Original subtitles

Ever since I was a little kid, I loved drawing cartoons.

If I couldn't have the toys I wanted, I'd draw them instead.

I sketched Snoopy and the Red Baron, werewolves, Frankenstein.

But what I drew the most were the wrestlers that I loved.

Guys like Killer Kowalski, Waldo Von Erich, Dr. Death, Mr. X, and my

favorite, the Zebra Kid.

I loved wrestling so much that I even drew myself.

And I dreamed that one day I'd be the champion of the world.

Dad, look!

It's Brett the Hitman Hart!

Brett!

We're not looking at a character. We're looking at a guy. His name is Brett

Hart. Go get him, Cam.

It wasn't... Comic book writing. It wasn't storytelling.

It wasn't fables. It wasn't make -believe.

Brett was the first superstar that you actually saw a human

being in.

We all wanted to be the kid that got the glasses.

He had the it factor all along. He was like magic. They just were drawn to him

like a magnet.

As a kid, I would sit down in front of the TV and pay attention to grass

more than anything else. The same way I would do if I was watching Disney, my

favorite film, because his matches were so captivating. They were so realistic.

He just had a cool factor.

You know, he had the shade, the leather jacket.

He made pink and black cool.

If I got pulled over for speeding and name dropped that Bret Hart was my

I'd get out of the speeding ticket. Definitely helped make me a cooler kid

school. And he was just kind of the it thing.

And I'm sure a pro wrestler such as yourself will appreciate all the closet

space, Hitman.

Ooh, this place got old man stink.

He took every aspect of being champion to heart.

Straightforward, honest, charismatic.

That was a real champion.

The best there is, the best there was, and the best there ever will be. The

excellence of execution.

I've lived for wrestling.

And my family has lived for wrestling.

And we've died for wrestling.

We both collapsed in each other's arms, just hugging each other, just crying.

We still grieve. We still miss him.

It's not a sad story.

He faced adversity in real life, and he battled through it.

And he came out on the other side with his head held high, with his

pride and his respect still intact.

I'm not getting into it to be an average wrestler or make a living. I want to be

the best wrestler that ever put on a pair of boots. I want everyone to go,

the best.

The whole mechanisms of a family of 12 kids is hard for anyone to understand.

And I've always been really grateful for how my dad raised all of us. He was a

very hardworking guy. Every single day he got up in the morning and made

breakfast for everybody.

He'd make 12 dishes.

Six dishes would be for the big ones.

And then he'd make six slightly smaller ones.

And you were not allowed to leave the table until you ate everything because

dad had grew up with such a tough life growing up.

He was born in Saskatoon.

Saskatchewan in 1915, he was dirt poor.

His father got swindled in some kind of a land deal.

He took up squatters' rights on the property until they got thrown off the

property, and they end up with his father and his two sisters and his mom

in a tent in the freezing Saskatchewan prairie for two or three winters, living

off whatever he could hunt, rabbits and whatever birds and stuff he could shoot

with a slingshot.

I sometimes wonder how he made it through those days.

My grandfather's salvation, his refuge, his shelter was the YMCA, where

he ended up taking up amateur wrestling really as just a way to stay warm. He

takes beating after beating after beating, but he's getting better and

and better. He came from such a low place that this was his way of asserting

himself in the world.

He winds up in New York, and it's in New York that he meets the famous wrestling

promoter Toots Montt.

He takes a look at Stu at that time, the chiseled Greek statue of a man.

My grandfather was, as we say, jacked.

My dad and a bunch of wrestlers all went to Long Beach, Long Island.

They were all on the beach, and they were all flirting with my mom, and my

was pretty hot stuff back in those days.

My dad somehow caught my mom's eye, and my mom took a shine to him.

My mother and father got married December 31, 1947, in one of the worst

snowstorms in New York history.

And my mother used to say, I've been snowed under ever since.

Stu was working as a wrestler, but he wanted to go home. He wanted to go back

Alberta, and he had dreams of being a promoter himself.

There was a Calgary promotion at the time. He bought the territory for $50

He's got some grand ideas, Stu, at the time. When we were growing up, It's hard

to imagine, but we lived in this 22 -room mansion.

It was kind of like a cross between a hotel where maybe all the staff quit and

little bit like an orphanage.

We were right on the edge of the city limits back in those days.

It was at one time a hospital for the Red Cross.

Although it was very stately, it was clearly a well -lived -in house.

you know, as a lot of houses when you have that number of children.

Smith, Bruce, Keith, then came Wayne, Dean, then we got our first girl, Ellie,

and then there was Georgia, and then I came along, and then my sister Allison

came along, and then my brother Ross came along, my sister Diana came along,

finally the last, my youngest brother Owen.

I had a really vivid imagination.

I loved cowboys and Indians. I loved the Wild West.

Davy Crockett was a big hero.

He was always an adventurer.

He was a guy that handled the wrestling bear, Terrible Ted, up in Calgary and

working the territory.

And my dad let him live on the property. He lived under the back porch of the

house, and it was in a little mesh cage.

My dad would always have fudgicles in the freezer, and you could take the

fudgicles and you could drip the ice cream on your toes.

And that bear would lick your feet clean. I remember my feet were like

the bottom. I mean, they were so dirty. I remember my mom going, oh, you took a

bath. It's like, yeah, I took a bath. The bear cleaned my feet.

I never even thought much about it. It's like I kind of assumed everybody had a

bear under their porch.

Dad did a lot of the cooking, the big stuff, you know, maybe two or three huge

turkeys. Stu had all these connections with the grocers where he would get the

distressed food and stuff.

They would give him all the fruit that they were unable to sell.

So he would sometimes come home with like 50 pounds of bananas.

We'd be having bananas and milk for breakfast for several months.

I spent every Friday night from the time I was four and a half or five years old

around wrestlers.

Gene Koniski and Killer Kowalski and Pat O 'Connor and Lou Thez. I can even

remember Bruno Sammartino coming up from my father. I earned my first money in

pro wrestling, selling programs, and I made pretty good money for a five -year

-old. I'd make two or three bucks a weekend and buy stuff for myself.

My dad had a feud going with a guy named Archie the Stomper.

I can remember Archie the Stomper.

Going on TV and talking about he was going to tear the hard house down brick

brick. Have everybody with the last name of H -A -R -T.

Every single one of them. Until he found my mom and my dad. He was going to pile

drive my mom on the interstate.

Basically scared the hell out of me with his promo.

And then I watched him pull into the yard and a yellow Corvette knocked on

door. And my mom came running down. She opened the door a crack.

Oh, Archie, she had the New York accent and all that, and she gave him a hug,

gave him his check.

They talked for about 20, 30 seconds, and he walked off and got in his car and

drove off.

What's going on here? Why is my mom being nice to Archie the Stomper,

after last night he was biting my dad's head?

I started to understand how wrestling really works, at the same time defending

wrestling at school all the time.

Growing up in a wrestling family the way we did, six months you might be doing

really good and then it's six months where it drops off horribly. And I

as a kid always reflected in my clothes, my shoes and my shoelaces.

Your knees are all torn out and kids would make fun of you for the clothes

you wore.

