My favourite documentary

Imagine a story where a man – let’s call him The Hero – goes from being a big fish in a small pond to being a very small fish in a very big pond. Slowly but surely The Hero works his way up the ladder, impressing people and earning their respect with hard work and natural talent. Eventually he reaches the pinnacle of his chosen field and becomes the subject of everyone’s attention. He is offered money or loyalty as two sides bid for his services. The Hero weighs the options and chooses loyalty over riches. The story has a sad end. And then another sad end. And then another sad end. The Hero’s life is destroyed piece by piece. But he doesn’t stop fighting.

And it’s a true story at that. The documentary in question is “Bret Hart – Wrestling With Shadows” and it covers the Hero’s life up until the first sad end. The subsequent sad ends add poignancy to the footage as we shall see. The reason I’m putting this here rather than in the Bladejob column that no one reads is that you really don’t have to like wrestling to appreciate this movie. BBC2 showed it as part of their Storyville documentary strand because it’s not a documentary about wrestling – it’s a documentary about a particular wrestler and a year in his life.

Bret was a big star in his father’s promotion up in the wilds of Canada until the WWF bought his dad out and Bret was given a lowly paying job as part of the deal. A 220lb man in a land of 300lb giants was never going to be a star but a successful tag team run and a mildly successful singles career followed over time. Then the steroid scandal broke and WWF cleared out most of it’s chemically enhanced monsters and fell back on what couldn’t even have been Plan X or Plan Y – the smaller guys (who – gasp – actually wrestled instead of sluggishly brawling) like Bret Hart. Bret was Canadian and became something of a Canadian hero. Just as the UK embraced the British Bulldog (who, ironically, got a job as part of the sale of the afore mentioned Canadian promotion at the same time as Bret Hart), so Canada embraced the latest superstar to emerge from the legendary Hart family. Bret would go on to headline Wrestlemania (the Superbowl of Wrestling), win the WWF title and became the guy the company relied upon when their latest “sure thing” flopped at the box office.

So it wasn’t surprising when a Canadian film company asked if they could follow Bret around for a year and make a movie about him. It would get shown at a few festivals, maybe put out on video and – if the WWF liked it – they might even throw their weight behind it and get it an airing on the USA network. Little did anyone know what they would become part of.

The first inklings that this might not be a normal year came when Bret’s WWF contract expired and he decided to take time off and consider his options. The WWF made him a good offer but rival company WCW made him an insanely good offer. Three million dollars per year – guaranteed – for the next three years. The WWF was never into paying high contracts. They preferred to pay their talent a basic salary and top it up with percentages of ticket sales, pay per view revenue, merchandise, personal appearances and so on. Essentially WCW was offering three times more money for what Bret knew would be a lot less work. The movie follows Bret’s agonies as he tries to make the biggest decision of his life. He wasn’t a young man – he was probably in his late 30s at the time – and this may be the last contract he would sign in the business. He was torn between money and loyalty to the company that had been his home for over ten years. His wife thought he should take the money because the loyalty to the WWF was strictly a one way affair. She didn’t trust WWF owner Vince McMahon. But Bret did and he signed with Vince’s company.

Almost immediately thing began to change. The WWF was changing and Bret’s clean cut hero character seemed rather out of place. The fans wanted the anarchy and anti-establishment antics of Stone Cold Steve Austin and Bret started being booed. Someone – and lots of people take credit for it – decided to turn this to the company’s advantage. Bret became a bad guy because he took out his frustrations on the fans. The American fans. The lowlife American fans who preferred a red neck bully to a real wrestling champion. Bret – backed by his brother Owen Hart, his brothers in law British Bulldog and Jim Neidhart and family friend Brian Pillman – went on an anti-American crusade which became extremely heated. But the masterstroke was that the WWF would run shows in Canada during this storyline and the roles were reversed. Without changing the characters, the Canadian faction were the good guys and Austin and co were the bad guys. The raw energy of working before such passionate crowds was clear in Hart. He was a man who was enjoying life despite twenty thousand people a night hating his guts.

Then his world began to fall apart. The WWF’s other big star of the era was Shawn Michaels and he hated Bret Hart. Shawn was a brat and would storm out of television tapings if asked to do something he didn’t like. Shawn had lost a lot of his power when his clique had left the company for the big bucks of WCW and it showed as his behaviour became ever more childish. He implied Bret was having an affair live on TV. He made Bret out to be a racist, again on live TV. Bret wasn’t going to sink to Shawn’s level but tempers boiled over before one show and the two had a backstage fight. Shawn walked out of the company vowing never to return. It was clear that there was only room for one of them and it is obvious that the stable Bret Hart would be the one you would choose, right?

