Black Widow
10-08-2008, 12:41 PM
There have been some good books written by some OK wrestlers, and some OK books written by some good ones. But, perhaps there has never been a great book written by a great wrestler, until now.
Bret’s Hart’s long awaited autobiography, “Hitman” has been widely praised by those who have read it as, arguably, the definitive book on the life of a pro wrestler. Yes, wrestling legends like Mick Foley and Ric Flair both wrote some good books, but in both cases the end-product was run through the WWE filter. In “Hitman,” Bret pulls no punches in talking about such controversial topics as steroids, infedelity, and, of course, a certain night in Montreal 11 years ago. What’s more, as it turns out, Bret is almost as talented a writer as he was a wrestler.
I recently had the opportunity to interview Bret at length about his book, which is now available for purchase. In this lengthy discussion, Bret talks about the emotional anguish of reliving many tragedies while writing his book,his response to criticisms that he takes wrestling too seriously, his thoughts on Ric Flair and what it means to be a “great wrestler,” his recent blow up at an Iowa wrestling banquet, and how he feels about Vince McMahon these days.
AC: That’s a heck of a long book. Did you worry about that at all – writing something that’s too long, especially with wrestling fans having gotten used to a certain kind of book?
BH: The truth is I didn’t write it for wrestling fans. I wrote it for people that were familiar with it and knew a lot about it, but never really knew about the real life of the wrestler that worked. That’s the perspective I tried to offer. I tried to write it for the people who knew a little bit about it and were really looking for a smarter book – a more honest book – about wrestling and told a little more truth about it.
AC: Tell me a little about the process. I understand this wasn’t a situation where you sat down and went through everything in your head and put it down. This was literally something you were working on for years and years and years. This was the product of an audio journal you kept, is that right?
BH: Yeah, it took me seven years. I started the audio journal in 85. But the truth is, when I did that I didn’t do that to write a book. I just made these little tapes and I put them away. I kept locking them up when they were finished, and I never looked back. I made myself a promise. I said I’d just drive myself crazy and I’d start editing myself all the time out of fear of what I said. So I just decided to say whatever I did into the tapes – sometimes in a drunken state. There’s a lot of gibberish in my tapes. But there’s a lot of juicy tidbits that came out of me just laying there and saying something. I would go through the tapes, I would write down something that I said and I’d say, “Jeez, that’s the perfect way to describe that situation” or “That’s a great analogy.” I got lots of little gems out of those tapes.
AC: Was there a lot that you’d forgotten?
BH: Well, it wouldn’t have been the same book without those tapes, for sure. Just the clarification of knowing really who was in the room when certain things happened or the name of a club when you’re talking about a situation. Just all the little details. I read books and I say, “Oh, that’s not what happened.” Like wrestling books, I read a lot of them, and I go, “That’s not even true. I wasn’t even in that town with that guy on that day.” And I know because I kept such good records.
AC: Did you ever stop the audio journal, or was this pretty consistent over whatever it was – 15 years?
BH: I stopped about 2003 or 4.
AC: So it pretty much documents your entire wrestling career, at least from when you arrived at the WWF.
BH: Yeah.
AC: Wow. Why did you do that? I mean, that’s pretty exhaustive and, I imagine, takes a lot of dedication to keep it going that long.
BH: At the time that I first went to WWF, I happened to be looking through old school books. And I had found a book, like a diary that I had kept from when I played football in high school. And it was, oddly enough in its own way, very much like the book. It was very honest, and I wrote about teammates and things that happened in the shower, and jokes and things we did on the field - the comradery. I remember finding this journal. I found it, and looked at it, and then went and picked up my bag and went back on the road with WWF. And that’s when I thought, “You know, I should do the same thing” – with my tapes. I didn’t have time to write anything down. In a hotel, I was usually rooming with one or three other guys. So you just decide to just make a tape, like when you’re dropping your car off and you're parked at the car rental. You’re just sitting there for a couple of minutes and you make an entry. You just say what the date is and what happened yesterday – “This might be a funny memory to remember some day that this happened or that happened.” It kind of started off pretty innocent like that. I never knew that my career would go the way it did. I always thought I was living on thin ice pretty much all the time anyway, and the axe was going to come any day. And these tapes, I’d pull out some day when I was old.
AC: Where physically did you keep them? Was there a crate somewhere in your house or something?
BH: I had a locked, like a little safe.
AC: How many tapes were there?
BH: It ended up being 100 tapes by the time I was done.
AC: And what was the average entry – just a few seconds or a minute long?
BH: Three, four minutes – five minutes.
AC: So was it literally a process of sitting down and listening through a hundred tapes over 18 years?
BH: I think I started having the tapes transcribed, through my lawyer, and I transcribed some of them, which was pretty hard to do. So I had stenographer for my lawyer do it, which was pretty pricey. But she got it all down for me. And that was all before my brother died, believe it or not.
AC: That long ago. Wow.
BH: I think it was after the Survivor Series when they screwed me in the big match that I thought, “You know, I’ve got a lot of stuff on tape and I can explain all this stuff. I can give an honest account of what really happened.”
AC: So you were thinking about a book even way back then.
BH: Yeah, pretty much it started becoming a firm idea in my head right after they screwed me, because I wanted people to know what really happened. And then Owen died, and I had written a rough version of the Stampede Wrestling part. I still had a ways to go with that. I had a little bit left of it. But I knew I’d have to piece the two sections together and write all about the WWF. At that time, the whole thing was a process that I started really looking forward to.
AC: The book isn’t a transcribing of your tapes, though. This is you listening to the tapes and putting it in something that makes sense in the book. And this is your writing?
BH: Yes, every word.
AC: Not to toot your horn too much, but you’re a tremendous writer. I’ve read some of these wrestling books and they run the gambit from pretty good – I guess Mick Foley’s are kind of held up as the standard - to some of the ghost writers’ books. Now I know you said you really weren’t thinking of a wrestling book or a wrestling audience, but wrestling or otherwise, your book is just a very, very well written book. It’s very colorful and it really puts you there. Where did you learn to write so well?
BH: I think the only thing I can say is I’ve read a lot. I think a lot of people would underestimate my intelligence. I think I was always underestimated in wrestling in a lot of ways. But I think the book, I had a real passion for it. I do remember when Mick Foley’s book came out. I remember thinking to myself, “What if Mick Foley’s book says everything that my book does, or could, and that he beats me to the punch.” And I had a manager at the time that was breathing down my neck to get this book done. He wanted it out in like two months or something. And I was like, “No, I’m going to need some years here. This is going to take a few years to get done. I’m going to do it my way, and I’m going to do it right.” I knew then that Mick Foley’s story was so much different than mine. Nobody in wrestling had my story, where their brother got killed, and the things that happened with Vince and everyone else. I just knew that I had a really unique story that was special and I think the writing of it was important for me to write just a really good book and try to reach out, not so much to wrestling fans, but to a higher caliber than that.”
AC: Did you go back and listen to the tapes from when your brother died and from Montreal and all that yourself?
