By Bruce Mitchell, Torch columnist

"Fluke"
Originally published: May 29, 1999
Pro Wrestling Torch Weekly newsletter #550

Herbie said, "Tony, can you fly?"
Tony couldn't fly
He died.

Those were people who died
They were all my friends
They died.
-Jim Carroll

This time it wasn't Somas.
Or an enlarged heart.

Or cocaine.

This time it was a fluke accident during a stunt that had been done hundreds of times before. In terms of a wrestling spot, it was pretty safe.

After all, Owen Hart wasn't taking a flying bump to a concrete floor straight on his head, like Jerry Lynn did last week. He wasn't getting Rock Bottomed though an announcers' table even when the wrong bump could leave him paralyzed, like Steve Austin a few weeks back. He wasn't diving off a two-story balcony on top of some poor guy on a table, like New Jack. He wasn't risking a broken skull taking a steel chair shot, like Bam Bam Bigelow or dozens of other wrestlers on any given night. He wasn't sticking his head through stained glass, like Undertaker later that night. He wasn't doing somersaults over concrete, trusting that someone would be there to catch him.

He wasn't taking a flying leap off the top of a steel cage 20 feet to the floor, like Mick Foley.

All he was doing was getting strapped in and lowered five-stories to the ring. The talented worker Owen Hart didn't need this lame trick to get over. No true wrestling fan was going to be impressed. The stunt was considered so safe it was given to the Blue Blazer, whose whole act was a parody of the Goody-Two-Shoes '80s babyface. The buzz-killing Blue Blazer hated the envelope-pushing, hardcore danger of the WWF.

Actually, Owen hated the nerdy Blue Blazer gimmick and knew he was being punished for refusing to do an angle where he was to sleep with Debra, and for being the only Hart available for abuse, much like Ken Shamrock's storyline was cut off when he refused to sleep with his "sister." So he was going to make one of those Tinky-Winky entrances like that flop Sting guy in WCW. If he was nervous about being up that high, well, he knew better than to complain to management.

And then something went wrong.

In front of 18,000 people in attendance, in front of his friends, co-workers, boss, and 400,000 watching on television, Owen Hart fell to his death.

In this sport, death, and its attendant ten-bell salute (Brian Pillman, Louie Spicoli, Junkyard Dog, Renegade, Rick Rude) has become just another part of Monday night, and just as memorable as any other TV angle. The live Raw the next night was an exception, an amazing piece of television. (Nitro wasn't - Terry Bollea, the biggest name in the sport in the last 20 years rattled on about how important he was without mentioning Hart.) Raw was a cathartic wake for Owen that showed the respect and love his fellow wrestlers had for him. The grace shown by Jerry Lawler and Jim Ross as they presided over what amounted to a two-hour nationally televised eulogy, with the Hart family, the entire WWF, the media, and a nation of wrestling fans looking over their shoulders was close to heroic. The tributes by Debra McMichael, Hunter Hearst Helmsley, Road Dogg, Jerry Lawler, Mick Foley, and particularly Jeff Jarrett were singular in the business for their heart and honesty, struggling to know the unknowable, knowing that every one of them has taken similar risks and worse.

The show was also a tremendous piece of public relations work for a company that was facing serious questions about its judgement from every corner of the national and local media. Titan Sports desperately wanted the entire company to turn babyface, to show a mushy sentiment at the center of its hardcore, pimpin' ain't easy, implant shakin', finger flippin', virgin crucifyin' crust. For the WWF fans who've spent years getting their weekly brainwashing and know that Vince McMahon is the wisest of them all, the show was ultimate proof that WWF Superstars would die for their fans.

The Hart family, though, has dealt with the WWF and the wrestling business good and bad for decades and was a little more dubious of the sincerity of the show, calling it "a ratings ploy." They have a lot of questions that will have to be answered.

The national media was also more skeptical than your average Attitude fan. The obvious liability issues, the safety of wrestlers, the inane "show must go on" mentality, and the failure to tell the people in the arena that Hart died, were all second guessed by reporters. Luckily, no one in the press has so far noticed that the Undertaker was champion at the end of the night.

The media is not going to understand that there is a ravenous wrestling monster that has to be fed, and that every instinct of Titan management is to throw it raw meat. Titan understands its clientele. After the tragedy, one fan here locally was interviewed to the effect that "if everybody died on the show, I'd still want to see wrestling Monday night." Another sagely noted, "Hey, that's show biz."

Fans who care enough about the deaths in wrestling to bother, bend themselves into ethical pretzels trying to rationalize the horror so they can enjoy their sports entertainment without pretend-guilt. My favorite excuse is the one about how rock musicians die young all the time so I guess it must be okay for wrestlers too.

