A guy like Benoit, he's really good and a lot like Dynamite. Dynamite, just because he was the original, was the best. But, you know, Benoit now is by far better. Dynamite Kid is nothing now.
All I had to do was go out and perform. One of the hardest things was doing those back flips, where you had to jump up and land on the top rope. It's precision movement.
Bret, the way he left WWF, wasn't like he was the Ultimate Warrior come to the WWF for a few months and then he just left, he really wasn't rooted in the company.
Double J is similar in age, we're similar in experience. I think if we hooked up, we could be a formidable team. We get along well inside the ring and outside the ring.
Dynamite, when I was a kid growing up, he might of set more of an image for me because I was younger, watching this older guy work.
I certainly would have regretted not getting into wrestling. It's been very lucrative for me and I've been fortunate to get into it and make money and not do anything stupid where I invested in something that collapsed.
I find too often in the wrestling business, you just wrestle, get to the hotel, make your money. Sometimes I have to stop and remind myself to enjoy my life and not just rush through.
I had a very bad torn groin, my abdomen right through my legs. I was finding it really hard to get in the ring and run around and function at a decent rate. Then they had the idea that it might be better to do a retirement thing.
I had lots of North American belts, different titles in Germany, Mexico but I don't know what the hell they were.
I liked working in Germany and Austria. The money was horrible but what was good about it was, I was with my wife. We lived out there for nine months.
I love working in Canada. The ovation is great. It makes me feel like I'm the top dog.
I owe a lot to my dad, just for having provided the wrestling business for us to get into.
I see these guys, they throw a guy into the ropes and they do a back flip and then clothesline the guy and it looks stupid. Why don't you just clothesline the guy?
I think by the time I was born, my parents had pretty well run the gauntlet with their kids. The novelty had kind of worn off by the time the twelfth child was born. I was lucky to get fed and changed, picked up and taken to school.
I watch these Mexicans, they work on our show and on the other network's show, and they do a lot of high-flying, entertaining things, but it looks so choreographed. It doesn't have a lot of impact to it when I watch it. I find it easy to change channels when I watch those guys.
I went three years to university, and I wouldn't have done anything differently.
I'd come from the bottom of the barrel. Just Owen Hart getting out of the shadow of Bret Hart's little brother. Everyone figured, this is a joke, Owen's going to get squashed.
I'm Owen Hart and I have my own identity and my own style.
If Bret went in there and stunk the place out, then they probably wouldn't have brought the little brother in. So just by being successful himself, it opened the door for me.
If you could have frozen them and put them together, time lapse where Dynamite was at his peak and with Chris now, they'd be an awesome team.
It's full-time work, wrestling, appearances and stuff. I couldn't put my full effort into a newspaper column and I'd probably do a lousy job at it.
It's good to go out and entertain these people, and you've got them on the edge of their seat, they're standing up. Then you know that you've done your job, you've entertained them. My way of entertaining them is going out and wrestling. Everyone's got their different ways.
It's hard to pick out one particular wrestler.
It's kind of an art, going out and performing. I'd like fans to remember me as a guy who would go out and entertain them, give them quality matches, and not just the same old garbage every week.
It's kind of beating a dead horse if you're talking about going out and saying wrestling's fake, or this or that. People don't want to hear that. They want to hear, they wanted to find an inside story.
It's unacceptable to just sit on the couch and say I'm not doing anything. You've got to get out and do everything you can.
Nobody really knows for sure who the Blue Blazer is, but like I said in my interview, there's a little bit of the Blue Blazer in each and every one of us.
Not only was it that I surprised people by beating Bret Hart, but it was a great match. They still rate it as one of the best wrestling matches of all time.
Some guys can do more talking in the ring, other guys do posing, body building, whatever the hell they do in the ring. But I don't have the big body, and I'm not the big smooth talker, but I can get in the ring and wrestle.
The perks of working in Japan are that you might go for two weeks every three or four months, so you do work an abbreviated schedule. But you really make up for the abbreviated schedule by how hard you have to fight, how much you've got to be in shape.
There was a bit of a comparison that Bret was making between Vince McMahon and my dad. He looked up to Vince as a dad and stuff, and it was a shame to see the whole thing end the way it did.
There's been a lot of guys who've come to the WWF, and they really didn't have the roots, feelings for the company, and the people they worked with.
There's so many documentaries out there right now and everything's exposing wrestling.
They said they wanted a lot of feathers, glitter, colourful colours. A costume. So I had a lady here in Calgary make it. She just kind of put together what I had in mind.
Vince McMahon said alright, we're going to call you the Blue Blazer.
When I came into the WWF, the first thing I really didn't want to have was being Bret Hart's little brother.
When I won the belt, it was kind of a precedent... The only Canadian to have ever held it.
Why do you need to do a fancy cartwheel for before you hit him? It just looks stupid.
You can do the acrobatic stuff, throw in a back flip or something that looks good, but it's got to be at the right time.
You get on TV and you become more of a star and it makes it real hard to go back to school and sit in a classroom, put your hand up if you have a question or something.
On the October 4, 1999 edition of WCW Nitro, Owen's brother Bret Hart wrestled Chris Benoit in an Owen Hart tribute match at Kemper Arena.
Owen was a 2-time Intercontinental Champion.
Owen won the "Feud of the Year Award," (versus Bret Hart) in 1994, by PWI.
In 1992 Owen was named the Most Underrated Wrestler.
Owen defeated his brother, Bret, at WrestleMania X.
Owen has been a member of both The Hart Foundation and The Nation of Domination.
His son Oje was seven and his daughter Athena was four when he died.
Owen injured the necks of both "Stone Cold" Steve Austin and "The Beast" Dan Severn. Both were injured with piledriver attempts.
In 1998, about a year before his death, Owen appeared on an episode of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids: The TV Show. He commented about injuries in professional wrestling being very real.
Owen's last match was on May 22, 1999 in Chicago. He and Jarrett won a tag team match against Edge and Christian.
Owen was trained by his father, Stu Hart.
Owen was the youngest of 12 children.
Owen was killed at the Over the Edge PPV on May 23, 1999 in Kansas City, Missouri. He was sopposed to wrestle the Godfather that night. The cause of death was revealed to be internal bleeding from blunt chest trauma. Due to Owen's death, Over the Edge(1999) is the only WWF Pay-Per-View to date that has never been released on video or DVD.
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