BH: Everything, yeah.
AC: What was that like? I guess it’s one thing to relive it from news clippings and writings, but it’s got to be another thing to hear your voice back then. Did it really bring things back, and what kind of emotion did it bring on?
BH: Yeah, sometimes it was very heartbreaking to relive a lot of that stuff. The tapes – not just with Owen – but to Benoit and to my other brother-in-law, The Bulldog. There were so many little memories and little details that came out from those tapes. And my own reflections from my marriage and my relationship with Vince McMahon. I know how much I was dedicated to him and to the company and how grateful for everything they did for me and how they put me on a kind of pedestal as the champion. When I listen to the tapes back, I realize that I always knew Vince, right from day one – even from my father – that he was a pretty slippery snake all along. There were no illusions. That’s why I think I’m a little soft on Vince. I’m pretty easy on him in some ways, because I always knew he was like that. I just didn’t think – there was never any reason to do to me what they did. It never did make any sense to me to do that to me.
AC: On that topic – the whole Montreal screwjob that I know has been relieved a million times in different writings. How important was it for you to have thee definitive account of what happened? I haven’t gotten up to that part, but I’ve heard from people who have read it that the level of detail really offers just that – the definitive account of exactly what happened leading up to that day and on that day? It must have been maddening for you, having lived through that, to hear a million different accounts of what happened, the most detailed of which I read was Dave Meltzer’s account in the Observer, which I think you had some input in. How important was that for you?
BH: It was important for me to try always in that book, I wanted people to walk in my shoes. I wanted to know what it was like. Whether it was with Vince that day, I wanted them to at least look and put themselves in my shoes and put themselves in the dressing room and asked themselves if they had been me, what would they have done? Would they have had – for the lack of a better word – would they have had the b___s to get up and knock him out? To stand up and do something about it? I could sense that day that it was kind of like everybody, or a lot of people, would have expected me to just blow it off and maybe say a few words to him and tell him he was a real jerk or something like that – slam the door and walk out. I think that’s what Vince was looking for. That’s all anybody ever does. Everyone is so job scared. But for me it was different. I grew up with wrestling, like Vince did. It was my whole life, and my whole family had given so much for the industry. And I thought about how much it would hurt my father at home and my kids were watching. I thought what I did and how I handled things was a defining moment for me and my character – not my wrestling character, but my own character as a human being. I always thought it was the best thing I ever did. I always think about that stuff and think that I can wake up every day and look myself in the mirror and know that I was very true to that guy. And he lied to me and misled me and cheated me and I was glad to be able to put that into words. I just wanted people to know what it was like to be me. And that accounts for a lot of my conduct on the road and honesty, whether it was drugs or women. I just wanted to be able to say, if you’re300 days a year away from home, 23 years of your life – when you can say you’ve done that or been in my shoes or have some idea what it’s like to have been in my shoes or at least read about it, then maybe you make comment on it. But I think too many people have no idea the hardship and the sacrifice that I put in or other wrestlers put in these lengthy career?
AC: When you talk about the drugs and the womanizing by you and others, did you worry about alienating yourself in writing this? I think about Jose Canseco naming names in his steroid book and how he’s blacklisted pretty much from all of baseball now. Did you worry about the same thing happening to you really pulling back the curtain on what the wrestling business is like?
BH: I did. I did worry about that a lot. I relied on my editor to protect me from myself a little bit. But I wanted to be honest, to a certain degree. I didn’t want to be low brow. I wasn’t looking for any kind of shock value so much. I thought to myself, “People are going to expect me to be honest. And if I’m going to be honest about Shawn Michaels or Vince McMahon or somebody else, then I’m going to kind of have to, to a certain degree, hold myself up to the light and let people know what it was like to be me.” I needed to let people know what it was like to be me.” I never tried to glorify my conduct as much as try to explain myself. The only thing I can say is that even my kids, who read the book and knew a lot of what was in the book anyway from their mother, they finally got an honest account. And I think they were a lot more understanding and forgiving of what my life really was all about and how hard it was. I thought it clarified things for them and in that sense I think it will clarify things for a lot of people. I never pretended to be a perfect saint.
AC: Did you warn people ahead of time – call up some people you used to work with and say, “Look I’m going to be writing so-and-so about you. Are you Ok with that?”
BH: I thought about it. There were a few guys I thought I should maybe talk to. But in the end, I said, “I’m going to write what I want. I’m writing this for me and they’re just going to have to live with this.” I don’t think I took any unnecessary shots at people. I didn’t write a vindictive book. I thought I really just tried to put in perspective - even with difficult relationships I had like with Shawn Michaels and Hulk Hogan or whatever – I just wanted people to know where I was coming from and how I saw things, and I stand by every word. It’s as honest an account of everything that happened as I think you could put into words.
AC: Still being pretty early in the book, the one thing I’m struck by that I don’t think a lot of people know is how poor you grew up. You tell these stories about not even having shoes to wear on your feet and being forced to go to school in Boyscout shorts in the dead of winter. Did you harbor any resentment toward your father for keeping at this wrestling thing even when it seemed like he was sacrificing so much? Obviously, if he hadn’t, you wouldn’t be wear you are today.
BH: No, I think the one thing I always got, and I think all my siblings would agree, was that my dad was the kind of guy who would give you the shirt off his back. He would do anything. And he wasn’t happy about those situations either. It was just a tough time for a big family. I think what I learned from my dad and loved about my dad is that he never ever gave up. He always had a kind of positive attitude about things. Things would always get better. I think I learned from my dad that there was never any quit in him. And I think a lot of the things I went through as a kid, I think as I got older and I reflected on them during the writing of the book, I realized they were all character builders. I mean, I probably wasn’t too happy about wearing shorts in grade 2 in the wintertime, but I also know that all that stuff made me tougher. The fights I had in school and the things I did to sort of prove myself. Maybe I was poor, but I was better off in some ways than a lot of people.
AC: Did you talk to your father about the book before he passed?
BH: No, I never really did. I talked to my mom a little bit about the book before she passed. She was, I think, quite fearful that I was going to write something that was going to reflect badly on the family. But I think I was pretty honest about my family. I think some people might take from the book that my father was an abusive monster, but I never saw it that way and I still don’t see it that way. In a lot of ways I wrote that book for my mom and dad. And I think my mom and dad would have been happy with everything I said in there. I just really wanted people to know that it was hard. In writing about my father I think it was important to establish or make people understand how hard it was to raise family with 12 kids and the sacrifices we all made as a family and how tough things were for all of us. We were always either doing really good or really bad. It was always either one or the other. When things got good and my dad was drawing money and wrestling was popular and he had a lot of big stars on his card, it was always a lot of fun and excitement. And it seemed like, within a few months, we might be back in the shorts and running shoes with no laces and stuff like that. When it got good, you never wanted to let it go. And when it got bad, you just had to hang in there until things got better. And I think I learned a lot of that from my dad.
