Hitman My Real Life in the Cartoon World (81 page)

“Vince senior never gave me any warning about dropping the belt either. He gave me less than an hour’s notice. I told him, you should prepare me for this.” Pedro told me to watch my back, stand up for myself and never let them destroy me. Harley Race filled my heart when he said, “I’m proud of you, Bret.” I felt like a scrappy alley cat that had got in an ugly fight with a big, vicious dog; even though I was limping off, that dog was limping off too.

Vince was deep in damage-control mode. He gave a big talk to all the wrestlers at Corn-wall TVs on November 11, 1997, saying that he did what he did to me for the sake of the boys and the business.

Owen told me that nobody believed a word he said, but Vince’s words seemed to do a number on Carlo, who did an about-face, calling me to say that Vince’s explanation made a lot of sense to him. I kept my disappointment with him to myself, but distanced myself a bit from him after that.

On November 24, Vince broke his promise that he would never tarnish my character after I was gone, the way he’d done to Hogan and Macho. First he teased the audience into thinking that I was going to appear on Raw, and then he had Shawn parade out a Mexican midget wrestler wearing a leather jacket and a Hitman Halloween mask. Hunter and Shawn quipped that they always knew The Hitman was short on talent, charisma and stature. I have to admit that I was hurt by such stunts. I was also worried about starting at WCW, though I kept a brave face for my family and the fans.

Harley had warned me that WCW was a den of wolves too.

On my first visit to the WCW offices in Atlanta on December 14, I bumped into Hogan, Macho and Eric Bischoff, who smiled confidently at me as he said, “If you think you’re a big star now, you’re going to be an even bigger star when I’m done with you!” Hogan said what’d happened between him and me before he left the WWF was all Vince’s fault. He said that Vince had bragged to him that he loved to ride the boys into the ground, “then cook and eat ’em.” The truth was that Hogan didn’t put me over when he had the chance for his own reasons. Because we needed to work together, however, I shook his hand when he offered it and told him I was sorry for anything I said about him after he left the WWF. He grinned back like I was an old friend. He also surprised me by giving me a compliment: He said he thought I was the best interview in the business now, even though I knew that honor really belonged to Stone Cold.

I made my WCW debut the next day on a sold-out live Nitro in Charlotte, North Carolina. I was a bit surprised that it didn’t feel that much different to me than a WWF show. WCW was loaded with hard-working Mexican boys. I’d never been much of a Lu-cha Libre fan until I saw the dedication and effort those wrestlers put in every night. In particular, I loved the amazing work of young Rey Mysterio Jr., a masked lightweight Mexican who could spin through, up and over the ropes with backflips and beautiful dives and rolls. In my opinion, he is the most talented Mexican wrestler there has ever been. I felt mucho respect from all the Mexican boys as they came to me to shake my hand.

Paul Wight, the new Giant of wrestling at seven-foot-two and four hundred pounds, lumbered up to say hello. There were old-timers, such as Roddy Piper and Ric Flair, and great young talent, including powerhouse Booker T and, from the Stampede territory, Chris Benoit and Chris Jericho. Even Miss Elizabeth was there, now working as Lex Luger’s valet. Curt Hennig gave me a big, warm smile and a slap on the back.

I felt honored to shake Rick Rude’s hand. He’d been at a taped Raw on November 17, which aired on November 24, just as he walked out live on Nitro. This was the first and only time a wrestler appeared for both organizations on TV at the same time. Raw was taped on alternate weeks from the live Nitros, and Bischoff liked to give out the results of Raw matches before they aired. Rude walked out there and delivered a well-spoken monologue about the rights and wrongs of professional wrestling. He said it was wrong for Shawn to claim he was the World Champion when Vince had cheated me out of the title. A lot of wrestlers were disgusted by what Vince had done in Montreal, but Rick Rude was one of the few who actually quit the WWF for good over it.

Mick Foley had quit too and missed a Raw but then returned the next day. He was finally making a name for himself as Mankind. For him, going back to WCW would have been career suicide. Steve Austin called to tell me how sorry he was that it ended up this way for me but warned me that WCW

was a black hole of bad booking and bad organization. Ken Shamrock had been so furious that he’d also wanted to quit, but I advised him to do what was best for his family and he finally elected to stay, though he said, “I’ll always be one of your crew, Bret.” Then he was quoted in a story in Maclean’s magazine on the screwjob, saying, “I can’t speak for what happened between Vince McMahon and Bret Hart, but I can say that Bret Hart was the kind of guy everyone looked up to.”

