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Courtroom cage match! | page 1, 2, 3
When "Over the Edge" concluded, McMahon insisted, "Out of respect for Owen, knowing the consummate performer he was, I'm sure members of the Hart family would concur with me that he would want the show to go on." It turned out that the Hart family did not concur. Indeed, they suspected that the headaches, logistical and financial, of refunding a pay-per-view match might have had more to do with the WWF's decision. The night after the pay-per-view, WWF's weekly "Raw is War" telecast was touted as a "tribute" to Hart. The show opened with a silent 10-bell count in the wrestler's memory, though viewers were never told how Hart died. The rest of the two hours were filled up with nondescript bouts, with some taped personal messages from wrestlers about Hart. At the show's conclusion, WWF meal ticket Steve Austin prowled around the ring, smashed two cans of beer together and raised a "toast" to Hart. But as some wrestling fans -- and certainly Hart's family -- knew, outside the ring Austin, who once suffered a serious injury at the hands of Owen, had no use for him. Austin may have even lobbied to keep the wrestler down as a mid-card draw. (McMahon and other WWF execs call all the shots for wrestlers, but some as popular as Austin have a say in their opponents and their character's story line.) But since Austin is WWF's number one baby-face, he got top billing for Hart's "tribute." "I suspect [WWF management] was high-fiving each other after the show and saying they got the job done," Hart's brother Bruce, a former professional wrestler, told a reporter. "They came out smelling like a rose. That's the way we all saw it. It was damage control and a bunch of crap where they say they were celebrating the life of Owen Hart. Nobody alluded to how needless and senseless the whole [ceiling stunt] was." (Another of Owen's brothers, Bret "The Hitman" Hart, a former member of the WWF, is the only wrestler who's ever smacked McMahon down in real life. It happened in Montreal in 1997, at the Hitman's final appearance with the WWF before he jumped ship for Turner's WCW. Despite agreeing beforehand to end the match in a staged disqualification, Hart was double-crossed by McMahon, who ordered the ringside referee to "ring the fucking bell" when Hart was temporarily pinned on his back. Backstage after the match, the Hitman decked McMahon during a locker room melee. It was no joke; McMahon wore a shiner to prove it.) Following "Over the Edge," the WWF announced that it had canceled the next week's live arena shows out of respect for the dead Canadian wrestler. Actually, right after the tragedy, WWF wrestlers were ordered to show up in St. Louis and then Moline, Ill., to tape two money-making television shows. Then they were allowed to go home and reflect. Online fans launched a campaign to have Hart named an honorary WWF champ; the notion was met with indifference at WWF's Stanford, Conn., headquarters. By the time the funeral arrived a week later in Calgary, Alberta, the wrestler's widow, Martha, had had enough. Sobbing from the altar, she promised "a day of reckoning" for those responsible. Sitting in the church's back pew, McMahon stewed quietly -- but not for long. Unable to pass up a confrontation, or unwilling to admit his mistakes, and no doubt convinced a lawsuit was in the making, McMahon fired off a letter to the Calgary Sun. He challenged Martha Hart on all sorts of details surrounding the funeral, from whether or not WWF had had the right to air footage of it on TV (Martha had specifically asked the WWF not to) to who had paid the bills. McMahon even bragged about how much money the WWF spent flying company employees up to Calgary to attend the burial service -- $152,200. "It is unfortunate that Mrs. Hart feels violated in any way, although her grief, which we share, is understandable," wrote McMahon. It was a textbook example of how not to treat the widow of a former employee who died on your watch just days earlier. Such high-level bungling, along with the general criticism that Hart was sacrificed in the name of ratings, opened the WWF up to other challenges. On June 10, WWF eye candy turned women's champion Sable (aka Rena Mero) filed a $110 million breach of contract and sexual harassment lawsuit against the WWF. She claimed the company had tried to intimidate her into participating in a lesbian story line and had humiliated her by trying to get her to expose her breasts in front of a raucous crowd -- and said the company took away her title when she refused. (Sable has posed for Playboy, but says there's a difference between working with a professional photographer and prancing around naked in front of an arena full of drunken men and small children.) Sable has her own agenda: she clearly wants to leave the company and keep her money-making name, which the WWF owns. But even if the suit goes nowhere, by publicly complaining about "staged stunts that are inherently dangerous" and how "wrestlers are forced to perform under dangerous and vulgar conditions controlled by the WWF," Sable was all but warming up a Kansas City jury for the Harts. The family's 118-page suit, filed on behalf of Hart's widow and two small children on June 15, names 46 offenses, but boils down to several key allegations: that Hart, not properly trained as a stuntman, was attached to a "a makeshift contraption" designed to rig sailboats, not transport men; that the quick-release mechanism that caused his fall needed only six pounds of pressure to open, making it susceptible to human error; and that no precautions, such as a safety net, safety harness, backup cables or a safety lock on the release mechanism, were used. Under Missouri law, the Hart family is not allowed to ask for a specific dollar amount in damages. That's up to a jury. The papers have been quoting experts who say they don't think nine figures is out of the question. (The Harts' attorney, Gary Robb, has among other things won a $350 million verdict in a helicopter crash case.) McMahon could settle, of course. But that would mean a very public apology -- something he's not particularly well practiced in. Meanwhile, Kansas City investigators continue their work to determine if there was criminal negligence involved in Hart's death. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- Coincidentally or not, in an interview with Bloomberg News the day after the Hart suit was filed, USA Network president and COO Barry Baker said the company was "monitoring all of the wrestling carefully," to make certain the shows "conform to what we think are good practices." McMahon can deal with the bad publicity and critics who say his WWF has taken a tacky but harmless sideshow and inserted an R-rated circus in its place. He takes those shots with a sly grin, shrugs his stocky shoulders, counts the receipts, and privately wonders if it's possible to package a product for Americans that's too violent or too sexy. What McMahon can't handle is any defection of the money men. The entertainment it offers aside, the WWF is not a fine-tuned fighting machine -- it's an efficient money machine, fueled by a cast of interchangeable ring stars. It's a machine McMahon built himself, and one that Wall Street may soon get a piece of. That's why over the last four weeks -- as the lawsuits have mounted, a criminal investigation has proceeded and the sour headlines have piled up -- if McMahon has been kept awake at nights, it's probably only with one nagging thought: "Wonder what the boys at Bear Stearns make of all this?"
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