The Dumbest Kid in Gifted Class

by Dan Ryckert

This was the first alignment change I remember seeing, and it blew me away. In wrestling lingo, it’s known as a “heel turn,” and it’s been a part of the act since the industry started. Bret’s leg wasn’t really hurt, Owen wasn’t really a bad guy, and the ending to the match was planned well before it started. I didn’t know any of this at the time, and none of it

  mattered to me. I would have hated a traitorous character in an action movie just as much, so it had nothing to do with whether it was predetermined or real.

  Prior to Owen’s heel turn, I had an inkling that something like it was possible. When I started watching Monday Night Raw, Razor Ramon and Doink the Clown were dyed-in-the-wool good guys. Once I got hooked on the product, I started renting old pay-per-views from our local video store and was often confused by what I saw. WrestleMania IX took place just a few months before I started watching wrestling, but when I rented it, I saw Razor and Doink acting like complete assholes. Razor was cocky and didn’t high-five the fans, while Doink was bringing in fake clown doubles to help him cheat during his match. What the hell had happened in the months between WrestleMania IX and the nice versions of Razor and Doink that I had been cheering for on Raw?

  As soon as Owen swept Bret’s leg, it all came into focus for me. Wrestling characters aren’t permanently fixed into position. They can change from pure good to pure evil overnight, or morph into different characters entirely. That witch doctor can turn into an MMA fighter before settling down as a cartoon pimp within the matter of a few years. If wrestling fascinated me before, Owen’s kick helped turn it into a full-on obsession.

  Owen’s turn culminated with a win over his brother Bret at WrestleMania X and a loss to him later that year at SummerSlam. After this feud, Owen remained a fixture on WWF television for years, even after Bret infamously left the company with plenty of real-life animosity in 1997. Owen’s storylines were rarely the focal point of the week’s drama, but he was always entertaining on the microphone, gifted in the ring, and beloved by the other wrestlers backstage. In an industry with no shortage of troubled and contentious performers, Owen was one of the true good guys in real life.

  Between my introduction to wrestling in 1993 and my first live event in 1999, the industry saw sweeping changes. The white-bread good guys who advocated for working hard and staying true to yourself were replaced by antiheroes—namely, the beer-swilling, foul-mouthed Stone Cold Steve Austin and the perennially gesturing-towards-their-penises D-Generation X stable.

  With edgy personalities now in vogue, Owen’s character was changed into a parody of a more innocent time. His initial run with the company in the late ‘80s saw him performing as the Blue Blazer, a masked superhero. For this parody character a decade later, the WWF put him back under the mask and had him lecture the crowd about saying their prayers, drinking their milk, and eating their vitamins (a frequent refrain of Hulk Hogan’s).

  During this period, my fascination with the industry only intensified. I was now in high school, and at one point I even considered dropping out and moving to San Antonio to attend the Shawn Michaels Wrestling Academy. I’ve always told myself that I stopped considering becoming a pro wrestler because my physique wouldn’t allow for it, but that didn’t stop Daniel Bryan. He was a scrawny kid who was three inches shorter than me, and he joined the academy and went on to win the WWE World Heavyweight Championship in a WrestleMania main event. With that excuse officially null and void, I guess I was just a coward who didn’t want to fall on his back hundreds of times a month for a living.

  Becoming a wrestler might not have been in the cards, but that wasn’t going to stop me from obsessively following the industry. I still hadn’t been to a live wrestling event and I wanted to see the action in person more than anything.

  Those years of waiting seemed destined to pay off when the WWF announced that it would be holding its Over the Edge pay-per-view at Kemper Arena in Kansas City. I was finally going to get to see wrestling live, and it wasn’t an untelevised house show, it wasn’t a random Monday Night Raw—it was a pay-per-view.

  It wasn’t just any pay-per-view, either. This was at the height of the “Attitude Era” boom period for wrestling, and the show would serve as the payoff for a couple of feuds that I was hugely invested in. Triple H and The Rock were two of the company’s biggest stars, and they’d be settling a long-standing grudge right there in my hometown. Even more exciting was the prospect of the main event, which saw Stone Cold Steve Austin defending his world championship against The Undertaker. A week earlier, Austin had crucified The Undertaker on his own cross-like logo and raised it above the ring while giving him his trademark double middle fingers. It was a great time to be a fan, especially if you happened to be 14 years old.