Davey had to pay a $150,000 penalty to get out of his WWF contract in order to jump to WCW. For him, I was just the excuse: Quitting was more about letting down his dying sister in Birmingham than it was about Vince betraying me over the way I got to leave. One week after Rude left the WWF, Jim was brought out to the ring to be humiliated and disgraced by Shawn and Hunter as part of a storyline, and then he was fired. Luckily, Eric liked Jim enough to sign him to a $150,-000-a-year deal.

I was glad to have Jim, Davey and Rude around.

That first night in the WCW dressing room in Charlotte, I also met Steve Borden, known as Sting. This hard-working pioneer of WCW was a well-built, born-again Christian with long, dark hair who worked a white-painted-face gimmick based on the movie The Crow; for his entrance, he was lowered from the rafters on a steel cable. He’d been famous for his scorpion death lock long before I ever came up with my own variation of it: the sharpshooter.

I was also impressed with the look of Bill Goldberg, a muscle-packed former NFLer who went simply by his last name. Bill was forced to retire from football after badly tearing an abdominal muscle. His former head coach, Bill Sleeman, later told me that if he had a whole team of Bill Goldbergs, he’d win the Super Bowl every year. Goldberg was bald-headed, with an angry face punctuated by a goatee—all he needed to be intimidating was simple black trunks and low-cut black boots. He made his entrance to dramatic marching music, pausing just long enough to pound his chest in a haze of billowing smoke. He was destined to be WCW’s new weapon in the battle of supremacy against Vince. Unfortunately, Bill was green and was injuring a lot of guys too.

I was bedazzled enough by that sold-out Nitro that for the first time I felt that WCW might actually work out for me. I had a great first interview and got a good pop when I said: “Nobody knows better than me what it’s like to get screwed by a referee.” That comment set me up to referee Hogan’s World title match with Sting at the Starrcade ’97 pay-per-view in Washington, D.C., on December 28.

Personally, I thought that appearing as a referee would be a lackluster debut, but what did I know?

What did I care? I wanted to comply, to do whatever they asked to the best of my ability—win, lose or draw—then pick up my check and come home safe. Nobody would accuse me of taking this business too seriously ever again.

The following morning at the Charlotte airport, I ran right into none other than Earl and Dave Hebner. Earl came up to me with his hand out and an apologetic look on his face. I refused to shake his hand, warning him calmly, “Don’t talk to me.” He insisted that he didn’t know what was up with Shawn and Vince until he was on his way out to the ring in Montreal.

“What d’ya mean you didn’t know? I told you, Earl! You promised me, swore on your kids!” But in the end, I forgave him. I knew that Vince held Earl’s livelihood in his hands, and the only thing Earl was guilty of was not having the guts to take a stand against the man who wrote the checks. Then Dave asked me if I thought Bischoff would take either him or Earl on, and I told him I’d ask.

Vince’s big news was that he was bringing in Mike Tyson to work an angle with Austin leading up to WrestleMania XIV, where Tyson would guest ref a main-event title match between Shawn and Stone Cold. At first, Bischoff laughed it off, saying he’d turned Tyson down. But then the WWF’s ratings went through the roof and Bischoff wasn’t laughing anymore. All I could think about was how Vince told me he was in such financial peril he couldn’t afford to live up to our contract, yet he was paying Tyson over $3 million for a few hours of work.

Tyson was part of a storyline with Stone Cold, who turned out to be the perfect antihero to go nose to nose with Vince’s own new TV persona: Vince had become a dictatorial heel boss! To this point, Vince had been known to the majority of wrestling fans mainly as a ringside announcer. With the truth out about what he’d done to me, he decided to capitalize on the intense heat by turning himself heel and making the betrayal all part of the “storyline.” Owen was forced to confront Vince as part of the storyline, because the corrupt wicked promoter had screwed over his big brother. On Raw, Shawn and Hunter called Owen a nugget of shit that didn’t quite get flushed down the toilet and, of course, I was the big, smelly turd. I admired how Owen refused to let Shawn or Hunter get to him, ignoring their swipes as if they didn’t matter. Owen put Shawn over, and Shawn purposely potatoed him at one point, splitting his head open. Like me, Owen found himself making truces with Shawn while at the same time never trusting anything Shawn said or did.

