WWE star Natalya Neidhart pours her ‘Hart’ into new memoir

Article content

Nattie Neidhart smiles as she prepares to do some late-day media from her West Coast hotel room.

Article content

She’s staring at her phone, grinning widely, the happenings around her temporarily ceasing to exist.

Article content

Article content

“Ohhh, my mom, my mom just sent me a photo,” Neidhart, 43, said on the Zoom call, turning her phone to show her interviewers.” “She’s at the bookstore.”

Neidhart’s screen displays a photo of her mother, Ellie Neidhart, holding a copy of her daughter’s freshly released memoir, The Last Hart Beating, a smile as wide as her daughter’s as she beams over the book.

“Her hair needs some work,” Neidhart joked about her mother, who lives with her and her husband, World Wrestling Entertainment producer TJ Wilson, in their Florida home. “I’m always fluffing her hair up because she and I, we are always working out and sweating.”

Article content

She glances back at her phone, again smiling.

“My mom buying the book is like…” she says with a pause, “that is so sweet.”

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

Play Video

Neidhart’s memoir, which she wrote during a hiatus from her wrestling career as she renegotiated her contract with WWE — where she has worked for nearly two decades — took the Calgary-born Hart family member a year to write.

On this day, Neidhart is, not surprisingly, on the road, prepping to head into one of the busiest stretches of her now iconic career, with wrestling obligations and a book tour that will stop in Kingston and Toronto before moving onto more than a dozen cities over the next several weeks.

Neidhart is used to being the underdog in wrestling, where despite her unrivalled run in WWE, she has only found herself wearing championship gold a few times despite her longevity and reliability.

Article content

Article content

But her opponents this weekend won’t be clad in spandex and wrestling boots, but rather Halloween costumes and baseball jerseys, as Halloween and the current World Series run by the Toronto Blue Jays will compete for audiences in Kingston and Toronto.

“I’m going to bring my Blue Jays jersey,” Neidhart said. “I’m so excited, though, to get back to Toronto and Kingston. I remember when WWE has done shows in Kingston, there’s just amazing people in that city.”

In the ring these days, the normally fan-friendly Neidhart, who still portrays her Natalya character in WWE, has been reinventing herself into a much edgier, grittier and darker persona — to much fanfare and success.

Article content

Much of that shift came as she worked at home, away from the WWE ring, putting pen to paper on her life in the family business.

Granddaughter of the iconic Stu Hart, niece to the legendary Bret ‘The Hitman’ Hart and daughter of WWE Hall of Famer, the late Jim ‘The Anvil’ Neidhart, the two-time WWE women’s champion reflected on her book-writing process in an exclusive interview with Postmedia.

“The first chapter I wrote was Chapter 3,” Neidhart answered when asked where she started with her memoir. “I rearranged the book. It’s the chapter on my dad coming to my kindergarten class for the very first time on his Ninja motorcycle and being late.”

Neidhart has openly admitted throughout her career that she had an at-times complicated relationship with her father, who died in 2018.

Article content

Toward the end of his life, however, the two were closer than ever. In fact, one could fairly assume that writing the chapter on her dad might have proven her toughest in the book-writing journey. But such wasn’t the case, Neidhart said.

“The most difficult chapter to write was the ending,” she said. “It was very hard. I was very stumped on the ending because in wrestling we always say, ‘what’s the finish?’

“What’s the big finish? What’s the finish of the book? What’s the finish of the match? What’s the finish of the promo? It’s funny because I’ve mentioned this before, but (Dwayne) The Rock (Johnson) actually helped me write the ending of my book.”

Along with Johnson, her uncle Bret also contributed to the book, which hit shelves this week. And while many might dig through the book looking for Hart to dish family dirt or delve into the many public happenings the family has endured, including the death of her uncle, Owen Hart, Neidhart said that while she certainly writes about Owen, Bret, her dad and grandfather, the focus of her book is on her — on her journey, her life and her contributions to the industry.

Article content

“We touch a little bit on Owen but, the truth is — and this isn’t any disrespect towards my family or to Owen or to anyone in my family — but I try not to delve too deeply into all of my family’s different stories,” Neidhard said. “We do touch base on it. We do talk about it. I do speak from my heart about it.”

It was impossible not to, she added.

“It’s so easy when you’re when you’re talking about the Hart family,” she said. “Where do I begin? You’ve got Stu Hart, he’s got an incredible story. You’ve got Bret Hart, he’s got an incredible story. You’ve got Owen, he’s got an incredible story.

“But with my book, I said to myself ‘Nattie, don’t forget that this is your story.’ So I tried not to go into a long-winded, big rant on anything with Owen. I do speak from my heart about Owen, what he meant to me, what he means to our family and I really tried to honour him in a very special way. I’m very proud of that.”

Article content

Delving into a past that has been enveloped in pro wrestling since she a toddler, there were a lot of memories and stories to choose from, Neidhart said, but she said her favourite chapter in the book has to be the one in which she writes about travelling with her friend and former WWE star The Great Khali.

“It is so funny,” Neidhart said. “I gave the chapter to (fellow WWE superstar) Liv Morgan to read on a plane. I said ‘Liv, I want you to read this.’ She sat behind me on a flight and she was snorting out loud laughing with tears rolling down her cheeks. She was cry laughing on the flight.”

