by Dan Ryckert
Eventually, the paramedics put Owen onto a stretcher and wheeled him up the entrance ramp. The crowd cheered as if it had seen a hero quarterback give a thumbs-up as he was taken off the field, but we had still received no word on what had happened or how Owen was doing. The event picked back up from there, which gave me hope that he might be all right. With Owen presumably on the way to the hospital, the show continued with no allusions to the accident outside of an “I’m praying for you, buddy” during an interview with the Road Dogg.
When the announcement eventually came, it was once again reserved for the television audience. With Jerry Lawler sitting silently next to him, Jim Ross delivered the news:
Ladies and gentlemen, earlier tonight here in Kansas City, tragedy befell the World Wrestling Federation and all of us. Owen Hart was set to make an entrance from the ceiling, and he fell from the ceiling. I have the unfortunate responsibility to let everyone know that Owen Hart has died. Owen Hart has tragically died from that accident here tonight.
Trying to snap back into a mindset that would allow me to enjoy the rest of the show was difficult, if not impossible. Even without any kind of actual information to go on, I feared the worst based on what I had seen. I can recall most of the early parts of the show vividly, but everything after Owen’s fall is hazy despite the high-profile nature of the matches. Triple H versus The Rock is a legendary feud, and I witnessed one of their pay-per-view matches live without any real memory of it. Steve Austin and The Undertaker are two of my favorite wrestlers of all time, and sometimes I forget that I saw the WWF Heavyweight Championship change hands between them. Wrestling had mattered so much to me for so long, but the matches and storylines from that night were pushed far into the back of my mind.
As The Undertaker celebrated his victory, the crowd started to shuffle out. Some people in the audience had received phone calls from friends at home and were relaying news that I prayed wasn’t true. In the hours after something terrible happens, rumors and speculation often prove to be wildly inaccurate. Hopefully, that would be the case with Owen.
Cherick and I got back into his Honda Accord. He turned the radio on, and the first thing I heard was the definitive statement that I had dreaded. Kansas City radio personalities were discussing “the incident at Kemper Arena” in which professional wrestler Owen Hart had fallen to his death. Neither Cherick nor I were prepared to hear that, and we rode the rest of the way home in silence. When he dropped me off, I went straight to bed without talking to anyone.
I went downstairs the next morning to eat breakfast, and saw a picture of EMTs attending to Owen plastered across the front page of the Kansas City Star with the headline “Pro Wrestler Suffers Fatal Fall.” Barely anyone at school had wanted to talk about wrestling with me before. Now I was being bombarded with questions about what I saw. I’ve told the story many times since then, but it was hard to get much out besides a “yeah, it was messed up” when the incident was that fresh.
For about two weeks afterward, I had trouble falling asleep and sleeping through the night. At one point, I approached my father to let him know that I was really struggling with what happened at Kemper. His advice was to “look at the bright side. There’s one less idiot in the world.”
Professional wrestling has a long history of tragic stories. Drug addiction, suicides, and even murders have claimed the lives of many wrestlers at young ages. Owen’s death was the one that hit me the hardest, and not just because I was there to see it live. He was one of the true “good guys” in the wrestling industry, even when his onscreen character was utterly despicable.
Being in attendance at Over the Edge in 1999 was memorable for all the wrong reasons, but the next night brought me as many smiles as it did tears.
Monday Night Raw was turned into a special “Raw is Owen” episode, with every wrestler and referee wearing black “OH” armbands. The night was filled with tributes to Owen in the form of classic clips of him and interviews with mourning colleagues. During many of these teary monologues, the interview subject couldn’t help but laugh as they recalled some funny Owen moment or practical joke he had pulled. He was clearly beloved by his peers and it wasn’t part of any script. Owen Hart left behind a legacy as a great wrestler, an honest husband and father, and most importantly, a genuinely good person in an industry where that can be rare.
I wish that the circumstances of me seeing Owen in person for the first time were wildly different, but I’ll never forget the impact he had on my life.
