Hitman My Real Life in the Cartoon World (83 page)

Then I heard the news that my old pal Jim Duggan had kidney cancer, which only added to the weight I was carrying around. My divorce had also turned into a War of the Roses.

Julie and I had monumental fights, over money, over whose friends were on whose side, over . . .

everything basically. And then we would make up. We went through this cycle over and over again. I couldn’t take the up-down, push-pull anymore and sank into a deep depression. On October 11, while riding with The Giant from Milwaukee to Chicago, I found myself wishing I was dead. But then, when Paul Wight actually started to pull out to pass—in front of a speeding semi truck—I heard myself shouting, “Stop!” When both our heart rates had slowed again, the big guy looked over at me and said, “Thanks for saving my life tonight.”

I worked Halloween Havoc with Sting in Las Vegas, retaining the U.S. title by beating him senseless with a baseball bat that was actually made of foam.

I could rarely bear to watch Raw anymore but checked it out to see Owen’s new turn as The Blue Blazer. I understood what Owen was talking about when I saw Vince McMahon appear to piss himself in the ring on live TV after Stone Cold pressed a .38 special to his head. With the WWF

ratings going through the roof, Sable appeared in the highest-selling Playboy magazine of all time and Stone Cold was on the cover of Rolling Stone.

That November, Jesse The Body Ventura surprised political pundits when he was elected governor of Minnesota. Dave Meltzer wrote, “Pro wrestling is more real and more phony than people can imagine.” The simple truth was that wrestling had never been more widely acceptable to the mainstream than it was that year. But it felt to me that I kept spiraling down, in my own estimation and in my fans’ eyes too.

On November 9, a year after the Montreal screwjob, I thought I finally had my chance to show Eric what I was worth when I worked the Nassau Coliseum, wrestling in New York for the first time since coming to WCW. To my complete dismay, I had a meaningless match with Konan and did a run-in during the last few seconds of the show. But I refrained from complaining: Eric had just given Davey more time off to get his act together, though he’d had to let Jim go because he was clumsily missing shots—not showing up for work.

The high point of the whole year was the premiere of Paul’s documentary at a gala in Toronto. After watching it with the audience, I got a standing ovation. A week later, I sat with Stu and the rest of the Hart family at the IMAX theater in Calgary, where once again the audience got to its feet to cheer me. That felt especially good, because halfway through the screening, Bruce abruptly dragged his kids out because of how Stu was portrayed. But Stu told me he liked it, which was a great relief.

Afterwards, I fielded questions from the audience, and I saw a warm smile on Owen’s face when I said the only thing I missed about the WWF was him.

New Year’s Eve, 1998. I had no idea when I bought my new house that the view would be like an ever-changing painting every day. I was alone and had my music cranked while looking out my kitchen window at a family of deer digging up fallen crab apples beneath a blanket of snow.

I eased myself into a more comfortable position on a huge round couch, where I could stare out at the distant lights of Calgary. I’d dropped the U.S. title again, to Dallas Page in Phoenix on November 22. The next day I worked a Nitro match in Grand Rapids, Michigan, against pintsized Dean Malenko, a second-generation wrestler who was a good, capable worker, although his style reminded me of Cirque du Soleil—it was a little too rehearsed. When Malenko went for a standing suplex on me, I went up for him effortlessly in the air, straight as two dinner forks stuck together. Instead of taking me back for a simple back bump, Malenko decided to walk me the short distance to the corner, but he didn’t have the size or strength and dropped me full-weight, crotching me and tearing my groin. I don’t even know how I was able to bring myself to finish the match. I was in too much pain even to tell Dean how pissed off I was at him. Even worse, he dressed fast and left without acknowledging that he hurt me, or that he was sorry. As well regarded as little Malenko was, I lost respect for him as a professional that day. I could barely walk, let alone wrestle, yet Eric had me win back the U.S. title from Page in Chattanooga a week later, with a lame finish where The Giant helped me. As ridiculous as the storyline was, at least The Giant did do all the work.

I also managed to do another appearance on Mad TV in December, in a sketch about The Hitman becoming Jesse Ventura’s lieutenant-governor and getting too physical at a press conference, where I’d rough up the cast before stomping off the set. The funniest bit came at the end of the show when I decked the heavy-set Will Sasso with a plastic chair, twisted him into a sharpshooter and fled. He followed me back to my dressing room, with a camera crew in tow, asking me what my problem was. I jumped him from behind, pulled his shirt over his head and appeared to beat him senseless.