The Great Khali story, stories about her family, reflections on her life and the lessons she’s learned and now shares are just some of what Neidhart said she packed into her publishing debut.

Article content

“With my book, you’re just going to feel so much, it’s going to make you laugh, cry, feel … heal. And I mean, really everything in between, there’s a very strong love story,” she said.

She knows this because this is what the writing process did for Neidhart herself.

“What I learned about myself is that I really learned to redefine the way that I look at success, and I want people reading the book to really redefine the way that they look at success in their own lives,” she said. “It’s not just a book.”

And you don’t have to be a wrestling fan to be able to enjoy The Last Hart Beating, Neidhart said.

“This book is a very easy read. It’s not just for people who like wrestling. If you don’t know anything about wrestling, if you hate wrestling, whatever your feelings are about professional wrestling, the book is really about finding your own voice,” she said.

Article content

She pointed to her own life, to her own nephews, whom she said she just wants to give them everything in life. But she said she can’t.

“Part of life is figuring it out,” she said. “That’s what makes really strong people. I have two little nephews who I just want to do everything for. I want to just give them everything. I want to give them the sun, the moon and the stars, but I’m like, ‘Nattie, you’ve got to let them figure it out because that’s how they build strong characters.’ I feel like I built this really strong character for myself because I went through a lot to get to where I’m at now and the truth is, it never really gets easier. It never gets easier, but you just get stronger.”

As she put her pen to paper while writing the book, Neidhart said she realized that she had to start looking out for herself.

Article content

“By the time I got to the end of the book, I was like. ‘Why not me? Why can’t I write a book? Why can’t I do this? Why can’t I do a movie? Why can’t I be in a great storyline? Why can’t I win another championship? Why can’t I build a new character? I just started saying why not? Why can’t I?” she said. “And I think everybody should look at themselves in the mirror and say ‘What is it that sets your soul on fire?’ What is it that makes you want to wake up and jump out of bed in the morning and then ask yourself, why not me?”

The Rock and Bret Hart both not only appear in the book, contributing its introduction and foreword, but have been huge inspirations for Neidhart when it came writing it in the first place.

“The first thing you read when you read my book is Bret’s intro and then you read The Rock’s foreword right after that,” Neidhart said. “It’s kind of like a double foreword. They’re both very different though. They’re both really important to the story.”

Article content

The book was transcending for Neidhart, who went into the project as a closer version of her WWE Natalya character: Maybe slightly complacent, abundantly grateful and with the feeling of needing to please everyone else.

But the woman who came out on the other side is a badass. In the process of writing and publishing her memoir, Neidhart found not only herself changing, but her wrestling character as well. She has developed her ‘Lowkey Legend’ persona: A tough, relentless, no-BS badass with a chip on her shoulder.

It took revisiting her own story to bring that side of her out, Neidhart said.

“I love what I do. I’m passionate about what I do. I was not — you can bleep it out — effing around this last year. I got to work. Success isn’t going to come knock on your door and meet you in your bed. That’s the truth,” she said. “I said to myself ‘I’m not going to be a successful person just staying in the house and hoping something great’s going to happen to me.’ If you want success, you’ve got to make it happen. You’ve got to chase it. You’ve got to run after your dreams. You’ve got to chase it down as hard as you can and the truth is, you might fall on your ass, you might fail. You might, but if you don’t chase it, you’ll never know.”

Article content

That was a revelation that she only truly understood as she wrote her story.

“I decided I would rather chase success, chase my dreams, chase stuff that scares me, get outside of my comfort zone and do different things, build different things and I would rather fail at all of it, than not try it.”

Neidhart said she didn’t have to look far for inspiration, pointing to The Rock — her friend and mentor.

“I saw The Rock, he was promoting his new movie, The Smashing Machine, and he was saying he really wanted that role. He did it for himself. You see him in these 100-, 200-, 300-million dollar movies, these huge blockbusters and that’s amazing. Those are awesome, but I love that he, for the first time in his life, stepped into the most vulnerable role of his of his life, where he could potentially win an Oscar, and it was about so much more than the box office for him. It was about fulfilling something personal inside for him,” she said.

Article content

Writing her book and betting on herself, Neidhart said, was no different than The Rock looking inward and taking on his most recent role.

“Imagine if Ben Affleck and Matt Damon didn’t take a chance on making Good Will Hunting,” she said. “Imagine if Jeff Bezos never took a chance to start Amazon. If Vince McMahon never took a chance on starting this thing called WWE. We wouldn’t have what we have here today.

“In the book, I was like, why not me? I will never know the greatness that I could potentially have if I don’t chase it with all of my heart. And so in in doing that, I wrote the book built a new character outside of WWE and just building so many more things, because it’s just all been the book has inspired me to do so much more.”

Imagine if Jim Neidhart and Ellie Hart had never decided to start a family. Undoubtedly, as a proud mother snapped a selfie inside a bookstore with her daughter’s memoir, Ellie Neidhart would say her daughter’s story is far from over, rather it’s just beginning.

Information on The Last Hart Beating, and on book signing dates, can be found online at https://lasthartbeatingbook.com/#events

Jan Murphy is the editor-in-chief of The Kingston Whig-Standard, a diehard wrestling fan and as a public school student declared himself the Excellence of Execution.

Article content