Force of Nature
A number of poor decisions I’ve made or dumb situations I’ve put myself in could have conceivably ended my life, but there was only one instance when I honestly thought that it might happen. It would have been at the hands of one of my good friends, a guy named Matt who lived on my floor in McCollum during my sophomore year of college. Nowadays, Matt is still a good friend and seems to be doing great. He had to drop out of college early, but he managed to find a good corporate job in Kansas City and climb the ranks. His college girlfriend was a train wreck, and most nights involved drunken screaming matches between them, but he’s moved on to get married to a girl who seems perfect for him. He’s produced approximately 45 children since college, and they bring him great joy, if Facebook is any indication. Matt has mellowed out substantially in recent years, seemingly finding a really good place for himself.
In college, Matt was a different story. He’d be mellow while sober, and we’d frequently hang out and play Xbox or chat about classic rock. A couple of nights a week, we’d be stereotypical college dudes and have people over to his place for games of beer pong before heading out to a party or bar.
Most of these nights were typical college fare. We’d drink heavily at his apartment before the bars to save money, and then we’d go out to bars featuring specials so we’d save money there, too. Occasionally, our ample pre-gaming at his apartment would lead to especially rough nights later on. We ran out of Milwaukee’s Best during one beer pong session, and substituted it with a ton of cheap whiskey from a plastic bottle. As we were walking to the bar that night, he spotted a police car at a red light and decided that it would be a good idea to jump on top of it. Despite the car being stationary, Matt slid right off of it and fractured his ankle on the street upon landing. I watched him sit injured on the ground, somehow talking the cops out of giving him anything stronger than a stern warning. His foot didn’t get off so easy, as he left it untreated and limped around on it for the better part of a year.
Another night started with us inventing a drinking game, something we did frequently. This one was WarioWare Shots, which involved taking shots at various points during a darts minigame in a Wii title called WarioWare: Smooth Moves. When we arrived at Fatso’s later that night, Matt must have set a campus record for the shortest amount of time before getting kicked out of a bar. We waited in line, provided our IDs, and were ushered in the front door. It was a snowy winter night in Kansas, and Matt instantly tripped over a space heater and fell flat on his face. We were immediately told to get out the same way we came in.
On these nights, it was easy to pinpoint the moment that Matt transitioned from silly drunk to “not actually here on any sort of mental level” drunk. He’d still be walking and talking and performing all of the bodily functions needed to stay alive, until his eyes would glaze over and his cheeks would turn bright red. My friends and I did our best to keep him from drinking further during these periods, but he was very much the “shut up, you pussies. I’m fine! Let’s keep drinking!” guy who refused to slow down under any circumstances.
The night he nearly killed me almost certainly started with one of our dumb drinking games. It could have been Lizardman Shots, which involved taking a shot every time
someone beats you with the Lizardman character in Soul Calibur. Maybe it was the checkers shots game, which my mother got me for Christmas and replaced checkers pieces with a couple dozen shot glasses. There’s a chance it was the weird clock game we came up with
, which had something to do with an alarm clock that shot a little propeller into the air. You had to flip a coin or something while the propeller was airborne, and take a shot or give out a shot based on god knows what before it hit the ground. I don’t know, we were drunk.
Whatever caused it, Matt was beyond drunk by the time last call was approaching. We were there with his roommate Patrick and our friend Lauren. While we were all enjoyably inebriated by the end, we were lucid enough to realize that Matt should not be drinking any more. We walked back to our apartment building—Matt and Patrick lived directly above me—draped Matt’s arms over our shoulders, and dropped him on his couch. We told him that he should chug a bunch of water and go to sleep, and then Lauren and I left.
She and I were good friends, and we’d had a long conversation about old Nickelodeon game shows earlier in the night. After leaving Matt and Patrick’s apartment, we felt like having a couple more drinks and continuing the nostalgia train at my place. Luckily for us, the Nickelodeon Games and Sports channel that aired old game shows 24/7 was in the middle of a programming block that included Legends of the Hidden Temple and GUTS, two of our favorites.
