The Globe and Mail in Canada features an article on Bret Hart's autobiography. The following are key article highlights and Bret quotes:

-In his fascinating new book, Hitman: My Real Life in the Cartoon World of Wrestling, Hart violates the code he grew up with in a wild wrestling family, the "kayfabe," the elaborate lie designed to keep the paying customers from ceasing to suspend their disbelief. (Once, when the script called for him to feud with his brother Owen, the two siblings made a point of not speaking to each other for months, even growling across the family dinner table.) This is the master magician explaining to everyone just how that woman was sawed in half, to a degree unprecedented in the long history of professional wrestling. And this is also a story packed with drugs, sex, vicious family in-fighting and tales of life on the road in a business where the only people who really understood were the ones who shared the ring. Hart names names and lays it all bare, in his own words, over more than 500 pages.

Bret Hart [artist Joseph Borzotta (c) PWTorch]

-"It wasn't an easy decision," he said of taking the audio diaries he kept during his life in wrestling and turning them into a tell-all. "But as the business I loved faded from view, it wasn't so hard. They lost all of the respect that they had for the guys that paved the way. I hope that there are a lot of wrestlers who are still alive who will appreciate my honesty, who will say, that's how I remember it."

-"The fans — they knee what was going on ahead of the wrestlers," he said. "There was no more kayfabe. Since then, it's been so exposed. Now the fans are hip to it, but not hip to the truth behind it."

-As Hart describes it, the wrestling business, under the stewardship of Vince McMahon, the strangely compelling genius-villain of the piece, descends into a world of steroids and cocaine, of economic exploitation and of broken bodies and broken minds. The good guys aren't necessarily good guys — stand up, Hulk Hogan — while some of the sweetest characters are the heels.

-"I think that when they're driving to and from the arena, they know it's just a show," Hart said. "But when they're sitting there, I think I could make them to believe that what they were seeing was real."

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Keller's Analysis: Bret is right. Fans know it's "not real," but there's still so much more about the business that has remained "kayfabe" that a book such as Bret's can "expose" like no one else ever has before. Bret clearly is as unfiltered in this book as anyone ever has in writing about the 1980s and 1990s era of pro wrestling, and without it going through the WWE editing machine, it's a book that should be at the top of the list of books wrestling fans should read - and that's me anticipating reading it from excerpts, since I haven't gotten a copy yet to review.

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