Broadcasters long ago adopted a system, known widely as the “seven-second delay,” to prevent profanity, nudity, or any other offensive material from being heard or seen on live television, which might cause viewers to burn up the phone lines with complaints and threaten a station or network’s license to broadcast. Occasionally, reality does slip through, and the shocking images are hard to erase.
Many cite the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin of President John F. Kennedy (yes, we’ll let the doubts and conspiracy theories linger) as the TV generation’s first onscreen killing. Oswald wasn’t a performer per se, but a major player in a reality drama that began on Friday, November 22, 1963, at 12:30 PM CST in Dallas, Texas. Two days later, at 11:21 AM CST, Oswald the suspect was shot in the stomach, fatally, by a mobbed-up strip club owner named Jacob Leon Rubenstein, a.k.a. Jack Ruby, as Oswald was being led by detectives past cameras in the basement of Dallas Police Headquarters.
Unlike the shooting of JFK, the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald was broadcast live to the nation, and a new era had begun.
I am so healthy that I expect to live on and on!
Nutritionist J. I. Rodale uttered versions of that statement more than once. He used those exact words on June 8, 1971, when he died on the set of The Dick Cavett Show.
Many people recall watching Cavett’s talk show on the night that one of his guests dropped dead mid-interview, a vision providing not only a traumatic, indelible memory but also a living, dying example of the inevitable results of hubris. The man was a health nut! He’d boasted that he was going to live to be a hundred! And then he dropped dead on live television!
Dick Cavett once wrote in the New York Times that he’s approached “about twenty times a year” by “people who are so sure that they saw it that they could pass a polygraph test.” The only problem? “Well, you see, that show never aired.”
Videotape of the most infamous incident of a person dying on a television talk show does exist, but for close to five decades, it has never been made public. It has not shown up on YouTube, Faces of Death movies, or any historical documentaries. The footage is owned by Cavett’s Daphne Productions and has been locked away ever since in the company’s storage facility. Cavett himself has one of the few copies, and he tells us he can rarely bring himself to watch.
“About two years ago, my friend Marshall Brickman and I took a mild drink in his New York apartment before loading the disc,” he says. “We felt the need of something a bit stronger after watching it. The first hour of the ninety minutes is a perfectly good, airable show, with many laughs. The final half hour is hell.”
Cavett’s description was confirmed in late 2018, when we, the authors, were granted a private viewing of the lost episode. The screening revealed that many published accounts of what occurred on the Cavett set that day have not been totally accurate, but although the facts may be at odds with the legend, they are no less impressive or ironic.
Jerome Irving Rodale (né Cohen) had spent more than two decades promoting controversial, nontraditional health and medical advice in his monthly magazines Organic Farming and Gardening and Prevention. He’d remained on the fringe of accepted science and mainstream America until the 1960s, when the counterculture and the “back to the garden” movement led to interest in organic foods and alternative therapies.
This interest led to an in-depth profile of Rodale in the New York Times Magazine on June 6, 1971. For “Guru of the Organic Food Cult,” editor Wade Greene visited Rodale at his sprawling home on the sixty-three-acre Rodale Experiment Organic Farm in Pennsylvania. The article portrayed Rodale as a very funny (his first publishing ventures were humor magazines), semiretired eccentric whose greatest passion was the theater (he’d written thirty-three plays and “seldom misses a Wednesday matinee in New York”) and who was derided by critics as a “crackpot,” although, at seventy-two, he remained “a walking testimonial to his health theories.” The article continued:
J.I., who, I suspect, is practicing comedy at times as well as writing it . . . certainly does go for some exceedingly unconventional things. . . . He thinks and has written at length that wheat is terrible for people, can make them overly aggressive or daffy, and that sugar is worse. “I’m going to live to be 100,” says the author of Natural Health, Sugar and the Criminal Mind, “unless I’m run down by a sugar-crazed taxi driver.”
