• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Ever since I first saw him in Stampede thirteen years earlier, he was one of the reasons I’d decided to become a wrestler in the first place. Even though we’d worked for many of the same companies worldwide, except for that one plane ride from Calgary to Los Angeles, we’d never crossed paths. He’d become a big star in the WWF and was currently playing the masked Blue Blazer, a superhero who was decidedly un-super due to his squeaky-clean, goody-two-shoes antics. When I sat down on the couch to watch his always entertaining match, I noticed that the camera was panning the crowd. After a few minutes of the increasingly long and awkward crowd shots, I said to Jess, “Something is wrong here.”

At that moment the cameras switched over to Jim Ross and his sidekick, Jerry Lawler, sitting at the announcer desk, their faces pale and ashen.

JR said something like, “Owen Hart has suffered a serious accident. He’s had a serious fall.”

My stomach plummeted and I thought, “He fell? What is he talking about? What do you mean he fell?”

I knew it wasn’t a gimmick because both announcers were crying real tears and soon after, so was I. Owen had fallen fifty feet from the rafters into the ring when an apparatus that was supposed to lower him snapped. He died pretty much on impact.

I was overwhelmed with feelings of desperation and helplessness much the same way I was when Magic told me that Art had died. I ran out of my apartment and called Benoit to tell him. There was no answer and I left a message ending with the same question I’d asked Magic: “What are we going to do?”

I hardly knew Owen, but his journey through the business mirrored mine and I considered myself to be a surrogate member of the Hart family. He was an inspiration...almost a hero...to me and I couldn’t comprehend what had happened. I’ve often had this fantasy that on the day of the accident I have a premonition that something bad is going to happen to Owen, so I call the Kemper Arena and manage to warn him just in time, saving his life.

But I didn’t have any such premonition.

The next Monday I went to my first funeral for a friend (I’ve been to too many of them since) and all of the respect and sympathy shown toward Owen and his family was overwhelming. The entire WWF roster was there and the streets of Calgary were lined with thousands of people sharing in the massive grief. The Hart family was the royalty of Calgary and Owen was the crown prince. He was one of those guys that nobody ever said a bad word about and you could tell how much he was loved from the number of people paying tribute to him.

He was planning on getting out of wrestling in a few short years to spend more time with his wife and two young children. They were scheduled to move into their new dream house the very next week. It’s an overwhelmingly dismal story and it still hurts to think about it.

Only the good die young, all the evil seem to live forever.

At the funeral home, Owen rested in an open casket. I leaned over and hugged him as the tears flowed down my face and I asked him the question I had been thinking all day: “What happened, man? We were supposed to be tag team champions someday.”

I kissed his cheek and said goodbye to the nicest guy I hardly ever met.

There was a first-class list of wrestlers paying tribute to Owen that day. I have a picture of Stu Hart, Bret Hart, Hulk Hogan, Chris Benoit, Terry Funk, Dory Funk Jr., Shane Douglas, Davey Boy Smith, and me standing together at Stu’s house after the funeral, all of us world champions at one point.

While the reason for the summit was terrible, the experience itself was actually a good one and it provided a small bit of closure. It was also a riot listening to Stu tell all of his stories while some of the greatest wrestlers of all time gathered in awe, hanging on to his every word. At eighty-four years old, he was still feisty. He even coerced a reluctant B. Brian Blair into allowing him to apply a shoot hold.

“This one can turn a man’s eyes completely bloodshot,