’t approved of it, nonetheless, he didn’t really think that had been that big of a factor. He pointed out that there had been cynicism about wrestling being on the level as far back as Frank Gotch and George Hackenschmidt’s big tilt back in 1911 and that, over the years, wrestling had been exposed several times before Vince did it in the ’80s.

He said that as far as he was concerned, wrestling, no matter which way you sliced it, was either sport or it was entertainment, if not a combination of the two. By that token since both athletes and entertainers were revered, admired and placed on lofty pedestals by the media and the public, then so, too, should wrestlers.

When it was put in that context, I had to agree with him and was about to grant him that . . . but before I could, he stopped me and said that wrestling

— specifically the WWE — had no one but itself to blame for the way it had come to be perceived. He said that he couldn’t blame the media or the fans for knocking it — given the gay weddings, hot lesbian action and assorted other bullshit that had been inflicted on the fans in the past decade. Perhaps the biggest indication, in his estimation, that traditional wrestling fans had turned their back on the WWE was the recent meteoric rise in popularity of UFC, Pride and mixed martial arts in general, which, he said, wasn’t much different than what pro wrestling had resembled back in the day — minus the Octagon.

He then pointed out that if a person didn’t have any respect for themselves —

which seemed to be the case with the WWE — then how the hell could they expect anyone else to respect them either?

He speculated that one of the likely reasons wrestlers seemed to have so little respect for the business was that, unlike in the old days, so few of them had been made to pay their dues the way they had in the Dungeon and other hardscrabble
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environments, where their mettle was severely tested before they were deemed worthy of being welcomed into the wrestling fraternity. The mission of men like Billy Riley, Lou Thesz, Dory Funk Sr., Verne Gagne, Gene LeBell, Karl Gotch and Hiro Matsuda was never to abuse or to infict pain, but to instill respect. He said that these days, all too often, the guys coming into the business hadn’t paid their dues and had been pushed simply because they had impressive physiques or whatever else, and, as such, not only didn’t they have much respect for it, but they didn’t have much passion for it either. Without passion, he said, it was damn near impossible to attain any level of greatness at anything.

He also said that another significant reason for wrestling’s present sorry state had been the erosion of the sport at the grassroots level — specifically, the disappearance of the smaller promotions, or territories as they used to be called.

The territories had not only been where all the great workers had broken in and, by trial and error, painstakingly honed their craft, but the territories were also where generations of wrestling fans had come to develop their passion for the sport. My father shook his head somewhat ruefully and said he’d never quite been able to figure out why Vince McMahon Jr. had gone out of his way to systematically wipe out the territories — as they were never any threat to him and were a reliable means of supplying him with talent, testing marketing concepts and renewing his fan base.

If anything, he figured that Vince should have thrown the territories a bone, rather than snuffing them out, and pondered where the NHL would be now if it had chosen to do away with minor and youth hockey leagues — or what the state of the NFL or the NBA would be today if they’d destroyed football and basketball at the grassroots levels.

He also suggested that with the elimination of the territories and the significant drop-off in the number of great workers, it was no coincidence that the WWE now had to resort to excessive gimmickry — sex, sleaze, slapstick and other crap — as cheap compensation for wrestling. It wasn’t the way to go because, as he put it, “There are no shortcuts to any place that’s really worth going to.”

It wasn’t the first time wrestling had faced this dilemma, he argued. As far back as the 1940s, after Gorgeous George had become the rage, there
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was a proliferation of gimmickry — “freaks, geeks and misfits,” he called it.

And almost overnight the business hit the skids. At that time, a number of the more conventional promoters, himself included, got together and made a conscientious effort to bring wrestling back to the middle of the road, to restore wrestling’s image and make fans feel they were a part of the equation. It created a stability that would last for almost forty years — until the WWF’s rise.

He believed it was key for the WWF to stop bullshitting itself — and everyone else — that there were no problems and everything was fine. Until it looked itself in the mirror and took the proverbial bull by the horns, he didn’t see things getting much better.

At that point, one of my dad’s nurses interrupted us and said that she needed to take my dad in for some tests. He extended his big left paw and gave me one of his patented bone-crushing handshakes and smiled — as if he was glad to have gotten all of that off his chest, and I bid him farewell.

Two days later, I was driving home from school when I heard on the radio that my dad had passed away that morning. I was amazed at the reaction — it received front page coverage in newspapers, not just in Calgary, but across the country. His passing was news on radio and television, locally, nationally and internationally. It was as if a head of state, a Churchill or a Regan, or an iconic movie star or athlete, a Paul Newman or Rocket Richard had died. All of it would have pleased my dad, but it probably would have humbled him as well because, as Dory Funk Sr. had put it, he’d never become a mark for himself.

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For a long time after my dad’s death, I found myself reflecting on his impassioned take on the wrestling business and wondered about passing it on to Vince Almighty. Given the ongoing acrimony between the Harts — specifically Bret who still refused to bury the hatchet — and the WWE, I never bothered. I figured it would only fall on deaf ears.

In January 2010, as a new decade was dawning, like many of you I was surprised to learn that hell
had
frozen over. My beloved brother Bret, nearly thirteen years after the big blowoff in Montreal, resurfaced on
Monday Night
RAW
. From there, he shot an angle that would lead to his big showdown with Vinnie Mac at WrestleMania XXVI in Phoenix.

As part of the story line and to show their good intentions, the WWE flew me, my brothers, sisters and assorted nieces and nephews in as well. Then, to cap my surprise, they invited me to participate in the match — as the guest referee.

On the morning of Wrestlemania, the WWE had us assemble at the stadium and we were given the script for the match. We were told it was going to be a no-disqualification bout, and the rest of the Hart clan would be stationed
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around the ring to act as “lumberjacks,” just in case Vinnie Mac had anything up his sleeve.

The match would consist of Bret kicking the shit out of Vince from start to finish — battering and bashing him with a claw bar and a steel chair and occasionally throwing him out to the lumberjacks (who would also beat the crap out of him) — while I, as ref, would aid and abet the Hitman as well. For the finish, of course, Bret was to apply the sharpshooter. Vince would then submit, and the Harts would come into the ring and abuse him a bit more, just for good measure.

When they ran it by me, I began to shake my head. To my way of thinking, it was far too one sided. What was the point of having Bret and his entire family gang up to beat the living crap out of a defenseless sixty-year-old non-wrestler?

Worse, I worried it might even transform poor Vince into a sympathetic figure

— which, as far as I knew, wasn’t the desired effect.