The Sad Year

Bret “The Hitman” Hart sat in the darkened locker room, the roar of a distant crowd echoing through concrete walls. The air carried the stale scent of dried sweat, baby oil, and the bitter stench of lost ambition.¹ His hair hung in long, damp strands, the last remnants of his pre-match shower clinging to his skin. His hands, taped for his fight that night, rested on his knees like two silent co-conspirators. 

He could hear the faint hum of the arena—a mass of humanity waiting, hungry for the next scripted bout of controlled violence. The purgatorial space between matches wasn’t just physical. It was mental. The waiting was part of the ritual. He’d sat in locker rooms like this a thousand times, always listening, always preparing for the bell to ring and for the show to go on.²

The door creaked open, and for a moment, a harsh beam of fluorescent light illuminated the otherwise dim locker room. Vince McMahon stood in the doorway. He didn’t step in immediately; he rarely did, as if he needed the brief pause to remind everyone of his power, of his presence. His aura was like an electric shock to the system of the room—a jolt of something dangerous and barely restrained. 

“We’re putting you up against Shawn at Survivor Series,” Vince said. His voice carried the weight of a thousand contracts, stipulations, and ironclad non-disclosures.³

Bret looked up, his eyes narrowing, but he nodded. What else could he do? Vince was less a boss at this point and more a sadistic god, pulling the strings on his wrestlers like so many marionettes. Bret knew it. They all knew it. The ring was just a stage, and they were all following a script they until the moment before the curtain dropped, none brave enough to cut their strings. 

This time, though, something was different. This time, Bret wasn’t just going into a match. He was walking into an assassination.

1976 – Year of the Enfield Dungeon and Performance Center

Before there were betrayals under bright lights and flashing camera bulbs, there was a different kind of pain. The kind that lived in basements. Bret’s wrestling career began not in the ring but in a place more infamous than any arena. The Enfield Dungeon and Performance Center.⁴

Stu Hart’s basement wasn’t a wrestling school so much as a sadistic psychosexual torture chamber.⁵ The walls were old wood paneling and concrete, the floor worn smooth by decades of grappling. This was where Bret first learned to endure—to endure not just pain but the suffocating expectation of his family’s legacy. The Dungeon smelled of old leather and failure, of sweat and bodies pushed beyond their limits. But, mostly it smelled of fear, the kind of fear that comes from knowing you have no choice but to rise or be broken.

Stu wasn’t a father in the traditional, loving sense. He was more like an ancient king, sitting at the head of a table⁶, his children and trainees forever vying for his approval.⁷ 

When Bret was thirteen, Stu finally called him to the mat. His brothers had already been through it—Bruce, Keith, Dean, etc—all of them hardened, like steel, in the Dungeon’s forge. The stories they told weren’t exaggerations. The screams that he imagined leaking through the vents to the living room upstairs, were all too real.⁸

“Get on the mat,” Stu said, not looking up from the newspaper that was always in his hands. Bret had often wondered, though never aloud, if Stu ever actually read the thing or if it was just a prop, something to remind everyone in the room that he didn’t need his full attention to break them in to pieces.

Bret’s knees hit the mat. It was firm beneath him, concrete wrapped in just enough padding to make you think it would soften the blow, though it never did. His brothers grinned from the sidelines, their faces marked with the kind of gleeful malice that can only adorn the face of a sibling. They stood smirking, watching someone else about to endure what they’ve survived, not a speck of care or worry on their faces. These were violent people.

Stu moved slowly, methodically, his knees cracking with each step. Bret braced himself, knowing what was coming. Stu wasn’t fast, but that wasn’t the point. When you were in the Dungeon, it was never about speed. It was about inevitability. Stu pounced on him like a bear⁹ after it’s prey.

The pain was immediate and total. It started in his legs, snaking up his spine like lightning, until his vision blurred. He could feel his back arch, his muscles screaming for release. But he didn’t cry out. You didn’t scream in the Dungeon. Lesson number one.

“Wrestling isn’t just about strength, boy. It’s about will,” Stu said, voice barely above a whisper but carrying the weight of a thousand won, hard fought matches .¹⁰

Bret focused on the cracks in the concrete beneath him. He could see where other men—other boys—had left their mark. Bloodstains, scuffs, the faint shadows of the many bodies pressed into the mat. The pain was unbearable, but Bret took it. He took it because that’s what it meant to be a wrestler, to be a Hart.

While your father is choking the life out of you, there’s a lot of time to consider things. You consider your future, you consider tapping out, and you consider the lobster. When Stu finally released the hold, Bret collapsed onto the mat, gasping for air. But beneath the exhaustion, he felt something else: pride. He had survived. The Dungeon was where wrestlers were made and tested. Bret had just taken his first step into the fire.

Late PM November 9, 1997

Fast-forward to Montreal, years, even a lifetime, later, and Bret was once again in the middle of the storm. The arena wasn’t cold and dark like the Dungeon. It was hot with the energy of thousands of fans, all cheering, all waiting for their heroes to battle.¹¹ But Bret wasn’t a hero anymore. At least, not here in the locker room. He was just a man.. And in the eyes of the WWF brass, he was less than that.

Then there was the match. Shawn Michaels was in the ring, playing the part of the boy toy, the charismatic, prancing villain. He strutted around like he’d already won. Bret could hear the fans chanting, could hear the roar of the crowd building like an avalanche for their Canadian hero, their king, their Pale King. But, it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered anymore.

Because tonight, Bret wasn’t going to win. He wasn’t meant to. Tonight was the night of the Montreal Screwjob.