Halfway through some kid’s seemingly 20-minute long attempt to assemble the Shrine of the Silver Monkey, we heard a commotion coming from upstairs. Matt’s girlfriend wasn’t staying over that night, so it couldn’t have been another drunken argument. We turned the TV down to hear better, and it sounded like a bunch of stomping and mumbling.
About 30 seconds later, we heard Matt’s front door open and quickly slam shut. Loud stomps made their way down the wooden stairs outside, and Lauren and I prepared for a nearly incoherent visitor. Sure enough, the banging on my front door came from Matt. I opened the door to see him standing there with two six-packs of Milwaukee’s Best, which would have been enough to put Lauren and me on his level if we had partaken in them.
“Let’s drink, pussies!” Matt yelled as he stepped inside my apartment.
Within two steps, Matt fell face-forward onto the table in front of my couch, nearly breaking it in a display that would’ve made Chris Farley proud. He stumbled off the table in the direction of my newly purchased HDTV, and I immediately grabbed him and moved him away from the electronics. Matt would be fine. The expensive TV that I bought on a college budget might not be, if he stuck around.
Twelve shaken-up beers sat on the carpet, and Lauren and I had no intention of letting Matt get into any of them.
“Alright, buddy,” I said. “Let’s get you back upstairs.”
Despite his protests, Lauren and I escorted Matt back up to the couch in his living room and laid him down again. We went back to my place and got about five minutes into GUTS before we heard more shuffling from upstairs. It was the same loud stomping, now accompanied by a confusingly angry voice. Matt had been silly-drunk that night, not emotional and combative—the angry nights were reserved for when his girlfriend was around. We didn’t hear Patrick responding at all, so we assumed that he was asleep and Matt was just yelling at nothing in particular.
We didn’t want to put up with another drunken display, especially since this time sounded significantly more hostile than the last. I got up from the couch and slid the deadbolt shut, hoping that Matt wouldn’t even attempt to come in again. But sure enough, he stomped down the stairs again and pounded his fist on the door.
“Open the fucking door!” he yelled. “Why the fuck are you gonna shut me out? I know you’re in there!”
I had dealt with a drunken Matt many times before, but I had never seen him like this. He only got angry with his girlfriend, and even then, it was never anything more than stupid drunken arguments. This time, he was blindingly drunk and suddenly seemed mad at me. Him falling through my TV was my original concern, but now I felt like he was out of his mind enough to try to start a fight for reasons unbeknownst to me.
“What is he so pissed about all of a sudden?” Lauren whispered to me as Matt banged on the door.
“I have no idea,” I said. “He seemed happy the last time he came down here.”
We never figured out what made the switch flip in his brain that night. Lauren and I had always been nothing more than platonic friends, so jealousy over me hanging out with her didn’t make sense. Besides, Matt had a girlfriend. Could it be that he was really that mad that we didn’t want to keep drinking with him? I’m as confused now as I was ten years ago when he was banging on my door.
Whatever the reason was, it was hard to ignore the incredibly angry, likely blacked-out man just beyond a door that sat five feet from us. I muted the TV as Lauren and I sat silently, hoping that he’d tire himself out and eventually make his way back upstairs. Half of our hopes came true, as he headed back to his apartment after a couple of minutes of futile yelling and knocking. We weren’t lucky enough for him to tire himself out, however. Rather, we heard him slam his own door so hard that it shattered the wood around the deadbolt.
Holy shit, Lauren mouthed to me.
Before I had a chance to respond, I heard Matt’s voice booming from above my ceiling.
“Patrick, get me a FUCKING KNIFE.”
This was the moment that put Lauren and me beyond “wow, Matt’s real drunk!” mode and into “we’re gonna have to call the police tonight, aren’t we?”