The show went off the air with cast members attending to Will, who actually got a bloody nose in all the excitement. As ole J.R. Foley used to say, “I never, erm, touched him.”

Christmas had been especially bleak. Diana had got so fed up with Davey passing out like a zombie on the couch in front of the kids that she downed his entire bottle of Xanax right in front of him to prove a point. Sadly, it was young Harry who had to call 911 because Davey was too out of it to dial the number. Alison said that Diana had had her stomach pumped and that they’d read her the last rites. But Owen told me at dinner at his place on Boxing Day that, as far as he was concerned, the incident hadn’t been life threatening and that Diana only acted like she was out of it when there were people around. I thought Owen was being a little too hard on Diana. She was having a tough time with Davey’s out-of-control drug problem. Poor Davey. His sister, Tracey, had only just passed away in November and his mother, Joyce, was dying of cancer and was down to her last days in a hospital in England too.

No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t seem to escape the Montreal screwjob. With the release of the documentary, wherever I went people stopped me to shake my hand. A teary-eyed Marine came up to me at the St. Louis airport and told me he’d never watch the WWF again, and that he was proud of me. But I’d read in a Forbes magazine before Christmas that the WWF was now a $500

million-a-year company. In the last year alone, the company grossed $54.7 million, breaking all records. I had to shake my head at the irony of the fact that the whole thing started when Vince told me that the WWF was in financial peril! Vince had used what he did to me for real to turn his company around completely—and his words about WCW not knowing what to do with a Bret Hart echoed louder and louder in my head.

The heated negotiations over my divorce were basically done, and all I needed to do was sign the papers. Though I’d decided that marriage was not for me, I’d gone through some kind of strange metamorphosis: I now had no interest in the pretty girls at the hotels who threw themselves at the wrestlers after the shows. Oddly, now that everything Julie and I had owned had been divided up, we were getting along better than we had in a long time.

The constant pain in my groin was bad enough that I winced when I hoisted myself off the couch to pace around inside my big house, thinking and remembering. I promised Eric I’d delay my groin surgery until after WCW’s Canadian debut, which was going to be in Toronto, on March 29, 1999. I thought I could make it because I could walk, run reasonably fast and take some bumps, but I’d have to go real easy. Eric had also apologized to me for how they’d dropped the ball with me from the start.

On February 1, Bill Goldberg and I were waiting on the runway in Los Angeles for Hogan and Bischoff to arrive for a chartered flight to San Francisco, both of us worried that we wouldn’t get to Nitro on time. As we chatted I told Bill that I had an idea for WCW’s debut in Toronto, which was coming up, a great angle that played on my popularity in Canada, especially after the documentary. Wearing my trademark skater shorts and a Hitmen jersey, I’d call him out and goad him into spear-tackling me like a freight train, only I’d hide a “steel” chest plate under my jersey, and he’d end up knocked out cold for the one . . . two . . . three. This of course would set us up to work together, with him coming after me to get even. “It’s great television, Bill, and it doesn’t hurt you one bit.” Bill grinned and told me he was all for it.

Eric, Hogan, Bill and I missed all but the last three minutes of Nitro and hit the ring one after another in our street clothes. The next day I told Eric my idea about Goldberg and the steel plate and he told me he loved it too, but he thought Bill would never go for it. I explained that I had already run it past Bill and that he wanted to do it. Surprised, Eric told me we could do it. I suggested to him that with Toronto barely two months away, I’d need to be built up some, get a few wins and cut some good promos. We planned out my next few weeks leading into Toronto, and Eric asked me not to say a peep about our plans to anyone.

On February 7, I was flown down to Atlanta to sit in on a booking meeting that was supposed to determine finally where The Hitman was going at WCW. I wasn’t surprised to find Hulk, Nash, Eric and the rest of the booking committee playing God with the careers of the wrestlers. First off, Hogan suddenly brought up rumors that I was going back to Vince, which would do big business. I downplayed the chance of it ever happening, while knowing this fear was really the only leverage I had anymore. The only thing bigger than a Hart-Hogan match would be if I did an angle with Vince, but for all the money in the world, I would never let Vince make an angle out of something that hurt so deeply. I let them know I was happy to put over anybody they wanted, but it seemed to me that it didn’t make much sense to beat me so often considering what they were paying me. Bischoff and Hogan stayed in the meeting just long enough to clear the way for me to work with Hogan in the fall.