When your dad's not a policeman or a doctor or a lawyer, when your dad's a

professional wrestler, And there's 12 of you and you're wearing hand -me -downs.

It had its challenges.

They called us heart fart.

And we hated that.

I was always pretty defensive about that stuff. I think more so defensive of the

wrestling. When somebody came up and told me that wrestling was all bullshit

none of it was real and your dad wasn't really a tough guy and my dad could beat

your dad up, that was time to throw down.

Where I would beat a kid with a full Nelson or a sleeper hold or a Boston

right on the grass.

It was a big deal to me to go out there and defend the Hart name.

I never lost a fight at school, ever.

It didn't matter if we dressed funny or if we were different. We were the Hart

family. My dad would say, the Hart boys are coming. The Hart boys are coming.

I slept most of my life in this room here with four of my brothers. There's

of us in the room there most of the time, if not more.

That's where a lot of hijinks and wrestling took place.

In the middle between the two bedrooms is my mom's office where all the calls

came in.

The phones never stopped ringing at the Hart House ever.

Hello?

It was a grassroots business.

that my mother and father started, and it's like the little promotion that

could. I have $1 ,000 here where the winner of it, each boy is contributed

and they're going to have a wrestle royal in Great Falls next Sunday.

You go upstairs, and my mother would be in the office booking plane flights,

managing the bank account and signing checks. And then in the basement, my dad

would be training people.

So you would hear people.

often screaming.

In the basement, this is, of course, the dungeon, where Stu trains, you know,

wannabe wrestlers, trains people who want to break into the business.

My grandfather had this deep passion for submission wrestling, where you

basically put somebody in a real hold.

It meant to induce so much pain in them that they scream or they tap out. He'd

stretch you and he'd twist you into a pretzel.

Many of these fellas were looking at parts of their body they had never seen

before and to see guys actually vomit. Guys defecating and crying and begging

him and blood vessels popping in their eyes, passing out in his arms.

Upstairs you'd be in the kitchen sipping red rose tea.

And down there, somebody's screaming their lights out and, like, begging for

mercy, and my grandfather's just having the time of his life.

My brothers would go down in the basement, and they would wrestle with my

and they would wrestle each other.

He taught his son how to make a living.

That's the way they want to play it. They're going to get double dose of

medicine next week. My brothers were doing it. Bruce and Keith were wrestling

full time.

Half as crazy as he makes out to be.

My brother Wayne was a referee.

Wayne Hart, the referee.

When I was in high school, if you'd ask me, what are you going to be when you

grow up? Are you going to be a pro wrestler?

I would have told you never. There's not a chance in the hell.

And when I went out for the wrestling team, and I had the long hair, I

coaches always saying, you've got to get a haircut.

And I was like, no, I'm not cutting my hair.

And then I would win.

My last year of high school wrestling, I was city and provincial champion.

That's pretty funny.

Of course, things change when you get your first girlfriend and drinking beer

and loving life and having a good time.

The last thing I wanted to do was wrestle.

Grab him, Dan.

I was a huge Beatles fan.

I was a big Doors fan. I loved rock and roll music.

I always loved Jim Morrison of the Doors because I liked the way his hair was

kind of like, I like to think that my hair was like that.

I went to the movie Papillon with Steve McQueen. It was one of my favorite

movies as a kid. And I remember going, that's what I want to do. I want to make

movies.

I did enroll in film school with no real guidance or plan.

There's our star.

This is all right behind my dad's house, and he couldn't drive.

Being a friend of mine, about an 8mm movie camera.

Damn lizard destroying the whole city of Calgary.

Our movie was going to be called The Lizard.

I went to a pet store and I bought an iguana that we were going to make the

monster in our movie.

They looked so vicious and scary looking.

We bought a bunch of model cars that looked like the cars we were driving

in those days. We had some of our friends pulling them on a string and we

them crash and blow up and burst into flames.

This is how bad his acting is.

We didn't really know what we were doing. We were actually so excited about

buying a movie camera and just making movies that we started making the movie

without a script and without any plans.

And the big blow to us as a production company was our lizard died.

He croaked on us and it was like, he's the star of the movie. It's like King

Kong dying.

So there it went to our movie.

Okay, cut.

We'll try something else.

I quit college in the film school and everything. I just dropped out.

So I remember telling my friends, like, I'm going to try the wrestling thing.

And it was like, really? Like, they couldn't believe it.

And I knew I was a good amateur wrestler, so I'm not getting into it to

promoter's kid wrestler.

I'm getting into wrestling to someday be the biggest star in my dad's territory.

I'm going to make this wrestling game work.

This is the fourth of the Hart clan.

Bret Hart, again, with a big slam.

He's got the abdominal stretch.

And that's it.

And there's your winner, young Bret Hart.

My dad's been working out with me a little this week. He knows a little bit

about the game. Yeah, a little bit.

Okay, Bret.

Good to see you. Bret Hart.

The only reservation I ever had was I didn't think he was big enough.

And then all of a sudden, his physique emerged.

He got bigger. He got stronger.

He was believable. He was likable. The fans took to him.

Like

a

lot of kids who grew up in Calgary in the 1970s, stampede wrestling was the

ritual. And it was something that you look forward to on Saturday afternoons.

And I do remember the boys in my elementary and junior high school, a lot

times at recess would emulate the hard boys.

I'm sure that me and Bruce and Keith are ready to fight it any way they want.

We'll give them any kind of match they want. It was quite funny because I was

like this kid that had been picked on, and all of a sudden girls were telling

that my brother Brad is so cute.

And I'd be like, okay, sure.

The fans loved the hearts so much. I mean, all the hearts. All of the eight

had some sort of dealings with the wrestling world.

And then the four girls all wind up marrying wrestlers as well. My mom,

is the oldest of the heart girls.

She ended up marrying Jim the Anvil Neidhart, who is my dad.

I'm going to dropkick you!

50 feet all the way to the ceiling.

My aunt Georgia, she ended up following in my mom's footsteps. His name was BJ

Annis. My aunt Allison was also married to a wrestler named Ben Basarab.

And then the baby, my aunt Diana, she married Davey Boy Smith, the British

Bulldog.

Davey came over to wrestle for my grandfather.

Davey proposed to me outside on my dad's balcony. He said, I've asked your dad

and he gave me his blessing. I asked your mom and she almost fainted.

That makes me laugh thinking about my grandmother, Helen. She started off not

really liking wrestling and her whole entire family ends up becoming a part of

it, including her daughters.

She was in over her head.

In August of that year of 84, my dad was...

quietly negotiating the sale of Stampede Wrestling and its TV rights to Vince

McMahon and WWE.

My mom was always pressing my dad to get out of the business.

He was hesitant, and he decided that he was going to sell.

Vince bought the company for the TV network, and as part of the deal, Stu

like, I want you to give jobs to four of my guys, which were Brett, his son,

Davey Boy Smith, his son -in -law, Dynamite Kid.

and Jim Neidhart, who was another son -in -law.

Stu wanted to make sure that they were taken care of and had a place to go.

Vince looked at all four and thought, we definitely could use them. He told me

that I was going to be a big star and they had big plans for me. And I was

that's bullshit. That'll never happen.

Basically, Vince McMahon had no plans for Bret Hart.

