1. Hall of Fame

HALL OF FAME

On March 25, 2019, I was in Central Park with my mom and two sisters as we tried to hold back our tears. My dad, the three-hundred-pound force of nature Jim “The Anvil” Neidhart, was now just three pounds of ash in our hands.

I don’t know what made us do it—maybe the serendipity of being in his favorite city, on the day he was getting inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame, and finding a giant oak tree straight out of his funeral eulogy––but we opened his urn and scattered his ashes right there in the park.

It was closure.

It was beautiful.

It was fitting for so many reasons.

And, as we were just about to find out, it was also illegal.

“Stop!” came a rattled voice from behind us.

We were filming a reality show at the time, Total Divas, and through my tears I could make out the head producer of the show, Russell Jay, who came running up to us frantically, waving his arms and shouting, “Stop! We can’t film this! It’s against the state law to spread ashes in a public place in New York City!”

“Nattie, did we just use Daddy to commit a crime!?” my now-panicked mom asked from behind her tissue.

“We need to get the hell out of here,” I told her as I ushered her to the park exit.

My dad wasn’t unfamiliar with being arrested, but my mom was a whole other story.

“We can’t just leave him there if it’s a crime,” she said.

“What do you want me to do, vacuum him up?!”

Okay, I’ll admit, I was stressed out. We were only in New York that day for the Hall of Fame induction ceremony, where my dad and his tag-team partner––my legendary uncle, Bret “Hitman” Hart––would be inducted as the Hart Foundation, and I started to envision headlines reading “WWE Wrestler Arrested for Felony in NYC.”

When I looked around, my sisters and the production crew were already in the wind, so I dragged my mom out of there toward our safe house across the bridge (the Barclays Center) where I knew Bret was waiting.

Nine months before, when my dad passed away, I’d worked up the courage to go see World Wrestling Entertainment’s Wizard of Oz, Vince McMahon, to ask him to finally put my dad in the Hall of Fame. Vince’s office was usually packed with people, with even more waiting outside to get a minute of his time, but that day, there was no one waiting; I had a clear road.

The then-owner of WWE had been amazing since my dad died, so I thought it was worth the ask.

“Natalie,” he said, “I thought your dad was in already.”

Vince was pissed off at whoever had overlooked my dad (Vince!) and immediately offered to include him in the upcoming 2019 class. But I knew teaming with Bret was the most special time in his life, so I requested he go in as part of the Hart Foundation. Like in the movie Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, my dad was John Candy to Bret’s Steve Martin.

Back at the Barclays Center, where everyone was setting up for that night’s live broadcast, my mom wanted to go find my sisters while I went and found Bret, who was in the empty seats going over his speech.

He looked very pensive. I knew this night meant a lot to him, and I could see that written all over his face as I approached.

“You want to hear it?” he asked, inviting me to join him.

I knew this was going to be special. Inside and outside the ring, Bret is a master storyteller––one of the greatest in the world, I think––and as we settled into the empty upper deck and he read his speech to me, I was reminded of that fact once again. Every sentence flowed beautifully—until he suddenly stopped.

“Nattie, why are you looking at your phone so much?” he asked.

I flashed him the stopwatch on my screen. Without pauses or clapping or any sort of engagement from the crowd, it was already forty-three minutes long.

“Okay, well, how long did they give us?” he asked.

“Fifteen.”

“Minutes?!” I could see Bret getting instantly overwhelmed as he scoured through the twenty pages he had yet to read. “How am I supposed to cut Jim’s life down to fifteen minutes?”

I felt caught between Bret’s beautiful writing and Vince’s militaristic timing. We were going live, and he hated when anyone ran over.

“Well, is there anything in there we can tighten?” I offered, trying to find a middle ground. “Maybe we take out the story with King Kong Bundy?”

But as anyone in wrestling could tell you, when it came to Bret and Vince—whose storied past peaked with Vince getting knocked out and Bret leaving the company he considered his home—finding a middle ground was tough.

“If he didn’t want me to, you know, read my speech the way I wanted to write it, then he shouldn’t have fucking invited me in the first place!”

