Straight from the Hart - Softcover

Hart, Bruce

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1550229397 ISBN 13: 9781550229394

Verlag: ECW Press, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

A no-holds-barred account of the often surreal, physically and psychologically brutal and politically cut-throat world of professional wrestling that fans everywhere - from the most casual or sceptical observer to the most rabid, hardcore aficionado - have truly been waiting for. Hart gets to the heart of the wrestling business, taking readers behind the scenes to discuss how wrestling should be booked, the toll steroids and other drugs have taken on his friends and family and what it was like to write his brother Bret's columns while The Hitman was on the road.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Bruce Hart is a member of the legendary Hart family, which spans three generations of wrestling fame. He lives in Calgary, Alberta.

Bruce Hart is a member of the legendary Hart family, which spans three generations of wrestling fame. He lives in Calgary, Alberta.

Bruce Hart i?s the son of Stu Hart and a member of the legendary Hart family, which spans three generations of wrestling fame. Hart is a teacher who lives in Calgary, Alberta.

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Straight from the Hart

By Bruce Hart, Michael Holmes

ECW PRESS

Copyright © 2011 Bruce Hart
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-55022-939-4

CHAPTER 1

AS FAR BACK AS I CAN REMEMBER ...

"Just when I think I'm out, they keep pulling me back in." — Michael Corleone

* * *

Those words, from The Godfather III, just about say everything you need to know about my affiliation (some would say affliction) with the business of professional wrestling. Sometimes it's been an exhilarating joyride; other times it's been a daunting descent, a ride down the highway to hell. Many times I figured I'd abandoned wrestling but invariably I would find myself somehow being drawn back — like a rationalizing junkie needing just one more fix.

My earliest recollections go back to when I was a wide-eyed kid of about four or five when my dad, who was promoting shows then, would invite aspiring prospects, or "wannabes" as he called them, up to the house to test their mettle in his infamous "Dungeon." My brothers and I would sneak down the basement stairs, pry open the door and watch with morbid curiosity as the sessions unfolded.

The trainees were generally big, imposing-looking types — football players, bouncers, bodybuilders and that sort — and most of them would swagger in cockily, figuring it wouldn't take them long to master pro wrestling, which most guys thought was little more than glorified play fighting. They were in for an extremely rude awakening.

My dad — a benign version of Cerberus, the three-headed dog at the gates of hell — would usually start the proceedings by putting the neophytes over, alluding to their awe-inspiring physiques or their vaunted reputations as one-man wrecking crews, street fighters and forces to be reckoned with. At the same time, he'd further disarm them by claiming to be nursing an injury, or that he'd just eaten or some such thing, and beseech them to take it easy on him. At this juncture, the cocky, self-absorbed rookies were licking their chops and contemplating that after they'd cleaned up the mat with this phony, flaccid old pretender, they'd be able to quickly ascend to stardom in the wrestling business. By this time, the trainees were figuring this would be a cakewalk. They were chomping at the bit to chew him up and spit him out and get on to bigger and better things.

Once they did get on the mat, my dad — appearing to be powerless to repel their onslaught — would allow the overzealous trainees to push him all over, which of course served to bolster their confidence even more. All of a sudden though, my dad would turn the tables on the unsuspecting wrestlers and in a flash, they'd find themselves trapped in some excruciatingly painful submission hold. From that point on, it was all downhill, with the suddenly not-so-bombastic newcomers being put through the wringer, as my dad used to call it — enduring one torture hold after another, and wondering what this sadistic psychopath had in mind next. During the course of their introduction to wrestling, the rookies abandoned most of their dignity — as well as, I might add, assorted bodily fluids — before they were finally allowed to limp off the mat with a decidedly different perspective about what it took to make it as a pro wrestler. Some would come back, but most would never be seen or heard from again.

At the time, being a wide-eyed and impressionable little kid, I found it quite horrifying to see my father — who ordinarily seemed to be a mild-mannered, easygoing sort — transform, down in the Dungeon. It was sinister, a Jekyll and Hyde thing. I often wondered about the demons lurking within him and it wasn't until several years later that I came to understand the method to his ostensible madness.

I would discover that when Stu Hart was first introduced to the wrestling business as a teenager in the 1930s, the inner workings of the sport were a closely guarded secret — kind of like in the Mafia. It was widely thought that the best deterrent to anyone exposing them was to make them pay their dues the hard way — in the tender of blood, sweat and tears.

Although pro wrestling was a work (pre-arranged) even that far back, for public consumption, it was still perceived to be a shoot (real). Within the inner sanctum of the wrestling fraternity, it was considered the ultimate transgression to expose it, and someone who was found to have violated that sacred covenant was dealt with quite harshly — in the form of having the living shit kicked out of them by shooters and/or by being permanently blackballed.

I was later to discover that my dad's own initiation into the wrestling fraternity was, by all accounts, every bit as harsh — if not worse — as what his Dungeon victims were put through. During the Great Depression of the '30s, his family, like many others from the prairies, had been hit hard and had lost everything, including their house and all their belongings. During this stretch, his mother died and he, his father and his two older sisters, who lived in a makeshift tent on the outskirts of Edmonton, were forced to eke out a meager existence, living off the land and getting by on whatever they could beg, borrow or steal.

As most Canadians can attest, it gets bitterly cold in the prairies in the winter, so on many a cold winter's night my dad, as a means of seeking refuge from the frigid temperatures, took to hanging out at the local YMCA and in due course, a group of grizzled old pro wrestlers who worked the circuit and trained there invited him to join them on the mat. From what he told me though, they were anything but gentle with him — using him as a sparring partner or human guinea pig, applying submission holds and essentially chewing him up and spitting him out. I can still recall my dad ruefully reflecting how on some occasions he'd leave the sessions so stiff and sore he could barely limp back home. In time, the sessions toughened him, both physically and mentally, to the point that he eventually began to hold his own against the shooters. Later he came to dominate them and to give them a dose of their own bitter medicine.

While at the YMCA, my dad made the acquaintance of Jack Taylor, a vaunted old shooter who was then in the twilight of a wrestling career that had begun back in the1890s. Taylor — a protégé of the legendary Farmer Burns, who was the founder of modern pro wrestling — gained a reputation as the toughest wrestler of his era. Many considered him to be even tougher than his stablemate and fellow Burns pupil, the iconic Iowa Assassin, Frank Gotch.

In any case, my dad would spend several years training with Taylor in the YMCA and would go on to become Canadian amateur wrestling champion. By all accounts, he was considered to have been a serious contender for Canada's first ever Olympic gold medal in wrestling at the 1940 Olympic Games, which were scheduled to take place in London.

His Olympic dreams were unfortunately derailed by a slightly deranged megalomaniac with aspirations of taking over the world — no, not Vince McMahon, but a heel named Adolf Hitler. With the onset of the Second World War, the Olympic Games were canceled and instead of shooting for glory on the mat, my dad found himself instead shooting for survival against the deadly Nazi U-boats in the North Atlantic as a member of the Canadian navy.

When the war finally ended in 1945, my dad found himself at a crossroads; he was nearly thirty and the next Olympics, which were then still up in the air, wouldn't be staged until 1948 at the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: ECW Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1550229397
• ISBN 13: 9781550229394
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 300
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: eucomply OÜ; hello@eucompliancepartner.com; ; Pärnu mnt 139b-14; Tallinn; 11317; Estland