I
had Bret Hart's book on my nightstand for nearly a year, holding off on
starting the book due to its length of 550 pages. Once I did finally
dive into the book, I finished it in three marathon reading sessions. As
a kid who grew up on 1980s WWF, I found the stories and details of
specific werestlers fascinating. The reason I went with four stars
instead of five stars was because, as awesome as the stories were, the
continual self-congratulations do get rather overbearing at times.Seemingly
everyone mentioned in the book had their "best match ever" against Hart
-- from Yokozuna to Tom McGee. Bret also points out in the book that he
carried Ric Flair to great matches and repeatedly mentions that he
never injured any wrestler during his career to the point that they were
unable to work the following night. Hart also pointed out that when he
injured his ribs during a match with Dino Bravo, horror washed over Bret
when he realize
d that his selling was so realistic that no one would be
able to tell he had been legitimately injured by a dive into the
ringside railing. After a while, the self-congratulations just became
too much,.But there is no doubt the book is one of the best
wrestling books out there. As expected, Shawn Michaels, Triple H and
Vince McMahon all come off looking very bad in the book. Another guy who
Bret crushes in the book is the Ultimate Warrior. Hart tells the story
of Warrior blowing off a dying child from the Make A Wish Foundation,
and says it was one of the worst things he ever saw during his wrestling
career.To me, the funniest story in the entire book was Bret
talking about pranking Dick Murdoch while in Dubai. Hart notcied a pair
of soiled underwear on the floor under a bench in the dressing room and
switched the soiled underwear with the clean pair Murdoch had hanging on
a hook. Upon seeing the dirty underwear where his once clean pair had
been, an exasperated Murdoch blurted out, "All I know is there must be a
**** freak running around here, because somebody **** in my underwear,
and I'm dang sure it wasn't me." LOLHart also writes extensively
about the Dynamite Kid, calling him the best wrestler he ever saw while
also repeatedly stating that Tom Billington suffered from "Small Man's
Syndrome". Hart openly wonders if Billington ending up in a wheelchair
wasn't karma for his repeated cruelty during his career. When Bret talks
about his own adultery while on the road, he seems to give himself a
pass by writing that his many adulterous relationships may have saved
his life because he was not into drugs and steroids nearly to the degree
of his contemporaries in the sport.The many
self-congratulations aside, it is hard not to feel sad for Hart when he
talks about the death of his brother and how it ripped his family to
pieces over money and how culpable Vince McMahon was in the death of
Owen Hart. Bret recounts conversations he had with Owen in which they
agreed that the wrestling business was not worth dying over, and the
vivid dreams Bret had about Owen after his brother's death.This
is one of the best wrestling autobiographies you can read, but just be
aware that the book comes with lots of self-congratulations mixed in
with plenty of great stories (both positive and negative) about nearly
every big name wrestler of the 1980s and 1990s.
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