The New York Times piece was followed two days later by Rodale’s appearance on The Dick Cavett Show. The late-night program on the ABC network was one of several series with that name that would be hosted by the erudite, witty former comedian over the next half-century. This version premiered on December 29, 1969, and survived five years as an offbeat, intellectual alternative to The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. The ninety-minute format was similar to Carson’s, with a studio audience and opening monologue followed by a comedy segment and interviews with entertainers and newsmakers of the day. Unlike today’s heavily produced late night shows that exist mainly to promote products, Cavett’s show provided a forum for conversation about ideas.
The set of The Dick Cavett Show at ABC studios on Manhattan’s Upper West Side was the same one used for ABC’s Wide World of Sports broadcast on weekends. Significantly, there was no host desk or couch on which guests could slide over. Everyone, including the host, sat in leather swivel chairs on an orange shag carpet.
Along with J. I. Rodale, the guests on the show recorded on Tuesday, June 8, 1971, included humorist Marshall Efron (who appeared in a cooking segment tied to the imminent White House nuptials of Richard Nixon’s daughter Tricia), prominent paleozoologist Elwyn Simons (who brought along some cute monkeys), and New York Post columnist Pete Hamill.
After the introduction, with music by drummer Bobby Rosengarden and the orchestra, Cavett’s monologue focused on current events, including the final episode of The Ed Sullivan Show two nights earlier, and a strike by New York City municipal workers who, as a protest, left dozens of city drawbridges in the raised position.
“It’s a wonderful city to live in, if we’re attacked by Mongol hordes,” Cavett observed, to some laughter. “. . . What else should I mention? Oh, there’s one other thing. So, Sophia Loren—can you verify this?—has adopted a baby girl in the paper today. That’s the truth. Now, she already has a baby, right? So she now has two babies at once, which the Italian government has hailed as maximum use of natural resources.”
J. I. Rodale appeared after the Efron and Simons segments. Cavett introduced him as “an unusual man with a lot of opinions, which the United States Department of Agriculture, to mention one, doesn’t necessarily agree with.” Rodale walked on as Rosengarden’s band played “Doin’ What Comes Naturally.”
Cavett recalls, quite accurately, that Rodale was “a slight man, and looked like Leon Trotsky with the little goatee.” Rodale began the interview by correcting Cavett’s pronunciation of his name.
“The accent, second syllable.”
“Rodale,” Cavett repeated. “Have a chair.”
“It’s, uh, accented on the first syllable. Ro-dale.”
“First syllable.”
“Don’t call me Raw Deal.”
And so began three segments and twenty-five minutes of entertaining and informative conversation.
“Organic gardening is using natural fertilizers, like manure,” Rodale explained. “I should say, animal manure. Manure is an all-comprehensive term.”
“Oh, is it?”
“Yes, technically even a leaf is manure.”
“Huh,” Cavett replied, thoughtfully. “. . . You started this years ago. They talk about this, people who believe in it, as a movement that’s time has come.”
“It started thirty years ago.”
“And people thought you were a crackpot then, and now a lot of people practice this.”
“‘Crackpot’ is mild,” Rodale said. “They called me ‘manure worshipers’—”
That got a laugh. So did Rodale’s admission that he was dragging out his explanations, “so you’ll call me back again. We don’t want to cover too much ground.”
“Oh, you don’t have to worry,” Cavett assured him. “I want to cover ground, because I know that you have acres and acres of it.”
“I have acres and acres of ground, but it’s organic ground!”
Cavett threw to a commercial break. He recalls, “Rodale was so good and so amusing that I had made a mental note to have him back.”
In the next segment, Rodale extolled the wonders not only of organic foods but also of bone meal supplements. The conversation went on from there:
DICK CAVETT: How old are you? Do you mind my asking?
J. I. RODALE: I will be seventy-three in August. Now, I am so healthy that I uh, expect to live on and on. I have no aches or pains. I’m full of energy. If you want me to do a—not a flip, but—
DICK CAVETT: No.
