Remember this Dude. OWEN HART (Five months before his death): “When my contract is up, I’m out of wrestling. I’ve made plans. I’ve been smart with my fiscal affairs. Financially, I’ll be set. I really want to devote a lot of time to my family. I’ve bought some property on a lake. I plan on doing a lot of boating and fishing. I want to continue to stay in shape. And who knows, I might do ten weeks a year in Japan. Something just to motivate me to keep in shape, keep involved a little bit but not have to deal with the politics, the pressures that are so intense right now. I’ve paid my dues for twelve years now. If I continue for five more, that’s seventeen years working at a pretty hard clip. I think that at that point my family, my wife and kids, have been compromised enough... JIMMY KORDERAS [referee]: I heard screaming. I didnt hear exactly what the screaming was...I was told later that it was [Owen yelling at me to move out of the way]. It would not have been out of character at all for Owen to do that. Meaning, I was very close to becoming a more tragic part of that story than people realize... VINCE RUSSO: The whole idea just started so innocently... We had brought back Owens old gimmick, The Blue Blazer. He was meant to be like a superhero, but a spoof on a superhero - to really get over the comedic genius of Owen Hart. It was probably the Friday before the show, the shows already written - I get a call from Steve Taylor [WWF V.P of operations]. He goes, Look, I just got a call from the people who propel Sting from the rafters [in rival WCW]. They said theyre gonna be at our pay-per-view...they wanna know if there is anything they may be able to do for the WWE... So while hes telling me this Im looking through the show...and I see Owen. And Im saying, Well, thatd really elevate Owens character, thatd be something really special and cool for Owen...what if we propelled The Blue Blazer? STING: I know what its like to be up there when you have 10-to-20,000 fans screaming at a fevered pitch. Music, lasers, lights, and you need to go down on your cue and all... Man, theres a lot of chaos all at one time, and you cant even hear yourself think... VINCE RUSSO: So now during the day [of the PPV] Owen comes up to me and what he said was, I rehearsed propelling from the ceiling...but when I propel down, it takes me awhile to get my harness off. If [Owens opponent] the Godfather is in the ring first and then I propel and I gotta take this harness off, the Godfather could pummel me... See, everyone [at that time] was thinking, Real, real, real; reality, so he said, Could my entrance come first...THEN have The Godfather come out? I said, Owen, no problem - Ill make the changes, no problem... And that was it. That was the extent of our conversation. JIM CORNETTE: Guys can get hurt. Theyre risking their lives, but that [stunt] was completely unnecessary. It was something that Owen was asked to do that he was not comfortable with. Still to this day I blame Vince Russo, like a lot of people do, because for those who dont know, Owen, instead of being able to do a normal entrance into the ring and have a wrestling match, which is dangerous enough, they decided that he would make a superhero entrance and be lowered into the ring in this outlandish costume that Russo had booked him to be in and was being lowered by a rigging company that didnt check the rigging or whatever and there were lawsuits... [ NOTE: Owen had already performed a variation of the stunt at an earlier date: youtu.be/2AHv3P0ya98 With the standard (safer) full harness and slow release clip the stunt took too long to disengage and, it was decided by all involved, made for bad television. For the PPV Over The Edge where the fatal accident occurred, it was decided that the stunt would be done using a nautical clip which was designed expressly for the quick release of a sailboat mast. It is alleged that several stunt coordinators were asked to test it, but all but one refused, declaring it crazy.] MARTHA HART (Owens Wife): He was hooked up to a make-shift contraption which included a quick- release snap shackle clip meant for the sole purpose of rigging sail boats. The hook that was practically the equivalent of a paper clip released [prematurely]...and Owen fell... STING: I was on my way to LAX and I was flying [to Greenville, SC]. We were doing a Monday Nitro...and I was scheduled to come out of the ceiling that night. My wife called me and told me. She said, Somebody died, and I think it was Owen Hart. And youre not gonna believe this...but he died coming out of the ceiling on a cable. I said Youve got to be kidding me... VINCE RUSSO: Owen