Vince kept working angles based on what he’d done to me for real. It not only made the Montreal screwjob seem less significant, it made an increasing number of fans wonder if everything that happened between Vince and me was “only” the biggest work in the history of the business.

Meanwhile, Paul Jay and his crew were quietly holed up in their studio in Toronto, meticulously editing the documentary. Paul kept telling me it would be my vindication, and I wanted to believe him.

Back at home, things were not good. For eighteen years, I’d yearned to be home. Now that I was home more, Julie and I found that we were leading completely different lives. We had a lousy Christmas and barely even spoke to each other. She served a beautiful Christmas dinner on paper plates. The kids were too consumed with all their presents to notice her gesture, which only deepened her already dark mood. The truth was that none of us wanted to piss her off any further. I was dragging my heart around over what Vince had done to me, and Julie snapped at me to get over it. She was also threatening to divorce me again.

I surrounded myself with my sadness—I missed my old friends, the fans, all kinds of people from the WWF circuit, from hotels, gyms, restaurants, clubs, arenas and airports. I had also lost track of my old loves, some of whom I missed terribly, but the truth was I didn’t want them to see me this way. I was hurt, vulnerable, changed: I had lost faith in the world. Bischoff wasn’t going to ask me to wrestle until late January 1998, and I couldn’t do any weight training because of my broken hand. I kept in shape through that unseasonably warm, brown Christmas in Calgary by riding my bike all over town.

I’d barely seen Owen or spoken with him since Survivor Series. On Boxing Day, up at Hart house, he seemed surprised when I greeted him warmly. He told me the WWF was only getting worse, with DX

getting more vulgar every week, not to mention Sable, a sensuous valet, walking out topless for a Fully Loaded bikini match with painted-on black handprints to cover her breasts. When he asked me again whether I was mad at him, I told him again that we could never let the fucked-up crazy business get between us. With the money Vince was paying him, Owen said, he was thinking about building a big house on some land just across from Clearwater Beach. I told him just to do whatever it took to survive and to take care of his wife and kids.

“In three years when our contracts are up,” I said, “we’ll sit on each other’s back decks and laugh about all this shit.”

Stu and Helen celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary that New Year’s Eve under the pall of the Montreal screwjob. Sipping tea in the kitchen, we reminisced about how happy and different everything was back at the Stampede show in July. What happened? I think 1997 was the weirdest year of my entire life.

My debut at Starrcade ’97 in December had been anything but brilliant. Eric told me my storyline was going to be about how I saved WCW by helping Sting win back the title from Hogan, which called for me to confront the referee after he made a fast count on Sting. In true WCW fashion, the referee forgot what he was supposed to do for real and made a normal count, but that didn’t stop me from knocking him out cold and declaring myself the new referee. Sting resumed the match and beat Hogan seconds later. If I thought things were going to get better for me from there on in, I was sadly mistaken.

My fans tuned into WCW for a while, but according to the mail I received and the opionions of the fans I ran into in person, they had a hard time following the incoherent story-lines—and so did I. In comparison, the WWF was well organized; usually Vince’s storyboards were done months in advance. I also noticed a stark contrast between WCW’s agents and Vince’s. With the exception of Dusty Rhodes and Paul Orndorff, none of Eric’s men had ever drawn a dime in the business. It was like having an NFL team run by a bunch of high-school coaches.

WCW took a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants approach to live TV. Nitro was three hours of high-flying matches mixed with live interviews starring Hollywood Hogan and the nWo, with Eric playing the part of a crooked promoter, just like Vince was doing. Many times, the ideas for the interviews were dreamed up just seconds before the befuddled wrestler had to walk out and deliver his lines, and they often contradicted whatever weak storylines were in place. Eric reminded me of a guy with a hundred birds pecking on his head all day long. Still, WCW was doing incredible business.

I tried my best to keep a low profile even though most of the boys wanted to pick my brain and hear all about what happened between me and Vince. After so many years of being at home in the dressing room and a leader, I was guarded and not so trusting. Hogan seemed to be the rock here, with waves constantly lapping up to him.