Age, Biography, and Wiki
Owen Hart was born on May 7, 1965, in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, to Stu and Helen Hart, the youngest of twelve children in the Hart wrestling family. He maintained dual Canadian-American citizenship and was part of a family with a rich wrestling legacy. His career spanned across several promotions, including Stampede Wrestling, New Japan Pro-Wrestling (NJPW), World Championship Wrestling (WCW), and the World Wrestling Federation (WWF), where he achieved most of his success.
| Occupation | Wrestlers |
|---|---|
| Date of Birth | 7 May 1965 |
| Age | 60 Years |
| Birth Place | Calgary, Alberta, Canada |
| Horoscope | Taurus |
| Country | Canada |
| Date of death | 23 May, 1999 |
| Died Place | Kemper Arena, Kansas City, Missouri, U.S. |
Height, Weight & Measurements
- Height: Not specified in available sources.
- Weight: Varies depending on the time period, but typically around 230 lbs during his wrestling career.
- Measurements: Not detailed in available sources.
At SummerSlam in August, Hart was to defend his Intercontinental Championship against Austin in a "Kiss My Ass" match, where Hart put the title up against Austin having to kiss his buttocks if he lost. During the match, Hart botched a piledriver and dropped Austin on the top of his head, injuring his neck. Austin won the title from Hart that evening, but due to the injury was forced to vacate the title. Although the entire situation was an accident, the WWF decided to make it part of the storyline as Owen began wearing a T-shirt patterned after Austin's that read "Owen 3:16/I Just Broke Your Neck".
On May 23, 1999, Hart fell to his death in Kansas City, Missouri, during the Over the Edge pay-per-view event. Hart was in the process of being lowered via harness and grapple line into the ring from the rafters of Kemper Arena for a booked Intercontinental Championship match against The Godfather. In keeping with the Blazer's new "buffoonish superhero" character, he was to begin a dramatic entrance, being lowered to just above ring level, at which time he would act "entangled", then release himself from the safety harness and fall flat on his face for comedic effect—this necessitated the use of a quick release mechanism. It was an elaboration on a Blue Blazer stunt done previously on the Sunday Night Heat before Survivor Series in 1998. Before being lowered into the ring, Hart fell 78 feet (24 m), landing chest-first on the top rope (approximately a foot from the nearest turnbuckle).
| Height | 5 ft 10 in |
| Weight | 227 lb |
| Body Measurements | |
| Eye Color | |
| Hair Color |
Dating & Relationship Status
Owen Hart was married to Martha Hart. The couple had two children together, Oje Edward Hart and Athena Christie Hart.
Hart's family background was Greek descent through his maternal grandmother and Irish through his maternal grandfather. His father was mainly of Scots-Irish descent, but also had Scottish and German ancestry.
Hart first gained wrestling experience in the amateur wrestling division at high school, through which he met his wife, Martha. Hart continued amateur wrestling for the Dinos at the University of Calgary. He placed 4th at the 1984 Canada West championships in the 76 kg weight class. Wrestling was not Hart's first choice for a career; as Martha explained in her book Broken Harts, Owen tried numerous times to find a profitable living outside of wrestling. Owen is quoted as saying, in the WWE Home Video "Owen Hart of Gold" that "during his time in the University, he wrestled incognito (under a mask) as the original British Bulldog. Then, after he graduated from the University, he wrestled as "Bronco" Owen Hart at Royal Albert Hall in London, England. As those attempts were unsuccessful, Hart was trained in his father's Hart Dungeon and worked for his father's federation, Stampede Wrestling and wrestled in England for Max Crabtree's Joint Promotions in matches that got broadcast on ITV's World of Sport and the later standalone wrestling program including a 1987 loss to former champion Marty Jones for the vacant World Mid-Heavyweight Championship. He remained with Stampede for the next couple of years while honing his skills. During 1986, Hart teamed with Ben Bassarab and won the Stampede Wrestling International Tag Team Championship. The success of the team and Hart's in-ring skills earned him Pro Wrestling Illustrated's Rookie of the Year Award in 1987. After he and Bassarab lost the tag team title, he feuded with Johnny Smith.
