More Than Just Hardcore (37 page)

When poor Owen Hart fell from the harness on a May 23, 1999, pay per view and died, he fell a lot farther, but he also landed on his head. Owen was doing a silly superhero gimmick, and they were going to lower him into the ring from the ceiling. But something went wrong, Owen came loose, and he didn’t make it.

Whatever problems the Hart family had after Bret got screwed over in Montreal paled in comparison to what happened after Owen Hart died. Martha,

Owen’s widow, sued McMahon and the company that made the harness that was to lower him into the ring, but some of the family backed McMahon. I don’t know if they truly thought he wasn’t to blame for Owen’s death, or if they thought there would be something in it for them, but it tore that family apart.

The whole thing was unbelievable. Bruce Hart, Bret and Owen’s older brother, called me up the night it happened and told me. I just couldn’t believe it. I mean, I really didn’t believe it. My first thought was, “Is this some kind of work?”

The whole thing was just heartbreaking. Owen was just 34, and I’d known him since he was 10 years old, hiding in the back of that dadgummed Cadillac, as we paraded through the streets of Calgary.

He had grown up to be a great guy. He was a great ribber, too.

Once it sank in, and especially the more I learned about what happened the night Owen died, the more I got to thinking about some equipment failures I had experienced during my last stint in the WWF.

There was that night, 11 months earlier, when Mick fell through the cage during that Hell in a Cell match with the Undertaker. And that wasn’t even the first time I noticed a problem.

Several weeks before the Hell in a Cell match, they had a prop man who was supposed to take care of my chainsaw, so I could go out and be Chainsaw Charlie. It had a chain on it, but the chain was frozen, so I wouldn’t hack anyone up swinging the thing around. It also had a grinder on it, which produced sparks. In fact, it produced a great deal of sparks.

Now, bear in mind it was this guy’s responsibility to make sure this thing was working, because Vince didn’t want me going out there with a chainsaw that didn’t work. Hell, I looked silly enough with a chainsaw that did work!

So on this night I was getting ready to go, and the props guy got the chainsaw running and handed it to me. They called for me to go to the ring, and I started heading down the aisle. As I walked to the ring, I raised the chainsaw over my head and clicked the switch to create sparks, without any luck.

After a few seconds of this, I noticed an odd odor and looked at the chainsaw. What I saw alarmed me, somewhat.

From the moment I lifted the thing over my head, gas had been pouring out of it, down my arm and onto my body. The son of a bitch had forgotten to tighten up the lid.

But here’s the damndest thing about it. I knew that gas was on me, but I kept trying to get the sparks to go, because, by God, I was Chainsaw Charlie! It was only through a stroke of luck or an act of God that I didn’t explode.

I was pretty upset with the guy, and you’d better believe I let him hear about it when I got backstage again, smelling like gasoline and half covered with it.

Now, this was a time when competition was really heavy. WCW was still ahead of Vince, but not for long, and they were neck and neck. Raw and Nitro were live, head-to-head shows, and both sides were pushing hard. They had timeframes in which they had to do stuff, and you had better be where they needed you, when they needed you there, because they wanted those shows to move. If they didn’t move enough, the thought was, people might change the channel and watch the other wrestling show. They were pushing hard to make everything happen during the breaks. And when you’re in that frame of mind, mistakes happen. But to me, after Mick took the plunge in that Hell in the Cell match, that was two mistakes too many.

And I don’t know if this same guy was involved in what happened to Owen Hart. I tend to doubt he was, but I do feel that Owen died because of the same “pressed for time” mentality that led to my chainsaw leak, that damn beam in that dumpster and Mick’s fall through the cage.

Sometimes I think, maybe if we’d made a bigger deal out of the incidents with Cactus and me, maybe they would have looked more carefully at everything else they did after that, including Owen Hart’s drop into the ring.

I didn’t work exclusively with Cactus the whole time I was there, though. I faced a lot of other WWF guys, and my terrible luck with catchers also continued. Just like a few years earlier, when I tried the same move at that show in Japan, I was doing a match in 1998 with Mark Henry, whom the WWF called “The World’s Strongest Man.” I went for a moonsault outside the ring with him right below me. To this day, I don’t understand how he missed me, coming down like a 250-pound sack of shit dropping from the top rope, when he could lift minivans and shit.