J. I. RODALE: —kicking my heels up! Not this time, the next time.
(AUDIENCE laughter)
DICK CAVETT: All right.
J. I. RODALE: I want to get to know you first.
DICK CAVETT: Oh, you don’t kick your heels up for just anybody?
J. I. RODALE: For strangers, no. . . . Now, after a few years on bone meal, my bones were so strong, that one night I fell down a whole flight of steps—
DICK CAVETT: Just to test them?
J. I. RODALE: I laughed all the way. I laughed all the way down, ’cause I knew. I knew, that I had been taking bone meal and that nothing could happen to me. And nothing did. And I enjoyed the ride.
The audience laughed, and they laughed and applauded when Rodale talked about the dangers of sugar and wheat, and the importance of protein.
In the third segment, Rodale pulled out props: asparagus spears. He convinced Cavett to take a bite.
“It’s all washed,” Rodale promised. “All the earthworms are out.”
Legend has it that Cavett took a bite of asparagus that had been boiled in urine. That was not the case. Though grown in manure, the vegetable was raw.
“You see, when you eat a piece of raw asparagus, you are getting all the enzymes,” Rodale explained. While the audience laughed at Cavett’s tentative chewing, he added: “You have just tasted the enzymes. Now, when you cook something, all the enzymes are destroyed.”
There was a raised eyebrow from the host when Rodale suggested that eating cooked food could lead to cancer. “In cancerous tissues, the results are always a lack of enzymes.”
Cavett upped the raised-eyebrow ante when he asked about the claim in the Times article that each day Rodale sat under a machine that sent short-wave beams through his body.
“The whole body runs on electricity,” Rodale posited. “. . . But as you get older, some of the electricity drains out. And I know that when I reached the age of about seventy, I got a little tired here and there. So by taking these electric treatments, it gives me more electrical energy.”
After he whipped out and cracked open a large, hard-boiled goose egg, it was time for another break. When The Dick Cavett Show returned, Rodale was in mid-conversation with the host, explaining that when he ate cooked asparagus “it gave a flavor to the urine that you could smell. Many of you know that. But when I ate raw asparagus, there was no such smell. You see, I’m always clinical this way, I’m willing to undress in public if it’ll help you.”
That may have given birth to the mash-up of memories that erroneously had Cavett chomping urine-boiled asparagus. In real time, it was a cue to bring out Pete Hamill.
When Hamill made his entrance, every inch the suave 1970s reporter with his Broadway Joe sideburns, electric blue sports jacket, and rectangular glasses, Rodale moved to the swivel chair to his right. Hamill got down to business, talking about New York politics that led workers to open drawbridges in protest.
It was three and a half minutes into the conversation. Hamill was talking about Governor Nelson Rockefeller when he was interrupted.
“The basis of his power and the basis of his continuing allegiance is in the Republican party, which in this state is basically a party of big business and homeowners,” Hamill stated. “So that two people that run the state legislature here are a fisherman—”
At this point, J. I. Rodale let out a rude, gurgling snore.
“. . . uh, fish salesman from—”
Audience members laughed. Hamill stopped short.
Rodale was now on camera, head tilted back. He continued to snore.
Various retellings of this story have Cavett inquiring, “Are we boring you, Mr. Rodale?” and Hamill leaning in and whispering, “This is bad.” In reality, the two men stopped and looked at Rodale with immediate concern. And though there were titters from the crowd, there was alarm on the orange shag carpet.
“You all right?” Cavett asked the snoring, unconscious man. He turned to Hamill. “I don’t know, I don’t know.” Then he looked past him. “Mr. Rodale?”
Rodale responded with a snore. A wave of laughter rolled across the studio audience. Not from Cavett. “I think we better do it.”
“Do you have a commercial?” Hamill muttered.
“Mr. Rodale, are you all right?”
