Hitman My Real Life in the Cartoon World by Bret Hart Read Free Book Online

night, September 15, Stu calmly floored the limo down to the pavilion for what very well might have turned out to be both opening and closing week.
    Bruce tore open the bundle of programs and there, on the cover, I saw a brooding bullet head atop a muscled frame. He was the answer to our prayers: Archie The Stomper Gouldie.
    The Stomper was the best wrestler I ever watched, and he was the one I studied the most. He turned my father’s fortunes around that year, selling out week after week against all kinds of different wrestlers, including Stu himself. But digging ourselves out of the hole took time. That Christmas I didn’t get any presents except for a red plastic bubble-bath gorilla and a small blue plastic American revolutionary soldier. I was hurt until I saw my mom smile and offer us coffee with cream and sugar to dip our chocolate chip cookies in. I named my toys King Kong and Montcalm and played with them for the rest of the day, waiting for the turkey that was roasting in the oven. At least we had that.
    Over the next three years, with the help of The Stomper, Stampede Wrestling became cutting edge in Calgary and across Canada, and through TV its popularity spread to far-off places around the world. Most wrestling shows were shot under hokey lighting in TV studios, with a scattering of fans on three benches on each side of the ring. My dad’s live wrestling show, filmed in front of capacity crowds at the pavilion, with Ed Whalen masterfully commentating, made wrestling seem real, gritty, exciting. My parents pulled themselves out of debt, us kids finally had nice clothes, and Stu bought a new big black Cadillac limousine to haul us around in—and, in secret, the chandeliers he’d had his eye on. He hid them from my mom for a while under blankets in the closets.
    One night The Stomper attacked Stu, stomping his arm over and over until he broke it. Stomper shouted in a rage that he was going to come and tear our house apart brick by brick and even piledrive my mom! I was really scared—I still hadn’t been smartened up. Stu had to wear a cast, but strangely enough he’d take it off when nobody else was around, or when he was cooking dinner.
    The Stomper and Stu show sold out for six straight weeks. And then, one Saturday afternoon, I saw Stomper climb out of his Corvette and come up the back steps. I didn’t know what to do. Mom greeted him with a hug. “Aw, hi, Arch.” She handed him his check. I still wasn’t sure what was going on, but I never viewed wrestling in quite the same way after that.
    Stomper left us in June 1969 after a new British wrestler named Billy Robinson, who was a noted shooter, tried to get cute with him in the ring. At the Stampede supercard that summer, I watched Robinson work with the newly crowned NWA champion, Dory Funk Jr. I watched their every move, two of the greatest, blending both the American and British styles together in a match that was ahead of its time. But what stands out in my mind the most about that Stampede week was holding my breath as my dad wrestled a Bengal tiger. I’ll never forget how, only days later, we were all watching The Untamed World and the voice-over told us that a tiger could break the neck of a yak with one swipe of its mighty paw. My mom slapped Stu hard on the arm with her own paw, and it was right around that time that my dad nicknamed my mom Tiger Belle.
    When my dad opened back up the next September without The Stomper, his ace heel, business was horrible right up until Christmas Day. Then Stu lucked out, bringing in a three-hundred-pound black school janitor out of Windsor, Ontario, who called himself Abdullah The Butcher and was billed as hailing from Khartoum. I watched this monster, unlike any I’d ever seen in wrestling, sell out week after week telling violent, bloody stories. Around the house, we called him Abbie.
    Abbie jumped Stu one night at the pavilion, and my brother Smith bravely came to his rescue. Abbie quickly decked Smith,