Hitman My Real Life in the Cartoon World (48 page)

What had started the Feds looking at Zahorian in the first place and whether they’d been after Zahorian himself or had simply used him as a stepping stone to try to get to McMahon, no one knew.

The fact is that prior to the Zahorian indictment, Superstar Billy Graham and Bruno Sammartino had made negative comments about the WWF to the media and the Feds, claiming that 95 percent of WWF wrestlers were abusing steroids. Zahorian’s testimony confirmed that. Graham had become severely crippled in recent years, and he blamed it on steroid abuse, painting himself as an unfortunate guinea pig from a time when the dangers of steroids were not known. He said he was speaking out to save a new generation of wrestlers from ending up in a wheelchair like he did. The media circled the scandal like sharks in a feeding frenzy.

As soon as Zahorian was found guilty, Vince called a meeting to let his wrestlers know that starting in just a few weeks he would voluntarily implement a drug testing policy even stricter than the one used for Olympic athletes: Everyone had to get off the juice. He made it clear that this time it would be impossible to cheat because there would be two people watching you piss in a cup.

In June 1991, I?had started writing a weekly column for the Calgary Sun about the wrestling life, and the first one also promoted the WWF card for the upcoming Stampede Week. TVs were going to be in Calgary and Edmonton during the 1991 Calgary Stampede. I expected Vince would figure that Calgary was the perfect place to start making me a star. I couldn’t help but ask myself what I would do if Vince really did come through with my big push and I didn’t make it. What if my self-perceptions were wrong and I didn’t get over like I always believed I would? Although I thought I was over, I didn’t really know, and I’d be heartbroken if I found out otherwise right there in my hometown of Calgary.

Pulling up to the Saddledome I could see the Pavilion and was flooded with memories; but Stampede Wrestling was no more. Foley was dead. Schultz and Dynamite were finished for good. Bad News, thank God, had been put out to pasture like a mean old bull. Bruce and Jim were still holding on to faint hope. The only two Stampede boys still really running were Davey and me. That night as I walked out to my music I was blown away by the thundering response. It touched me in a way that said, You hang in there, Bret Hart. You show ’em you’re the best!

After the tapings, Stu and Helen invited Vince and all the boys to Hart house for homemade corned beef sandwiches and beer. Davey Boy asked The Nasty Boys to stay over at Stu’s house, intentionally misleading Sags, who was severely allergic to cats, by telling him that Stu had got rid of them all.

Sags soon started sneezing and broke into a rash and was forced to flee.

Vince arrived with Pat, Howard Finkel, Terry Garvin and a black ring announcer named Mel Phillips.

Mel was something of a whipping boy for all of them, and before long Vince and Pat were doing everything they could to get Stu to stretch him in the dungeon. Stu thought they only wanted to make fun of Mel, and at first he wouldn’t go for it.

A couple of months earlier, on a bus ride somewhere in Europe, Mike Tomay, a rookie referee, made the mistake of confiding to Jacques Rougeau that one night when he shared a room with Mel Phillips he was awakened by Mel straddling him buck naked at the foot of his bed and sucking hard on his big toe!

“Then what happened?” Jacques asked.

Mike said, “I told him I didn’t like it and to stop, and he did.”

Between fits of laughter Jacques told everybody on the bus. Of course none of us could stop laughing either. When we got back to the States I had little choice but to immortalize the incident on the blackboard, adding Mel to the long-standing, ever-changing orgy with Princess Tomah and Chief.

Mic in hand and still wearing his announcing tuxedo, Mel Phillips hung by his lips from Chief’s big toe! This was a big hit with the boys, so I drew it everywhere for a while.

After an hour of prodding from Vince and Pat, Stu was finally persuaded to get his hooks on Mel.

From the kitchen, we could hear sharp screams followed by giddy laughter and grunting coming from downstairs. I hurried down to find Mel stripped down to his undershirt, slacks and socks, and inquired whether he wanted Stu to show him how to put on a flying toe hold. Neither Vince nor Pat wanted to get too close: Stu stretching either one of them would have been a beautiful thing to watch, and they knew it. Stu let Mel off easily enough, climbing off him like a forgiving spider. It turned out to be a wonderful evening for everyone, except maybe for Mel Phillips.