Hart's success in Japan and Stampede's working relationship with the World Wrestling Federation led to Hart signing with the company in the summer of 1988. Instead of promoting Owen as Bret Hart's younger brother, the WWF decided to create a masked "superhero" type gimmick for him which played to his high-flying style. He broke into the WWF as The Blue Blazer (initially The Blue Angel), with his early appearances seeing him defeat the likes of Terry Gibbs, Steve Lombardi and Barry Horowitz. The Blue Blazer made his pay-per-view debut at Survivor Series '88, teaming with The Ultimate Warrior, Brutus Beefcake, Jim Brunzell and Sam Houston against The Honky Tonk Man, Greg Valentine, Outlaw Ron Bass, Bad News Brown and Dangerous Danny Davis. The Blazer was eliminated by Valentine, but his team went on to win the match. He continued to wrestle in the midcard, defeating enhancement talent but often falling short against other name talent; he lost to Ted DiBiase on the March 11, 1989 Saturday Night's Main Event XX and was defeated by Mr. Perfect at WrestleMania V.
Hart returned to the WWF ring in the fall of 1993, at a time when Bret's feud with Lawler was temporarily sidetracked. Bret, along with Owen and their brothers Bruce and Keith, were scheduled to face Lawler and his team at Survivor Series. However, Lawler was unable to make it to the show, and as a result could not appear on WWF television. Lawler was replaced with Shawn Michaels. During the match Owen and Bret inadvertently crashed into each other, causing Owen to be eliminated from the team. Owen showed up after the match and had a heated confrontation with Bret, while Keith, Bruce and Stu tried to calm things down. This confrontation resulted in Owen leaving the ring to boos while his brothers and father watched in dismay and mother Helen cried at ringside. The following night Owen adopted the pink and black tights, sunglasses and Sharpshooter finisher to send a message to his brother. Owen, angry with being in Bret's shadow, challenged his brother which Bret declined. Instead the brothers seemed to reunite by the holidays. According to Bret, the original plan was to have brother Bruce turn on Bret and have Owen leave the WWF alongside Keith, but Bret suggested that he'd feud with Owen instead.
Owen and Bret feuded throughout the summer of 1994, clashing many times both in singles and later in tag team matches (with Bret joined by the returning British Bulldog). Two prominent matches took place in this feud: first, their steel cage match in the co-main event of SummerSlam for Bret's WWF Championship, which Bret won. This match later received a five-star rating from Dave Meltzer. The second was a lumberjack match on August 17 that Owen initially won and was announced as WWF Champion; Bret won the match after it was ordered to continue due to interference. At the Survivor Series, Owen struck the most damaging blow against his brother as he conned his own mother Helen to throw in the towel for Bret. The ploy cost Bret the WWF Championship to Bob Backlund. Owen also prevented Bret from regaining the WWF Championship at the Royal Rumble in 1995 when he interfered in the match between Bret and new champion Diesel. In the weeks after the Royal Rumble, Bret and Owen clashed again with Bret soundly defeating his brother, thus putting an end to their feud for the time being.
| Parents | |
| Husband | Martha Hart (m. 1989) |
| Sibling | |
| Children |
Net Worth and Salary
At the peak of his career, Owen Hart had a significant net worth, largely due to his lucrative contracts with the WWF. In 1996, he received a guaranteed salary of $250,000 per year, which was increased to $400,000 from November 1997. He also earned substantial amounts from pay-per-view events and merchandise sales. However, calculating his net worth in 2025 is challenging, as his career ended in 1999. After his death, his family received an $18 million settlement from the WWF following a wrongful death lawsuit.
