Hitman My Real Life in the Cartoon World (7 page)

Dean hung around the business but was too small. Wayne was a ref, and became famous as a great wheelman who could drive through the most godawful weather and get the wrestlers to the shows, alive and on time. Bruce was taught the art by an old Mexican hand; despite being too small and light, he had a fever for wrestling, and at that time, he may well have been the Hart who wanted most to succeed in the ring. As hard as he tried, Bruce just was not a good worker. When he broke his shoulder, Keith, who was bigger than Bruce and an amateur on the University of Saskatchewan wrestling team, stepped into Bruce’s spot until he recovered. Keith turned out to be a decent worker, with a better sense of the business than Bruce, and ended up taking a year off from university to wrestle fulltime. Keith ran things for Stu, while Bruce tagged up with Smith, who, in many ways, had more natural ability as a worker than either Keith or Bruce. But Smith lacked the drive to put in a real effort and squandered every chance my parents gave him. I didn’t want to follow in any of their footsteps.

Having unloaded Clearwater Beach, my dad now had to sell the prime acreage in front of Hart house, out of necessity, for $1.5 million. We took the news with mixed emotions; our childhood surroundings would be changing, but it was one more chance for the Harts to get out of the poor house.

By April I was working at Occidental Petroleum, and I had a plan. My friend Jim Cummings and I wanted to go to film school together and start a movie production company; we were both accepted to Mount Royal College in Calgary for the term that started in February 1977.

That summer Jim and I bought a Eumig 8 mm movie camera. One of our precollege epic action features was a spoof of monster flicks called The Lizard, which starred my pet iguana Snyder, some model cars that we painted to match the ones in Stu’s yard and a Chihuahua named Spike. I bought a beat-up old Ford Falcon and we got a simple-minded guy named Eugene, whom we knew from hanging out at the pavilion, to drive it, screaming in mock terror, “Oh no! It’s the lizard!” Production came to a screeching halt when Snyder suddenly died.

The night before the first day of film school, Jim backed out. Construction was booming in the province, and he decided it would be more practical for him to keep working with his dad at a surveying job.

When college started in February, I had a hard time staying focused. At the tail end of the wrestling season that spring, I was summoned by the coach and asked to pull off a win at the collegiate amateur wrestling championships. Somehow, even after a two-year layoff, I succeeded, but my grades were in the toilet. After one semester I abandoned my dream of making movies. I got a job raking leaves and digging graves at Queen’s Park Cemetery and contemplated what I wanted to do with my life.

That July, at my dad’s Stampede show, I watched the new NWA Champion Harley Race defend his title against seven-foot-four André The Giant. Both Harley and André were friendly to me. They could see I was going to be the biggest of Stu’s boys and had wrestling in my blood: Soon Verne Gagne, visiting kingpin of the rival American Wrestling Association (AWA), who was an old friend of Stu’s, invited me to Minneapolis so he could personally train me, and I began rethinking a career as a pro wrestler. My brothers were making out okay. Surely I could be as good as them, or better. I told myself to take Verne Gagne up on his offer. I decided to moonlight as a referee a couple of nights a week for my father, who was now running Stampede Wrestling year-round; I’d work the short trips and keep my day job to save up money to go down to Minneapolis in the spring.

I finally got smartened up to the business by Keith and the rest of the boys on a drive up to Red Deer. Certainly I’d suspected that on some level there was unreality in wrestling, but I’d never really clued in. That’s how careful the wrestling profession was back then with keeping the illusion alive for the fans.

When my cemetery job was over for the season, I became a fulltime referee and driver. Business was awful, but I was getting my first real taste of wrestling life, driving the whole circuit, listening to rock ’n’ roll and drinking beer with the wrestlers, setting up the ring and giving the wrestlers the finishes of their matches as told to me by the booker, Leo Burke, a great French-Canadian wrestler out of the Maritimes.

Leo became a huge influence on me, teaching me right from wrong when it came to booking. He stressed the simple things, like when it made sense for a wrestler to bleed, or get juice; how to work a match, an angle, a program; when to do a count-out or a disqualification; who should go over and who shouldn’t; and not to repeat the same things week after week and risk boring the fans.