AC: You’ve earned a reputation, for better or for worse, for really taking the wrestling business seriously – to the point that sometimes you’re mocked about it and people talk about Bret Hart “not getting it.” I know recently there was some sort of banquet where you walked out. I don’t know if you want to talk about that, but kind of tying that to the book, did you want to use this book to sort of explain yourself and tell people, “Yeah, I take it seriously and here’s why”?
BH: Yeah, I think you put it right the way I see it. I don’t think anyone knows what it’s like to be a wrestler. And a lot of wrestlers who do know don’t write their own books. Somebody else interprets what they’re trying to say. I’m just so sick of these books and these guys that are so-called experts or pseudo experts. They have no credentials… They’ve never been in the dressing room. They don’t know what transpired. They don’t know the tensions that built between feuding wrestlers, and the egos and the personalities and how you’ve got to negotiate things with someone like Vince, and how you can encourage things along, or how a wrestler builds an entire story. You know, Vince might give you the last three seconds of a match – the outcome and tells you what he wants. But he doesn’t tell you what to do for the 57 other minutes you might do in an iron match. I’ve felt for myself that I was my own producer, director, stunt coordinator and editor of my own movies. There were never any scripts for me, but I could memorize 60 minutes worth of wrestling. You’re read later on my sort of version of what happened with me and Shawn at our big iron match where we wrestled at WrestleMania XII. But to be such professionals and pull this story together in really a couple of hours. There’s no rehearsing. There’s no script. You’ve just got to go out there and remember so many little things. And to pull it off so well, I don’t know of any other actor or anybody who could do those kind of things. And I really just wanted people to know what it’s like from somebody who really knows what it is. People always talk about who the best wrestlers are. I actually go to maybe too much of an explanation about someone like Ric Flair for example. They rave about Ric Flair about being this great, great wrestler. And he was a great wrestler in many ways. But, in a lot of ways, like working with him in the ring, he was not so great. And for someone to contest that with me or argue with me that I don’t know what I’m talking about, things like that drive me crazy. Because it’s not true. They don’t know what they’re talking about. I know. I’ve worked with some of the greatest wrestlers of all time. And I worked with them throughout my career before I got to the WWF. I knew who the great wrestlers were. I’m sort of tired of people telling me who the great wrestlers were. I know who they were. And I can tell you the ones that weren’t. A lot of these books that come out, they’re not honest in telling you the truth. People interpret them as the truth. I’m sick of people making up stuff about wrestling. I’d rather they wrote the truth about who really were the great wrestlers – the wrestlers that made a difference. That thing I did, I think it was in Iowa, they were giving these guys an award for their books that they had been writing. I was so annoyed by the books that they had been writing because they were just made up. It was just some guy that didn’t know anything about wrestling that was making up whatever he thought. He was just a fan that had declared himself as an expert. And he was being cited that night as an expert and a guy that everybody appreciated what he contributed. And I thought, “He contributes nothing. He doesn’t even tell the truth.” And that’s what that was all about. It really wasn’t even worth my time to make a big issue of it.
AC: But how much of that sort of thing is subjective? Couldn’t you accept that who you would consider a great wrestler might be different than who somebody else would consider a great wrestler? Or do you think it’s not subjective – that great wrestler is a great wrestler is a great wrestler – period?
BH: I think the only ones that know who the real great wrestlers are are the great wrestlers. And I don’t think anybody else knows. I don’t think Dave Meltzer knows. I think he tries to know. What I like about Dave Meltzer is that he tries to get it right. There’s a sense of integrity there. He’s not making it up. He’s trying to get it right. And maybe he gets it right a lot of the time, but sometimes he gets it wrong, and I think he’d be fair enough to say that, yeah, sometimes he gets it wrong. But there’s some people out there who don’t have a clue what they’re talking about and they’ve got no business telling me my business.
AC: I think of when WWE released your DVD set a few years ago. To be honest, going into it, I though, “Yeah, Bret was a really great wrestler, but I don’t know that he should be up there with the very top wrestlers. I can’t remember that many great matches that he had.” Then I sat down and watched the DVD and totally ate my words. Because, just match after match, I was reminded of all these terrific matches that you had and at the end was just thinking of how many were left off. What kind of struck me was that it wasn’t a terribly big business period for WWE when you talk about those early 90’s, mid 90’s years. Does it bother you that when you were at your peak, business wasn’t that great?
BH: No, not really. I think after Hulk Hogan and the steroid scandal and everything, wrestling was on a real downhill swing then. It was really hard. Wrestling had this huge surge with Hulk Hogan. He made such a huge impact on everything. When he started to kind of slip and fall and wrestling was taking a lot of shots for the steroids and Vince and Hogan, and that sex scandal with the ring crew. There were a lot of really tough things that had nothing to do with me. And the company was in a tough spot. And I’ve always been kind of flattered that they called on me to sort of pull the sword out of the stone. And I did. I think I wasn’t the biggest draw in the world, but I stopped things from sinking. They didn’t go down any further after that. They kind of started to come up. And I held things. If you look at the wrestling period, you see where in the early 80s, Hulk Hogan and a lot of characters, they became cartoon characters. Wrestling was just a cartoon with real life muscle men that were all on steroids. And if you look at that period all through the steroid scandal, everything was cartoon stories. Elizabeth would lift up her dress and Andre would get distracted and then he’d lose his match. It was all a cartoon if you ask me. It was entertaining, but nobody was taking it too seriously. And then I became champion, and you look at the matches starting with [Roddy] Piper and [Mr.] Perfect, people started kind of looking at wrestling for the wrestling. I think I changed the wrestling. I made the priority wrestling. The actual stories themselves became the priority and the belt meant something. And maybe I took it too seriously, but at the same time I thought that’s about what wrestling needed to do as a company – go back to wrestling. It was the only thing that could save us. Too much cartoon stuff is not going to help anybody right now, because they see us as a bunch of oversized steroid freaks. So I think if you look at where wrestling went through my period, right up until Steve Austin and everything, you can see that wrestling got a lot more serious for the time period I was in. And I think my history and my backlog of matches, there was a certain sense of realism that came from those stories and those matches that raised the bar of wrestling for wrestlers today.
AC: And you were performing at that level even during the cartoon period. You watch those mid-80s WWF house shows from Madison Square Garden or the Boston gardens, and there wasn’t any wrestling on them until your match came out. You and Jim would maybe be out there with the Killer Bees or the Rougueaus, and it was so different than anything else on the card… I’ve heard more recently about wrestlers in WWE being discouraged from giving their all and being told to dial it back a notch. I imagine it was even more so back then because there was zero priority in workrate. Were you discouraged at the time from working so hard?