Patrick was the most responsible, sane person I knew in college, so we weren’t concerned about him becoming an accomplice to the world’s most confusing double murder. If anything, he’d wrangle Matt’s drunken rage and help him pass out somewhere. That was assuming that all the commotion of the last fifteen minutes or so had woken him up. It hadn’t.
Sobering up is easy to do when you hear someone rummaging through drawers in an effort to find a suitable knife to presumably stab you with. When we heard Matt coming down the stairs again, his state was no longer an odd curiosity. It was now a reason for immediate concern, and we needed to act. Still on the couch, I grabbed my cell phone and dialed 911.
“911, what’s your emergency?”
“My friend Matt is really drunk and we think he has a knife. I don’t know why, but he seems to be really angry at me and my friend Lauren.”
The operator asked for my address, and in the middle of giving it to them, I heard a slow sawing noise coming from the front door. It didn’t take long to realize that Matt was trying to make the slowest The Shining entrance ever by using his knife to cut around the doorknob.
“Okay, he definitely has a knife,” I said. “He’s trying to saw through the front door right now.”
At this point, Lauren was visibly starting to panic. I motioned for her to run into the bathroom and lock the door as I continued relaying my address and providing details to the operator. Matt was larger than me and had actually been in fights, so I ran into the bedroom and grabbed a baseball bat in case he made his way inside. Under normal circumstances, I rarely want to beat my friends with a bat or send them to jail. This was different, however, and I wouldn’t have felt guilty using force in that moment.
Officers were on their way, so all I needed to do was hope that Matt couldn’t find a way into the apartment. His genius sawing plan didn’t seem to be bearing any fruit, as I heard him start walking around to the side of the apartment. Just then, I realized that I didn’t know how or if my windows locked. Considering that he was making his way toward them, I wasn’t about to get close to them. I did the bravest thing I could muster in that moment, which was running into the bathroom and locking myself in with Lauren.
Terrified to make a noise, we stood in there and listened for any indication of Matt’s status. As drunk as he was, I half hoped to hear him fall into some leaves and start snoring. Instead, I heard metal scraping against the edge of a window. With no idea of the window’s locking mechanism, I could only assume he was trying to work his way inside. The amount of time that he spent messing with it was promising, as every second that passed meant another second the cops had to reach us.
After a couple of minutes of him messing
with the window, I heard something that made it clear he had found his way inside. I was one of those idiots in college who displayed all of his empty whiskey bottles around his apartment like lame trophies. I’m not sure what the thought process was. Maybe I’d bring a girl home and she’d look around at all the seven-dollar liters of Old Crow and think “I wasn’t sure about this guy before, but he has clearly ingested a large amount of terrible alcohol. I should probably have sexual intercourse with him.”
Those empty whiskey bottles served as a low-rent alarm system, clearly marking the moment that Matt had breached the window. With no sounds of sirens approaching, I had to prepare for the possibility of having to actually deal with him myself. I clutched the baseball bat with full knowledge of my lack of strength, ability to fight, or threshold for pain. If he actually found his way into the bathroom that Lauren and I were huddled in, I’d probably be better off trying to spray shampoo into his eyes.
After the whiskey bottles hit the floor, we heard some grunts as Matt tried to heave himself over the window’s ledge and into the apartment. Once we heard what sounded like a full-sized adult man landing on a carpeted floor, we assumed that it wouldn’t be long before he kicked in the bathroom door. My apartment at the time was about 450 square feet and featured a living room/kitchen area, my bedroom, and the bathroom. Matt may have been drunker than I’ve ever seen him, but surely he’d be able to whittle down our location using process of elimination.
Instead of the ranting and raving and knocking and stabbing that we expected once he found his way in, his entrance was met with damn near silence. We assumed that he had stood back up after landing on the carpet, but if he was moving around, he was being stealthy about it. Lauren and I were expecting him to bust through the only closed door in the apartment and confront us at any second, but it never happened. The eerie quiet lasted for less than a minute before we heard the good kind of knocking on the front door.
