Bret Hart Audiobooks

Hitman: the most candid memoir professional wrestling has produced

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.7/5 average

2 listener ratings

Who is Bret Hart?

Wrestling was not a career choice in the Hart house; it was the weather. Bret Sergeant Hart, born in Calgary in 1957, grew up with a father, Stu, who ran Stampede Wrestling and trained fighters in the basement, and he came up through it himself, refereeing from 1976 and wrestling from 1978.

As the Hitman he became one of the defining figures of the World Wrestling Federation in the early nineties, credited with dragging technical, believable wrestling back into a business then dominated by cartoon spectacle. Five WWF championships, two WCW world titles, thirty two belts across five decades: the record is absurd. So is the ending of the WWF chapter, the 1997 Montreal Screwjob, still the most argued about night in the sport’s history.

A concussion ended his career in 1999; he retired formally in 2000 and returned only briefly. He has since become the first wrestler inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame three separate times.

Bret Hart in audiobooks

Hitman is the memoir, and it is a monster: close to twenty five hours, written without a ghostwriter, and drawn from the tape recordings Hart made obsessively throughout his career. That last detail is why the book has the reputation it does. He is not reconstructing the past from memory; he is quoting it.

Hart narrates it himself, which turns a long book into something closer to a confession. The tone is unguarded to the point of discomfort: grief, grudges, the deaths in his family, the Montreal night, all of it delivered flat and without the performer’s gloss. Listeners who have found it here rate it very highly.

You do not need to care about wrestling to be gripped by it, though you may well care about wrestling by the end. Find it below.