Among other accolades, Owen was a one-time USWA Unified World Heavyweight Champion, a two-time WWF Intercontinental Champion, a one-time WWF European Champion, and a four-time WWF World Tag Team Champion, as well as the 1994 WWF King of the Ring. He headlined multiple pay-per-view events for the WWF, and was widely regarded as one of the company's best in-ring performers.
Hart died on May 23, 1999, during his entrance from the rafters of Kemper Arena in Kansas City, Missouri, United States. The equipment that was lowering him to the ring malfunctioned and he fell to his death in front of a live audience and live on Pay Per View during WWF's Over the Edge event.
Hart had been engaged in contract discussions with WCW but the deal was never struck, as Owen was not willing to move himself and his family to the company's headquarters in Atlanta. Instead, he signed with the WWF for a second time. In the WWF the popular Hart Foundation, composed of his brother Bret and real-life brother-in-law Jim Neidhart, had split up; Bret set out on a singles career while Neidhart was used sparingly. When Neidhart returned from a storyline injury, he joined Owen to form a team known as The New Foundation. Owen and Neidhart first feuded with the Beverly Brothers. They then had their only pay-per-view match at the Royal Rumble in January 1992 where they beat The Orient Express. Neidhart left the WWF shortly afterward, and Hart set out on a very short run as a singles wrestler, including a victorious match at WrestleMania VIII when he faced off against Skinner. Shortly after WrestleMania, Hart was teamed up with Koko B. Ware (whom he had previously partnered while wrestling as the Blue Blazer) to form the duo known as High Energy. They had only one pay-per-view match as a team, at the Survivor Series where they lost to The Headshrinkers. The team was quietly dropped at the start of 1993 with Hart starting a singles career. Owen suffered a knee injury on April 17, 1993, in a match taped for Superstars, against Bam Bam Bigelow, which kept him sidelined for nearly two months.
In September 1996, Bulldog and Hart earned a pay-per-view shot at the tag team titles at In Your House 10. Owen and Bulldog left with the gold after defeating the Smoking Gunns. They also left with a new manager as Clarence Mason had conned Jim Cornette into signing over the contracts of the new champions. Signs of dissension, however, slowly started to show. One occasion where this was evident was at the Royal Rumble when Hart accidentally eliminated Bulldog. After the Rumble, they had miscommunication in matches against Doug Furnas and Phil LaFon and Bulldog fired Mason after losing a match to Crush who was also managed by Mason, something which did not sit well with Hart. Another bone of contention between the two was the newly created WWF European Championship; both men had fought their way to the finals to crown the first champion with Bulldog coming out as the victor.
Four weeks after WrestleMania, during a tag team match with Ken Shamrock against Mark Henry and Rocky Maivia (later known as The Rock), Hart turned on Shamrock, "snapping" his ankle and "biting his ear" in the process, and becoming a heel once again. After the attack on Shamrock, Hart became the co-leader, with The Rock, of the Nation of Domination, claiming that "Enough is enough and it's time for a change". The Nation's first big feud after Hart joined was against DX. It was during this feud that D-Generation X parodied the Nation of Domination. The imitation was complete with an actor dressing up as Hart and uttering the phrase "I am not a nugget"; this was in response to Shawn Michaels referring to Owen as a nugget of feces in a toilet bowl that, no matter how many times Michaels flushed, he was unable to get rid of. "Nugget" became a derisive term that followed Hart for the rest of his career. Hart's participation in the DX feud was sidetracked when Shamrock returned from injuries dead set on getting revenge on Hart. The two split a pair of specialty matches on pay-per-view, but nothing was ever conclusively settled between them.