There were people that believed in him, but Vince just wasn't totally sold on

him. And Bret was struggling to find himself because there were only going to

so many failed characters in WWE until Vince ended up just cutting them.

I was a bit more into the Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones.

And Bret was Cat Stevens, the Bee Gees, Harry Chapin, Bob Dylan kind of

stuff. And I loved Van Morrison.

And he couldn't believe it. He's going, wow, I never thought you'd be a Van

Morrison fan.

And I'm like, oh, I love Van Morrison.

I was getting to that point with Julie where I hinted to my parents and my dad

especially that I wanted to get married.

Why don't you marry a doctor?

And I'm thinking, I don't know any doctors that are going to be interested

me. That's wishful thinking on your part, not mine.

We eloped.

We took Brett's best friend and this other friend of ours. He was working at

restaurant that we would always go to on Friday night. We needed two witnesses.

So Brett ran into the restaurant. He's like, George, come on. He goes, you got

to come with us. Julie and I are getting married.

And so he came with us to City Hall.

And after the judge basically told us that we were married, we went outside.

He goes, oh, yeah. He goes, I got your ring.

Went and had a quick meal, and he had to go wrestle.

The night I got married, I wrestled Nick Bonkwinkel for the AWA World

Championship in Calgary at the Pavilion, and that was my honeymoon.

I was convinced, absolutely, totally convinced that I was going to have the

first son, the first hard boy.

The baby's name is going to be Stu.

I'm going to carry the legacy.

But when they came and told me, like, you've got a baby girl, It just floored

me. It's like, wow, I got a girl.

She was a really beautiful baby, and it was a very happy time for me and Julie.

It wasn't long that Dallas was coming next, like the next baby.

So I kind of prepared myself, and it's like, I am not going to overthink this

this time.

And I didn't have a name. One of my brothers ended up naming his kid Stuart.

So the Stu Hart thing was gone. That wasn't going to happen anymore.

The Dallas Cowboys were on TV.

They were my favorite football team at that time.

And I named him after the Dallas Cowboys.

He reminded me a little bit of a miniature version of King Kong Bundy.

So he was immediately nicknamed Bundy back in those days.

He was a great dad.

Brett was really hands -on with our kids because he was gone so much. Like,

that's all he did. He was just staying home. He didn't want to go anywhere.

I can remember playing with my daughter. She was pushing a shopping cart or toy

one around, and she was so excited she was going to get me groceries, and we

stuff all afternoon.

I had to hide my suitcase.

I had to bring it down the stairs and sneak out of the house because she would

get so upset if she thought I was leaving again.

But it was always on the night that my dad would have to sneak out and, you

know, get on a plane to leave.

I wish that he could have been there more.

But I also, I think, felt so bad for my mom.

I would love to have stayed home, especially at that time with two very

babies.

Welcome to the World Wrestling Federation, and welcome to the good old

A. Yeah, it's great to be here. Now I'm down in the United States, I want to

really earn myself a niche here. I pretty much walked out the door and in a

of ways never came back. And I was gone at least 300 days a year, every year.

Bret Hart from Calgary, Canada, following in his father's footsteps into

ranks of professional wrestling.

Brett had been used to being a top star in Calgary. He was the promoter's son

and an incredible talent.

But when Brett came

into the WWE, he didn't really fit into the upper echelon as

far as size, drawing power, personality.

He didn't have the confidence. The company wasn't totally sold on him. At

point, they wanted him to be a cowboy.

We're going to call you Cowboy Bret Hart.

You're going to ride a different horse out to the ring every night.

I'm not a cowboy.

You know, where I come from in Calgary, you've got to be a real cowboy to call

yourself a cowboy.

I can't even ride a horse.

He had to come up with a suggestion.

Bret decided that he and my dad could be a tag team.

Jim the Anvil and Bret Hart teaming up in the air. And what's going to happen

here?

Oh, my, what a clothesline.

Here are your winners, Brent Park and Jim the Anvil. When we first teamed up,

didn't even have matching outfits. I didn't think we were going to last.

We had a Saturday night main event match coming up. I called the lady out of

Ohio that used to make all the wrestling gear.

I was in the hotel room with Jim Neidhart. I said, she's got a hot pink.

He liked it. He gave her the nod, like, go for it and go for the pink.

And I remember thinking, pink? Like, are you serious?

All of a sudden, everyone's wearing pink?

Why is this?

Because they're jealous!

I didn't like it. Jim loved it.

And, well, I've always said pink is not my favorite color.

But it was my lucky color. We're the best team in professional wrestling. And

we've got this manager right here, the greatest manager in professional

wrestling. How do you feel, baby? How do you feel? The original formation of the

Hart Foundation were kind of three guys that were kind of put together. But I

think with all of us having the name Hart somewhere in it, Knight Hart, Jimmy

Hart, Bret Hart, it was just something that really meshed. You know, it was

the three amigos.

Everybody was different.

I was running around the ring like 90 miles an hour with a high squeaky voice.

Come on, Jim. Kind of stirring up everything.

You got it right where you want it, baby. What about that, man?

I love to see the day when somebody takes a megaphone and shoves it down his

throat. He would just absolutely drive you insane.

Never stopping was where he got his name, Mouth of the South. And my dad was

always the scene stealer. They won.

He was always the one that just had an over -the -top charisma about him.

And he loved to laugh like a lunatic.

Even though we were the bad guys.

The girls love Bret. Oh, my gosh, do they love Bret. We've got skill, we've

looks, we've got everything, and we've got money. His talk and everything else

was so smooth. He was like, smooth operator.

Not only am I possibly the greatest looking wrestler, but I'm also the

technical wrestler.

Ooh, what a dropkick by Bret Hart.

Get Bret to come in with this crisp, slick, but yet rough, rugged

technical wrestling.

And then here comes Andy.

Look at the power and the strength of the anvil, man.

Slingshotted over the top like a Harry Zeppelin.

Big forearms and the goatee and the ha -ha, yeah, baby. And Brett just calm,

cool, holding it down.

All of the things that as a teenager that I loved in a tag team, they brought

all to the table.

One of the most important parts to our success as a team was that we all really

liked each other.

Every day was an adventure with Jim Neidhart.

I wish I could just go back and live those days just for a few minutes.

Vincent called me. He goes, I don't know what it is. For some reason, we got

more fan mail for you than any other wrestler in the company.

We're going to take you out of the tags, and you're going to be a single

wrestler all by yourself.

I was kind of skeptical of anything that was going to happen for me, and so I

didn't really believe it.

He had that twinkle in his eye that you knew there's something there.

For whatever reason, it didn't blast off immediately.

Once you put me in singles, you took away Jimmy Hart, you took away Anvil,

they were my support for promos. And I had to start talking on my own.

It wasn't my strongest suit, but I was trying my hardest.

You may have come out of Harlem, but I came out of the dungeon.

Everything was tied in with my dad.

The Hart family, one of 12 kids.

He's taught us how to be tough.

He's made us fight. And I learned hold after hold after hold, and I learned to

never quit.

Gorilla Monsoon always talked about my dad on TV in the dungeon.

And he learned that in the dungeon in Calgary, Alberta, from one of the

wrestlers of all time, Stu Hart.