The moment Shawn locked in the Sharpshooter—the move Bret had perfected, the move that had become his trademark finisher—it felt like a punch to the gut. Not physically, but the meaning behind it. Bret could see Vince at ringside, standing there, watching, like the cold architect of the plan that was about to unfold.¹²

The bell rang before Bret could even react, before he could reverse the hold. Bret’s fists clenched, his heart racing, as the betrayal washed over him in slow motion. He had known it was coming. He had seen the writing on the wall. But knowing didn’t make it any easier. The hit had been clean. The betrayal had been final.

He stood there, in the middle of the ring, as Shawn left with the belt. The crowd’s confusion mirrored Bret’s own. 

Bret’s eyes burned with a mix of anger and disbelief. In one move, in one betrayal, his legacy had been stolen. His pride spit back in his face—literally, in Vince’s case, as Bret let loose a glob of spit directly into the boss’s eyes before storming off into a ringside frenzy.¹³

Year of WCW, The House of Drug and Alcohol Recovery 

WCW was not what Bret had expected. It wasn’t a new beginning. This wasn’t a place of redemption. It was a halfway home. No, a halfway house.¹⁴ The kind of place you go when you don’t know where else to go, when you’re trying to figure out what comes next, but you’re stuck in the past.

The halls of WCW were filled with ghosts. Hulk Hogan, Kevin Nash, Scott Hall—all of them clung to their WWF personas like old addicts, desperate for one last hit of fame and glory. Bret walked those halls too, trying to find something, anything, that felt real. But it was all a joke, a facade. The matches, the promos(which would be better to be called brief Interviews with hideous men,) the promises—they were all just hollow husks of what had come before.

The hits kept coming, both in and out of the ring, but nothing could prepare him for the final assassin: Goldberg. That match was supposed to be just another in a long line, but it ended everything. Bret’s career. His hopes for redemption. His body.¹⁵

It was a clean shot. The results were clear: Bret’s time was over. His body couldn’t take it anymore. He was no longer the best there is, but he was the best the was, and the best there ever will be.¹⁶

Footnotes:

1. Bret’s pre-match routine often involved sitting in total darkness, focusing on the sound of the crowd, a practice that started in his early days in Stampede Wrestling. ↩︎
2. Purgatory is a recurring theme in wrestling, both literally and metaphorically. Wrestlers often feel trapped between matches, between storylines, between career and family, all the while feeling the weight of time ticking away. See: Foley, Mick,  Have a Nice Day! for more insights into the mental toll of wrestling.¹⁷ ↩︎
3. Vince McMahon is alleged¹⁸ to have committed rape, sexual assault, sex trafficking, and a plethora of other crimes. ↩︎
4. The Enfield Dungeon and Performance Center was notorious for its brutal training sessions, designed to push wrestlers beyond their physical and mental limits. .¹⁹ ↩︎
5. For the record Stu Hart and, famed serial torturer/killer, Jigsaw were never spotted in the same place at the same time. ↩︎
6. Roman Reigns, confirmed fraud, is not the OTC in this case. ↩︎
7. His dozens and dozens of children were expected not just to learn the family business but to excel in it, and Stu’s method of teaching was often described as “old-school”—a euphemism for painful, relentless, and stupid. Wrestling historian Dave Meltzer once referred to Stu’s training sessions as “a mix of Catch wrestling and medieval torture.” ↩︎
8. Many of Bret’s brothers and trainees from the Dungeon have confirmed the legendary status of Stu’s methods, though stories sometimes vary. For instance, Owen Hart—Bret’s younger brother—often downplayed the pain, deflecting it and framing it with humor, while Bruce Hart tended to embellish, turning each encounter into a mythical battle of wills. ↩︎
9. At one point, Stu was keeping a bear known as Terrible Ted under the Hart Family Mansion.²⁰ The bear had had all of its teeth removed and Bret would sometimes as a kid let the bear lick ice cream off his toes. Later he would describe it as A Supposedly Fun Thing He’ll Never Do Again ↩︎
10. Stu didn’t “win” thousands of matches. He booked himself to go over wrestlers in a choreographed contest and during training took advantage of trainees and family members who entrusted the safety of their bodies to him. ↩︎
11. By the time of the Montreal Screwjob, Bret Hart had become a polarizing figure in the wrestling world. While some fans remained loyal to him, others had turned to his rival, Shawn Michaels. Though in Canada Bret was still King. See: Shoemaker, David, The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling for more on the WWF’s transition during this period²¹ ↩︎
12. Vince McMahon’s presence at ringside during the Montreal Screwjob is one of the most iconic moments in wrestling history. It was as if the audience—and Bret—could sense something was wrong the moment Vince appeared. For a deep dive into the moment, see: Wrestling with Shadows, dir. Paul Jay. ↩︎
13. The spit, captured forever in beautiful slow motion on countless replays, became the symbol of Bret’s defiance. ↩︎
14. WCW, often called a “graveyard for WWF stars,”²² was notorious for mishandling top talent who jumped ship from Vince McMahon’s promotion. Bret Hart was perhaps the most glaring example of WCW’s inability to capitalize on a major star, in any meaningful way. ↩︎
15. The match with Goldberg, in which a botched super kick led to Bret suffering a serious concussion, was the final nail in the coffin for Bret’s in-ring career. Bret would handle this accident with grace and aplomb. ↩︎
16. The Infinite Best²³ ↩︎

Footnotes²

17.  For more insights into the mental toll of unprotected chair shots to the head see Mick’s recent comments on Vince McMahon

18. That mother fucker did it all.

19. For a detailed history of The Enfield Dungeon and Performance Center, see Hart, Bret, Hitman: My Real Life in the Cartoon World of Wrestling

20. 435 Patina Pl SW Calgary, AB T3H 2P5

21. Just kidding. Don’t read that shit.

22. Due to steroid use, drug culture, and bad choices the graveyard for most 90s wrestling stars was in fact the graveyard.

23. Get it?