Hitman: My Real Life in the Cartoon World of Wrestling
- Author: Bret Hart
- Page count: 593
- Started on: 2026/08/13
- Finished on: 2026/08/26
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
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Bret Hart was an active pro-wrestler from 1978 until his retirement in 2000. He first became famous in WWF (now WWE) as The Hitman, one half of The Hart Foundation, together with Jim The Anvil Neidhart, before becoming one of the promotion’s biggest singles stars.
In this autobiography from 2007 Hart covers his life as the eighth of 12 children. His father ran the Stampede Wrestling promotion in Calgary and trained wrestlers in the ‘Dungeon’ in his home basement. Based largely on the audio diary Hart kept during his wrestling career, he retells family and wrestling events through personal observations and anecdotes all the way through his 2006 WWE Hall of Fame induction.
I’ve been a fan of pro-wrestling since my early teens, and discovered Hart through The Hart Foundation’s feuds with The British Bulldogs. Hart has always been an exceptional wrestler, and just in case you didn’t know that, he’ll remind you of it every few pages. And it’s not just him saying it (😉); everyone who ever told him so seems to be quoted in this dense memoir.
I found the first third of the book, covering his youth and early wrestling career, hard to read, as the paragraphs lacked almost any storytelling. It often read like a bullet-point summary of events, rather than a personal memoir. Luckily, that changed in the rest of the book. Maybe Hart’s personal audio diary became more detailed as his career progressed. 🤔 Hundreds of wrestling personalities make an appearance, as Hart interacted with so many of them throughout his long and storied career.
Hart comes across as very self-centered and bitter, always judging other people’s actions while justifying his own. For example, he justifies his incessant cheating while on the road by saying that he just couldn’t stand to be alone, but then blames his wife for being nasty to him when he was not traveling. 🤷 All in all, the book does not paint Hart as a very likable person, which is an interesting choice in an autobiography. Luckily, the author doesn’t have to be likable for this to be a fascinating, personal view of a long, eventful period of pro-wrestling history.
