I recently celebrated my eight-year anniversary as a journalist here at the North Island Gazette, and I figured in honour of that, I’d write a column about something personal to me. Specifically, why I first became interested in the sport of wrestling way back when I was just a little kid growing up in the small town of Port Hardy.
For starters, as far back as I can remember, my older brother Derek and I were always constantly fighting. Literally every single day we’d spend our free time wrestling in the living room, the basement, or the backyard if it was nice out.
My brother wasn’t a bully, he just had a ton of energy and was a good athlete. He’d throw me around like a tackling dummy, put me in painful submission holds, and then pin me to the ground without mercy. Eventually I started getting pretty good at defending myself, and as I got older, I even managed to sneak in a bit of offence. Don’t get me wrong, I never once pinned him or made him tap out, but I like to think I held my own despite the size difference between us (he’s around three years older than me).
My parents didn’t care too much about us roughhousing. This was back in the late 80’s and early 90’s, when parenting was far less strict than it is now. So long as we didn’t throw punches or break furniture and nobody ended up in the hospital, it was basically fine for my mom to say, “go down to the basement if you two want to wrestle.”
Growing up, my brother and I were big WWF (now WWE) fans. We’d watch pro wrestling on TV on Saturdays, rent the VHS tapes from Vaso’s Videos, and we both had our favourite wrestlers we liked to cheer for. Derek was a huge fan of “Macho Man” Randy Savage, whereas I was firmly in the corner of “The Excellence of Execution” Bret “The Hitman” Hart.
I personally think Hart should be regarded as one of Canada’s greatest sports heroes. Yes, pro wrestling matches are scripted with predetermined outcomes, but putting that aside, what he accomplished by becoming the WWF World Champion in the early 90’s is the stuff of legend. While Hart was born into the business thanks to his family owning a pro wrestling promotion based out of Calgary, I think what really made him special is that he had a legitimate amateur wrestling background. Hart actually won big matches at both the high school and university level. I think this is an important point to make, because I feel his amateur wrestling ability is what really set him off on his path to becoming such a master technician of the squared circle. You could also argue that all of the time he spent wrestling in Calgary with the legendary “Dynamite Kid” Tom Billington is what helped shape his career, but I still feel his amateur wrestling background played a major part in his success.
I first took notice of Hart when he and “The Anvil” Jim Neidhart held the WWF Tag Team Championships, but he really became my childhood hero after watching his Summerslam 1991 match against Mr. Perfect. To this day, I think it might still be my favourite pro wrestling match of all time.
Mr. Perfect was the WWF Intercontinental Champion at the time, playing the role of an arrogant jock. He was always bragging about about his athletic prowess and how “perfect” he was. I believe he was either dealing with a nagging injury or simply took Hart lightly and didn’t train very hard for their match. Big mistake. The Hitman came out like a house on fire, bringing the fight right to his opponent. He wore Mr. Perfect down, gassed him out, and even tore his singlet in half before making him tap out to the dreaded Sharpshooter, Hart’s dangerous leg submission hold.
Hart and Mr. Perfect would go on to have another classic match at King of the Ring 1993 where Hart would once again ultimately prevail, but I definitely prefer the storytelling and psychology that was featured in their Summerslam 1991 match.
After losing the Intercontinental title to his brother-in-law Davey Boy Smith, Hart would go on to wrestle “The Nature Boy” Ric Flair at a random WWF show in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.
With the WWF World Championship title on the line, Hart managed to pull out the victory against Flair, who was known as the dirtiest player in the game due to his constant cheating. I remember being really annoyed as a kid because I wasn’t able to watch the match anywhere. It felt like I had to wait an eternity before it was finally released on VHS and I was able to rent it from Vaso’s.
To be fair, it definitely isn’t one of the greatest matches I’ve ever seen and was even a bit of a letdown. In hindsight, I think Flair might have sandbagged Hart. Maybe he did it because he wasn’t particularly happy about losing the title? Either way, it was still an unreal moment for me when I got to witness my childhood hero hold up the WWF World Championship. Hart had been putting in the work and honing his craft since the late 1970’s, and he’d finally reached the pinnacle of the business with that big victory over Flair in 1992.
As champion, Hart took on all comers. He used his masterful technical wrestling skills to “excellently execute” all of his opponents. If you go back and watch his matches from this time period, I’d say from the early to mid 90’s, they all hold up extremely well, but especially his matches with his younger brother, Owen Hart. Their Wrestlemania 1994 match is one I rate extremely high, as well as their cage match from Summerslam that same year. They also had quite possibly my favourite tag team match of all time against the Steiner Brothers, which was eventually released as part of the Wrestlefest 94 collection.
Another bout I rate highly from that era would be Hart’s “No Disqualification” match against Diesel at Survivor Series 1995. Hart took an absolute pounding from his nearly seven-foot-tall opponent, even getting sent through the Spanish announce table, only to come back and sneakily roll Diesel up at the last second to win the world title for the third time in his illustrious career. I think I was 11 or 12-years-old when I watched it, and I don’t think I’ve ever cheered louder during a pro wrestling match than when I watched Hart pin Diesel. I remember at the time wishing he’d made Diesel tap out to the Sharpshooter, but hey, a win’s still a win no matter how you earn it.
I could go on, but I’d rather not cover the rest of Hart’s career. The 1997 “Montreal Screwjob” has had enough written about it, and his time in WCW was kind of lacklustre. Also, as I got older, I simply stopped watching pro wrestling.
Nowadays, whenever I briefly see it on TV while I’m flipping through the channels, I feel like the matches lack storytelling and the wrestlers are just hitting move after move with no real rhyme or reason for doing so. Technical mat skills have also sadly become a thing of the past. But every now and then, when I’m in the mood to watch some good old fashioned professional wrasslin’, I fire up my VCR, put on one of my old Coliseum Home Video tapes, and I just sit there on my couch reliving the memories from my childhood all over again.
I’m pretty sure Bret would appreciate that.
Tyson’s Top 10 (actually 11) Bret Hart matches
1. Bret Hart vs. Mr. Perfect Summerslam 1991
2. Bret Hart & Owen Hart vs. The Steiner Brothers Wrestlefest 1994
3. Bret Hart vs. Diesel “No Disqualification match” Survivor Series 1995
4. Bret Hart vs. Owen Hart Wrestlemania 1994 / Bret Hart vs. Owen Hart “Cage match” Summerslam 1994
5. Bret Hart vs. Roddy Piper Wrestlemania 1992
6. Bret Hart vs. Mr. Perfect King of the Ring 1993
7. Bret Hart vs. Jean-Pierre Lafitte In Your House 1995
8. Bret Hart vs. Shawn Michaels Survivor Series 1992
9. Bret Hart vs. 123 Kid WWF Raw 1994
10. Bret Hart vs. Hakushi In Your House 1995
Tyson Whitney is an award-winning journalist and the editor of the North Island Gazette in Port Hardy.