13 Wrestlers Who Died In The Ring 9

9. Owen Hart

Owen Hart’s accidental death is, after Chris Benoit, the most infamous death in professional wrestling in the West. The youngest son of Stu Hart, Owen was the most naturally gifted of all the male Hart brothers, all of whom became wrestlers. Trained by his family, he debuted for Stampede Wrestling as a teenager in 1983. He also made several trips to the UK, as Stampede had close links with Joint Promotions, with wrestlers from one promotion frequently touring the other. Owen made two appearances on British television, one as an 18 year old in an international tag team tournament, where he tagged with brother Ross, and the second in 1987 as a much more mature wrestler in an all-time British classic against Marty Jones, challenging for Jones’s World Mid-Heavyweight Championship.In between these two appearances, Hart had also ventured out to New Japan, where junior heavyweights like Jushin Liger, with their faster paced matches, were starting to capture the attention of the Japanese audiences. Hart had a brief tenure in the WWF in 1988-89 under a mask as the high flying Blue Blazer. While a favourite of children and wrestling connoisseurs, he didn’t fit in with the WWF of the time, where the heavyweights ruled the land, and soon left for pastures new.
                                                       

After a very short stay in WCW, where he wrestled just five times on television, a stay in Mexico using the Blazer gimmick, and another trip to England, where he had another British classic in Bath with Danny Collins, he resurfaced in the WWF, where his most famous feud in the WWF came in 1994. Sick of being in his brother’s shadow, Owen turned heel and attacked Bret after they had unsuccessfully challenged for the World Tag Team Championship at the Royal Rumble. This led to their all-time classic confrontation at WrestleMania X, and a dramatic cage match which headlined SummerSlam ’94. But then, with these two combatants, they were never going to have anything but classic matches really. Bret won the feud and Owen dropped back down the card, mainly competing in successful tag teams with Davey Boy Smith and Yokozuna.
In 1999, Hart ‘quit’ the promotion in storyline and started competing once more as the masked Blue Blazer. However, this time, in the Attitude era, the righteous, preaching and clumsy Blazer was a pseudo-heel comedy character. He would occasionally descend from the ceiling attached to a zip wire, usually getting stuck a few feet off the ground and needing help to get unshackled. All of this was done as a dig at Sting in WCW. In the midst of WCW’s dominance in the Monday Night Wars, the reinvention of Sting as a dark character descending from the ceiling had been one of the sparks of their triumphant ratings.
At the Over the Edge pay-per-view on May 23rd 1999 in Kansas City, Hart was supposed to descend from the ceiling in his full Blue Blazer attire. While a pre-recorded interview played out to the television audience, Hart’s shackle accidentally released within moments of him stepping off the catwalk in the rafters. He plummeted approximately 80 feet, landing chest first on the top rope just by the turnbuckle, and slumping into the ring. Fortunately for the TV audience, this footage never made it to air due to the slight delay that live TV is usually broadcast on. The camera panned the audience before cutting to a visibly shell-shocked Jim Ross, who had to inform viewers what had happened, telling them famously that this was not part of a storyline, but was “as real as real can be”. Hart was rushed to hospital but he had died, most probably in the ring, from blunt force trauma.
In the aftermath, the WWF was widely criticised afterwards for continuing with the rest of the show. WCW, meanwhile, immediately stopped using a similar zip wire for Sting’s entrances, and Martha Hart, Owen’s widow, took legal action against the WWF and the manufacturers of the shackle device which had opened accidentally, sending Hart to his death at the age of 34.