BH: No, I always thought that my ability was in my intense kind of performance every night. I think I kind of wrote about it in my book in the sense that it was “Time to show the WWF guys what the Stampede boys could do.” That’s how I worked. That’s how we all worked up in Canada here. We wrestled like it was real. When you walked down the streets or you went into a bar or gas station, basically people thought you were a real legitimate tough guy. I think we all tried to live up to that. My dad liked tough wrestlers and he liked the matches to look credible. And he liked the stories, the psychology of wrestling – working holds and making people believe it was real. And that’s what I always tried to do. And I get criticized. Like you were saying a few minutes ago, people might judge me for taking things too seriously. But I think I said it best in the book – Wrestling might all be bulls—t, but that bulls—t was everything to me. To me it was something I defended from the time I was four years old. I went to school my whole life believing – well, not believing - but I guess believing for a vast part of it, that it was real and that I had to defend it all the time. And I don’t think that ever changed. Even when I wrestled Owen, I can remember when we first started that little angle with each other, I said, “We don’t ever want to insult the fans’ intelligence. We’ve got to do this the old fashioned way where we don’t talk to each other and we don’t ride together. We’re not going to be sitting together in the coffee shop after the matches and letting everyone know that it’s all a big show. We’re not going to talk to each other anywhere.” And we wouldn’t talk to each other in airports or anywhere – no matter what. I remember landing in Calgary and going through customs. They held us at customs and they put us in the same room for a coupe of minutes while we were waiting… I remember all the people from customs came in and they had us on the camera. And they were watching us to see if we would talk. I remember we both burst out laughing. They had been waiting, and we had already been through there so many times. Some people might ridicule me for something like that, but that’s just how we grew up. That’s how serious I took things. I wrote in there about a little kid coming up to me near the end of my book. We had worked this storyline in wrestling where I had hurt my leg. I remember walking out and getting into my car and I wasn’t even limping or anything like that because I forgot all about the storyline because nothing mattered in WCW at the time. I remember a little kid sort of appeared behind me and he asked me about my ankle or my foot or my knee or whatever it was. And I remember that it hit me for a second that for him, it was all still real. He wanted me to limp. It was just one of those “Mean” Joe Green kind of moments. This kid just came up to me to ask me about my leg. And I could have said, “My leg is not hurt” or just blew the kid off. But to me, those are the most important fans of all. I remember limping to my car and getting in real slow and telling him that it was going to get better. It was stuff like that that I think defined me as a performer.
AC: Do you feel that there’s anything left now? I guess there’s been a lot of sort of different points of closure for you – one being the Hall of Fame ceremony some years ago in Chicago. Now you get to write this book that really kind of ties the bow on your career. Is there anything left? Or did you sort of feel that you were kind of closing the book on your wrestling life with this book?
BH: I think that’s it. I mean you never know if something happens, but I don’t see it coming. I don’t know what else I can do in wrestling or what else I have to say about it. I think I said it all. I wrote 1,200-something pages and they edited it down to 553, so I’ve got lots of other material. Lots of other of the same type of stuff that’s already in there. But I think that my connection to wrestling will probably be in the next few years be tied in with recreating my book into film and portraying the real drama of the wrestling life. I know that Mickey Rourke is coming out with a movie and I’m curious to see how close it is to the real thing. I’ve never seen a good movie on wrestling ever.
AC: Didn’t you see “Ready to Rumble” released by WCW in 1990-whatever it was?
BH: No, I thank God I wasn’t in it.
AC: I think you were working for the company at the time.
BH: Who knows? I probably was in it.
AC: It’s a good point. Do you see a film in your story? And how do you get it down to two hours?
BH: I’m hoping in the next few years that I could probably dedicate myself to using my imagination in other ways. I’d like to try to write another book on something else other than wrestling. I’m not sure what it is. Maybe I’ll try to write a novel. Like you said in the beginning when you talked to me, you said I was a good writer. I enjoy writing. I like the process. I’d like to take another stab at it in another vein, but I’m not quite sure where that will go. I’ll certainly give it a shot. But aside from that, I’d like to pursue – Before I got into wrestling I was supposed to go to film school. And I went through my career in wrestling, I used to always think, “I’m making these little 20-minute movies every night.” They only come up and give you the last three seconds of the match. The rest was up to me to figure out. For the most part in my career, I’d sit down with the guys I was working with and say, “OK, this is what we’re doing.” And they’d just sit and listen to me. And most guys just sat back. And I can remember some wrestlers just looking at me and saying, “That’s what we’re going to do?” They would be blown away by it – amazed. Like, “If you could pull off that kind of story with me out there, that would be great.” And I would walk out there and pull it off. And we’d have these great matches and they would come back. And I would say, within six months in being in the WWF, I had a lot of respect from the wrestlers for being an extremely qualified and skilled wrestler that was really safe. I looked very punishing and no fun to work with. But I think once you worked with me, you realized that that was the beauty of wrestling Bret Hart. It looked like it was really a tough experience and you were going through a lot of physical punishment out there. And in the end when you came back, you’d realize that you had the easiest match on the card and it looked the best. That’s what I tried to always give to them.
AC: Did the book also make you miss wrestling, and being out there on the road and the comradery? Did you entertain during the writing process whether you had another run in you, or was that not even on the table?
BH: Well, you know I still come up with endings to matches all the time. I have a lot of creativity and I still come up with stuff. I have a match in my head with Vince McMahon that will probably never ever – obviously, never ever happen. But I have lots of what they call “finishes” in my head that I could utilize if I ever needed to. If I could physically do them, it would be great. Or maybe for someone else. But I’ve always had a good imagination and I can take that and move it into a different area. It doesn’t always have to be about wrestling. When it was all over for me, I don’t know that I had much left to say about it, like physically – the stories that I contributed to throughout my career. When it was all over, I really think I got it all out. I didn’t miss it. I don’t think I’ve ever missed it a single time. I wish I could have ended it on a better note or that it had lasted maybe another couple years. That would have been nice. But in the end I was satisfied that I won every title that I could possibly win and do everything that was important to me. I just don’t know that I could have given any more. I don’t ever want to be remembered for being a manager, or an announcer or a commissioner or anything like that. I want to be remembered for being the great wrestler that I was. Because that’s what I was. I wasn’t the greatest talker. I wasn’t the most charismatic character that ever walked. But I do think that I was – I don’t know that anybody could say who was actually the best, greatest wrestler of all time – but I know that I was as good as they can get.
AC: Does it mean something to you to still have that legacy going on? Your niece and nephew working in WWE. Chris Jericho I guess was one of the last people to be trained in the Dungeon… and he’s the world champion right now. What does that mean to you – to still see that Hart legacy going on?
BH: I like it. Even with the WWF and Vince, we’re kind of at “live and let live.” It’s all kind of done and over with now. Vince can’t be feeling too bad. He’s a billionaire. He probably doesn’t reflect too much. He probably doesn’t give a damn about what happened to me anymore. But at the same time, I think he maybe starts to reflect sometimes about the contributions that I made. And I think what’s sorely missing in wrestling today is exactly what I was doing. And I think that a lot of young wrestlers today that I talk to, they’re the ones – the people that are in the business – that I mean the most to. And I know from Nattie and the Bulldog’s kid Harry, that I’m really important to them. And they have much respect and take great pride in everything I contributed to in wrestling. I just hope that maybe in some way I can be something positive to them, despite whatever’s happened with Vince.
