Celebrity tag team Hart, Wilson take on cancer
One is a world famous tough guy, the other a businessman/ philanthropist who was known as the nice guy on a reality TV show. One is always ready with a quip in person or on social media, the other a slow, soft talker who plays his cards close to his chest.
Brett Wilson and Bret Hart, though, insist they have a lot in common. “I shot really high and got a team to the Memorial Cup,” says Hart, the wrestling star and one of the original owners of the Calgary Hitmen hockey team. “He shot really high and almost got himself a Stanley Cup.”
“We’re also born a day apart,” says Wilson, the entrepreneur and philanthropist who has a stake in the NHL’s Nashville Predators. “And neither of us is any good on skates,” he says, with Hart interjecting: “I’d be a good goalie if I laid on my back.”
On Tuesday afternoon, good humour dominates a meeting of the two Calgary-based celebrities who also share something deeply personal and life changing: both have survived bouts with prostate cancer.
So when the newly minted friends were asked to be the faces of a fall fundraising campaign for Calgary’s Prostate Cancer Centre, they said yes without hesitation.
When we chat Tuesday afternoon, they’ve just finished recording videos for the centre’s Keep it in Calgary (keepitincalgary.com) campaign, which launches Oct. 15. The central message is that by donating directly to the centre, the funds will stay local, helping Calgary and southern Alberta men fight a disease that will affect one out of seven of them in their lifetime.
Founded in 1999, the centre is housed in the Southern Alberta Institute of Urology on the grounds of the Rockyview Hospital. Among its many offerings are six rapid access clinics and a Man Van program that travels around southern Alberta providing free, on-the-spot tests to men over the age of 40.
“We’ve helped more than 18,000 men at the centre,” says Linda MacNaughton, the Prostate Cancer Centre’s director of resource and community development. “Our goal is to save lives,” she says of a disease that is very treatable if caught in its early stages. “We’ve been able to make this very much a made-in-Calgary success story.”
MacNaughton is quick to point out that the campaign doesn’t want to discourage people from donating to such worthy causes as Movember, which raises funds for Prostate Cancer Canada. “But so many don’t realize that the funds raised through such campaigns don’t make it to us,” she says. “We are donor funded and don’t get any money from government.”
Despite such challenges, the centre continues to do the great work people like Wilson, who has had two battles with the disease, envisioned in the late 1990s when he and fellow philanthropist, the late Doc Seaman, each put in $5 million of their own money to help get it started.
When Hart was diagnosed in 2016, he discovered that the Prostate Cancer Centre was one of the best facilities in North America. “I decided to get treated in Calgary,” he says, “because doctors in the U.S. had nothing but the best things to say about what we had right here.”
Along with their other many things in common, both Wilson and Hart decided to go public with their prostate cancer fights. Wilson, in fact, was asked to call Hart just before the wrestler went public.
“It was a scary time, it shook me to the core,” says Hart. “Brett helped prepare me for a lot of what was to come.”
Now, the pair hopes to help others.
“We’re both pretty grateful,” says Hart. “We’re two guys who went through it.”
Wilson agrees. “When I had my first bout with prostate cancer, Calgary didn’t have that focus we have now,” he says. “When I had my second bout, I came here. It’s a privilege to help in any way I can.”