A kid named Jimmy Rougeau (who, years later, would be known as The Mountie in the WWF) had just begun to work the territory. For working a fifteen-minute match every night, he was making double the money I was. I still intended to go to Minneapolis and break in, and then come back to work for my dad. But then, on a long, snowy drive home from a show, two well-respected Japanese wrestlers offered to teach me pro wrestling. I figured, why wait for Minneapolis?

Katsuji Adachi (who worked as Mr. Hito) and Kazuo Sakurada kindly began instructing me in the dungeon at Hart house. I thought I could learn this wrestling stuff in a week or so, but they continued to show up every morning, week after week, putting me through basic training for three or four hours a day. I realized that I’d been studying the art of pro wrestling my whole life, analyzing the moves of every wrestler I ever saw: Canadians, Americans, Japanese, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans and Brits; big and small, real and unreal; the high flyers, the tough guys, the greenhorns and the great champions. Though I had a lot to learn in terms of the mechanics, it began to dawn on me that maybe, just maybe, pro wrestling had been my destiny all along.

Hito looked Inuit and had a long, shaggy mane of black hair. Sakurada reminded me of a gray seal, with a shaved head and a thin mustache. Both men had been sumo wrestlers who weighed more than 350 pounds each, but they’d trimmed down to an agile 250 pounds. Were they tough? One night Hito and Sakurada mopped the floor with an entire hockey team at the Diamond Head lounge in Saskatoon, kicking bodies in the air like soccer balls. But they were never troublemakers, unless given reason to be.

I was a skinny kid then, with shoulder-length brown hair, six feet tall and weighing 198 pounds. I took to the training like a fish to water. A great many wrestlers boasted about coming out of Stu’s dungeon, and I would too. My father taught me submission wrestling down there, but Hito and Sakurada taught me pro wrestling. I owe them everything. I learned to perfect my balance; how to lock up, which is when wrestlers first make physical contact during a match; how to throw and be thrown; how to make the desired sound when hitting the mat; and how to break my fall using my feet and hands, head tucked. I knew that a good worker never makes contact with bone, never forces things. I learned to protect knees, shoulders, hips, teeth and eyes. The most important rule of all was to protect my opponent, not myself, because he was putting his trust, his life, in my hands. If someone got hurt, there was usually no compensation, no matter whose fault it was.

I ended each training session with Hito and Sakurada by taking fifty slams in a row. With every one I was taught simple things some wrestlers never learn, like how to get up from lying flat on my back by throwing out my leg and using my elbows to roll to my knees.

At the end of each session I’d put on some tea, and my dad would join us in the dining room. Hito would enthusiastically tell him that I was very good, that I had a natural, catlike instinct when it came to falling. “This one I’m never see, him besto one, him fan-tas-tic bump. Stu, this one you see.

Him become your best son!”

My dad would smile and tell him that I was a good amateur too, that I could turn around in my own skin. He never pushed me to become a pro; he believed I could still go to the Olympics or the Commonwealth Games if I wanted. He once put it to me this way: “Don’t you want to walk down the street and hear people say, there goes Bret Hart; he won a gold medal in wrestling?” I replied, “I’d rather drive by those very same people in a brand-new car.”

Apart from training, my life in those days consisted of driving the wrestlers and refereeing matches.

We’d do a Friday night show in Calgary, then make the three-hour drive to Edmonton on Saturday, driving back after the show in the middle of the night. We’d be home in Calgary for Sunday, when we’d have our booking and general business meeting at Hart house. On Monday, we’d drive 400

miles to Saskatoon, staying in a sleazy hotel every Monday night, where the wrestlers got drunk and picked up middle-aged women, some of whom had been sleeping around with wrestlers for years.

On Tuesday, we’d drive the 180 miles from Saskatoon to Regina. Sometimes we’d stay over, but often we’d drive the 500 miles back to Calgary after the show, arriving with the sunrise on Wednesday morning. Wednesdays it was 150 miles north to Red Deer, then back after the show.

Thursdays, 225 miles south to Lethbridge and back. This went on every week of the year. And we could just as easily find ourselves adding spot shows in Montana, British Columbia or way up north.

In Saskatoon, I usually ended up playing rummy in John Foley’s room. John was from Wigan, England. He wasn’t a big man, but he’d been a feared shooter and a bully in his day. Story had it that, somewhere down south, as he was roughing up the two Poffo boys, Randy and Lanny, their dad, Angelo, hit the ring, and the three of them beat Foley senseless for real. It was one story this old shooter couldn’t seem to live down. He was now a harmless, jolly old boozer with a little pot-belly and a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. He loved singing old songs as we drove and telling the same tired old jokes every night.