Rodale responded with a slurping snore, which continued under Cavett’s stream-of-consciousness statements. “Maybe we should get a doctor. I don’t know . . . Does he have a relative with him? No?”
J. I. Rodale’s death-rattle snore ceased. He remained stretched out on the leather swivel chair, head back, mouth open.
“Check— Get a doctor,” Cavett called out. “Do you have, do you have a doc— Does anyone know, is there a doctor here? Is there a doctor here?”
Cavett later said he paused deliberately and chose his words when asking about a doctor. Had he said, Is there a doctor in the house? he would have gotten a laugh. By this point, however, the seriousness was clear. The audience was silent.
“Is there a doctor here?” one of the studio crew repeated, loudly.
Someone called out, “Get an ambulance!”
“Yeah, can you?” Cavett replied. “What do we have for emergency?”
A crew member: “An ambulance is on the way.”
“Who is?”
“An ambulance was called.”
“Does he have epilepsy or anything?” Cavett asked. “Get the ox— Can you get the oxygen unit?”
“Yes.”
“Get the oxygen unit.”
Another stagehand: “Call the fire department!”
“Jesus,” Dick Cavett muttered.
The video segment ends with the crew sending someone to the firehouse across the street, while Cavett asks who knows how to use the oxygen unit kept in the studio for emergencies. The stage lights are dimmed. The picture fades to black.
Meanwhile, the drama continued. Two doctors, an internist, and an orthopedic surgeon rushed from their seats to the stage. They loosened Rodale’s tie and pants, laid him flat on the floor, and administered CPR and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
“Naturally, it was assumed that this was somehow part of the show, and then the assurance that it wasn’t drifted like a wave, backwards through the audience. People began to cry,” Cavett recalls. “As often happens, a vivid and inappropriately amusing image remains: a short cameraman struggling to remain on his toes in order to look down into his tilted camera to focus on Rodale, lying on the floor.”
Dick Cavett also reveals a more unsettling memory. “The studio had oxygen equipment, but it didn’t work. I try not to think about that.”
Pete Hamill took out his reporter’s notebook and calmly and professionally took notes for the next day’s column. The ambulance attendants arrived to take Rodale to Roosevelt Hospital, though in Cavett’s words “he was the ghastly pale of a plumber’s candle.
“Poor Rodale was DOA at the hospital,” he tells us. “Someone said that he had spent most of his life with a damaged heart and was not supposed to live beyond his youth. An apparent tribute to his health practices?”
J. I. Rodale would not live to be a hundred, after all. He would not live on and on; he would not make it to seventy-three. The snores were his death rattle. Most agree he was dead in the chair.
Death was attributed to a heart attack. A unique theory as to what triggered it came from Marshall Efron, the humorist from the Nixon wedding–themed cooking segment. He watched the Rodale tragedy unfold in a monitor in the greenroom and told the Realist a few days later that the “health nut” should never have entered a television studio, because overhead steel beams and the insulated stage floor would sap the electricity that he’d zapped into his body every day. Even worse, “TV cameras and microphones were already draining his body electricity. No wonder he expired. I told that to people and they asked me, ‘Do you believe that?’ Of course, it doesn’t make any difference what I believe; he believed it.”
“Who would the gods have die on a talk show but a health expert?” Cavett asked more than once in the decades to follow. Time and again, he’s explained that although he described the incident in his opening monologue on the show that aired the following evening, and Hamill wrote about it in his newspaper column, the only ones who witnessed the death of J. I. Rodale were those in the studio. (A repeat episode from the previous April Fool’s Day, featuring Jack Benny, Phil Silvers, Jane Asher, and Fats Domino, aired instead that night.)
“That was a live death on camera—we weren’t live, obviously,” Cavett says. “The show didn’t air. I must have described it so brilliantly.”
