On May 23, Hart, known as the Blue Blazer, was set to be lowered by cable from high above the ring for a match in an event billed, with unintended prescience, as "Over the Edge." But Hart, 34, became unhooked from his cable (a release mechanism may have been triggered prematurely) and plummeted some 75 feet, hitting his head on one of the ring's padded turnbuckles. "A lot of people thought it was a joke, a dummy," says Dennis Roberts, one of more than 16,000 fans on hand. "It was really sickening."
Paramedics tried to revive Hart, who was later pronounced dead of internal bleeding. "The wrestlers have taken it very, very hard," said World Wrestling Federation chairman Vince McMahon, who nevertheless chose not to cancel the pay-per-view event after the accident. The youngest of eight wrestling brothers, Hart took to the mat "from the time he was a toddler," says his father, ex-wrestler and promoter Stu Hart, 83, who trained his sons out of the basement of his Calgary, Alta., home. "Owen had a great outlook and really enjoyed life."
But Hart, who signed on with the WWF in 1988, had been building a stock portfolio so he could quit wrestling and spend more time with wife Martha, son Oje, 7, and daughter Athena, 3. On the day he died, Hart donned his mask and told an interviewer, "The Blue Blazer will always triumph over evil forces." Sadly, he could not survive his sport's increasingly surreal showbiz excesses.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