  The opportunity to finally see wrestling live was in front of me; now I just had to figure out how to make it happen. I had a few friends who were good for chipping in five dollars or so when I ordered pay-per-views from my house, but asking them to commit to $80-100 for decent seats was a harder sell. Plus, my mom would be waiting tables at Macaroni Grill that night and my father sure as hell wouldn’t consider doing anything that would help support my interest in professional wrestling. In my adult life, he’s even sincerely offered to pay me $10,000 if I promised to stop watching it.

  With no friends willing to pay the ticket price, and my parents either unavailable or unwilling to give me a ride, I was fully ready to save up and pay for a ticket and a taxi myself. I started working at McDonald’s not long after I became eligible for employment after turning 14. Making $5.15 an hour didn’t help my savings account grow very rapidly, but I was more than willing to save up for a good seat and a ride to Kemper Arena.

  Before I had to save up, luck fell in my favor. One of my mother’s coworkers at Macaroni Grill was an eccentric dude named Cherick. He was in his mid-20s, and his pale skin, ponytail, and sinister facial hair made it look like he had just stepped out of a Transylvanian castle. It seemed as though this was a look that he was intentionally pursuing, as evidenced by the tattoo of two bleeding fang marks on the left side of his neck.

  More important than his look was the fact that he had two eighth-row tickets to Over the Edge coming to him thanks to 101.1 The Fox, a local classic rock station. My mother overheard him talking about winning the radio contest, and quickly let him know that her son was a massive fan, in case one of those tickets was in danger of going unused. He checked around the restaurant, but no one seemed interested in going to this professional wrestling event with a pasta-serving vampire man.

  Cherick was an odd duck for sure, but my mother was confident that he’d be a safe chauffeur for the event. Plans were made, and on May 23, he pulled up to my house in an old red Honda Accord. I opened the passenger door and was almost knocked onto my ass by the wave of cigarette stench that washed over me. At this point, I couldn’t care less about what he looked like or what his car smelled like. But at this point, my enthusiasm wouldn’t have been dampened one bit even if he looked like Rasputin and drove a hearse filled with rotting meat and old diapers.

  Being a wrestling fan helps to bridge any gap between age and lifestyle, which was helpful considering that I don’t know what else a 14-year-old who never left the house and an undead Juggalo/future vaping enthusiast would talk about. Anything related to real life was happily left out of the conversation, as we focused on topics like whether the WWF would ever figure out something to do with Steve Blackman (they wouldn’t) or whether Triple H would ever make it to the main event level (boy, would he).

  We maintained our purely wrestling-focused chat until Cherick needed to run into a gas station to grab more cigarettes. There, the tenor of the conversation immediately swung hard in the other direction.

  “Alright, Dan,” he said as we pulled into the gas station parking lot. “I need you to listen, because your mom is gonna kill me if anything happens to you while you’re with me.”

  “Uh, okay.”

  I wasn’t aware of any impending danger,
and we weren’t in a particularly bad part of town, so I had zero idea where he was going with this.

  “I’m gonna run in there, and I won’t be gone more than five minutes. If anyone—and I mean anyone—comes up to this car while I’m in there, just open the glove compartment.”

  After I assured him that I understood what he was talking about, he left the car and I immediately opened the glove compartment to figure out what the hell he was talking about. As I should have guessed, it was a handgun. It was presumably loaded and I wasn’t sure if the safety was on, but I wasn’t about to find out. I’d never handled anything with more stopping power than a BB gun before, so I wasn’t confident in my potential effectiveness if a would-be kidnapper or car thief decided to make his move during that five-minute window. Also, I didn’t want to get my fingerprints on a handgun that had almost certainly been involved in several attempted murders of Van Helsing.