The day after J. I. Rodale died, with the incident “on the news and in the papers,” Cavett made a phone call. “I called Johnny Carson to ask how in hell you do the next night’s show. He said, ‘It’s no damn fun, Richard. You walk out and calmly relate the story of what happened. Then, mercifully, there’s a commercial break and after that, to your surprise, you feel sort of cleansed and are able to go on and do a show. Before long it’s fun and games again.’
“He was right, and I thanked him. It was the first conversation between us that had contained no humor. And then the wonderful, sadness-relieving Carson irreverence: ‘Oh, one other pointer, Richard. When telling the story, try not to get more than, say, two big laughs’—followed by a quick hang-up.”
Of all the on-camera deaths in television news, few if any were as big a shock to the system, or as mysterious, as that of Christine Chubbuck, host of Suncoast Digest, the morning talk show on Channel 40, WXLT-TV in Sarasota, Florida.
On the morning of July 15, 1974, the attractive, twenty-nine-year-old brunette had a change-up for the crew. She wanted to add a news report near the top of the 9:30 AM broadcast, something that hadn’t been done before.
The big story that Monday morning was out of Washington, DC, where seven hostages who’d been held in a basement cell block by armed convicts escaped after an elevator key was smuggled in a box of sanitary napkins. Chubbuck, though, wanted to run a taped package on a shooting at a local restaurant the previous day.
The show went on as usual until eight minutes in, when Chubbuck introduced the news package. The tape jammed. The package didn’t run.
Ever the pro, Christine Chubbuck turned to the camera, very nonchalantly, and said, “In keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing you the latest in blood and guts, and in living color, you are going to see another first,” and, looking straight into the camera, stated, “an attempted suicide.”
She then pulled out a .38 caliber revolver from a bag of puppets she kept under the anchor desk and shot herself behind the right ear. Smoke puffed from the gun and her hair flew up around her face, which contorted as she fell forward violently against the desk, before slipping out of camera range.
The screen faded quickly to black. Viewers responded. Some called the station, others police, not sure if this was a bad joke, a performance—or an actual suicide on camera.
It was after the anchorwoman was taken to Sarasota Memorial Hospital that news director Mike Simmons got a closer look at the papers she was reading at the desk. The papers included a follow-up story written by Chubbuck: “TV 40 news personality Christine Chubbuck shot herself in a live broadcast this morning on a Channel 40 talk program. She was rushed to Sarasota Memorial Hospital, where she remains in critical condition.”
Christine Chubbuck was indeed in very critical condition. She’d suffered irreparable brain damage, and she died on Tuesday. The station’s master tape was seized by police as evidence and reportedly was destroyed.
The suicide received minimal coverage on network news, the facts recited much as Chubbuck had written. It has since been cited as an inspiration for Paddy Chayefsky’s Oscar-winning screenplay for Network, the 1976 film about the “as mad as hell” news anchorman, but whether the suicide was in fact a protest against the “if it bleeds it leads” philosophy of local television news was never clear. (Chubbuck’s family members said she was extremely depressed in the weeks leading up to her death and had been under psychiatric care.)
Three years after the suicide, news director Simmons told the Associated Press, “There hasn’t really been any changes, not as far as the station goes. That incident didn’t happen because of our editorial policy. We had just been through a particularly violent week, with a kidnaping-and-hostage situation, a shootout between some cops and someone else, and these had bumped a couple of her feature stories. But the crux of the situation was that she was a twenty-nine-year-old-girl who wanted to be married and who wasn’t.” Suncoast Digest was still on the air, and there had been two successor anchorwomen, both young and single.
In the decades that followed the suicide, video of the shooting never surfaced. Two separate films about the death of Christine Chubbuck premiered at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival. In June of that year, it was reported that Mollie Nelson, widow of WXLT-TV’s former owner, did have a copy of the suicide tape. She said she gave the video to a “very large law firm” for safekeeping and had no plans to show it.