After they left, Nash, who was the new captain of the booking committee, told me there was no chance I’d be working with Hogan in the fall: he had Hogan with Gold-berg.

“Eric was just here and we were all in agreement.” I said. “Where were you?”

Nash walked off, bitching and shaking his head.

The next day, in Buffalo for Nitro, as part of an angle that was tied in with Mad TV, I was supposed to drop the belt to an unworthy and unreliable Razor, but at the last minute that was switched, and Roddy Piper was going to get the belt. I wanted to do all I could for Roddy, in return for all his years of being a true friend to me. I laid him out after the referee had also been knocked down. Then I attempted to drag the semi-conscious ref over to make the count, just as Will Sasso climbed over the railing. We got into a tug-o’war over the ref, with me pulling on his arm and Will pulling on his leg.

When Roddy schoolboyed me from behind, with the ref just able to make the count, it got a huge pop.

Then Eric decided to go on a family vacation to France, leaving Nash in charge. Eric’s last Nitro before his time off was February 22 in Sacramento; instead of building me up for Goldberg, he had me lose to Booker T. This made no sense to me at all, but Eric sheepishly told me that his booking committee insisted that it was time to see me do a job. I told him I’d done plenty of them and beating me was beyond stupid when they had so much invested in me. “Just put Booker over and we’ll build everything after this,” he said. I had nothing but respect for Booker T, so told Eric I’d do whatever he needed me to do. (I was pleased to see that despite my groin injury, Meltzer rated it a four-star match.)

Three days later, at Thunder in Salt Lake City, Eric was gone and Nash had the nerve to tell me that he’d taken my groin injury into account but he still wanted me to do a ridiculously long seventeen minutes with Disco Inferno. Disco was comic relief, and no way to build me for Goldberg, let alone Hogan. Next, at Nitro in Worcester on March 8, it was Malenko I would supposedly lose to. When I protested to Nash that I needed to stay strong for Goldberg, of course he didn’t know what I was talking about. To me, it felt like Rome was burning yet again. Nash was doing all he could to kill me off, for reasons I’ll never know. That time, I somehow managed to persuade him that Eric had something big planned for me, so, acting like he was doing me a huge favor, he threw me in with a big, clumsy rookie named Heavy Metal Van Hammer. I didn’t lose, but it added nothing to my heat going into Toronto.

At home, my mom told me that Smith’s on-and-off girlfriend Zoe—Chad’s mother—had died of a drug overdose. I decided to go to her funeral to be there for Smith. A few days later Smith showed up at my place with Stu in tow, his excuse being that Stu wanted to see my house (clearly an excuse because Stu had just been over for a visit). I helped my dad into the kitchen where we soon got so engrossed in talking about Davey, and the pain he was in from a hurt back, that I didn’t immediately notice that Smith had gone missing. I soon found him rummaging through my things in the living room, and I invited him back to the kitchen, telling him he had to stay where I could keep an eye on him. He sheepishly followed me. My dad told me he thought Eric Bischoff was the cause of Davey’s problems and soon I was defending Eric to my dad: Davey’s story was that he’d hurt his back on a malfunctioning trap door in a WCW ring. He and Diana were even talking about suing. I told Stu that as far as I was concerned, Davey was battling a morphine addiction more than any injury or infection, and he needed to get clean. Eric had given him lots of chances to do just that, but Davey was still procrastinating about going to rehab.

On March 22, I flew all the way to Panama City to find out I’d be off that night, but I managed to persuade Nash to give me an interview on Nitro to set things up for Toronto—because it looked like WCW was going to waste that opportunity too, even though I was over in Canada following the documentary release. In my brief interview with Gene Okerlund, I prepped my Canadian fans by challenging Hogan and Nash, and then subtly tossing Goldberg’s name out for the very first time, planting a seed that I knew was sure to grow in the week remaining before the Toronto show.