These are all things that fans didn't hear about from other wrestlers.

Fans started to slowly get opened up to this backstory.

And at the same time, fans had seen me slowly climb up. They understood my

struggle. They related to it.

Although he is very technical and very sound, very believable, Brett was not

that big compared to the other performers.

But Brett stayed in there, hung in there, and hung in there. It's like

eventually everyone recognized his skill, and the rest is history.

Rhett was put in with Kurt Hennig, who was one of the absolute greatest

performers in the history of the business.

No matter how much you beat the crap out of him, he

just wouldn't die. He just kept coming back. Kind of like a Rocky type of vibe,

you know what I mean?

As the match progressed, you would notice he would focus more on the back

Why is he doing that?

He's finishing with the sharpshooter. He's wearing down his opponent, so he's

finishing. He was effective.

The Intercontinental title was given to the best actual technical wrestler in

the company.

We'd come that far and had this moment together as a family, and I was so happy

to give both my mom and my dad in that moment.

It brought honor to the family and the name and my dad and

everybody.

Brett defends his coveted intercontinental title against his

the British Bulldog.

Brett, you are my brother -in -law.

But when I step in the ring with you, Brett...

The beauty of what the storyline presented was this realism.

He wanted the big fight. He's got the big fight.

Davey's consumed with witting it. This is not a made -up story. She's not an

actress. This is my real sister, and she really is married to the bulldog. But

they don't understand what we're going through.

It was a legitimate storyline.

I had feelings for both of them. I really did. Take a listen to the

your dear mother, Helen. Take a look at the emotion she shows.

I don't want them to fight. I don't want them to hurt each other.

They're all blood.

I just can't stand it. That's all.

Sorry. She'd pretend to cry or something, because she was so torn up

family fighting over this, and they even had certain members of my family take

Davey's side.

Brett's ego was so damn big that he can't get a grasp of reality.

All that just came across as layers to the truth of the story.

Then it's like, okay, well, can you deliver the match?

And they sold that out in less than 11 hours.

Before that, I think Madonna and Michael Jackson had the record for selling out

the fastest, and over 80 ,000 tickets were sold. Two great competitors about

collide here.

This is my husband wrestling my brother.

It was extraordinarily overwhelming for me.

My brother's kicking my husband in the face. It's like... And then he suplexes

Brett off the top rope.

Brett grabs Davey by the hair.

Davey slingshots him, and Brett goes into the turnbuckle.

Oh, my God.

Thank God that's over and Davey won.

Davey boy won. I was so happy about that.

Winning and losing when you're telling a great story really doesn't matter.

What matters at the end of the day is what does the audience remember?

Losing isn't always a bad thing. If it's done in a dramatic way, an honest way,

and an emotional way.

make me a bigger star.

I don't know if that was ever in the plans. And that's what makes me respect

even more. He had to prove it.

Night in, night out.

He's about to slap it on. You're talking about the shot shooter.

You'll probably surrender.

Shot shooter, there it is. Forget about it.

Kids like me showing up.

always watching that Bret Hart match because we just knew it was going to be

great.

That eventually springboarded to the World Heavyweight Championship.

There was a fair number of people that never imagined me being world champion,

including fans and wrestlers.

Geez. Talk about a dark horse.

How

do

you express to an audience how happy I was and how much of a dream this was?

You know what? Just tell the truth.

Just tell them the truth.

You know, Gene, since I was this tall, I've been involved in wrestling. My

family's been involved in wrestling. I've dedicated my whole life to

I dedicate this moment to all the people that believe that the biggest dreams

can still come true.

Family is real, and family is something that everyone has.

Anybody that has siblings know that siblings fight.

There's nothing, nothing that will ever stop the rocket,

brother.

When people look at the hitman, they see that I don't have 24 -inch arms, and

maybe I'm not 6 '8", but you know what I am? The greatest.

technical wrestler in the World Wrestling Federation.

And he is a wrestler's wrestler.

This is man Bret Hart, one of the great technicians in the WWF.

His execution of everything he did in the ring was absolutely flawless.

His nickname is the excellence of execution for a reason. Every suplex,

backbreaker, every punch, everything just looks so authentic and it was very

important to me that everything I do look as believable and real as Bret.

Get a shot of Brent Hart doing a suplex and put it side by side with mine. It's

exactly the same.

This is some day that speaks to me.

Brent looked at the ring as an artist canvas.

He was going to paint a picture every time he got into the ring.

He was an artist in real life.

Everybody.

Good at something.

Sometimes you don't even know yourself what it is, and one day you're just

to stumble upon it. I really love to draw cartoons.

Everybody has a gift hidden inside themselves, and you've just got to find

These are my old cartoons from years and years ago.

Or WrestleMania, where I fought Roddy Piper for the Intercontinental belt. I

went through Piper, and I did go through Flair to get the title.

Here's one with me and Davey at SummerSlam, which is kind of funny. It's

actually a good cartoon.

Goldberg and Hogan, two of my favorites.

What has four years done to the warrior?

Which warrior would laugh really hard at that cartoon?

Here's Yoko and Lex Luger.

And the Mountie.

And of course this is one of my favorites.

Owen Jim and my dad.

I had fun drawing Jim.

He was always a fun character.

Here's an old one of Steve Austin.

And there's Vader and Undertaker.

Hoban.

I would get the story from somebody what happened the night before.

And then I would draw some kind of cartoon about it.

To make everyone laugh. And Andre used to love him. He used to laugh all the

time. This one was pretty special in a way because it was about Andre, and it

was Andre basically carrying the territory.

I was probably about 12 or 13. I don't know what possessed me or what the

reasoning behind it was because I loved my brother Owen. He was seven years

younger than I am, but it was my job often to put Owen's shoes on or get Owen

dressed or make sure Owen ate dinner or given the task of making sure Owen was

being taken care of.

But I remember Owen loved it when I drew him. I remember drawing him in the

story. You're going to be the bad heart.

He had a little stubble on his chin. He was always in a mad mood.

Years later when we were wrestling, we enjoyed bringing that storyline we made

up as kids to reality.

We're going to be the champions. Here is two brothers that come from a wrestling

family. We're like a fine -tuned machine.

One had ascended.

to championship status.

The younger brother, Owen, was damn good, but had never really had that shot

be in a main event.

They didn't have much going for Owen, and they never had.

They'd made promises to him, but they never panned out. I think he got hurt

different things happened, but Owen got so discouraged that he told me that he

was quitting and he'd be a fireman.

I thought he was such a great wrestler, and I really wanted to give him that

chance. Brett knew that if Owen had this opportunity to have this rivalry with

him, it could be what catapulted Owen into stardom.

We're going to go at each other and it's going to be a war between me and you

and we're going to make this real and try to make people believe that we

hate each other.

Deep down inside, Brett, in your heart, you know I'm better than you.

Owen played his part so well.

You've tried to hold me back. You've tried to keep me down.

He was just that bratty.

little younger brother.

You, Brett, you've been a problem for a long time for me and never getting any

recognition. It's always you, Brett. Your ego is too big. You only worry

yourself, Brett. Brett was just like on the knife of the foolishness.