  In a shocking turn of events, Cherick was able to successfully buy a pack of cigarettes without a swarm of criminals descending upon his Honda Accord like it was the Hope Diamond. I shut the glove compartment before he returned to the car, and we got back on the road to Kemper Arena. Before we even pulled into the parking lot, I was amazed by what I saw. For several blocks leading up to the event, the sidewalks were filled with people wearing Steve Austin shirts and holding signs. This was 1999, so it’s a good bet that most of these signs were along the lines of “I’M CARTMAN’S FATHER” or “CHRIS IS GAY.”

  The sight of these people amazed me because it was the first tangible evidence I had that wrestling fans existed. This should have been obvious enough from the television ratings, the active message boards on the internet, and the sellout crowds on every Monday Night Raw, but I had never really seen them before. Outside of a couple of friends at school who were on-and-off fans, I had no one to talk to on Tuesday mornings when I breathlessly wanted to spew some nonsense like “HEY, DID YOU HEAR THAT HEEL PROMO HUNTER CUT LAST NIGHT? I CAN’T TELL IF HE WAS BREAKING KAYFABE, BUT HE WAS DEFINITELY SHOOTING!” Here, I felt like I could have said that to any one of the almost 17,000 people in attendance and fallen into a long rabbit hole of a conversation.

  Once we parked and worked our way through the sea of fans, I gave the usher my ticket and stepped through the curtain that separated the concession area from the interior of the arena. After six years of obsessing over this product through my TV screen, it was surreal to see everything with my own eyes. The matches hadn’t even started yet, and I was staring at the ring, the entryway, and the TitanTron like they were Abraham Lincoln’s hat at the Smithsonian Institute.

  An episode of MTV’s Sunday Night Heat program was filmed prior to Over the Edge, and I was watching these throwaway matches from my eighth-row seat like they had the historical significance of Hulk Hogan versus Andre the Giant. Sure, I was watching Grandmaster Sexay versus Meat, but I was watching live wrestling. I was in attendance for a “wrestling match” featuring Mideon versus Vince McMahon, but I was in the presence of Vince McMahon. Any of my snarky message board opinions about the product went out the window in that moment. Being there in person took me back to being nine years old, watching Bret and Owen work through their sibling rivalry.

  Owen was scheduled to perform during the third match of the pay-per-view as his comedic Blue Blazer persona, taking on The Godfather (the witch-doctor-turned-pimp) for his Intercontinental Title. It was far from a major storyline at the time, and paled in comparison to Owen’s legendary feud with his brother, but I was still excited at the prospect of seeing the man who first taught me about how effective a wrestling bad guy could be.

  Prior to the match, a taped interview began playing on the gigantic TitanTron that hung above the entrance ramp. An interviewer was asking the Blue Blazer about his upcoming match with The Godfather. Owen said The Godfather represented all the poor values that he was fighting against in the World Wrestling Federation, and assured fans that he’d come out victorious.

  From where I was sitting, the TitanTron was located to my left. During the middle of this Blue Blazer interview, I heard a few gasps and saw something moving above the ring to my right. I snapped my head to the right in time to see a blue figure plummeting toward the ground. It was Owen Hart, and his body crashed into a turnbuckle after falling from a height of almost 80 feet.

  His chest hit the turnbuckle first, causing his body to snap backward and collapse on the mat. For a brief moment, it looked like he was attempting to get up. His head rose slightly, and he tried to get his elbow underneath him for support. That didn’t last long—his arm and neck went limp within a second or two, and he slumped to the mat, motionless.

  Immediately, Jerry “The King” Lawler jumped out from behind the announce table and slid into the ring. As he cradled Owen’s head in his hands, Lawler’s panicked face made it clear that something terrible had happened. With no response from Owen, Lawler threw his arms up in the air and made an “X” with his forearms. This gesture is frequently used by wrestling performers to signal that a legitimate injury has occurred.

  All of this happened within the span of ten or fifteen seconds, and the crowd didn’t know how to react. Many had missed the fall, as their attention had been on the TitanTron at the time. I could hear dozens of people asking those around them to explain what had happened, and most of the responses were along the lines of “they threw a mannequin off the roof” or “a fake Blue Blazer fell.” When some expressed concern that it was a real accident, others would say “Nah, it’s a fake wrestling thing.”