News Day Blog
Bret’s Hart’s long awaited autobiography, “Hitman” has been widely praised by those who have read it as, arguably, the definitive book on the life of a pro wrestler. Yes, wrestling legends like Mick Foley and Ric Flair both wrote some good books, but in both cases the end-product was run through the WWE filter. In “Hitman,” Bret pulls no punches in talking about such controversial topics as steroids, infedelity, and, of course, a certain night in Montreal 11 years ago. What’s more, as it turns out, Bret is almost as talented a writer as he was a wrestler.
I recently had the opportunity to interview Bret at length about his book, which is now available for purchase. In this lengthy discussion, Bret talks about the emotional anguish of reliving many tragedies while writing his book,his response to criticisms that he takes wrestling too seriously, his thoughts on Ric Flair and what it means to be a “great wrestler,” his recent blow up at an Iowa wrestling banquet, and how he feels about Vince McMahon these days.
AC: That’s a heck of a long book. Did you worry about that at all – writing something that’s too long, especially with wrestling fans having gotten used to a certain kind of book?
BH: The truth is I didn’t write it for wrestling fans. I wrote it for people that were familiar with it and knew a lot about it, but never really knew about the real life of the wrestler that worked. That’s the perspective I tried to offer. I tried to write it for the people who knew a little bit about it and were really looking for a smarter book – a more honest book – about wrestling and told a little more truth about it.
AC: Tell me a little about the process. I understand this wasn’t a situation where you sat down and went through everything in your head and put it down. This was literally something you were working on for years and years and years. This was the product of an audio journal you kept, is that right?
BH: Yeah, it took me seven years. I started the audio journal in 85. But the truth is, when I did that I didn’t do that to write a book. I just made these little tapes and I put them away. I kept locking them up when they were finished, and I never looked back. I made myself a promise. I said I’d just drive myself crazy and I’d start editing myself all the time out of fear of what I said. So I just decided to say whatever I did into the tapes – sometimes in a drunken state. There’s a lot of gibberish in my tapes. But there’s a lot of juicy tidbits that came out of me just laying there and saying something. I would go through the tapes, I would write down something that I said and I’d say, “Jeez, that’s the perfect way to describe that situation” or “That’s a great analogy.” I got lots of little gems out of those tapes.
AC: Was there a lot that you’d forgotten?
BH: Well, it wouldn’t have been the same book without those tapes, for sure. Just the clarification of knowing really who was in the room when certain things happened or the name of a club when you’re talking about a situation. Just all the little details. I read books and I say, “Oh, that’s not what happened.” Like wrestling books, I read a lot of them, and I go, “That’s not even true. I wasn’t even in that town with that guy on that day.” And I know because I kept such good records.
AC: Did you ever stop the audio journal, or was this pretty consistent over whatever it was – 15 years?
BH: I stopped about 2003 or 4.
AC: So it pretty much documents your entire wrestling career, at least from when you arrived at the WWF.
BH: Yeah.
AC: Wow. Why did you do that? I mean, that’s pretty exhaustive and, I imagine, takes a lot of dedication to keep it going that long.
BH: At the time that I first went to WWF, I happened to be looking through old school books. And I had found a book, like a diary that I had kept from when I played football in high school. And it was, oddly enough in its own way, very much like the book. It was very honest, and I wrote about teammates and things that happened in the shower, and jokes and things we did on the field - the comradery. I remember finding this journal. I found it, and looked at it, and then went and picked up my bag and went back on the road with WWF. And that’s when I thought, “You know, I should do the same thing” – with my tapes. I didn’t have time to write anything down. In a hotel, I was usually rooming with one or three other guys. So you just decide to just make a tape, like when you’re dropping your car off and you're parked at the car rental. You’re just sitting there for a couple of minutes and you make an entry. You just say what the date is and what happened yesterday – “This might be a funny memory to remember some day that this happened or that happened.” It kind of started off pretty innocent like that. I never knew that my career would go the way it did. I always thought I was living on thin ice pretty much all the time anyway, and the axe was going to come any day. And these tapes, I’d pull out some day when I was old.
AC: Where physically did you keep them? Was there a crate somewhere in your house or something?
BH: I had a locked, like a little safe.
AC: How many tapes were there?
BH: It ended up being 100 tapes by the time I was done.
AC: And what was the average entry – just a few seconds or a minute long?
BH: Three, four minutes – five minutes.
AC: So was it literally a process of sitting down and listening through a hundred tapes over 18 years?
BH: I think I started having the tapes transcribed, through my lawyer, and I transcribed some of them, which was pretty hard to do. So I had stenographer for my lawyer do it, which was pretty pricey. But she got it all down for me. And that was all before my brother died, believe it or not.
AC: That long ago. Wow.
BH: I think it was after the Survivor Series when they screwed me in the big match that I thought, “You know, I’ve got a lot of stuff on tape and I can explain all this stuff. I can give an honest account of what really happened.”
AC: So you were thinking about a book even way back then.
BH: Yeah, pretty much it started becoming a firm idea in my head right after they screwed me, because I wanted people to know what really happened. And then Owen died, and I had written a rough version of the Stampede Wrestling part. I still had a ways to go with that. I had a little bit left of it. But I knew I’d have to piece the two sections together and write all about the WWF. At that time, the whole thing was a process that I started really looking forward to.
AC: The book isn’t a transcribing of your tapes, though. This is you listening to the tapes and putting it in something that makes sense in the book. And this is your writing?
BH: Yes, every word.
AC: Not to toot your horn too much, but you’re a tremendous writer. I’ve read some of these wrestling books and they run the gambit from pretty good – I guess Mick Foley’s are kind of held up as the standard - to some of the ghost writers’ books. Now I know you said you really weren’t thinking of a wrestling book or a wrestling audience, but wrestling or otherwise, your book is just a very, very well written book. It’s very colorful and it really puts you there. Where did you learn to write so well?
BH: I think the only thing I can say is I’ve read a lot. I think a lot of people would underestimate my intelligence. I think I was always underestimated in wrestling in a lot of ways. But I think the book, I had a real passion for it. I do remember when Mick Foley’s book came out. I remember thinking to myself, “What if Mick Foley’s book says everything that my book does, or could, and that he beats me to the punch.” And I had a manager at the time that was breathing down my neck to get this book done. He wanted it out in like two months or something. And I was like, “No, I’m going to need some years here. This is going to take a few years to get done. I’m going to do it my way, and I’m going to do it right.” I knew then that Mick Foley’s story was so much different than mine. Nobody in wrestling had my story, where their brother got killed, and the things that happened with Vince and everyone else. I just knew that I had a really unique story that was special and I think the writing of it was important for me to write just a really good book and try to reach out, not so much to wrestling fans, but to a higher caliber than that.”
AC: Did you go back and listen to the tapes from when your brother died and from Montreal and all that yourself?
BH: Everything, yeah.