That having been said, for the sake of everyone involved, Titan should have stopped the show immediately after the accident. As cold-blooded as fans can be, most saw what happened and would have understood. The fans were victims here too, just as all the co-workers and family were, because they were eyewitnesses to the accident. Everyone needed to deal with their shock and grief honestly, not suffer the strange aching denial of the show that followed.

Ironically, Owen Hart would have been a low pick in any insider's Death Pool. Hart wasn't known for drunkenly wrecking rental cars, or appearing on television stoned, or missing his dates in a crack-induced funk, or getting "She's a Crack Whore" chanted at him. Owen Hart was the type of versatile professional that is the glue of any successful promotion, a guy who could be used on any point of the card because of his versatility. As the Raw Memorial showed, he was a decent guy who showed up for work every night.

If wrestling had miraculously cured its drug epidemic and if concussion-causing hardcore matches suddenly went out of style, the incident still could have happened. This was simply a freak accident.

And the media that only touched on the disturbing pattern of death among young men in wrestling has blown up a fluke into the Biggest Death of All, the one that promoters, wrestlers, and fans all have been in denial about, the one that causes the power structure in society to demand reforms instead of giving a laugh and wink to this joke-sport.

Unless, of course, our attention-deficit media decides to move on a newer atrocity.

The stakes in court of public opinion are high. Ask the Ultimate Fighting Championship what happens when the media and issue-hungry politicians label you a Blood Sport.

If politicos and state athletic commissions get involved, wrestling could finally be a clean sport, you know, like boxing.

Luckily for promoters and fans who justifiably shudder at the possibility, between the enormous amount of tax money wrestling brings in to the commissions and the voters who want their wrestling no matter what, the prospect of legal reforms in wrestling are remote.

If wrestlers have been shocked in wondering about the risks they take as a matter of course, and many of them have, and have begun to question a system that requires them to often do things against their nature without any recourse other than damaging their earning power, and wondering why they, unlike any other entity in sports or entertainment are requried to do this without the benefit of company health insurance or benefits, some good may come from this senseless death.

Wrestlers are still "independent contractors," that ridiculous misnomer that binds wrestlers to companies for the life of the contract while allowing a multi-million dollar corporation to deny benefits that any local mini-mart routinely gives the assistant manager.

Even the noted kiss-ass faker Larry King had enough wits about him to ask Eric Bischoff and that show-off Gov. Jesse Ventura about wrestlers' lack of a collective bargaining agreement.

What does this have to do with a tragic freak accident?

Simply this. If Owen Hart, or any other wrestler, has qualms about a stunt, or a spot, or a travel schedule, or pay questions, or injury rehabilitation (see Steve Williams), he must face management alone and hope that they see the his way without punishing him for standing up for his contractual rights (see Sable). The only leverage an individual wrestler has is, in Hogan's phrase Monday, the "stroke" he has at the given time.

The pressure is even more in a boom period, when wrestlers and promoters both have to get paid as much as they can while they can. So performers climb up a ramp, or into a dumpster, or up a scaffold, and do what they feel they have to for the job.

If (the word that has stopped a thousand ideas) wrestlers, the only stars allowed on television without union representation, actually organized instead of cutting each other's balls off politically, the WWF and WCW would have to spend more time responding to the collective concerns of its entire work force instead of catering to the whims of a select few big stars.

Wrestling promoters have always hated the idea of a wrestling union, firing and blackballing wrestlers at the first hint of organizing. Even Hulk Hogan was part of the long tradition of wrestling dressing room stooges, making sure Vince McMahon knew of a nascent uprising back in the '80s. Playing wrestlers against each other has kept the long tradition of pro wrestling union-free.

With a union, wrestlers would have group insurance, benefits, and grievance options. Worse for promoters, a union would require a wrestling company to document its salary structure. Titan Sports currently justifies how much wrestlers are paid on not much more than a whim.

For a wrestling union to succeed, it would have to start in the WWF. WCW wrestlers can't work together long enough to produce a coherent hour of television and old guys have no interest in the future of the business. They have to get it now, because their career could be over at any moment (see Davey Boy Smith, Shawn Michaels, Jim Duggan, et al).

Three Superstars are young enough, famous enough, and stroked enough to pull this tremendous gamble. Steve Austin, Mark Calloway, and Duane Johnson have enough leverage to bring in the rest of the locker room before Titan could replace them.

If (there's that word again) they stuck together.

The highly unlikely aside, this tragedy, and the Raw tribute, may have one true benefit. By opening their hearts and giving fans some sense of their lives, WWF wrestlers hopefully showed them that their heroes are actually real people with families, not meat puppets to be used and thrown away for their amusement.

Something good has to come of this.

Doesn't it?

Bruce Mitchell of Greensboro, N.C. has been a TORCH columnist since September 1990.

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