Good thing they didn’t call him “The World’s Fastest Man!”

During this time, Vince actually presented me with one of the few things I refused to do, and it wasn’t an in-ring gimmick. He wanted me to run for one of the Texas seats in the U.S. Senate. He called me up late one night, very excited about his idea, and I said no. It was pretty stupid on my part, really. A decade earlier, I had given Ted DiBiase great advice about jumping at the chance to do something that McMahon was ready to push that hard, and here I was, not taking my own advice.

Through the years, I had contemplated running for the state legislature or senate a few times. In late 2003,1 actually gave some serious thought to running in the 31st District and came very close to running. In the end, the guy who had initially asked me to run called the house and asked me not to. There were some other people in the Amarillo political community who were pressuring me not to run, too.

Still, I think I had a very good chance against the incumbent. The area represented was the area I had known all my life, and an area where people knew me. I was really concerned about the water issue here. Boone Pickens has water rights to the Ogelalla, and he wants to supply other major cities of Texas with water from the reservoir. Well, the water is drawn from saturated sand, and it takes years to fill up again. The whole thing is tied up in litigation. I don’t want water to get scarce here because he’s providing it to someone else. I just don’t want my grandkids having to pay every time they flush the toilet. I felt it was an important issue and felt like I could have an impact on it.

I called the guy who had asked me to run and then changed his mind, and told him he had convinced me not to run. But that wasn’t really the case.

What really killed it was being in the kitchen one day with my wife and my daughter Brandee. We sat and talked about it, and we all knew it would be very time consuming, with a lot of time spent in Austin. Well, they wanted me home, not arguing about policy hundreds of miles away. My daughter Stacy, who was out of town, had also voiced her opinion on me having a political career, which was similar to Vicki’s and Brandee’s. They were already tired of me being gone all the time while I was wrestling full time. We talked it over from every angle.

Finally, I said, “All right, let’s do this the right way; let’s vote. Should I run? Yes or no.”

Each of us took a piece of paper, to write down our answers. I looked at my little scrap of paper and thought about how much they hated me gone and how much me doing this would change all of our lives.

We wrote down our votes, and when I opened up the papers, they read, “No,” “No,” and “No.”

And so I didn’t run for office. And I don’t think I ever will. If there was a right time, that was it, and that time is over.

My last run in the WWF was as a partner of John Layfield, who wrestled as Justin Bradshaw. I liked him, but you’d better watch out for that goofball’s clothesline. It was like taking one from Hansen! They’re both idiots! Listen—the crowd does not feel your clothesline. They just see it. It’s not necessary to take someone’s goddamned head off to make the fans appreciate the move!

Bradshaw was also a big Dick Murdoch fan and was half-goofy, just like his hero. What can I say about a guy who idolized Dick Murdoch? Dick Murdoch was a nut! What does that make Bradshaw? It makes him a pretty unique guy. I mean, here was a guy emulating Dick Murdoch, and yet he was a guy writing a book on the stock market and how to invest! Would you trust a guy who wants to be just like Dick Murdoch telling you what stock to buy? Hell, it’s a wonder he wasn’t pushing Coors! CNBC was probably right to fire his ass!

He got to meet Murdoch early in his career, and even when I worked with him in the WWF, all he would talk about was Dick Murdoch! He thought Murdoch was the greatest guy in the world! Hell, I bet he was one of those guys who got in the pickup with Murdoch early on, with Murdoch telling him, “You and me, we’re the only ones around here with any damned sense!”

And Bradshaw believed him! He must have been the only one who didn’t know Dick was full of bullshit.

OK now, I want to back up for a second, because I made a joke of Bradshaw getting fired by CNBC, and I think it’s worth stopping with the bullshit for a second, going back and talking seriously about the situation that led to that happening.

Bradshaw decided to try to get a rise out of the German fans while touring over there in 2004 by goose-stepping and giving the Nazi salute. When CNBC got wind of it, they fired him as a financial analyst.