I was the only Hart making road trips at that time; Stu didn’t travel anymore, except for the hop up to Edmonton. Bruce and Keith had gone back to university, Wayne was in art school and Smith and Dean were too busy scheming and dreaming to actually work at anything.

That April, snowstorms buried houses all across the Prairies. One night the van sputtered to a stop in the middle of nowhere, thirty miles outside of Regina. A full crew was packed in like sardines: Hito; Sakurada; Little Tokyo, a midget wrestler whose usual good nature took a turn to the dark side when he drank; several black wrestlers, including Kasavubu, a big friendly kid out of Akron, Ohio, who talked and acted like a giant-sized Gary Coleman; Jerry Morrow, a hardworking French-speaking wrestler from Martinique who could sell a beating so well that it would bring tears to your eyes; George Wells, a natural athlete who was one of the best CFL tackles to ever play and a star with the Saskatchewan Roughriders; and the quiet, easygoing, hairy-faced Cuban Assassin who worked hard, never complained and carried a knife tucked in his boot in case anybody decided to get cute with him in the ring. Then there was Oki Shikina, a fat, bald, over-the-hill Mexican with a Fu Manchu who was pretending to be Manchurian. And four midgets, including the Haiti Kid, who looked like a tiny Lou Rawls. The midgets slept on the floor or on top of the bags stacked in the back of the packed van because that was the only way to fit them in.

I had no idea why we’d broken down but knew that if we didn’t make it to Regina, we’d lose the gate money. It was damp and cold as we all climbed out of the van. I was sure that nobody in their right mind was going to stop for us. I asked everyone to huddle down in a ditch at the side of the road while I tried to wave down a passing motorist. Finally an ancient black car that may actually have been a Model T eased over to the side of the road, and I ran up and opened the door. Inside was a smartly dressed old white-haired couple who looked as if they were just coming back from church.

Before I could explain my predicament, the wrestlers rose up out of the ditch like the ragged ghosts of Genghis Khan’s army and began to run toward the car. It was scary even for me—and I knew who they all were! The old woman nearly fainted as her husband clenched his teeth in fear and floored it, with me hanging on to the open door, running alongside the car, trying to tell them not to worry.

It was hard not to laugh as they sped off, leaving a crowd of midgets and giants shouting and shaking their fists. I managed to get everyone to stay hidden in the ditch long enough so that I could explain things to the next car that pulled over. Miraculously, we made the town, and the van was ready to go again by the time the show was over.

Back in Calgary, Hito and Sakurada explained to me that because of the low ceiling and the fact that there was no ring, ring posts or ring ropes in the dungeon, there was nothing more they could teach me. I protested: “When do I learn how to do drop kicks and throw punches, do all those fancy moves?” Hito grinned. “The rest you learn by yourself. You learn as you go.”

They thought I was ready, and I knew I wasn’t. But fate stepped in.

4

PUERTO RICO

I GOT TALKED INTO making my unofficial debut in Saskatoon on May 2, 1978. Stu was one wrestler short, and it was as simple as that. Being green here wouldn’t hurt the ring rep I needed to build as a Hart in Calgary; I’d appear before the usual crowd of about one hundred fans, which consisted mostly of busloads of mentally challenged kids, a handful of diehards and a few drunks. I would tag up with an old veteran wrestler named Paddy Ryan, a thick, rugged mick, as big and round as a cement truck. All I really needed to do was sell—make it look like my opponents were getting the better of me—which would be easy since Paddy and I would be working with Hito and Sakurada. I walked out that night pale, skinny and cold, and Hito and Sakurada kicked and slammed me so hard I thought I’d really pissed them off. After the match they praised me, explaining, “Stiff okay!” For the handful of dedicated fans who knew I was normally just a referee, and that I was a rookie, it was necessary to protect the business, keep it real. Stiff was as real as it got.

After the matches that night, I relaxed at the hotel bar drinking draft with Paddy Ryan and was more than proud of myself. It meant a lot to me when an old fan came by and said, “Hey, Hart, you done good out there tonight!”