Deaths of athletes on the playing field, in the arena, in the ring, or on the pitch are far too numerous to list, and athletes in many sports, like bullfighters or boxers, can’t be counted among performers who die unexpectedly onstage, because death is in the cards every time they step up to compete. Even professional wrestlers, who straddle that fine line of show business with their comic book personas, scripted matches, and choreographed movements, are athletes who put their bodies at risk with every piledriver, clothesline, and body slam.
Yet, there is no ignoring the World Wrestling Federation star who made the biggest impact of all—in more ways than one—while the television cameras rolled. Owen Hart is considered to be one of the greatest professional wrestlers of all time. He certainly was one of most charismatic and entertaining wrestlers of the 1990s, and it was in his role as entertainer, making an entrance to the ring, that he made his exit—not as an athlete but as a consummate performer.
Born in Calgary, Alberta, to a wrestling family in 1965, Owen Hart began his career in Canada on his father Stu Hart’s Stampede Wrestling circuit. He went on to tour Japan and ultimately became a superstar with the World Wrestling Federation, the world’s premier professional wrestling show.
On May 23, 1999, Owen Hart was one of the stars of the WWF’s Over the Edge pay-per-view event at Kemper Arena, a 19,500-seat venue in Kansas City, Missouri. This was a wrestling spectacular, and all the WWF’s biggest stars, including the Rock, Triple H, Steve Austin, and the Big Boss Man, were there.
Now, it should be mentioned again that for all the drama and real-life brutality they contain, WWF wrestling matches were not legitimate sporting events but choreographed, scripted playlets. For an event of this magnitude, the WWF scriptwriters wanted to ensure that Hart made a spectacular entrance that not only demonstrated his comedic skills but also kicked off a very serious battle between good and evil.
His scheduled opponent was WWF Intercontinental champion the Godfather. The Godfather character was played by African American wrestler Charles Wright as a hulking “pimp daddy” who’d often enter the ring surrounded by “hoes”—usually women from local strip clubs—whom he’d offer to an opponent in exchange for forfeiting the match. The Godfather was the “evil.”
For his part, Hart had resurrected his character, the Blue Blazer, a spoof superhero in electric blue tights, a feather-lined cape, and a blue, silver, and red face mask. The Blue Blazer would make his entrance as an actual superhero might—descending into the ring from high in the rafters of the arena.
He wouldn’t actually fly, of course. The script called for him to be lowered on a grapple line connected by a harness. Attached to the harness would be midget wrestler Max Mini, wearing an identical Blue Blazer costume. When Hart was a few feet above the ring, he’d drop Max Mini, pretend to become entangled in the line, then release himself and fall flat on his face in the ring. The Godfather would proceed to beat the daylights out of him. The Blue Blazer would recover, turn the tables, and take the title. “Good” would prevail.
Owen Hart had run into difficulties when he carried out a version of this superhero entrance at a WWF Sunday Night Heat event in 1998. After he descended toward the ring, the release clip on the safety harness took too long to disengage, leaving him hanging a few feet off the floor outside the ring. While he fumbled and twisted in the air, his opponent stepped out of the ring and kicked and punched at him like he was a piñata. The scene was ridiculous enough, but it was agreed that the long delay didn’t make for good television. The WWF brass insisted that Owen Hart needed to separate himself from the cable much more quickly.
A rigger from Orlando, Florida, was hired to coordinate the stunt. Bobby Talbert had worked on a similar drop of the wrestler Sting of the rival World Championship Wrestling organization. Talbert’s solution was simple. This time, the harness would be attached to the line with a nautical clip—a hair-trigger, instant-release mechanism designed for use on a sailboat mast. Hart would just have to give it a touch and he’d fall from the rappelling line.
Several stunt coordinators allegedly refused to test the new method, saying it was “crazy,” but despite the reservations, Talbert and his assistants moved forward with the complicated rigging high above the arena floor. They supposedly performed two tests with a 250-pound sandbag. Meanwhile, Hart was very nervous about the entire stunt and refused to carry another stuntman on the way down. The fact that Max Mini didn’t speak English and was in need of a translator to explain the dangers of hitting that nautical clip too early led to the scrapping of the double drop.