  I may have only been 14, but I had seen enough wrestling by this point to spot the signs that something had gone terribly wrong. Lawler’s “X” and clear panic were evidence enough, and the fact that a video interview had been playing on the TitanTron at the time of the fall cemented it for me. This event was being broadcast live to a pay-per-view audience of millions. I knew that the WWF wouldn’t pull a stunt in the ring while the live audience was looking at the screen and the television audience was seeing the interview segment.

  A tragedy was surely playing out in front of me, but you wouldn’t have known from my reaction. I had gone from the high of my first wrestling event to the low of watching a childhood hero plummet to what very well might be his death. I was lost in the confusion of everything. I wasn’t distraught or crying, because I had no idea what exactly had happened, and many of those in attendance seemed to be feeling the same way.

  Owen had done this stunt before. If everything had gone correctly, he would have been lowered to the ring in overdramatic fashion as his entrance music played. Once he was low enough, he’d flail around and make a fool of himself as he tried to get out of the harness, then fall flat on his face once he flipped the release switch. That was surely the plan.

  What could have happened up there? Owen was well-known as a happy family man who loved to make his fellow wrestlers laugh on the road, so the odds of this being a suicide seemed highly unlikely. All I could imagine is that something went awry as he was preparing to descend into the ring. Based on the gradual turn of the audience’s mood, it seemed like the “it’s a mannequin” people were starting to change their tune. This wasn’t being treated with the theatrics of a pro wrestling storyline, and nothing about the urgency on the faces of the EMTs and ringside attendees seemed fake.

  Cherick seemed to be in a state similar to mine, and we weren’t saying a whole lot to each other. At no point was any information conveyed to the live audience. No updates appeared on the TitanTron screen, and no WWF or Kemper Arena employee said anything over the PA system. Owen had been lying in the ring for what felt like ten minutes, and the EMTs were now performing chest compressions.

  I glanced to the right of the ring and saw longtime commentator Jim Ross speaking directly to a camera, and realized that he must have been giving some sort of update on the television broadcast. If this had occurred ten years later, I’d have been texting friends or checking Twitter to see what had happened, but I didn’t have t
hose options in 1999.

  Later, I’d learn that Ross had indeed been speaking to the home audience, informing them that an accident had occurred and that it was “not a part of the entertainment here tonight. This is as real as real can be here.” He went on to speculate about a harness breaking or experiencing some kind of malfunction, and his uncharacteristically rambling speech made it clear that he was just as baffled as everyone else.

  Camera shots had been trained on the crowd during this time, and the TitanTron screen eventually cut to a prepared video package advertising an upcoming tag team match that pitted Val Venis and Nicole Bass against Jeff Jarrett and his girlfriend Debra. Owen Hart had often teamed up with Jarrett, and the interview that aired after the video package was nothing short of surreal.

  With Owen still lying in the ring, the promo ended and the TitanTron cut to a live interview—shown to both the home and arena audiences—with a visibly distraught Jarrett and Debra. The script called for the villainous Jarrett to play up his role of Debra’s jealous boyfriend, with the fate of their real-life friend still undetermined at this point.

  In the interview, Jarrett paces around a bit until the announcer asks him about his upcoming match. Before launching into his character, Jarrett takes his sunglasses off, looks directly at the camera, and says “Owen Hart, I’m prayin’ for ya, buddy.” Immediately afterward, the script calls for him to ramble about how a porn star wrestling character named Val Venis is jealous of Debra’s “puppies” (late ‘90s wrestling speak for breasts). Seconds after saying “These are my puppies, and they always have been,” Jarrett drops the act and says “Owen, you’re in our prayers,” before walking out of the frame. Debra chokes out an “Owen, we love you” as she fights back tears.

  Wrestling is an industry that’s always joyously blended the worlds of fantasy and reality, but this was so far beyond anything I’d ever seen. Jeff Jarrett transitioned from giving his prayers to a dying friend to talking about how Val Venis needs to stay away from Debra’s boobs, then back to Owen again in less than a minute. It was an awful position to be in, and the rest of the night would be filled with performers whose thoughts clearly lay elsewhere.