Free Straight from the Hart by Bruce Hart

though I’d done jobs pretty regularly for the past year or so and had long since checked my ego at the door, Moreau was even lower on the totem pole than me — he’d never won a match in his life and, beyond that, was finishing up that night anyway and heading back to Ontario after the match.
    When a guy is leaving, it’s customary for them to put someone over. As such, I had figured I’d be getting my hand raised, but lo and behold, Keith informed me that he wanted me to put the Rocket over. I went out and did the job, but after the match I got to thinking that if I was doing jobs in my hometown for part-time referees who were leaving the territory perhaps I should see the writing on the wall — that maybe my future didn’t lie on the yellow brick road (as Elton John put it) to wrestling stardom. I decided to hang up my tights, so to speak, and go back to university to complete my teaching practicum. After 56
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    ♥ STRAIGHT FROM THE HART ♥
    that, I only worked or went on the road when old buddies, like Terry Funk or Andre the Giant, came up for Stampede Week and other special occasions.

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    The promotion itself seemed to be going in pretty much the same direction as my career and one of the main reasons was the uninspiring booking. I have no doubt that my brother Keith was trying hard and that he had the best interests of the business at heart, but he never seemed to quite grasp what booking was all about, or, as they say in the industry — he never seemed to “get it.” Booking, I came to find later on, is all about storytelling — coming up with compelling characters and scenarios and being able to gracefully extricate yourself from corners you’ve unintentionally painted yourself into. It’s very intuitive and instinctive, or, as Kenny Rogers once put it, it’s about knowing
    “when to hold ’em” and “when to fold ’em.” Like the boy wonder, Eric Bischoff
    — when he was running WCW into the ground — Keith never quite seemed to understand those things. The results attest to that.
    When Keith first took the book in my dad’s promotion, he had this idea of making Stampede Wrestling into glorified amateur wrestling, with the emphasis on good sportsmanship and athleticism. On paper, it may have sounded noble, but it got over about as well as someone passing gas in a hot, crowded elevator.
    Somebody probably should have told him that one of the main reasons why so few great amateur wrestlers have ever amounted to much as professional 58
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    ♥ STRAIGHT FROM THE HART ♥
    wrestlers is that in amateur it’s all about concealing your emotions — kind of like a poker player not showing his hand. It’s about never showing your opponents that you’re hurt, angry or whatever else. In pro wrestling though, it’s the complete opposite: one’s ability to project one’s emotions to the audience is what really enables a wrestler to get over.
    After several months of unsuccessfully seeking to convert Stampede Wrestling fans into amateur wrestling aficionados, Keith had an abrupt change of heart
    — and decided to bring in King Curtis, Mark Lewin, Big Bad John, Black Jack Slade, Abdullah the Butcher and associates — the reigning kings of hardcore at that time.
    In a matter of weeks, the territory went from Sesame Street to Elm Street, and every nightmare there would be barbwire matches, cage matches, chain matches, no-holds-barred bloodbaths and a proliferation of violence and extremism that would have made Paul Heyman proud. Unfortunately, there never seemed to be any method to the madness, no justifying rationale — just gratuitous violence for the sake of gratuitous violence. Gates continued to be lousy — which is the road to ruin and something my esteemed colleagues in the WWE need to not lose sight of.
    During the height of King Curtis’ and