AC: What was that like? I guess it’s one thing to relive it from news clippings and writings, but it’s got to be another thing to hear your voice back then. Did it really bring things back, and what kind of emotion did it bring on?
BH: Yeah, sometimes it was very heartbreaking to relive a lot of that stuff. The tapes – not just with Owen – but to Benoit and to my other brother-in-law, The Bulldog. There were so many little memories and little details that came out from those tapes. And my own reflections from my marriage and my relationship with Vince McMahon. I know how much I was dedicated to him and to the company and how grateful for everything they did for me and how they put me on a kind of pedestal as the champion. When I listen to the tapes back, I realize that I always knew Vince, right from day one – even from my father – that he was a pretty slippery snake all along. There were no illusions. That’s why I think I’m a little soft on Vince. I’m pretty easy on him in some ways, because I always knew he was like that. I just didn’t think – there was never any reason to do to me what they did. It never did make any sense to me to do that to me.
AC: On that topic – the whole Montreal screwjob that I know has been relieved a million times in different writings. How important was it for you to have thee definitive account of what happened? I haven’t gotten up to that part, but I’ve heard from people who have read it that the level of detail really offers just that – the definitive account of exactly what happened leading up to that day and on that day? It must have been maddening for you, having lived through that, to hear a million different accounts of what happened, the most detailed of which I read was Dave Meltzer’s account in the Observer, which I think you had some input in. How important was that for you?
BH: It was important for me to try always in that book, I wanted people to walk in my shoes. I wanted to know what it was like. Whether it was with Vince that day, I wanted them to at least look and put themselves in my shoes and put themselves in the dressing room and asked themselves if they had been me, what would they have done? Would they have had – for the lack of a better word – would they have had the b___s to get up and knock him out? To stand up and do something about it? I could sense that day that it was kind of like everybody, or a lot of people, would have expected me to just blow it off and maybe say a few words to him and tell him he was a real jerk or something like that – slam the door and walk out. I think that’s what Vince was looking for. That’s all anybody ever does. Everyone is so job scared. But for me it was different. I grew up with wrestling, like Vince did. It was my whole life, and my whole family had given so much for the industry. And I thought about how much it would hurt my father at home and my kids were watching. I thought what I did and how I handled things was a defining moment for me and my character – not my wrestling character, but my own character as a human being. I always thought it was the best thing I ever did. I always think about that stuff and think that I can wake up every day and look myself in the mirror and know that I was very true to that guy. And he lied to me and misled me and cheated me and I was glad to be able to put that into words. I just wanted people to know what it was like to be me. And that accounts for a lot of my conduct on the road and honesty, whether it was drugs or women. I just wanted to be able to say, if you’re300 days a year away from home, 23 years of your life – when you can say you’ve done that or been in my shoes or have some idea what it’s like to have been in my shoes or at least read about it, then maybe you make comment on it. But I think too many people have no idea the hardship and the sacrifice that I put in or other wrestlers put in these lengthy career?
AC: When you talk about the drugs and the womanizing by you and others, did you worry about alienating yourself in writing this? I think about Jose Canseco naming names in his steroid book and how he’s blacklisted pretty much from all of baseball now. Did you worry about the same thing happening to you really pulling back the curtain on what the wrestling business is like?
BH: I did. I did worry about that a lot. I relied on my editor to protect me from myself a little bit. But I wanted to be honest, to a certain degree. I didn’t want to be low brow. I wasn’t looking for any kind of shock value so much. I thought to myself, “People are going to expect me to be honest. And if I’m going to be honest about Shawn Michaels or Vince McMahon or somebody else, then I’m going to kind of have to, to a certain degree, hold myself up to the light and let people know what it was like to be me.” I needed to let people know what it was like to be me.” I never tried to glorify my conduct as much as try to explain myself. The only thing I can say is that even my kids, who read the book and knew a lot of what was in the book anyway from their mother, they finally got an honest account. And I think they were a lot more understanding and forgiving of what my life really was all about and how hard it was. I thought it clarified things for them and in that sense I think it will clarify things for a lot of people. I never pretended to be a perfect saint.
AC: Did you warn people ahead of time – call up some people you used to work with and say, “Look I’m going to be writing so-and-so about you. Are you Ok with that?”
BH: I thought about it. There were a few guys I thought I should maybe talk to. But in the end, I said, “I’m going to write what I want. I’m writing this for me and they’re just going to have to live with this.” I don’t think I took any unnecessary shots at people. I didn’t write a vindictive book. I thought I really just tried to put in perspective - even with difficult relationships I had like with Shawn Michaels and Hulk Hogan or whatever – I just wanted people to know where I was coming from and how I saw things, and I stand by every word. It’s as honest an account of everything that happened as I think you could put into words.
AC: Still being pretty early in the book, the one thing I’m struck by that I don’t think a lot of people know is how poor you grew up. You tell these stories about not even having shoes to wear on your feet and being forced to go to school in Boyscout shorts in the dead of winter. Did you harbor any resentment toward your father for keeping at this wrestling thing even when it seemed like he was sacrificing so much? Obviously, if he hadn’t, you wouldn’t be wear you are today.
BH: No, I think the one thing I always got, and I think all my siblings would agree, was that my dad was the kind of guy who would give you the shirt off his back. He would do anything. And he wasn’t happy about those situations either. It was just a tough time for a big family. I think what I learned from my dad and loved about my dad is that he never ever gave up. He always had a kind of positive attitude about things. Things would always get better. I think I learned from my dad that there was never any quit in him. And I think a lot of the things I went through as a kid, I think as I got older and I reflected on them during the writing of the book, I realized they were all character builders. I mean, I probably wasn’t too happy about wearing shorts in grade 2 in the wintertime, but I also know that all that stuff made me tougher. The fights I had in school and the things I did to sort of prove myself. Maybe I was poor, but I was better off in some ways than a lot of people.
AC: Did you talk to your father about the book before he passed?
BH: No, I never really did. I talked to my mom a little bit about the book before she passed. She was, I think, quite fearful that I was going to write something that was going to reflect badly on the family. But I think I was pretty honest about my family. I think some people might take from the book that my father was an abusive monster, but I never saw it that way and I still don’t see it that way. In a lot of ways I wrote that book for my mom and dad. And I think my mom and dad would have been happy with everything I said in there. I just really wanted people to know that it was hard. In writing about my father I think it was important to establish or make people understand how hard it was to raise family with 12 kids and the sacrifices we all made as a family and how tough things were for all of us. We were always either doing really good or really bad. It was always either one or the other. When things got good and my dad was drawing money and wrestling was popular and he had a lot of big stars on his card, it was always a lot of fun and excitement. And it seemed like, within a few months, we might be back in the shorts and running shoes with no laces and stuff like that. When it got good, you never wanted to let it go. And when it got bad, you just had to hang in there until things got better. And I think I learned a lot of that from my dad.
