Death of Owen Hart in the ring | 25 years ago, one risk too many

On May 24, 1999, in a living room in Marieville, a 15-year-old teenager named Kevin Steen watched Rawthe WWF’s weekly Monday event.

This is not an episode like any other. Instead of the absurd stories of the time, the show is entirely devoted to Owen Hart. The day before, he suffered a horrific accident and became the first wrestler – and the only one to date – to die during a WWF (now WWE) show. The show was a series of poignant testimonies from his colleagues, interspersed with sober fights.

Steen remembers it well.

We move forward about ten years. “When my wife got pregnant and we found out it was a guy, I asked her if we could call him Owen, and luckily she said yes. But then, we visited our future apartment, it was upstairs from my mother-in-law’s house. We arrive at the room of the little guy who lived there. His name was written on the door. And it was Owen. So that confirmed that we had our name! »

This Kevin Steen has made his own way in wrestling. Once he got to WWE, he had to come up with a stage name. This is where he became Kevin Owens, a nod to his son, but also, inevitably, to Owen Hart.

May 23 will mark the 25^e anniversary of the disturbing death of this wrestler loved by all. Here is his story, told by the people here who knew him.

The world of professional wrestling sometimes seems like a parallel universe and this was particularly true in the 1990s. Raymond Rougeau, who then worked as an interviewer and describer, knows something about this.

“Guys like Macho Man, like the Ultimate Warrior, got lost in their character. Owen Hart, his character, was that: a character. He didn’t get lost. There was the wrestler and there was the guy outside the ring. »

The wrestler was a fabulous role of the little brother in the shadows. He was the youngest of 12 Hart children, a true wrestling royal family, established in Calgary. His big brother Bret “Hitman” Hart was the headliner of the 1990s WWF.

Slowly, Owen became the jealous, envious, attention-starved brother. This character really took off in 1994, at WrestleMania X, when he defeated Bret, in the middle of the ring, at Madison Square Garden.

Watch the Hart brothers fight

“That’s where we fully realized Owen’s talent,” says Pat Laprade, wrestling historian and describer of WWE Raw wrestling at TVA Sports. Before that, he had played the first incarnation of the Blue Blazer, wrestled as a tag team with Koko B. Ware, and most recently turned on his family. But after a great match with Bret against the Quebecers at the 1994 Royal Rumble, his match against his brother is really what brought him out of the shadows. »

But outside the arena, it was different. Denis Gauthier, son of Joanne Rougeau, who worked as a promoter for Eastern Canada for the WWF, has very vivid memories of it. In 1996, the WWF held its first ever show at the Molson Center. On the bill: Owen Hart against Raymond Rougeau, who came out of retirement for one evening only.

Gauthier, then newly drafted by the Calgary Flames, met Hart at a promotional event on the sidelines of the show.

“I don’t remember everything that was said, but we chatted for 15, 20 minutes about hockey, where I came from, what my background was,” remembers Gauthier. Owen was a huge Flames fan. It was short, but he seemed very human to me, as interested in knowing my story as I was in knowing his, which I knew very well.

And in the locker room? “A friendly guy, always smiling,” remembers Pierre-Carl Ouellet, former partner of Jacques Rougeau within the Quebecers. He was a continual trick player. There’s nothing he hasn’t done! »

On the road too, he stood out. Joanne Rougeau remembers one evening in St. John’s when, on the way back to the hotel, she had to get him to sign some papers. “And he said to me: ‘I can’t talk to you, it’s 8 a.m., I have to call my wife.’ Every evening he called her at 8 a.m. I found it fun. It’s rare on the road. On the contrary, guys forget their wives. »

Hart was also very frugal, while other wrestlers spent lavishly. “When we went on the road, I took him in to save him from having to rent a car. I rented one anyway, continues Joanne Rougeau. The guys weren’t all easy. So he was there to protect me.

“He was a simple guy. We have jeans with holes, we don’t throw them away. It either. He was very grateful. And his way of paying me back was to help me out when a guy didn’t show up for an interview. He said, “It’s okay, I’ll go for you.” »

A fatal fall of 78 feet

In 1999, the WWF was in the midst of the “Attitude Era”, where everything was done to shock: the foul language, the chairs, the beer, the hypersexualized women. Remember that among the characters of the time, we found a porn actor and a pimp.

Owen Hart hardly found himself in this universe. The WWF therefore offered to resurrect his character of the Blue Blazer, a masked superhero that he had played when he started with the company, a decade earlier.

As he was a superhero, he was sometimes asked to make his entrance from the ceiling of the arena, which he had to do on May 23, 1999. Except that the mechanism which held him back gave way. This was followed by a fatal fall of 78 feet into the arena.

“People there said that as he fell, he shouted: “Be careful!” The guy plunges to his death, he knows it’s over, and the last thing he thinks is: Be careful, I don’t want to hurt you,” says Jim Cornette, former wrestling promoter, in a documentary of the series Dark Side of the Ring dedicated to this tragedy.

Watch the full episode: Season 2, Episode 10 (Crave subscription required)

Only the people gathered at Kemper Arena witnessed his death. The show was presented on pay-per-view television, but the accident occurred during the broadcast of a video montage.

Pierre-Carl Ouellet was then wrestling in a WWF “school club” in Memphis. He was gathered with a few wrestlers, including future champion Kurt Angle, to watch the show on television. “We worked from Thursday to Saturday, then we had time off. So we listened to the Sunday shows together. We were falling apart. There was no texting back then. We managed to see the news on the web. »

They didn’t have to wait long after all. A few minutes later, commentator Jim Ross announced the death of Owen Hart live.

The affair was a huge black eye for the WWF.

Owen Hart’s widow, Martha, sued the company for negligence. Vince McMahon’s decision to continue the show after the accident was also roundly criticized.

“It was hard to watch the rest of the show. We looked at it, but we really lost it,” remembers Kevin Steen.

The accident was also a reminder of the risks of this crazy industry. Danger usually comes from stunts in the arena. Owen Hart’s accident was different in that sense, but a common thread remains: athletes take risks in order to put on a show.

That said, the WWF had not taken all the necessary precautions. In the documentary of Dark Side of the Ring, Martha Hart shows the mechanism, which only needed 6 lbs of pressure to open. “Vince didn’t want Owen to take time to loosen up once he was in the ring, like Sting did in WCW,” explains Pat Laprade. So there was a quick release device and it was because of this device that Hart died. »

Owen Hart’s loved ones were torn apart. In the said documentary, his widow says that the Hart family put obstacles in the way of his prosecution. She also refuses to allow her late husband to be inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame, another issue that divides the family.

Here we are at the reception of Queens Park Cemetery, in Calgary.

“Hello, can you give me directions to a tombstone?

– Of course. What is the person’s name?

—Owen Hart.

— Oh, that one’s easy! »

There are obviously many people coming to pay tribute to the former star.

The ground is particularly muddy on this unusually hot Friday in March. But here we are in front of the monument, a larger than normal tombstone.

“Oje loves dad” on the left side. “Athena loves dad” on the right side. Between the messages from his children, a note from his widow. “Martha and Owen forever”, in a heart.

“His death came for me,” admits Pierre-Carl Ouellet. I found it valuable, he made a lot of effort to save his money, he didn’t really drink, he had a young family, but he was never able to take advantage of it. »