Wrestling promoter remembers ‘The Anvil’ as true professional
By the time Jim “The Anvil” Neidhart came to the North Shore, his days of wrestling in front of soldout arenas were behind him.
Neidhart, who died Monday, is perhaps best remembered as the tag team partner of Brett “The Hitman” Hart and a regular on World Wrestling Federation broadcasts. In his heyday, he was the ultimate heel known for his maniacal laugh, long goatee and bull-shouldered physique.
He would not have looked out of place on a Viking ship, storming the shores of medieval England with a double-edged axe in his hands.
So when he came to Deux Montagnes in 2002, he was banking on the aura he’d built during his glory days in the 1980s and ’90s.
Joseph Fitzmorris had booked him and fellow WWF castoff Jake “The Snake” Roberts for an event at Olympia arena — a 1,000-seat barn that housed local youth hockey teams.
There was only one hitch: the last time Roberts and Neidhart were together at an event, just a few weeks earlier, they’d gotten into a real-life brawl backstage.
“By the time I found out about the backstage fight, it was too late, we’d already booked them,” said Fitzmorris, a pro-wrestler known as the Green Phantom. “So I was freaking out. I had Jake the Snake staying in my parents’ basement and Jim the Anvil had just found out he’d be wrestling Jake and he was just like, ‘Take me to Jake!’
“Here I was thinking they were gonna get into a fight and tear apart my parents’ house, but what else were we going to do? So I took Jim to see Jake and he was all serious for a second.”
Fitzmorris, a wrestler and former high school football player, said he would have been powerless to prevent two of his childhood heroes from settling the score in a North Shore basement. At least, not without calling upon his father — a retired biology teacher — to help pull the hulking men apart.
“But then nothing happened, they just put their beef aside and hung out.”
Fitzmorris had only been promoting events for a few years and anything less than a stellar performance from Neidhart would have been disastrous.
“When he stepped in the ring, he did everything you would want to see from Jim the Anvil,” said Manny Eleftheriou, who wrestled on the card. “And he had to wrestle twice that night because the event was called Tournament of the Icons.”
The event culminated in a match involving Roberts, Neidhart and Fitzmorris’s character the Green Phantom. Roberts applied his signature move, the DDT, on Neidhart and Phantom pinned the fading legend.
Fitzmorris, at the time, was making a go of it as a pro wrestler and he said that Neidhart accepting a loss to the up-and-comer was a sign of his graciousness.
“I’ve booked a lot of wrestling stars over the years and it’s not always easy to deal with them,” Eleftheriou said. “Some guys just come in, pick up their cheque and they want to be left alone. Jim was a true professional and a gentleman.”
After the card, Fitzmorris took the wrestlers to an Italian restaurant his roommate worked at. They sat there with Neidhart, drinking, eating and watching a tape of the matches from earlier that night.
“He took the time to critique our matches and give us advice,” said Eleftheriou, who owns the Montreal-based International Wrestling Syndicate. “We were all doing this crazy hardcore stuff, putting each other through tables and barbed wire and all that.
“And Neidhart respected that, he treated us like colleagues instead of a bunch of dumb kids. I remember him saying, ‘When you get hurt like that you can’t just get back up. You have to sell it, the audience has to believe that you might actually be hurt.’ ”
Fitzmorris recalled the outfit Neidhart sported for their night out: a one-piece leopard-print spandex suit.
“He told me he designed it himself,” said Fitzmorris, who still wrestles as the Green Phantom. “I mean, given what a big tough guy he was I was a bit surprised. He was a cool guy, a really funny guy. He liked to party.”
For Eleftheriou, who said he idolized Neidhart, learning about his death was a real blow.
“To lose someone who is the reason you do what you do, the hurt is deep,” he said. “I’m really sorry for his family and his friends.”
Neidhart was one of the last living members of the Hart Foundation — a stable of wrestlers that included Brett Hart, Hart’s brother Owen, David “Davey Boy” Smith and Brian Pillman.
Brett Hart, the only surviving member, wrote Monday that he was “stunned and saddened” by news of Neidhart’s death.
“I just don’t have the words right now,” Hart wrote, in an Instagram post.
A report from TMZ suggests Neidhart, 63, died after collapsing from an apparent seizure Monday. He was at his Florida home with his wife, Elizabeth, at the time.
Neidhart’s daughter, Natalie Katherine Neidhart-Wilson, is a wrestler in the World Wrestling Entertainment promotion.