AC: You’ve earned a reputation, for better or for worse, for really taking the wrestling business seriously – to the point that sometimes you’re mocked about it and people talk about Bret Hart “not getting it.” I know recently there was some sort of banquet where you walked out. I don’t know if you want to talk about that, but kind of tying that to the book, did you want to use this book to sort of explain yourself and tell people, “Yeah, I take it seriously and here’s why”?
BH: Yeah, I think you put it right the way I see it. I don’t think anyone knows what it’s like to be a wrestler. And a lot of wrestlers who do know don’t write their own books. Somebody else interprets what they’re trying to say. I’m just so sick of these books and these guys that are so-called experts or pseudo experts. They have no credentials… They’ve never been in the dressing room. They don’t know what transpired. They don’t know the tensions that built between feuding wrestlers, and the egos and the personalities and how you’ve got to negotiate things with someone like Vince, and how you can encourage things along, or how a wrestler builds an entire story. You know, Vince might give you the last three seconds of a match – the outcome and tells you what he wants. But he doesn’t tell you what to do for the 57 other minutes you might do in an iron match. I’ve felt for myself that I was my own producer, director, stunt coordinator and editor of my own movies. There were never any scripts for me, but I could memorize 60 minutes worth of wrestling. You’re read later on my sort of version of what happened with me and Shawn at our big iron match where we wrestled at WrestleMania XII. But to be such professionals and pull this story together in really a couple of hours. There’s no rehearsing. There’s no script. You’ve just got to go out there and remember so many little things. And to pull it off so well, I don’t know of any other actor or anybody who could do those kind of things. And I really just wanted people to know what it’s like from somebody who really knows what it is. People always talk about who the best wrestlers are. I actually go to maybe too much of an explanation about someone like Ric Flair for example. They rave about Ric Flair about being this great, great wrestler. And he was a great wrestler in many ways. But, in a lot of ways, like working with him in the ring, he was not so great. And for someone to contest that with me or argue with me that I don’t know what I’m talking about, things like that drive me crazy. Because it’s not true. They don’t know what they’re talking about. I know. I’ve worked with some of the greatest wrestlers of all time. And I worked with them throughout my career before I got to the WWF. I knew who the great wrestlers were. I’m sort of tired of people telling me who the great wrestlers were. I know who they were. And I can tell you the ones that weren’t. A lot of these books that come out, they’re not honest in telling you the truth. People interpret them as the truth. I’m sick of people making up stuff about wrestling. I’d rather they wrote the truth about who really were the great wrestlers – the wrestlers that made a difference. That thing I did, I think it was in Iowa, they were giving these guys an award for their books that they had been writing. I was so annoyed by the books that they had been writing because they were just made up. It was just some guy that didn’t know anything about wrestling that was making up whatever he thought. He was just a fan that had declared himself as an expert. And he was being cited that night as an expert and a guy that everybody appreciated what he contributed. And I thought, “He contributes nothing. He doesn’t even tell the truth.” And that’s what that was all about. It really wasn’t even worth my time to make a big issue of it.
AC: But how much of that sort of thing is subjective? Couldn’t you accept that who you would consider a great wrestler might be different than who somebody else would consider a great wrestler? Or do you think it’s not subjective – that great wrestler is a great wrestler is a great wrestler – period?
BH: I think the only ones that know who the real great wrestlers are are the great wrestlers. And I don’t think anybody else knows. I don’t think Dave Meltzer knows. I think he tries to know. What I like about Dave Meltzer is that he tries to get it right. There’s a sense of integrity there. He’s not making it up. He’s trying to get it right. And maybe he gets it right a lot of the time, but sometimes he gets it wrong, and I think he’d be fair enough to say that, yeah, sometimes he gets it wrong. But there’s some people out there who don’t have a clue what they’re talking about and they’ve got no business telling me my business.
AC: I think of when WWE released your DVD set a few years ago. To be honest, going into it, I though, “Yeah, Bret was a really great wrestler, but I don’t know that he should be up there with the very top wrestlers. I can’t remember that many great matches that he had.” Then I sat down and watched the DVD and totally ate my words. Because, just match after match, I was reminded of all these terrific matches that you had and at the end was just thinking of how many were left off. What kind of struck me was that it wasn’t a terribly big business period for WWE when you talk about those early 90’s, mid 90’s years. Does it bother you that when you were at your peak, business wasn’t that great?
BH: No, not really. I think after Hulk Hogan and the steroid scandal and everything, wrestling was on a real downhill swing then. It was really hard. Wrestling had this huge surge with Hulk Hogan. He made such a huge impact on everything. When he started to kind of slip and fall and wrestling was taking a lot of shots for the steroids and Vince and Hogan, and that sex scandal with the ring crew. There were a lot of really tough things that had nothing to do with me. And the company was in a tough spot. And I’ve always been kind of flattered that they called on me to sort of pull the sword out of the stone. And I did. I think I wasn’t the biggest draw in the world, but I stopped things from sinking. They didn’t go down any further after that. They kind of started to come up. And I held things. If you look at the wrestling period, you see where in the early 80s, Hulk Hogan and a lot of characters, they became cartoon characters. Wrestling was just a cartoon with real life muscle men that were all on steroids. And if you look at that period all through the steroid scandal, everything was cartoon stories. Elizabeth would lift up her dress and Andre would get distracted and then he’d lose his match. It was all a cartoon if you ask me. It was entertaining, but nobody was taking it too seriously. And then I became champion, and you look at the matches starting with [Roddy] Piper and [Mr.] Perfect, people started kind of looking at wrestling for the wrestling. I think I changed the wrestling. I made the priority wrestling. The actual stories themselves became the priority and the belt meant something. And maybe I took it too seriously, but at the same time I thought that’s about what wrestling needed to do as a company – go back to wrestling. It was the only thing that could save us. Too much cartoon stuff is not going to help anybody right now, because they see us as a bunch of oversized steroid freaks. So I think if you look at where wrestling went through my period, right up until Steve Austin and everything, you can see that wrestling got a lot more serious for the time period I was in. And I think my history and my backlog of matches, there was a certain sense of realism that came from those stories and those matches that raised the bar of wrestling for wrestlers today.
AC: And you were performing at that level even during the cartoon period. You watch those mid-80s WWF house shows from Madison Square Garden or the Boston gardens, and there wasn’t any wrestling on them until your match came out. You and Jim would maybe be out there with the Killer Bees or the Rougueaus, and it was so different than anything else on the card… I’ve heard more recently about wrestlers in WWE being discouraged from giving their all and being told to dial it back a notch. I imagine it was even more so back then because there was zero priority in workrate. Were you discouraged at the time from working so hard?