I'm going to ask you one thing. You sit down with me, mom, dad, and we're going

to settle this thing. Get it all worked out. Everything's got to be fine.

This is family.

You know I'm better than you. And come WrestleMania 10, Brett, I'm coming at

like a freight train, and I'm not stopping. I'm going to beat you, Brett.

Welcome to WrestleMania 10.

This is the moment.

Bret Hart thought he would never see that he would actually be facing his

brother. Oh, what a flip. And yes.

Putting on the brakes, nice maneuver.

And now, pile driver.

Yeah, here comes the hitman.

Full slide over the top to the outside.

Damn, those brothers are beating the hell out of each other.

Look at Owen yelling and screaming at his brother. What a matchup this is.

Unbelievable.

It's the best opening match of any WrestleMania.

It might be the best opening match of any pay -per -view. Owen shocked the

by winning the match.

The one opportunity that you had in front

of a worldwide stage, you couldn't beat me, Brett.

I am the best there is, the best there was, and the best there ever will be.

Don't you forget it, brother.

Woo!

This is why it's such brilliant storytelling.

WrestleMania tends to be a very unique WrestleMania in the sense that Bret Hart

has two matches.

So after losing to Owen in the opening match of the show, Bret goes to the main

event, and he beats Yokozuna, and he becomes the champion.

The hitman at WrestleMania 10, he's done it. All the good guys come out to the

ring and they hoist Bret up on their shoulders. Somehow, he's done the

impossible. And Owen is just looking at Bret with such contempt.

You did it again. I beat you. This was supposed to be my night.

We have forgotten about Owen again, and we are now applauding Bret.

The World Wrestling Federation champion.

And it carries from April all the way into the summer.

Owen's getting the mom to

throw in the towel. I mean, Owen cost Brett his championship.

Mom and dad, you fell right into my trap. You threw the towel

in, and Brett, you're not a champion anymore. You're a loser, and I'm a king.

When the cameras stopped rolling and there was nobody around,

I don't know if I ever saw a more respectful, loving relationship between

brothers.

Owen was so happy. He was on top of the world. He loved the storyline that we

had. And working with Owen, we definitely did become closer as we

together.

The love for what we were doing for each other mattered so much to both of us.

I love that about wrestling and especially

with Owen, how it was,

there's this appreciation for one another that

supersedes everything.

Put the old ankle right down.

And then he was all... Mesmerized, I'm sure. In a disarray. Yeah. All right.

Let's get serious, all right?

Brett, how would you compare yourself to previous World Wrestling Federation

champions?

Well, I mean, I'll be honest with you, and I have the utmost respect for all

previous champions, you know, but I'm a completely different breed of cat than

all of them.

Brett's an unusual cat.

Man, that was a real...

That was the credibility factor with Brett, I think, will be the highest of

anyone we've ever had as champion.

He took every aspect of being champion to heart.

It was a true honor for him. I mean, he's an old school guy, right? I mean,

know, his daddy, all his brothers were in the business. So it meant a lot for

him to be champion.

Brett never looked at his titles as a prop.

There was something honored, earned, and privileged to have.

Brett liked being a role model.

And I would give wrestling fans and little kids all around the world

that they can look up to. I didn't yell at my fans. Like, I didn't yell what I

was going to do, and I'm going to do this.

I'm the first wrestling hero that communicates and talks.

There's something that he has tapped into here.

He became this different type of hero, but a much more realistic

hero.

Wasn't this over -the -top character?

He was still cool. He was a hitman.

But it was Bret who just happened to be a wrestler.

Everyone can relate to that.

Everyone can feel like they're a part of that.

C -H -A -Z.

All right.

Everything was just a natural extension of the real Bret Hart.

And the fans then will make that all -important emotional investment.

into your TV persona.

Let me tell you something, boys.

I am the World Wrestling Federation champion.

The excellence of execution is on top.

The best there is, the best there was, and the best there ever will be.

When I hit my music and I walked out, that place went crazy. They stampeded

It was like Beatlemania.

Brad had a rock star persona. He really had this kind of grungy vibe that was...

cool this energy and the presence that was ahead of its time

brett

was also a heartthrob he was so handsome women were just very very drawn to him

he had a huge female audience

Well, that's kind of weird that I'm, like, giving a poster of my dad to my

friend for a birthday present.

I was the star, Vince's top guy, with or without the belt.

I was the top draw. I sold the most T -shirts and merchandise.

All the right things came into place at the right time, and it just made me

stand out above and beyond all the other wrestlers.

Hi there. Hi.

Welcome back. Yeah, it's been a while.

A cowboy on a television show, you could have asked me that when I was five

years old, and that's what I would have wanted to be.

I was lucky they were shooting Lonesome Dove up here in Calgary.

Lose the roots.

Who is the thirstiest, the hottest, and the hungriest man in the valley?

You, if you're buying. That's right.

Carson, three whiskeys. Set them up.

I was always throwing somebody out of the bar. They'd come find me in the

whorehouse. It's such a fun role to play.

Well, I heard you were in trouble.

Who says I'm in trouble?

There's one scene in there where I have a fight with a big guy.

He hauled off and just drilled me as hard as he could.

Right smack in the teeth. Busted my lip.

I've always said I got hurt more in acting than I ever did in pro wrestling.

Lonesome Dove was the most fun I ever had in my life.

At that time, my contract completely expired, and I was actually a free

This was in the middle of the most heated national wrestling war that

ever been.

WCW was a group out of Atlanta owned by Ted Turner, and they had made a

concerted effort to compete with WWE and had started to entice our top

talent to come.

And so I found myself in a meeting with Eric Bischoff. He said, look, what's it

going to take to bring you to WCW?

Give you the exact same contract as Hulk Hogan, plus one penny.

They called me the very next day and said, 2 .8, plus royalties.

To me, it was $3 million a year. They're going to give it to me for three years.

$2 .8 million for a pro wrestler in 1996 is money at the level that they could

not have dreamed.

Now all of a sudden, it's like, how can I turn this down?

Geez, I got a guy offering me $3 million a year, three or four times what I'm

making for Vince.

I got four kids, and I'm in the twilight of my career right now, and I got to

think about what's right for my family.

I didn't want to lose Brett.

Hogan was gone, Razor Ramon, you know, all those guys were gone. They just

get them all, you know, so I wanted to hang on to Brett. He said, I can't match

it. And I said, well, I don't expect you to match it then, but, I mean, give me

the best offer you can. The one I had from WCW was for $9 million for three

years, and the one he came up with was $10 .5 million for 20 years.

A lot less than WCW, but we'll give you, over the course of 20 years, a good

amount of money, and you'll be part of the WWE family for life.

Basically, I was going to take whatever offer he gave me because I didn't want

to go to WCW.

Who turns down $2 .8 million?

I can't imagine anyone doing that, and he really did do it.

I was very loyal to Vince, and I was going to stay with Vince kind of no

what.

I shook his hand. I accepted the agreement.

I was a WWE guy all along, always was.

I would have jumped in front of a train for Vince McMahon.

Vince called me, and he goes, I want to turn you heel.

I don't want to turn heel.

I'm making almost half a million dollars a year on my merchandise.

