Greetings.
This week (May 23rd) marks the twentieth anniversary of my brother Owen’s tragic death in Kansas City in 1999 – “the day the music died”, as my brother Smith, to paraphrase Don McLean, succinctly put it.
In some ways, Owen’s accident seems like it was only yesterday, yet, in so many others, it seems like an eternity, as so many others have passed and so much has transpired since then. This week, I’d like to pay tribute to Owen and to reflect on his career and his life.
Owen was the baby of the family – the twelfth child. Because my dad, back then, was often on the road and preoccupied with running our wrestling promotion and not therefore not around that much, as one of his older siblings, I kind of took him under my wing, so to speak, and in some ways not only was he my kid brother but almost like a surrogate son to me. In addition to hanging out together, I took him with me on safaris to places like Texas, where we visited my old friends Dory and Terry Funk and assorted other adventures.
By the time Owen was in his early teens, I was doing the booking for my dad’s fabled Stampede Wrestling promotion and around that time, I was breaking in several talented young prospects, including Tommy Billington (Dynamite Kid), Davey Boy Smith, Robbie Steward, Jim Neidhart, Georgie Takano (the Cobra) and Junji Hirada (Sonny Two Rivers) – all of whom would go on to become major stars and Owen, who loved every aspect of the wrestling business, would hang out in the Dungeon and listen intently to every word that was said.
I also used to take him on road trips on weekends, where he would hang with some of the above mentioned wrestlers, as well as the likes of John Foley, Cedrick Hathaway, Duke Myers, Kerry Brown, David Shults, Gama Singh, Mike Sharpe and, quite often, my dad – and we all used to “school him”, as they say, about the various elements of wrestling business, including technique, ring psychology and the do’s and don’t’s of working.
During the summer of 1980, Dynamite Kid and I were wrestling in Hawaii for an old friend of my dad’s named Peter Maivia – where I was helping Peter and his son-in-law, Rocky Johnson, with the booking (matchmaking). Since Hawaii was a fascinating place, I flew Owen down to hang out with me and Dynamite. At that time Rocky had a teenaged son, Dwayne, and, he and Owen hit it off immediately and would become fast friends. Dwayne would, of course, grow up to become “the Rock”.
By the mid 80’s, while Owen was fascinated with pro wrestling, he was still pursuing an education and after graduating from high school, he received a scholarship to the University of Calgary for amateur wrestling. By his sophomore year he was one of the top collegiate wrestlers in the country – which my dad was exceedingly proud of and his goal was to compete for Canada at the 1988 Olympics in amateur wrestling.
In the spring of 1986 however, Owen called me up, somewhat disconsolate that the University of Calgary, due to financial constraints, was scrapping its amateur wrestling program, which put a serious crimp in his Olympic dreams. He told me that since his Olympic aspirations were now something of a longshot, he’s like to turn pro and see how that went.
At the time, most of our top stars had been hijacked by Vince McMahon and the WWF, including my brother Bret, my brothers-in-law Davey Boy Smith and Jim Neidhart, Dynamite Kid, David Shults, Bad News Allen and Honky Tonk Wayne and I was in the process of breaking in a bunch of novice wannabes. At the time, many people in the wrestling business were kind of sneering at me and my dad for thinking we could revive the territory with the no name rookies, which only further fuelled my desire to succeed.
In retrospect that group of rookies – which included Chris Benoit, Johnny Smith, Brian Pillman, Jushin Liger, Hiroshi Hase, Garry Albright and Shinya Hashimoto would all go on to become game changing superstars, but the brightest star of all would turn out to be Owen – who was an instant sensation from his very first match. I can still recall, with pride, how esteemed Wrestling Observer publisher, who was one of the most respected judges of talent in the business, declared that Owen was the best rookie he had ever seen and predicted he’d go on to become a superstar of the highest order.
From 1986 to 1989, Owen almost singlehandedly revived our promotion – doing great business with the likes of Mike Shaw, Great Gama, Johnny Smith, Hiroshi Hase, Barry Orton (Zodiak), Karl Moffat (Jason the Terrible), Garry Allbright, Garfield Portz and B. G. Holliday, among others and continuing to garner rave reviews as one of the best workers in the business.