By mid-July the latest WWF crisis was an interview that Hogan did on The Arsenio Hall Show in which he flat-out lied and looked bad doing it. I was embarrassed hearing him say he’d never taken steroids, except once for an injury. If he’d been honest, it’s likely we’d never have heard another word about it. But now the media was all over Hogan, calling him a hypocrite because he had always preached to kids that they could be like him by saying their prayers and taking their vitamins.

Reminiscent of Tricky Dick Nixon, Hogan would find out that it’s the lie that’ll bring you down.

A few days after the interview, Hogan told me that Vince had given him direct orders that he was never to admit to taking steroids, so he had no choice but to lie. I never bought that: Nobody should be able to make you lie about something so obvious. If it’s true that Vince told him to lie, it shows the extent of Vince’s influence.

When I thought about myself and steroids, it occurred to me that all the commotion might actually benefit me. Compared to the rest of them I was relatively clean.

On August 10 in Des Moines, I posed for pictures with the Intercontinental belt, which I hadn’t even won yet, for the cover of the November issue of the WWF’s monthly magazine. I’d never known Vince to cancel a magazine cover yet, so it was a great sign that nothing was going wrong this time.

That same day, Vince called all the wrestlers to a meeting where he introduced Dr. Mauro Pasquale, a world-renowned expert on drug testing. Vince was caught off guard to find that most of the wrestlers were vehemently opposed to the drug testing; he didn’t seem to realize that a lot of the guys were physically addicted to steroids.

When the angry wrestlers called him on whether the bodybuilders in his fledgling World Bodybuilding Federation would be tested—men who had guaranteed contracts and medical benefits that the wrestlers still didn’t have, paid for with revenue generated by the wrestlers—Vince swore that in his bodybuilding federation no one would be on steroids. It seemed ridiculous to me that Vince thought clean bodybuilders could compete with steroid freaks.

At the meeting, the wrestlers were told that they would have six weeks to wean themselves, and that then Dr. Pasquale would ensure that every wrestler in the WWF had acceptable testosterone levels. If you failed a test, it would be three strikes and you’re out. It was tough for many of the steroid freaks to decide what was more important, their jobs or their ’roids.

My matches with Curt Hennig remind me of those Spy vs. Spy cartoons in Mad magazine. We were comparable in age, size and background, and we had a similar look, except that Curt’s mane was long, blond and curly. Both of us were second-generation wrestlers whose fathers were respected men in a tough business; we shared an understanding of what it was like to fill their shoes. But until I saw Curt in the locker room before the show August 26, 1991, at Madison Square Garden, I’d been anxious: The rumor was that he wouldn’t show because his back was too messed up. In fact his injury was bad enough that he’d been forced to do nothing all summer long but fish.

Aware that this match could end up being Curt’s last one, I wanted to give him the best send-off I could. He told me he’d been unable to do much to get ready and he trusted me to take care of him out there. It was a big night for me, with Stu, Helen, Bruce, Julie and my kids in the audience.

Curt had put on a little weight from not working for over two months and his back was tight. Often during the match he winced from jarring spasms. I made myself as humanly light as possible to help Curt, who gave all he had. I could actually see my mom and dad looking on from the front row of the first loge. If there was ever chemistry between two wrestlers, there was none better than that between me and Curt, who insisted that night that I kick out of his finish, the Perfectplex, something he had never done for anyone else. Going into the finish, when I was on the mat selling, Perfect pulled me to the middle of the ring, parted my legs and dropped his leg across my groin. Then he rolled backward smartly to his feet, parted my legs and went for it again, but as his leg dropped across my stomach I wrapped it with mine, hooking him into the sharpshooter from my back. I twisted to my stomach and pushed myself up to a standing position with the crowd right behind me thunderously chanting, “Let’s go, Bret!” Before I could even hold the pose long enough for Perfect to submit properly, Hebner rang the bell. In the aftermath, it was Curt’s idea that I should rip his blue singlet off and wear it over my shoulder like a battle trophy. I kissed the Intercontinental belt before I held it up over my head and paraded to all four corners, standing on the second rope bullhorning the crowd with my fingers, something I’d do for the rest of my career.

When I left the ring I took the short steps up to shake Stu’s hand and hug my mom, with the cameras following me. I’d never seen my mom this happy. It was as though she’d finally made peace with the darn wrestling business, after all these years. Stu looked so proud: Here he was, forty-five years later, back at MSG, that good-looking kid from Edmonton with the virgin ears and his cute little girlfriend from Long Beach. He grinned and clapped, nudging my mom to join in, but she couldn’t have been clapping any harder.