NEVER said to me he was concerned about doing it. He never said to me he was afraid. He never said to me he had trepidations about it. But then...theres that other side. You start thinking about the wrestler side of Owen. Was Owen afraid to say he was uncomfortable with this because three weeks ago hed told us he was uncomfortable with [another storyline] and the old wrestler mentality kicked in...Would he have been afraid to lose his spot..? JIM CORNETTE: Vince Russo didnt feel that [Owen] was exciting enough as himself and wanted to make him a superhero, and came up with the idea of doing that. Owen wasnt comfortable with it, but he had already turned down a few things that he wasnt comfortable with, and he didnt want to be Negative Nancy and be known as the guy who kept saying no, so he went along with it, and it didnt turn out well... VINCE MCMAHON: Earlier that day, my son Shane and I were out by the ring, walking through a physical bit we had to do that night, and I was shocked and surprised by Owen. He was descending to the ring in typical Owen fashion, yelling and raising hell. He was one of the biggest rippers - as we call them in the business - a practical joker, a prankster. One time he and Davey Boy Smith put goats in my office, and they made sure those goats were well fed beforehand. You can imagining how it stunk. But thats how it is in the WWF, and how it was with Owen. So many jokes... TRIPLE H: Owen was a great guy. He didnt take the business too seriously. He didnt take anything too seriously - except his family. And he kept a lot of his life personal. Owen saw this [just] as a career where he could make some money, take care of his family. Then hed was done with it. But he was a good friend to a lot of the guys, very funny, always playing a joke on somebody. Ive been in the ring with Owen and he was unbelievable...an unbelievable talent. So much so, that sometimes he would go out and have a bad match on purpose...to make himself laugh. You know what I mean? Because he would think it was funny... THE ROCK: I was backstage in the dressing room, going over the details of my match with Triple H and Chyna. We were talking, moving around, trying to figure out how to make the match memorable, when Sergeant Slaughter walked into the room and said, Owen is hurt... I looked at Hunter, then looked at Sarge and said, Oh, come on. Are you serious or are you ribbing? Owen was known for his pranks, and I thought maybe this was just another example of his twisted sense of humor. No, Sarge said. It looks pretty bad. Theyre working on him in the middle of the ring... JULIE HART [Brets wife at the time]: “My boys and I just came back from Ottawa, we were just pulling up to the driveway and my sister called and she said, Julie, something happened to Owen - I dont know what’s going on... I ran into the house called up Stu (Owens father) and I could tell it was not good because I could hear crying in the background. Helen was too upset to come to the phone. It was like being in a dream...wondering, when am I going to wake up...” THE ROCK: I went straight to the curtain...as I reached the gorilla position, where everyone was gathered, I could see the shock on their faces, the disbelief. People were crying, hugging. And then it hit me: This is real. I walked up to the curtain and looked out. the eMTs were working on Owen in the middle of the ring, giving him CPR. The crowd was on its feet, absolutely silent... VINCE MCMAHON: I was backstage in my office when I heard. It happened when the arena was dark, so nobody saw the fall... THE ROCK: [I thought] My god...thats my friend, I have to go out there. I turned around. Vince McMahon was standing there, watching everything on the monitors. He was in shock, just like the rest of us. Vince, I said, I want to go out there - what do you think? Vince just stared at me, with a look on his face that seemed to say, Rock, thats entirely up to you. After a few moments, though, Vince spoke. If you go out there, Rock, those people are really going to react to you. They may think this whole thing is a work... ERIC BISCHOFF: I was watching an NBA game when someone called me to tell me that Owen had just died at a WWE Pay- Per-View. Hed fallen to his death during a stunt where he was supposed to rappel down to the ring. I was shocked, and I didnt believe it. A couple of months before, as a twisted practical joke, one of the wrestlers in WCW had made a prank call claiming that Brets father had passed away. Id been informed and told Bret he needed to call home. Bret did so, finding out that it wasnt true at all. It was a pretty disgusting joke, or rib, as the