Quintin Jardine's blog

This is my year for reading autobiographies, Mandelson, Blair, Bush, I’ve been into them all and been interested by different people’s takes on the same events. But they’re heavy going, so  a couple of days ago I loaded on to my Kindle, ‘Hitman: my real life in the cartoon world of wrestling’ by Bret Hart.

Eh? I hear you exclaim. Wrestling? But it’s fake. Of course it is, but so what? For this book is fantastic, one of the best and most gripping autobiographies I’ve ever read. Bret Hart is Canadian and  comes from a family of eight brothers and four sisters. Their dad, Stu, was a wrestler and promoter; their mother, Helen, a New York girl, kept most of them more or less sane, most of the time. All the brothers became pro wrestlers, and all the daughters married pro wrestlers (with disastrous results). The saga is about the rasslin’ industry as it really is, and describes Bret’s life on the road, a body-breaking, hard-drinking odyssey filled with rogues, villains, heroes, lots of sex and drugs and even a little rock and roll. Fascinating stuff, and a far more interesting journey that Tony Blair’s, but where it really scores is in his description of the most dysfunctional extended family that you could ever imagine. You couldn’t make the movie, for two reasons; you couldn’t cast it, and nobody would believe it.