I think the ones who should be chastised are the ones who fired Bradshaw, because I think they’re the ones who are prejudiced. They don’t want someone coming from a “lowly sport” like professional wrestling into their world, while still able to do the things wrestlers sometimes do to get heat.

When Bradshaw did his goose-stepping, he ended up getting the crap beat out of him in the ring, so it was a case of a heel getting what was coming to him. When he sold for Eddy Guerrero and the Undertaker later in that match, he took the idea of what he’d been representing, and he destroyed it. Eddy and Undertaker destroyed the whole Nazi regime in that match! Bradshaw’s CNBC firing was utterly ridiculous.

One of my last opponents in the WWF was Vader, a huge man with great mobility. There’s one thing I’ll say for Vader. In professional wrestling, you have to believe in yourself and in the character you are portraying. And Leon “Vader” White certainly did.

After the little run with Bradshaw, I went to Vince and told him I had done the job I came to do, and that I felt like I’d helped as much as I could. Vince was very professional about it, and thanked me for my work.

Mick was kind of sorry to see me go, but he knew I hadn’t been wanting to go in for any long-term deal.

I’ll tell you this, though. Vince is a controversial figure, but he has his generous side. Steve Nelson, a tough kid who was the son of lady wrestler Marie Laverne (who had some great matches with Kay Noble) and Gordon “Mr. Wrestling” Nelson and a good wrestler in his own right, was trying to go to a sambo tournament in Russia where he wanted to compete, but he couldn’t afford it. Gordon Nelson never wrestled for Vince, but someone informed Vince that the kid needed some money to go over there and compete.

Vince sent him the money without even knowing the kid!

Like most of my incursions from 1993 onward, this one started with a phone call. The call came from Kevin Sullivan, who was now the booker for WCW. It was January 2000, and WCW had just had a major power shift, with Eric Bischoff finally getting the boot in September 1999. WWF writers Vince Russo and Ed Ferrara came in, but they were also gone before long. Turner Broadcasting executives then made Sullivan the booker, which led to some problems with some of the talent.

Specifically, Chris Benoit had a lot of problems with Kevin Sullivan, both professional and personal. He led a group of WCW stars consisting of himself, Perry Saturn, Dean Malenko and Eddy Guerrero, right over to the WWF. When I got there, they were just about out of there. Shane Douglas had been part of their group, but they ended up going without him, and I don’t know why.

I still remember seeing Benoit and Malenko in Japan, and later in ECW. I knew both those guys would do well. Their biggest problem was having a window open for them to show what they could do for the decision-makers in the wrestling business, and to have an opportunity to perform in front of their people.

I think the world of Chris Benoit, but I also considered Sullivan a friend, so I stayed out of that whole mess. As far as I was concerned, I was just there to work my way through it and make a buck. And once I got down there, it became pretty clear that making a buck was going to be the extent of what I could do there.

Sullivan was still a great idea man, but he had forces working against him that were tough to overcome, and he still needed someone to keep him in check.

If there was someone around Kevin to keep him within the boundaries of good sense, he’d be worth his weight in gold to any company, because he has no shortage of really great ideas. If I were going to start a promotion right now, I’d get Kevin Sullivan to be my booker, because by God, he’d have a gazillion ideas for whatever wrestlers I could get working for me, and he has endless energy, something you need in a position like that.

There was so much chaos there that no one could accomplish much of anything. It was constant change, and you never knew who was running what. One day, J.J. Dillon was the guy I needed to talk to about my program. The next week, he wasn’t. People were suddenly there, and suddenly gone and sometimes back again.

Kevin Sullivan called and presented me a scenario where I would start as the WCW commissioner. I would be working a program against Kevin Nash, with kind of a power struggle between us.

So I went in and cut some promos and got the thing with Nash set up.

We had a hardcore match, which proved to be another example of a guy stiffing me in the match and giving me nothing. Maybe he thought since he was a foot taller than me, he shouldn’t have to make an old man look like he could do him any harm. Who knows?