The only sour note for me was that Julie missed the match because she’d gone shopping. By the time I got to the hotel, she was inexplicably in a bad mood. As had become a pattern at every pay-per-view I ever brought her to, we launched into an ugly, heated quarrel, for reasons I’ve never understood. I ended up celebrating the biggest moment of my career so far at the Hardrock Cafe with Jade, Dallas and Bruce, who sat picking at his burger as though somebody had hit him over the head with a sledge hammer. He was deeply worried because back at home Andrea had been rushed to the hospital in premature labor. Every time I brought Bruce down, something went wrong, and I felt horrible for him.

I flew home from SummerSlam with Julie and the kids and found out when we arrived that Andrea had given birth to a baby boy who they named Rhett. He was so sickly that it didn’t look like he was going to pull through. The whole Hart family became gravely consumed with little Rhett fighting for his life.

26

“YOU’RE OVER, BROTHER!”

AS PART OF THE ONGOING WAR with Ted Turner, that November Vince pulled off a coup, wooing Ric Flair to his team, along with the actual WCW Champion belt, which Ric brought with him like a captured flag. I would face Flair for the first time at the New Haven TVs on November 13, and I was looking forward to finding out whether he was the best worker in the business, as all the marks and wrestling commentators generally declared. Flair was what my dad called a “routine man,” because he did the same match every night no matter who he worked with. He also liked to call every step of the match with little input from me.

For a guy nearing fifty he was in great shape. Ric took his usual bumps and cut a blistering pace.

When we talked before the match, he had suggested a finish that called for me to do a flying tackle where he’d catch me and stagger backward with the two of us toppling over the top rope only to be counted out for the finish, which would be a double DQ. It was a simple move that I’d done countless times with less skilled wrestlers, but at the end of the match, when I dove into Flair, he stood too far from the ropes, mistimed it, and didn’t have the strength to catch me, so we fell down in a heap! On the spot Ric came up with a makeshift finish that, not surprisingly, benefited him and not me. I wasn’t going to make a big deal out of it, but back in the dressing room, I was annoyed to hear Flair crying to me about what happened on the finish, implying that I had screwed up. He showed me, right then and there, that he wasn’t as great as he was supposed to be. I’d heard there were a lot of wrestlers who didn’t trust or like Flair, and I was starting to see why.

On December 3, I was in San Antonio, which I loved because I got to visit the Alamo and I always stayed at the historic Crockett Hotel right next door. After having a decent match with a relatively new arrival named Skinner on a one-time-only pay-per-view called Tuesday in Texas, I zipped over to the airport in a rented Mustang convertible to pick up Owen, who’d flown in from Germany. I’d suggested to Vince that he could team Owen with Jim and call them The New Foundation, and Vince had gone for it. I was in a great mood as I pulled up to the terminal and spotted him waiting for me curbside with a big smile. I hadn’t seen him for over a year.

Most of the wrestlers were meeting at a strip bar after the show, one of our regular hangouts in San Antonio, and as we drove over there Owen told me that things had gone well for him in Germany and that Martha was expecting their first child in March. He was happy to be back in the WWF and said he thought he could work well with Jim. I told him Jim was thrilled about it too. Jim was thrilled in general: He had finally won his settlement from U.S. Air, a whopping U.S.$380,000. Owen asked me for advice on how to handle Jim, and I told him that I’d tried just about everything but that in the end it was reverse psychology that worked best.

He shook his head as he told me how unbelievably over I was in Germany. I could tell it also meant something to him that I had the Intercontinental belt. We talked about home, about losing and missing Dean and about Rhett’s struggle in the hospital.

The previous day I’d been to El Paso, where some buddies I called Cheech and Chong had given me a giant baggie filled with Mexican dirt-weed. So, of course it figures that before the tapings in San Antonio, Vince called a meeting to inform all the wrestlers that in a few weeks drug testing would be expanded to cover any and all non-prescription drugs, including marijuana. Vince said that with the FBI and the media waiting to pounce on him, the WWF couldn’t take a chance on another scandal. I believed, and still do, that Vince’s decision was shortsighted. With weed taken off the menu, even more wrestlers wound up as alcoholics; instead of smoking a bit of weed holed up in their hotel rooms talking about the business, they roamed hotel bars drunk and on downers.