wrestlers liked to call it. So you can imagine what went through my mind this time. So I placed three or four calls to people I knew I could trust. They confirmed that Owen had really died. Bret was already in the air on his way to meet me [in LA]. I knew I had to go to the airport and tell him. As it turned out, I wasnt the first... BRET HART: I found out on the plane. I was flying to do the Jay Leno show. You dont ever wanna find out about a tragedy on an airplane, trust me on that one. That was really hard...there was nowhere to go... THE ROCK: So I waited anxiously, helplessly by the curtain, until they wheeled Owen through on a stretcher. One of the EMTs was still straddling Owen, pumping his chest, desperately administering CPR. I walked alongside them and said a prayer as I looked at Owens face. Then I helped them load the stretcher into the ambulance. I climbed into the passenger side of the vehicle and looked in the back, where they were still working furiously on Owen. I kept praying that God would save my friends life... BRET HART: I actually know first-hand from the wrestlers involved that they wheeled my dead brother right past all the wrestlers and actually pushed them out the door and said, Go...go...go - youre on... I think thats really insensitive. Really cold... THE ROCK: I felt completely numb. And now, somehow, we had to deal with the task of going out there and performing. Triple H and I talked about the rest of our match, tried to finish putting things together, but it was almost impossible because we were so worried. Two minutes before we were scheduled to hit the stage, we were told that Owen had died... STING: I ended up landing wherever it was we were doing the show, and it was confirmed. Owen had died. I saw the guys that do my set-up and I said, Guys, you wont be setting up anything for me tonight. I will not be doing that...two different reasons: number one, it would be completely disrespectful. Number two, I was too shaken to do something like that... JBL: Owen dressed with Ron and I that day in KC. It was a small dressing room so we were there during all the discussion about the stunt. I remember going in and telling Undertaker, who was going over his match [with Austin], that Owen was dead... STEVE AUSTIN: We were backstage just chilling, waiting to perform, then all of a sudden word comes to the back that Owen is dead. I was like, What the hell are you talking about..? Then it was like, Are we gonna work? Or are we gonna stop..? JBL: It was tough because we knew he had died but no one knew what to do; to wrestle or not to wrestle... Vince was overwhelmed and gave us the option of finishing show or not wrestling...he told everyone that they could do what they wanted - no pressure. He really didnt know what to do...no one did...there wasnt a right decision. We decided to wrestle. We wrestled shortly after Owen died, I dont think right after, I think it was a couple of matches later, I cant remember... THE ROCK: I said a prayer for his family. Then - and I know this sounds strange - I started to think about the performance, the show. I thought...Can I really go out there right now? Not SHOULD I go out there...but CAN I? Am I capable of performing? I could not remember anything about the match we had designed. My mind was blank. Everything seemed...pointless. But as quickly as I asked myself that question - can I go out there now? - the answer came. I envisioned Owen saying, D.J, you have to go out there... I personally felt comfortable with going on because I knew Owen, and I believe Owen would have wanted that... MARTHA HART (Owens wife): As he lay dying in the ring, he struggled to live for me and our children...and after he lost his fight for life they just scooped him up and ordered the next match out. Wheres the humanity? Owen was a man of many faces but I knew the true Owen...I felt I was the only one who really knew him, so believe me when I say I would know exactly what he would and wouldnt want. Would he have wanted the show to go on? Absolutely not. BRET HART: His life was centred around his wife, Martha, his one and only childhood sweetheart, and his two beautiful children, Oje and Athena. I recall, so often, in airports, hotel rooms, dressing rooms, long drives on endless highways, his only dream was to come home to his wife and his two children. So many times, I remember he sprinted from the door of the plane, his two carry-on bags in each hand, at a full run, worn out and weary, just to clear customs, through the sliding doors, to their outstretched arms...
Posted on: Sat, 13 Dec 2014 17:15:50 +0000
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