Bret was devastated when Vince McMahon called him and said he couldn’t afford to pay Bret’s contract. The deal was worth $1.5m per year for three years and even though the WWF was losing money, this was not an excessive amount. Vince offered Bret a deal whereby Bret would get half his money with the other half coming at an unspecified point in “the future”. Bret could see that the writing was on the wall. Shawn Michaels had taken Bret’s spot as the most hated man amongst the fans. He was an arrogant pretty boy with a juvenile sense of humour and a cowardly way of avoiding those who stood up to him. Good looks and no guts are even more likely to annoy the average American male than pro-Canadian propaganda. Shawn’s vague homosexual undertones only made him more reviled. Bret couldn’t return to the good side as Steve Austin was unassailable as top good guy. With Undertaker and the upcoming Rock next in line, Bret had been manoeuvred into limbo. When Vince McMahon positively encouraged him to call WCW Bret knew his time was up.

But this was early November 1997 and Bret wouldn’t be leaving until 1st December. He was WWF champion and tradition dictated he had to drop the belt. Bret, being from a wrestling family, understood this and had no problem with it. Except that that month’s title match was in Canada and Bret never lost in Canada. And it was against Shawn Michaels and Bret had grown to hate Michaels as much as Michaels hated him. Bret’s contract gave him “creative control” for the last month of his WWF career. So he could flat out refuse to lose the match – in a city that has become synonymous with that night – without being in breach of contract. A scenario was laid out which had the match ending by disqualification when both men’s allies stormed the ring. We know this is what was agreed because Bret was wearing a microphone.

The documentary crew had everything they wanted by early November. They had stumbled across something much better than a Year In the Life of Bret Hart – they now had the final year of Bret’s WWF career. But Bret (and from the footage, Bret’s wife even more so) smelled a rat. Which is why on that night in Montreal (and unknown to everyone else involved) Bret was wearing a microphone under his t-shirt. We hear quite clearly the conversations that take place. We hear what was promised. The wrestling industry may be founded on lies, deception and backstabbing but in the ring there is an unspoken bond. Each man has the others life in his hands. Literally. One wrong move and necks can be broken. Literally. So the shockwaves emanating from that match are still felt today.

The plan – Shawn puts Bret in a submission move, Bret reverses it, allies storm the ring.

The reality – Shawn puts Bret in a submission move, the referee calls for the bell saying Bret submitted, the referee runs out of the ring and doesn’t stop until he reaches a waiting car. Shawn flees the ring. The fans throw garbage. Bret spits in Vince’s face.

The aftermath is captured on film. Shawn Michaels swears blind that he wasn’t in on it (which we find out years later was a lie). Bret’s wife scares the hell out of Triple H who is left cowering in her presence. Vince emerges from Bret’s locker room looking like he’s been in a car crash. Bret mutters sheepishly that Vince ran into his fist. Vince would later claim that he went there knowing he was going to be beaten up but, like Jesus, he sacrificed himself so that Bret wouldn’t harm anyone else.

And so the movie ends with Bret and his father Stu watching how the WWF handled what they had done. It involved Shawn Michaels beating up a midget who was wearing a Bret Hart mask and later had Vince McMahon utter the immortal line “Vince McMahon didn’t screw Bret Hart – Bret screwed Bret”.

Over the course of ninety minutes we see the highs and lows of someone who took his job very seriously. We see him mobbed in India and he’s genuinely moved by how the children revere the Hitman character. From beginning to end we see a man who understood how wrestling was supposed to work and who ultimately came a cropper because the business had changed. He went on to a poor career in WCW – that company’s top stars were envious of Bret’s salary and ensured he was never put in a position to make money for WCW. After two years he suffered a series of concussions which left him with a degree of brain damage. His brother was killed when a WWF stunt went wrong and the subsequent lawsuits tore the huge Hart family apart. His wife divorced him, his brother in law British Bulldog died, his parents passed away and Bret himself suffered a stroke following a quad-bike crash.

The sadness at the end of the film – and it is edited in such a way as to make it a very downbeat ending – pales into insignificance as the years have put it into a tragic perspective. You almost begin to play the game of What If…? If Bret had lost in Montreal by choice, Vince wouldn’t have persecuted his memory and his family. Owen wouldn’t have been put in the position which killed him. The lawsuit wouldn’t have happened, his parents might have lived longer without that stress.

Wrestling isn’t real but wrestlers are.

4th March 2004