It's not like I'm no good as a good guy anymore. My stuff's selling like crazy,

and I'm super popular, and I don't want to mess with that. And Vince was like,

you're only going to be a bad guy in America.

This is going to be a whole different thing. We've never done this before.

You're going to be a good guy everywhere else.

Okay. It's always more fun being a bad guy.

Stone Cold Steve Austin shows up.

It's just a beer -drinking badass who has no respect for anybody, including

the Hitman.

If you put the letter S in front of Hitman, you have my exact opinion of

Hart. It sounded cool, and it worked.

If you put the letter S in front of Hitman, you've had my exact opinion of

Hart.

He was always lurking behind a corner or a wall or something to jump me. Bret

Hart!

They have been building really nicely from a storyline standpoint.

I remember walking out to the ring at WrestleMania 13 and there's kids holding

signs for me and I'm high -fiving and everyone loves me.

It's going to have to be a bare -knuckle brawl. I'm just going to go to kick his

ass big time. We've got him hooked right from the get -go. And so we took him on

a ride. We brawled up. We came back.

I got busted open.

Blood just started flowing out of my head and ran down my cheek and between

teeth. And I'm thinking to myself, God dang, this feels good because I'm

listening to the crowd.

He's agonizing. He's screaming in pain.

And he won't quit.

And he passes out.

That gets you respect.

People just love me because they knew that I would go through thick and thin

through anything and never, ever give up. Come on, Brett.

Enough's enough.

I'm a Bret Hart fan, but that's enough.

Now you're going back to do more to a packed -out man?

And that audience went, whew, immediately.

He went from being the best there is, the best there was, to being an asshole.

I'm walking back to the dressing room and people were giving me the finger and

flipping me off. And I knew that I was the bad guy.

Steve has been the lousiest, rottenest bad guy. Everyone fell in love with him.

It was like falling in love with the shark on Jaws.

He blamed Americans for idolizing people like Steve Austin. He blamed Americans

for idolizing antiheroes. All you have to do is look at OJ Simpson.

There's no such thing as justice in America.

It was fun being a bad guy and pushing all their buttons, going to the American

cities and being food out of the building.

Bret Hart has appalled this capacity crowd.

Canada and Britain and everywhere else around my big name.

I'm still the hero. I'm still Bret Hart the good guy. I'm standing up against

Americans.

While I was crusading against America, I was also feuding with Shawn Michaels.

Unrelenting youth and freedom. A sexuality that was open.

Was absolutely 100 % full -on prick as a character and as a personality.

Things were changing. I didn't think you could still do the same mom -and -pop

storylines. I felt that we could continue to grow, evolve, change. And

me want to puke.

You're a guy that has degraded the World Wrestling Federation Championship belt.

Sean's cockiness and attitude in general irritated Brett.

I don't like him, I don't trust him, and I don't believe him. I don't believe in

anything about the guy. He's a phony little shit.

The storyline, dislike for one another, became very real very quickly. People

can feel real animosity.

Hitman, I seen you on the road, and bro, you ain't no role model.

I felt like I got pushed to a point and I just, you know, on live television and

that ain't good.

You couldn't go ten minutes in any situation, even though lately you've had

some. Sunny days, my friend.

He made some reference to me having sunny days, and I remember thinking,

days. Sunny!

There was a young lady there who worked for the company. Her name was Sunny. She

and I used to run around, and all I'd know was that we were about to become

friends, and so I made a comment that they were more than friends, so to

and that he wasn't happy about it, understandably so.

When I got home the next day after that Monday Night Raw, my oldest son asked me

if I had something going on with Sonny, and my daughter asked me.

I had enough problems with my marriage at that time without Sean's little

comment. We were in Hartford, Connecticut, and that's where I made up

that I was going to straighten Sean out once and for all about this Sonny thing.

And I just beelined straight over to him and pushed the door in.

He takes a swing. Oh, I move out of the way. Well, we get into it, so we're

just... I grabbed him by the hair, pulled him down, and...

Dragged him all around the dressing room by his hair. The big old chunk of hair

comes out of my head.

The end of 1997 is a wild time in WWE.

It starts in August.

Bret Hart becomes the champion.

Now all this is going on, Vince goes to Bret and says, you know that lifetime

contract we signed?

Can't do it.

WCW was pretty far ahead of WWE when it came to popularity at that point. WWE's

finances were weak at the time. They were losing money.

They were taking out loans at the time to make payroll, but all of a sudden

you've got Bret, who turned down $2 .8 million a year, and now all of a sudden

he's being asked to take a pay cut.

Went from that to...

Well, maybe you should call WCW and see if you can still get that offer. I'm

sure I'll get you a fatter contract, a lot more money, and we'll work it

together so you can go to WCW and earn far more money than what I was paying

you.

Brett's flabbergasted. He never wanted to go to WCW.

Vince kind of left him with no choice. So the contract gets torn up, and Brett

Hart signs with WCW.

He's the WWE champion at the time. Vince wants Bret to lose it to Shawn Michaels

in Montreal.

So I went to Shawn. I said, hey, Shawn, I want you to know I have no problem

dropping the belt to you.

Shawn looked at me and said, well, I appreciate that, but I just want you to

know that I'm not willing to do the same thing for you.

And that really floored me. Why would I do the honors for somebody that has no

respect for me?

Why would you expect me to? To hell with him.

I can't drop the belt to a guy that can't be professional with me.

He's been so disrespectful, for lack of a better word, such a d***.

Because it was me, it was a flat -out no. And look, that just causes a

Brent going into Montreal, signed with WCW to start in December.

And it's November, and he's the WWE champion.

How did Vince...

get himself into this predicament but here it is he did i didn't want him to

to wcw with our championship so the request for brett would be okay let's

this championship back to someone here in wwe where it belongs and uh and that

didn't happen so i had to do what i had to do

I had it in the initial contract that I had creative control for my last 60

days. So I knew I had my rights. I was covered. I could protect myself.

I'll drop the belt to Steve Austin. I'll drop it to Steve Lombardi. I'll lose it

to anybody you want, any way you want. But I will not lose to a guy that has no

respect for me. I truly believe that I am the best. On top of it, I'm not going

to let you do this to me in my home country. And the last thing I could ever

dream of is letting that lousy, rotten, stinking little degenerate.

Take the World Wrestling Federation Championship belt from me in front of my

home people.

It's not going to happen.

After refusing and refusing and refusing to lose to Shawn Michaels, this plan is

presented to Bret Hart.

The entire time, a documentary called Wrestling with Shadows was being filmed

independent of WWE about Bret Hart.

Bret Hart has one last meeting with Vince McMahon.

I got to just talk about what the finish of the Survivor Series 97 match is

going to be.

And he's still miked by the documentary crew.

The way this whole thing has been depicted, it's really hard for me as a

here to come up short this weekend.

What would you want to do today, then? I'm open to anything.

I think what I'd like to do is get through today.

I think tomorrow I should just go in and do my speech and forfeit the title. I

think it allows me a chance to leave with my head up and leave in a nice way.

mean, I don't have speech on. We could have a schmoz or whatever you want.

I would think it'd be a run -in type thing.

Yeah. But I'm open to anything. No, hang on.

I'm open to anything.

