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HART DIDN'T WANT TO WRESTLE - TRAGIC GRAPPLER'S LAMENT IS AIRED ON 'BIOGRAPHY'
Don Kaplan
11/16/1999
New York Post
90
Copyright (c) 1999, N.Y.P. Holdings, Inc. All rights reserved.
BEFORE he was killed last spring in a pay-per-view WWF stunt, wrestler Owen Hart said in a taped interview he wished he'd never gone into the ring.
"I always said, I don't want to do that [wrestling],'" Hart explains in a never-before-seen interview airing on tonight's edition of A&E's "Biography: The Life and Death of Owen Hart."
"I always said: I wanna be a fireman or a schoolteacher,'" Hart explained two years before his tragic death.
The TV portrait of Hart -- one of the most popular pro-wrestlers ever to step into the ring -- draws a picture of the wrestler as someone who went into the family business reluctantly.
Hart grew up in a family of pro wrestlers and was the youngest of 12 children. His older brother is ring superstar Bret "The Hitman" Hart and his father is wrestling legend Stu Hart.
Once in wrestling, Hart was trapped by his desire to provide for his wife and two children, friends and family now say.
Hart, 34, was killed last May when he fell from the rafters of a Kansas City arena while doing a dangerous stunt. He was supposed to swing down from the ceiling to the ring on a wire -- but his safety harness unexpectedly opened, and Hart fell 75 feet to his death in front of thousands of horrified fans.
Rather than stop the show, the WWF chose to continue it after Hart's damaged body had been removed from the ring.
"In our life together we really just wanted this country home, this private life that we had created for ourselves," says Hart's widow, Martha.
Hart, his wife and their two young children were a week away from moving into their dream house when he was killed.
He had been working as a wrestler to pay for the house and support his family.
"He had his priorities in the right order," said wrestling superstar Mick "Mankind" Foley. "[Owen] lived for his family, and he wrestled to live."
At one point Hart left wrestling and tried to become a fireman, but was not accepted into the department. The lure of big bucks, his exceptional talent and the need to support his wife and kids soon sent him back to the ring.
The elder Hart was known for putting his kids into torturous submission holds in the basement gym of their Calgary, Alberta, home -- a room called the "dungeon" -- while teaching them how to wrestle.
One family friend interviewed on "Biography" describes the elder Hart as being, "born about 300,000 years too late; he would have made an excellent cave man."
Meanwhile, Hart's death has fueled the ongoing debate that pro-wrestling is too violent and takes unnecessary risks for the sake of big ratings and big bucks.
"Wrestling is not that much different than a lot of other things that are going on now in our society," said Paul Jay, who co-created the "Biography" of Hart and the award-winning documentary about Hart's older brother, Bret, called "Hitman Hart, Wrestling with Shadows."
"Everything now is about making money, and there doesn't seem to be many other values, so wrestling will do whatever it takes to keep selling tickets," Jay said.
Wrestler Owen Hart gets the "Biography" treatment tonight on A&E in an up-close-and-personal look at his life -- and untimely death.