koilungfish | Under The Mat: Inside Wrestling's Greatest Family by Diana Hart with Kirstie McLellan

Title - Under The Mat: Inside Wrestling's Greatest Family
Author - Diana Hart with Kirstie McLellan
ISBN - 1-55168-256-7

"The closet had one of those slatted doors so she could see what was going on and she sat in there for about five hours watching Hans and Jane beat the hell out of each other. It was mostly Hans beating the hell out of Jane. He threw her hard into the pullout bed and smashed her face into the steel frame. Her nose was squashed flat as if he had whacked it with a small ax. She wound up with a permanent divot on the bridge of her nose, about half an inch thick. The next day, her eyes were black and blue and bloodshot and there were lumps all over her face. Her toes were broken while trying to defend herself and as a result she couldn't even walk."

Under The Mat is about the most unpleasant book I've ever read in my life. As one of if not the most infamous autobiography associated with pro wrestling, it was top of my list of books to read as part of Project: Pro Wrestling, assuming I could get hold of it. Under The Mat was pulled from the shelves shortly after publication due to its content, deemed libellous, and quite rightly so. Second-hand copies can be found for significant prices, as can free-to-download-if-you-know-where-to-look copies in pdf or ebook format.

Project: Pro Wrestling is starting to have results in that each book so far has had a different voice, a different character. Reading Have A Nice Day was like sitting in a quiet corner of a pub whilst Mr Foley told stories in his quiet, amiable way. On Edge was more like sitting on Mr Copeland's couch whilst he went through a photo album of the greatest moments in his life. Are You Ready? was like sitting in a tape recorder listening to Mr Helmsley talk extensively whilst Mr Michaels thought about something else.

Reading Under The Mat is like sitting in on Ms Hart's therapy sessions. This book is wall-to-wall human horror. Under The Mat begins with Ms Hart's description of her husband, Davey Boy Smith, going through drug withdrawal, her discovery of his extensive stash of pharmaceuticals and realisation of the extent of his addiction, along with a glancing mention of how he was sexually abusing her.

That's the first page.

As said, Under The Mat reads like a therapy session, one where Ms Hart was encouraged to cough up all the unpleasant things that happened both to her and around her, as part of growing up as one of the famous and/or infamous Canadian wrestling tribe, the Hart family. The result is unrelenting unpleasantness. Violence and drug abuse are presented as standard behaviour. Illness, both mental and physical, is treated as taboo, pushed aside and ignored. Ms Hart describes watching one of her brothers die of kidney failure and wonders but cannot explain why none of the family - not one of the man's eleven brothers and sisters, never mind the raft of nieces and nephews - offered to donate a kidney.

By the third or fourth chapter the reader is numb from the simple consistency of the unpleasantness. There seems to be no end to it. There is very little that could be called positive in any light - most of it relates to Owen Hart, the man of whom nobody seems to have a bad word - and what little positivity there is is drowned out by the endless roar of pain.

This is not an autobiography. This is a filth-shovelling session.

Inasmuch as Mr Foley and Mr Copeland had little or nothing bad to say about the people they worked with and the industry they worked in, Ms Hart has little or nothing good to say about those same things. To list what she says would take too long, yet it is hard not to repeat over and over how much violence, date rape, abuse of women, drug abuse and general unpleasantness is in Under The Mat. It simply doesn't stop being horrible.

For example, Bret "The Hitman" Hart, one of pro wrestling's greatest names, a man with a reputation being trustworthy, reliable, and safe to work with, is portrayed by his own sister as a manic-depressive megalomaniac with broad tendency towards violence in general and violence towards women in particular. The gulf of portrayal is obviously vast. Bret Hart's public persona is naturally the best parts of him polished up for show. What Ms hart is portraying seems to be the absolute worst parts, the few nastiest moments of Bret Hart's life, exhibited as part of her parade of atrocities. The truth of who and what Bret Hart is presumably lies somewhere in the middle, a very vast and grey area that it is.

The litany continues. Ms Hart's husband, Davey Boy Smith, is presented as a dim-witted drug addict and spouse-rapist with connections to organised crime. Her brother-in-law, Jim Neidhart, is shown in an even worse light. The list is endless; date rape, drug use, violence, over and over and over. The only people who escape Under The Mat with clean reputations are, bizarrely enough, Shawn Michaels and the McMahon family. Indeed, as she's plastering her family with dirt of the foulest order, Ms Hart takes pains to exonerate her brother Bret Hart's hated rival, Mr Michaels, of any and all stain on his reputation, and to damned near elevate Vince McMahon to the status of a minor saint; kind, generous, seeking only the best for his employees and their families and much loved by all those around him.