Bret had a point, and I could see he wasn’t going to budge. So I was pretty nervous later that night as Bret and I hit the ring that acted as a stage in the now-packed arena.

On the way through the ropes, I said a little prayer to my dad above and asked him to please make sure we got through this: Daddy, I’m sorry about the park earlier, but please find us the time for Bret’s speech. Or please try to keep Vince calm backstage if we go an hour… Get us through this…

Bret was dressed in a crisp suit and I was in a custom-made pantsuit and a twenty-inch ponytail, which pictures of Jennifer Lopez at the time had convinced me was cool. It was not cool. And it kept yanking my head back every time I accidentally sat on it and then tried to move. By the time I made it to the ring that night, I felt like I had a twenty-inch dead ferret hanging by a thread from the back of my head.

But all I wanted was some kind of miracle to happen that would give Bret the time to honor my dad the way he wanted. It felt like this was our last chance as a family to really say goodbye. And I didn’t want to say goodbye at all.

I kept my part of the speech short, unlike my deeply regrettable hair, so I could give the floor to Bret, who began his speech… word for word like I’d heard earlier. Okay, he’s going for it! The audience was there for him, too, just they’d been his whole career, except this time they were hanging on his words instead of his athleticism. With Bret it was storytelling all the same. No one is a better storyteller than Bret.

I was just starting to wonder when Vince would shut us down when I heard a commotion behind us. I didn’t want to turn around because it would look like I wasn’t paying attention to Bret’s words. Then I saw someone enter the ring from the corner of my eye, and thought, Oh, shit, here it is, we’re getting pulled offstage. Vince must think we’re going too long already.

Until I suddenly realized that, no, this wasn’t somebody from WWE, this was somebody from the crowd who’d stormed the ring––and he was tackling Bret to the canvas.

Bret has endured a lot after his wrestling career, including a very serious stroke that took a huge toll on him, and it’s made us all very protective of him. Instinct kicked in and I grabbed on to my uncle as he was being taken down. In an effort not to land on him as we fell, I sent myself flying over him instead, like I was taking a bump.

A split second later, Travis Browne, Ronda Rousey’s MMA-heavyweight husband, appeared in the ring (the fastest heavyweight fighter I’ve ever seen!), along with a flurry of wrestlers piling in from all sides a second behind him.

If there was one guy the whole locker room would run through walls to defend, it was my principled, honest, outspoken, and singularly talented uncle. The attacker was quickly pinned down, and some of the rescuers started giving him a wrestler’s welcome that involved introducing their fists to his face.

And in the chaos, with Bret secured and his attacker seeing stars, my next thought was, I hope this fucking ponytail is still on my head. I’d taken a solid tumble in the middle of everything, and I was horrified to think the camera would zoom in on me on live TV and everyone was going to realize that I didn’t have any real hair left. Fortunately, it stayed put.

And through the stampede of black pants legs and shiny shoes all around us, Bret and I shared a smile from the canvas. We realized in that moment that nothing could have summed up the craziness, mayhem, and comedy that my dad loved about this business more. Not only did the attack that night not stop the Harts, but it granted us all the time we needed to give my dad the send-off of a lifetime. Who could say no to Bret going long after all that?

We never did find out why the man attacked Bret. But after he was hauled out, bruised and battered, Bret got to deliver his speech in full while everybody laughed, clapped, and hung on his every word about my dad.

Video of the event trended worldwide for two days afterward. As I said to my mom as we left the arena that night, “I felt like Daddy wanted to make sure that we stole the show in the most Jim Neidhart fashion ever.”

And as we both quietly remembered my dad on the ride back to the hotel, I was reminded all over again what “the most Jim Neidhart fashion” had meant in our lives––good and bad.

That’s the thing about spending your life with someone who’s always unapologetic about who they are––sometimes you’re in awe, and sometimes you’re left aching to hear them say “Sorry.”

We told the world a lot about my dad, but I was still struggling with how to carry his memory and not get crushed by it.

But that was the journey of any Hart.

You step into the ring to honor those who came before you, but you fight to figure out your own place in that historic family lineage.

A lineage born from a chance meeting in the very city we were in many decades before.