Like I said before, I'm determined this is going to wind up quite well.

We taped the whole conversation.

It was made perfectly clear to me it was going to be a run -in, a

disqualification. In wrestling dressing room jargon, it's a schmoz with outside

interference from various wrestlers coming in. The title was not going to

hands. Vince goes in there with the suggestion of the finish, which Brett

is what the finish is. It's going to be a DQ finish.

Brett's getting his hand raised in Montreal.

It was all done. There was nothing to fight about anymore.

I won.

Brett did meet with Vince.

Then when it went down, it was like, okay, we didn't do that.

It's no different than an actor in a television series who at the end of it

refuses to die or refuses to do the job, so to speak.

What do you do?

Look, Vince, I want you to know that I'll do whatever it is you need me to

You ever read Sammy the Bull Gravano's book?

And especially at that time in my life, there was a sense of validation that he

trusted me enough to do the dirty work.

We were getting that belt off of Brett tonight.

This is what I have to do.

It goes off the rails right away.

I clothesline him over the top rope, and I'm fighting him in the crowd, and I'm

beating him all over the place.

We've got all these moves and different things planned to keep telling this

great story.

One of the spots called for Sean to

try to put a sharpshooter on me.

Suddenly I look over and I see Vince McMahon yelling at the timekeeper to

the bell.

Ring the effing bell.

And all of a sudden, we hear the bell ringing.

And I was just like... Brett did not tap out. What the F was that?

We just screamed Brett.

He got screwed.

The bell was ringing. The referee was already signaling that I supposedly

out and gave up.

Clearly, I was reversing the hold, and I was not giving up. It was a screw job.

We're seeing something that we can't hardly believe.

that we didn't know what was going to occur.

He got jobbed out of the title, for real.

The deed was done.

It was unlike anything I'd ever seen.

Real guttural emotion.

When they screwed me, I just was so angry and so disappointed that Vince

to go that way.

When the, as he calls it, Montreal screw job occurred, I wanted to make sure

that Brett saw me.

Out at ringside and know that what I did was the right thing to do, at least

from my standpoint.

He's really good at spitting, I'm sorry to say.

I could have hidden. I could have not gone out to the ring at all.

You know, I could have left the building. I could have done a lot of

Rick Rude and Davey Boy came in the shower and they go, Vince is waiting for

you. He wants to talk to you.

As soon as I get dressed, if you're still here, I thought I'm going to knock

out.

And he gave me one right in the temple on the left side.

I hit him as hard as I could. I remember going 14 years for this guy.

Christmases and birthdays, all the front turnbuckles, all the body slams I ever

gave this guy.

All the times I worked harder than I needed to. And the gratitude that he

me for all those years of working for him, I was going to connect.

It was the greatest punch I ever threw. When it had just first happened

backstage, I was kind of confused, like, what's going on? Like, Dad's mad, and

it was more scary, kind of intense.

And then on the flight home, I saw how it really hit him. It's actually the

first time I ever saw my dad crying.

It broke my heart to see him so upset by that.

I don't think people understood how much that really meant to him.

He felt very hurt. And it was like the ultimate betrayal for Brett to have

do that to him. Nothing like that had ever happened before in WWE.

It was a part of the biggest shaft, certainly of the wrestling business

I wanted to go down in history in this business. I didn't imagine it being like

this. And it was just, you knew you were part of something incredibly big, but

something that wasn't incredibly positive.

Did you or did you not?

Screw Bret Hart. Bret screwed Bret. I have no sympathy whatsoever for Bret.

What I asked for was to be treated with respect on my way out. And if I had to

do the whole thing again tomorrow, I'd do it exactly the same way.

I resent people that intimate to me that I overreacted or I didn't do the right

thing or I should have just done what I was told.

The hell with all those guys.

It was a huge insult to me and really bothered me for a long time to the point

that it was really tough for me to move on from it.

Growing up in wrestling, being Stu Hart's kid, is all part of that.

I wasn't just some guy that got into wrestling. Wrestling was my whole life.

When Brett joined the WCW, it just was not the same. It was just so hard, and

was disillusioned and disappointed.

The day I got there, I wanted to turn that company around and just stuff it

right down Vince's throat.

But they were so stupid, they didn't know what they were doing.

I spun my tires from the day I got there to the day I left.

May 23rd, 1999, it was like the worst thing that's ever happened in pro

wrestling ever.

I got on a plane and headed to Los Angeles to do the Jay Leno show.

So I just was on the plane sitting there in a kind of a mostly empty cabin and I

just had the strangest, darkest thought. I knew something bad happened. I could

feel it in my bones.

Finally, I checked my voice messages, and I got a message from a friend of

that worked in WWE that Owen had died doing a stunt in the ring.

Tragedy befell the World Wrestling Federation and all of us. Owen Hart was

to make an entrance from the ceiling, and something terribly, terribly went

wrong. I don't know if the harness broke or what the malfunction was.

I had to say something from my heart and from my soul.

And he fell from the ceiling.

When someone dies that you love, it just brings you to your knees.

Unfortunate responsibility to let everyone know that Owen Hart has died.

Owen Hart has tragically died from that accident here tonight.

I had blocked so much of it out of my memory.

He was special. He just was.

One of the most legitimately lovely men that I've ever known.

To this day, I never heard anybody ever say one negative word about Owen Hart.

It's never a good time to lose a friend.

But he was young and just so much going.

It was just really, really hard.

The actual funeral procession that went through town, Calgary, came out great

and strong for that. It was really impressive to see how much they cared.

It was very sad to see, to lose a child like that, and to a sport that

created your family persona.

And now that's the very thing that has taken away your child. I really felt a

lot of sympathy for Helen and Stu.

He'd left a widow and two beautiful kids behind. Owen missed out on being a

husband and a dad to his wonderful kids, and they missed out on growing up with

their dad and the wonderful memories they would have had with them.

Owen was the last heart. His little, golden, big, blue -eyed...

little boy.

He was so loved and cherished and he was so funny.

We will never get over Owen. We will never stop missing him. We will never

thinking about him.

We will never stop grieving.

I had as much reason as anybody to hate wrestling.

The more I thought about it, then I realized that Owen loved wrestling just

same way I did.

I can think of so many funny memories about Owen and the jokes he pulled and

things he did.

And so many wrestlers loved Owen the same way.

I wish a lot of times that I could talk to him and remember some of the great

memories we had.

We had so much fun.

being Bret Hart and Owen Hart.

My mother and father, they did not recover.

It was like a light went out.

It aged my parents considerably.

My mom died a few years later, and then my dad was somewhat brokenhearted after

she had passed away.

He loved wrestling so much. You could wake my dad up at 4 in the morning and

tell him that there's some Chippendale dancer down in the basement that wants

learn how to wrestle.

And I'm telling you, he couldn't get his pants on fast enough.

His whole life was wrestling, and he loved every bit of it.

I was in the room when he passed, and it was a very peaceful passing.

And I could feel the power drain from the room.

So I've always felt that it was an honor for me to be there.

I've always been grateful for it and so glad that I was there at the end for

him.

There was a string of years there, like from 99 to 2004.

I went through a lot of tough stuff.

My career ended, which was really hard for me to accept.