By the middle parts of this book, one cannot help but wonder if one has slipped into a mirror world, where black is white and white is black. Everything present seems so intensely counter to all other available information. Perhaps it is just that Ms Hart is offering up the choicest filth from her many and varied experiences, but everything is presented as if this were the sum total of the tapestry of life.

The sense of reality disassociation deepens as it becomes clear that Ms Hart's recollections are not wholly accurate. At one juncture, concerning the infamous Montreal Screwjob, she writes the following:

Bret had just lost the World's Belt at Wrestlemania 13, in a 60-minute hard-fought match with Shawn who had entered the ring on a harness from the ceiling of the Anaheim Duck Pond.

Ms Hart's data is off; the match in question happened a year earlier, at Wrestlemania 12. This alone could be considered a typographical error, or perhaps just a minor flaw in recollection - at the absolute least a failure of editing - but there are suggestions that this is simply the easily-identified and easily-verified tip of an iceberg of inaccuracy.

For further example, when describing the funeral of her brother Owen Hart, Ms Hart mentions Mr Foley and repeats two anecdotes Mr Foley supposedly told at the time. These two anecdotes are exactly the same as the ones Mr Foley wrote in Have A Nice Day. Are the readers to believe that Mr Foley only had two stories about Owen Hart? And that he told them nearly the same every time? Or is it more likely that there is some confusion here, that Ms Hart has conflated what Mr Foley wrote in his book with what Mr Foley said at the funeral? The latter seems likely.

The strangeness continues. Either there is something wrong with Ms Hart's recollections of her family's financial status in her childhood or something utterly bizarre was going on in the Hart family. At various points she mentions how her father, Stu Hart, had a limousine and thirty Cadillacs, had filled the kitchen with professional quality cooking equipment and how there were expensive refrigerators all over the house ... yet at the same time her brother Bret was sent to school in winter wearing shorts because the family could not afford to buy him trousers, toothpaste was an expensive luxury and her elder sisters had to share clothes. These two sets of data are hard to reconcile. There are two possibilities here. One is that Ms Hart is trying to describe how her family went through boom and bust periods, with the family sometimes having an excess of wealth and sometimes being on hard times, with the extent of these periods perhaps being exaggerated as memories of childhood generally are. The other possibility is that these are accurate or near-accurate and that the Hart family's approach to money and childcare was schizophrenic bordering on the neglectful. Given the tales of mental illness and strange behaviour, it's actually possible to believe both may be simultaneously true.

There is a third option: Diana Hart is rather stupid. Her narrative style is plain and flat, the prose workmanlike to the point of blankness. She rambles from one anecdote to another, with no sense of relevance or interconnectedness. At one point she segues from Jake Roberts dumping a snake on Jim Cornette, to a proposed angle between herself and Shawn Michaels, to Bret Hart taking time out to do TV, back to the angle with Shawn, all in about five paragraphs, with no sense of any relationship between these events. She just rambles. Whatever comes into her apparently uncluttered head goes directly onto the page.

Under The Mat is barely coherent in any sense, presenting a misarranged mish-mash of tales, some very tall, and events with little air of sequence or interrelation. Her ability to explain why anything happened is nearly non-existent. At certain points it seems as if she is oblivious to the consequences of events around her. Nothing seems to have any impact beyond the event. Nobody ever seems inclined to take action to stop anything from happening, or even from getting worse. It is as if she drifts through a dream, barely aware of anything beyond her fingertips, collecting memories like newspaper cuttings, and Under The Mat is her scrapbook of horrors.

All in all, this book is a barely sensible collocation of unpleasant events, some of which seem irrelevant and some of which seem inaccurate, documenting what is mostly likely more than half-true but nonetheless a catalogue of all the unpleasant things a large group of people with small-town mindsets and bad tempers can do to one another. This is a gallery of a large family's darkest moments. The eye shies from it; it is better left unread.

This book is:
* - unrelenting human pain
* - rambling and incoherent
* - a collection of a large family's worst moments

This book is not:
* - suitable for those with delicate temperaments
* - easily available
* - worth seeking out