In 1990, my dad, who was now 75 and was incurring hassles with the wrestling commission, as well as my mother, who wanted him to get out of the business, decided to finally pull the plug on the promotion and beckoned Owen to head to the WWF.
I had no doubt at the time that Owen was more than capable of attaining superstardom in the WWF, but at that time, the WWF seemed pre-occupied with enormous body builder and strongmen types, including Hulk Hogan, Ultimate Warrior, Big John Studd, the Legion of Doom, Brutus Beefcake, the Warlord, the Barbarian, Tony Atlas and Zeus. As a result, Owen, who never weighed much more than two hundred pounds, was relegated to doing jobs in the opening matches – where he remained for several years.
In the mid 90’s, the news broke that Vince McMahon’s physician – Dr. George Zahorian had been charged with administering prescriptions for anabolic steroids to many of the above mentioned WWE superstars and the resulting scandal threatened the future of the whole promotion. As a result , the WWE parted ways with many of the muscle men types and opted to start pushing less anabolically enhanced guys, like Shawn Michaels, Steve Austin, Sean Waltman and my brother Bret.
To my consternation though, even though Owen was as good as any of them, the powers that be in the WWE continued to miss the boat on him, giving him one lame gimmick after another, including as the masked Blue Blazer, the American Eagle and teaming him up in a pseudo comic tag team called High Energy with Koko B. Ware and a parrot named Frankie.
After all of those lame and unproductive incarnations, the WWE then turned Owen into a wimpy, whiny heel who was supposedly jealous of his big brother, Bret. For a while, they flogged the so-called Family Feud with Bret and Owen and because they were both decent workers, they did some not bad business, but most of the fans had trouble hating Owen, because he was so charismatic and appealing (kind of like the present situation with the WWE trying to turn Daniel Bryan into a despicable heel).
Later on, the WWE tried to turn all the Harts into heels – as the supposedly dastardly Hart Foundation, which consisted of Owen, Bret, Davey Boy, Neidhart and my former tag partner, Brian Pillman. That transcended into some not bad business, but it still seemed incongruous for most fans to be booing faces, like Owen and Davey Boy, whom most of the fans actually loved.
Everything changed in 1997, after the infamous Montreal Screw Job, after which, Bret, Davey Boy and Anvil quit the WWF and went to WCW, while Pillman, tragically, died. That left Owen as the only member of the Hart Foundation still remaining in the WWF. I’m not sure if Vince McMahon and company chose to finally start pushing Owen out of loyalty, for having remained with the promotion, or if they finally saw the light and realized that he was an awesome talent. In any case, by 1998, Owen was climbing the stairway to heaven, so to speak and was being groomed for superstardom.
In the spring of 1999, Owen called me up and divulged that the WWE was planning to put one of their major titles on him and, after all the trials and tribulations he’d been through and promised unfulfilled and whatnot, he seemed pleased that things were finally going his way. I was delighted, because I knew he was an incredible talent and I had no doubt that he was going to prove to everybody that, like Dave Meltzer had predicted so many years ago, he was a generational talent.
The next weekend, I was up at my parents’ house for Sunday dinner and as we were sitting down to dinner, a local television reporter showed up at the door and informed us that Owen had been killed during some stunt that had gone wrong – which left us all grief stricken and in disbelieving shock.
Sad to say, our lives have never been the same since, as not long after a bitter and divisive law suit between the Hart and the WWE ensued, which led to my mother’s untimely passing. Subsequent to that my brother-in-law Davey Boy, who’d been condemned by Bret for remaining with the WWE after Owen’s death, died, with many attributing his death to all the stress and guilt he’d been carrying. Not long after that, my dad, whose life had been shattered by all the grief, family feuding and whatnot, also died – which was kind of the last straw.
In the years since, I’ve often pondered about what happened on May 23, 1999 and it brings to mind a prescient quotation from the Quaker poet John Whittier who wrote that “the saddest words in the English language are what might have been”. I can only imagine.
On that winsome note, I’ll call this a wrap but will look forward to catching up with you all next time.