Bill Goldberg was a guy that, on a scale of 1 to 10 as a wrestler, he was a

zero. He was just so reckless, so dangerous.

He didn't know wrestling wasn't real.

He kicked me so hard, he would have knocked bricks out of a wall.

Finally got home off the road, and my doctor checked me, and he goes, you are

really messed up. You are so concussed. You need to stop everything right now.

You know, you can fix certain things, but you only got one brain.

That's it, my career's over.

I don't know where I had my stroke.

After falling from his mountain bike, the crash triggered an acute stroke.

I was in a wheelchair for three months. My left side was completely dead.

Essentially, he had been reduced to an infant, learning to talk and walk all

over again.

The fact that I survived it and had the recovery that I did, I count my

blessings and I thank everyone that helped me.

My first wife did help me a lot through that time period, which says a lot about

her. Well, he was the father of my children, and we were still kind of

back and forth, still kind of seeing each other and still one foot in the

one out.

My first wife, Julie, we went through a lot together, and we just grew apart. We

got along really well, about 50 % of the time.

And we really got along really badly the other 50 % of the time. Right until we

had all the kids, it seemed like he was always gone.

So I think I've always been a single parent. The whole time we were married,

never took a break.

Never took a break.

We were both going through a lot, even myself.

You know, pull away, come back, pull away.

And eventually...

Nah, it's not going to work.

We're not even the same people anymore.

Finally, I reached a point where there was no turning back.

And we got divorced, and I don't want to sit here and pretend that it was all

her. I mean, I failed in a lot of ways as an unfaithful husband.

Once I got divorced, I just wanted to be alone.

I was just doing nothing. I had a lot of dark thoughts, and I really questioned

a lot about myself.

Everywhere I went, the first question I got asked was about the Montreal

Screwjob, whether it was real, how it happened, did I really hit Vince

It just was like a constant downer in my life.

It changed me in a lot of ways. It made me a bit of an angry man and bitter

about what happened.

It was kind of like carrying around a big bag of rocks.

You pick it up every day and you put it over your shoulder and you carry it

around. And the best way to put it to bed was to drop the rocks, drop the

bag and make peace.

What if I called Vince McMahon up and said, hey, let's bury the hatchet so I

don't have to worry about it anymore.

It's been 12 long years since anyone's seen Bret Hart.

After all these years, he deserved that moment.

It's like he had never left.

People were dying to see him.

They were dying to acknowledge him, to give him a standing ovation. All those

things are beautiful.

Bret's legacy is timeless.

Bret's body of work is timeless. Our WWE universe has never forgotten that.

It's been 12 years.

Since I've been back in the WWE, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart

carrying me in your hearts for all these years.

And the very first thing I want to do is I want to call back there and ask Shawn

Michaels to come out here.

Now we both were realizing, oh my God, there's more to

life than just the wrestling business. Who knew?

I was good friends with Shawn Michaels when we were younger.

You know, I had a hand in all that stuff, too, that happened with Sean.

And it wasn't just me, the victim.

You know, we're both guilty.

We're synonymous with each other. We're such a big part of each other's lives

and careers.

But I do put myself in his shoes, and I have deep regret and deep remorse. You

want to end it. You want to end it for him and certainly for yourself.

You're not the only one,

Brett, that's been carrying this around for 12 years.

You're not the only one that wants to bury the hatchet. I think he did

understand the real remorse and sorrow that I had about that entire time.

I call for a truce, and I call for you to shake my hand, and if you want to

the hatchet, let's bury it right now.

It's a similar feeling for both of us. It was a release of those rocks.

And a

good

lesson in my life, and I think it was a good lesson for Sean.

Healing's good for everybody, even pro wrestling. And it sounds silly, but

are real -life aspects of it that make it serious.

With Vince, you know, I never forget what happened, but I also know that

Did a lot for me. The man that I am today, I owe so much of it to Vince.

One of the reasons that this whole Montreal thing was so personal between

and me, I was like a father figure to you.

And I'd like to thank you for being the best there is.

I'd like to thank you for being the best there was and the best there ever will

be.

Of course there were shenanigans. I mean, you can't have a WWE show without

somebody getting kicked in the crotch.

My match with Vince wasn't the greatest match of my career by any means, but

people laughed and people enjoyed it, and it was a happy ending for me.

Mr. McMahon taps to the sharpshooter. Bret Hart's signature submission hold

brings an end to one of the most volatile rivalries in WWE history.

Bret Hart definitely screwed Mr.

McMahon. Bret was right back where he belonged. Mr. McMahon, grandest stage of

all.

His character reminds me a lot of the Shawshank Redemption, Andy Dufresne.

WWE is like the asylum, and Bret survives the asylum, and he's lived to

story. And more than anything, Bret gives people hope.

Like Andy Dufresne said in the movie, Shawshank Redemption, hope is a good

thing.

We met in 2008.

We have a mutual friend of ours that introduced us.

I moved up to Canada in 2009, and we got married in 2010.

I know a lot of people on the outside think, what the heck could they see in

each other, especially when they look at our racial differences and our age

difference.

But it's just really hard to explain how well we get along with each other, if

anything. I like to joke that I feel like sometimes I'm the 63 -year -old and

he's the 38 -year -old.

Because he is so young at heart and I'm an old soul.

You look great.

It was such a beautiful day.

This was magical.

Just a great little bond that we just take good care of each other and get

really well. You can just tell how happy everyone is. Steph's really hard not to

like. What you see is what you get.

Just a really kind person, and I'm really lucky.

Steph's birthday's on the same day as my mom's, and Steph kind of reminds me a

little bit of my mom in the sense that she was an American girl.

There was a big gap between my mom and dad's age, and I feel like my mom and

were kind of cheering us on.

Like, even in the beginning, I knew his kids were reluctant about me.

I had to really... earn their love and earn their respect and i think i did

time once they saw us and saw how happy he was and saw how happy i was my

relationship with them has only gotten stronger with steph i think when they

me with stuff that they know that we're happy

his

house here is kind of like

his dad's house. It was like the nucleus for the family.

We always come here for dinner. This is where our family meets.

Family is everything to him. My grandpa's legacy, and now my dad's

within the footsteps of that. He's created his own legacy, of course, but

you put it all together, it's actually such a beautiful story.

I think it's one of a kind, which makes the Hart family as a whole so unique.

We shared him with the whole world.

Which is why I am enjoying his retirement so much, because we kind of

more to ourself.

With grandkids, my dad is just so happy to be able to spend time with them and

kind of make up for the time that he missed with us.

Resilience. There's nothing that can stop him. He's the hitman.

I got to live my dreams.

The good and the bad.

The sorrow, the tragedy.

A difficult life makes you a better person.

I'm very content and very satisfied. I had a good life.

I wouldn't change any of it.

How do you want the fans around the world to remember Bret the Hitman Hart

from now?

I just hope they reflect on me. I think you fade once you're off the TV.

And if you're talking about WrestleMania or a big show or, you know, it's

Madison Square Garden, I'm still the best.

You want somebody that stands up for right and wrong and someone that speaks

justice, someone who's not afraid to come forward and to take on anybody and

fight fire with fire, that's me.

That's me.