Owen Hart did a solo rehearsal at 3:30 PM. The drop worked well enough, but he forgot to pull the release cord and moved around the ring with the line still attached. He said he realized his mistake and would get it right when it counted.
Showtime for Owen Hart was forty minutes into the Over the Edge event. He was positioned, along with Talbert and his assistants, on a catwalk just under the eighty-five-foot-high roof of the arena, above the southwest corner of the ring. He was fitted with the harness and release cord that, when pulled, would open the nautical clip and free him from the rappel line.
The house lights dimmed. Owen Hart climbed over a four-foot railing. Talbert checked the tension of the line by dangling the wrestler a few feet beneath the catwalk. A forty-second video profile of the Blue Blazer began to play on the giant TitanTron screen below. While the referee cleared debris from the ring following the last match, Hart let go of the catwalk railing, placed his hands on his harness, and dangled, suspended, waiting to be lowered.
He extended his elbows to adjust the cape that was attached to his hands by elastic bands and kept getting in his way. Then there was the sound of a snap.
The nautical clip had somehow released prematurely. Owen Hart plunged toward the wrestling ring. His 229-pound body dropped seventy-eight feet before slamming chest-first on the top rope of the ring. Hart flipped backwards, landed on his back in the ring, and bounced a foot off the canvas. His arms continued to bounce on the springy floor of the ring before settling.
The crowd, not realizing what it was witnessing, cheered. A fan in the stands offered testimony on an Internet forum:
Since it was my first pay-per-view, I was anxiously looking around the arena, rather than watching the boring pre-taped promo on the TitanTron. As I was looking around, I noticed something blue out of the corner of my eye. I quickly looked over and saw the Blue Blazer’s body falling to the ring. He didn’t kick his legs or flail his arms. He didn’t scream or make any sound. It looked as if it was just a stiff lifeless mannequin that was dropped as a stunt.
Most people in attendance actually thought it was a dummy at first, which caused a lot of laughs and confusion in the audience until everyone saw the EMTs rushing to the ring. Then everyone gasped and there was an eerie silence.
Wrestlers and WWF commentators climbed into the ring, cut off Hart’s tight facemask, and saw immediately that he wasn’t breathing. Within minutes, his skin turned ashen grey. There were no vital signs. His eyes remained open, staring at nothing. Emergency personnel attended to him. His fellow wrestlers called out encouraging words as he was loaded into an ambulance.
Owen Hart was transported to Truman Medical Center, but there was no chance. The impact had severed his aorta, filling his lungs with blood and killing him. Owen Hart was thirty-four.
As the fan reported, the fall took place while a video was being projected, so it wasn’t seen on the WWF pay-per-view special, which went on as scheduled. Wrestling commentator Jim Ross announced Hart’s death to the pay-per-view audience, but nothing was said in the arena.
The day after the tragedy, the WWF celebrated the fallen star on its weekly RAW program. Wrestler Mark Henry read a poem in Owen Hart’s honor, which included the following lines:
When Owen left, it felt like hands across my throat . . .
My heart is heavy, this is why you get the burn when you cry.
It digs down deep, you cannot sleep.
You toss and turn in your sheets.
Awaken with sobs and wet pillowcases.
You wander aimlessly, looking to the sky.
The event was never released on home video like other WWF spectaculars, but fifteen years later, Over the Edge 1999 was aired on the new streaming WWE network (the World Wrestling Federation had been rebranded World Wrestling Entertainment in 2002, after a lawsuit from the World Wildlife Fund). All footage of Owen Hart was cut from the show, which was preceded by a photo tribute and the words:
In Memory of Owen Hart May 7, 1965–May 23, 1999
who accidentally passed away during this broadcast.
WWE officials claimed the only copy of the video of the tragedy remained locked away in its headquarters, never to be shown.