After a match in which Hart "accidentally injured" Dan Severn, Hart seemingly quit the WWF. Playing off the legitimate injury Hart had inflicted on Austin the year before, the angle blurred the lines between reality and "storyline." Yet as soon as Hart "quit," the Blue Blazer appeared in the WWF claiming to in no way be Hart despite it being very obvious who was under the mask. Unlike the first run of the character, the Blazer was now an overbearing, self-righteous heel who treated the edgy Attitude Era WWF with disdain. Hart and Jarrett ended up making the storyline comical. To prove that Hart was not the Blazer, he showed up beside the Blue Blazer, who was a masked Jarrett. In a later attempt to prove that neither Hart or Jarrett was the Blazer, they both appeared next to a man in the Blue Blazer mask; however, it was obvious that a black man was under the mask (Hart's former tag team partner Koko B. Ware). On January 25, 1999, in the midst of the Blue Blazer angle Hart and Jarrett defeated Ken Shamrock and The Big Boss Man for the WWF Tag Team Championship. The pair successfully defended the belts against Test and D'Lo Brown at WrestleMania XV. They lost the titles to the team of Kane and X-Pac on the (pre-taped) episode of Raw that aired on April 5, 1999. However, Hart and Jarrett continued to team together until Hart's death in May during the Over the Edge pay-per-view event.
Hart had performed the stunt a few times before. Hart's widow Martha has suggested that, by moving around to get comfortable with both the harness and his cape on, Hart unintentionally triggered an early release. Television viewers did not see the incident. During the fall, a pre-taped vignette was being shown on the pay-per-view broadcast as well as on the monitors in the darkened arena. Afterward, while Hart was being worked on by medical personnel inside the ring, the live event's broadcast showed only the audience. Meanwhile, WWF television announcer Jim Ross repeatedly told those watching live on pay-per-view that what had just transpired was not a wrestling angle or storyline and that Hart was hurt badly, emphasizing the seriousness of the situation. Hart was transported to Truman Medical Center in Kansas City. While several attempts to revive him were made, he died due to his injuries. The cause of death was later revealed to be internal bleeding from blunt force trauma. The impact severed his aorta, resulting in Hart bleeding to death just minutes later; he was 34 years old.
WWF and Vince McMahon drew controversy when the company chose to continue the pay-per-view event after Jim Ross announced Owen Hart's death on the live broadcast. Over the Edge was never commercially released on WWF Home Video, although it was available on the WWE Network in 2014 for the first time since its original air date. Other than a short memorial that was added before the show began, all footage and mention of Hart was edited out.
After a lawsuit that lasted over a year and a half, a settlement was reached on November 2, 2000, which saw WWF pay the estate of Owen Hart US$18 million with the help of Pamela Fischer. The manufacturer of the harness system was also a defendant against the Hart family, but they were dismissed from the case after the settlement was reached. Owen Hart's widow Martha used some of the settlement to establish the Owen Hart Foundation.
Career, Business, and Investments
Owen Hart's career was marked by numerous achievements, including being a one-time USWA Unified World Heavyweight Champion, a two-time WWF Intercontinental Champion, a one-time WWF European Champion, and a four-time WWF World Tag Team Champion. He won the 1994 WWF King of the Ring and headlined multiple pay-per-view events for the WWF. His business ventures were primarily centered around his wrestling career, though he also benefited from royalties and merchandise sales.
Hart was widely regarded as one of the best in-ring performers in the WWE; Fox Sports dubbed him a "genius". He went on to be considered one of the greatest professional wrestlers of all time by many industry colleagues.
On September 20, 2021, All Elite Wrestling (AEW) announced the Owen Hart Cup Tournament, in partnership with the Owen Hart Foundation, wherein the winner will receive a trophy called "The Owen". The company also announced production and distribution of original Owen Hart merchandise, action figures and Hart as a character in AEW's console game, AEW Fight Forever.
Social Network
Owen Hart passed away before the widespread use of social media platforms, so he did not have an active presence on these networks. However, his legacy continues to be celebrated by fans and wrestlers alike through various online communities and tributes.
Education
There is limited information available about Owen Hart's formal education. His early life and career were heavily influenced by his family's involvement in the wrestling industry.