BH: No, I always thought that my ability was in my intense kind of performance every night. I think I kind of wrote about it in my book in the sense that it was “Time to show the WWF guys what the Stampede boys could do.” That’s how I worked. That’s how we all worked up in Canada here. We wrestled like it was real. When you walked down the streets or you went into a bar or gas station, basically people thought you were a real legitimate tough guy. I think we all tried to live up to that. My dad liked tough wrestlers and he liked the matches to look credible. And he liked the stories, the psychology of wrestling – working holds and making people believe it was real. And that’s what I always tried to do. And I get criticized. Like you were saying a few minutes ago, people might judge me for taking things too seriously. But I think I said it best in the book – Wrestling might all be bulls—t, but that bulls—t was everything to me. To me it was something I defended from the time I was four years old. I went to school my whole life believing – well, not believing - but I guess believing for a vast part of it, that it was real and that I had to defend it all the time. And I don’t think that ever changed. Even when I wrestled Owen, I can remember when we first started that little angle with each other, I said, “We don’t ever want to insult the fans’ intelligence. We’ve got to do this the old fashioned way where we don’t talk to each other and we don’t ride together. We’re not going to be sitting together in the coffee shop after the matches and letting everyone know that it’s all a big show. We’re not going to talk to each other anywhere.” And we wouldn’t talk to each other in airports or anywhere – no matter what. I remember landing in Calgary and going through customs. They held us at customs and they put us in the same room for a coupe of minutes while we were waiting… I remember all the people from customs came in and they had us on the camera. And they were watching us to see if we would talk. I remember we both burst out laughing. They had been waiting, and we had already been through there so many times. Some people might ridicule me for something like that, but that’s just how we grew up. That’s how serious I took things. I wrote in there about a little kid coming up to me near the end of my book. We had worked this storyline in wrestling where I had hurt my leg. I remember walking out and getting into my car and I wasn’t even limping or anything like that because I forgot all about the storyline because nothing mattered in WCW at the time. I remember a little kid sort of appeared behind me and he asked me about my ankle or my foot or my knee or whatever it was. And I remember that it hit me for a second that for him, it was all still real. He wanted me to limp. It was just one of those “Mean” Joe Green kind of moments. This kid just came up to me to ask me about my leg. And I could have said, “My leg is not hurt” or just blew the kid off. But to me, those are the most important fans of all. I remember limping to my car and getting in real slow and telling him that it was going to get better. It was stuff like that that I think defined me as a performer.
AC: Do you feel that there’s anything left now? I guess there’s been a lot of sort of different points of closure for you – one being the Hall of Fame ceremony some years ago in Chicago. Now you get to write this book that really kind of ties the bow on your career. Is there anything left? Or did you sort of feel that you were kind of closing the book on your wrestling life with this book?
BH: I think that’s it. I mean you never know if something happens, but I don’t see it coming. I don’t know what else I can do in wrestling or what else I have to say about it. I think I said it all. I wrote 1,200-something pages and they edited it down to 553, so I’ve got lots of other material. Lots of other of the same type of stuff that’s already in there. But I think that my connection to wrestling will probably be in the next few years be tied in with recreating my book into film and portraying the real drama of the wrestling life. I know that Mickey Rourke is coming out with a movie and I’m curious to see how close it is to the real thing. I’ve never seen a good movie on wrestling ever.
AC: Didn’t you see “Ready to Rumble” released by WCW in 1990-whatever it was?
BH: No, I thank God I wasn’t in it.
AC: I think you were working for the company at the time.
BH: Who knows? I probably was in it.
AC: It’s a good point. Do you see a film in your story? And how do you get it down to two hours?
BH: I’m hoping in the next few years that I could probably dedicate myself to using my imagination in other ways. I’d like to try to write another book on something else other than wrestling. I’m not sure what it is. Maybe I’ll try to write a novel. Like you said in the beginning when you talked to me, you said I was a good writer. I enjoy writing. I like the process. I’d like to take another stab at it in another vein, but I’m not quite sure where that will go. I’ll certainly give it a shot. But aside from that, I’d like to pursue – Before I got into wrestling I was supposed to go to film school. And I went through my career in wrestling, I used to always think, “I’m making these little 20-minute movies every night.” They only come up and give you the last three seconds of the match. The rest was up to me to figure out. For the most part in my career, I’d sit down with the guys I was working with and say, “OK, this is what we’re doing.” And they’d just sit and listen to me. And most guys just sat back. And I can remember some wrestlers just looking at me and saying, “That’s what we’re going to do?” They would be blown away by it – amazed. Like, “If you could pull off that kind of story with me out there, that would be great.” And I would walk out there and pull it off. And we’d have these great matches and they would come back. And I would say, within six months in being in the WWF, I had a lot of respect from the wrestlers for being an extremely qualified and skilled wrestler that was really safe. I looked very punishing and no fun to work with. But I think once you worked with me, you realized that that was the beauty of wrestling Bret Hart. It looked like it was really a tough experience and you were going through a lot of physical punishment out there. And in the end when you came back, you’d realize that you had the easiest match on the card and it looked the best. That’s what I tried to always give to them.
AC: Did the book also make you miss wrestling, and being out there on the road and the comradery? Did you entertain during the writing process whether you had another run in you, or was that not even on the table?
BH: Well, you know I still come up with endings to matches all the time. I have a lot of creativity and I still come up with stuff. I have a match in my head with Vince McMahon that will probably never ever – obviously, never ever happen. But I have lots of what they call “finishes” in my head that I could utilize if I ever needed to. If I could physically do them, it would be great. Or maybe for someone else. But I’ve always had a good imagination and I can take that and move it into a different area. It doesn’t always have to be about wrestling. When it was all over for me, I don’t know that I had much left to say about it, like physically – the stories that I contributed to throughout my career. When it was all over, I really think I got it all out. I didn’t miss it. I don’t think I’ve ever missed it a single time. I wish I could have ended it on a better note or that it had lasted maybe another couple years. That would have been nice. But in the end I was satisfied that I won every title that I could possibly win and do everything that was important to me. I just don’t know that I could have given any more. I don’t ever want to be remembered for being a manager, or an announcer or a commissioner or anything like that. I want to be remembered for being the great wrestler that I was. Because that’s what I was. I wasn’t the greatest talker. I wasn’t the most charismatic character that ever walked. But I do think that I was – I don’t know that anybody could say who was actually the best, greatest wrestler of all time – but I know that I was as good as they can get.
AC: Does it mean something to you to still have that legacy going on? Your niece and nephew working in WWE. Chris Jericho I guess was one of the last people to be trained in the Dungeon… and he’s the world champion right now. What does that mean to you – to still see that Hart legacy going on?
BH: I like it. Even with the WWF and Vince, we’re kind of at “live and let live.” It’s all kind of done and over with now. Vince can’t be feeling too bad. He’s a billionaire. He probably doesn’t reflect too much. He probably doesn’t give a damn about what happened to me anymore. But at the same time, I think he maybe starts to reflect sometimes about the contributions that I made. And I think what’s sorely missing in wrestling today is exactly what I was doing. And I think that a lot of young wrestlers today that I talk to, they’re the ones – the people that are in the business – that I mean the most to. And I know from Nattie and the Bulldog’s kid Harry, that I’m really important to them. And they have much respect and take great pride in everything I contributed to in wrestling. I just hope that maybe in some way I can be something positive to them, despite whatever’s happened with Vince.
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