"Hildebrand" (Patreon)

"Hildebrand"

By Bruce Mitchell

Originally published December 12, 1998

I remember my father lying in his hospital bed, struggling for breath. I had gotten the call about 2:30 Monday morning. I drove the hour back to Durham to find my mother, my brother, and our minister gathered around the bed watching the oxygen mask bob up and down on his chest, irregular rasps and low whispers the only sounds in the room. Doctors had begun to broach the subject of what to do about the respirator.

By the middle of the next afternoon Dad was chatting amiably with visitors. This was cancer. Cancer transcends expectations.

It started only months before. My father, a year before his retirement from Belk Department Stores, started having liver problems. Basically, he turned yellow.

My parents had raised three children, gotten them college educations and out of the house. They had weathered the storms of three decades of marriage and were getting ready to enjoy the travel and relaxation of retirement. It was wrong that they had to face this just as they were about to enter this new phase of life. Cancer transcends fairness.

First the doctors said it was liver cancer and explained that if several internal organs were removed my father might lead a life of diminished capacity for a few more years. Then they said it wasn't liver cancer, it was oat cell cancer and chemotherapy might get it all. That sounded good. Except he kept getting violently sick because his body couldn't fight off infection. The worst thing I ever saw in the house I grew up in was the sight of the EMTs in the driveway loading my father into the ambulance one Sunday morning while curious, concerned neighbors looked on just hours after he had returned from his first chemo. Then the new oncologist matter of factly told us that the cancer had spread to his brain and radiation treatments were all that were left.

Every time things looked bad, Dad would somehow rally. Every time he would rally, things would go wrong. The doctors said one thing, the doctors said another. Cancer transcends knowledge.

I remember my father on the phone with old friends wishing him well. I remember him when his mind had travelled back forty years and he thought he was single in Atlanta. I remember him asking over and over for pain medicine because he had no sense of time and feeling guilty and foolish because I wouldn't get the doctor. I remember the ritualistic tics and scratching, the repeating of phrases that had lost their meaning.

I remember my mother, angry and confused because the doctors contradicted themselves and nothing made sense. Even now, she sometimes second-guesses herself about impossible choices. I remember my sister heartbroken because her dad was leaving her. I remember my brother, in the midst of a separation, trying to do things the way he thought our father would in the same situation.

I remember coldly watching, trying to cling to a naive notion that where there's life, there's hope - all the while learning the bigger, bitter truth that death defines life. I remember escaping the antiseptic whites of hospital rooms in the seamiest bars I could find, seeking out depravity as a distraction.

But I also remember the people who came from the church, the neighborhood, the stores, his old college, his hometown, who said kind words, cooked food, shared memories, and did big things and little things to help. I remember the two ministers from the church who sang hymns to him and laughingly ignored my jibes of "Hey, Indigo Girls, has he suffered enough?"

Cancer transcends everything but the Peace that Passes all Understanding.

* * * *

Brian Hildebrand is battling inoperable stomach cancer. He is 36 years old, newly wed, and in the last few years achieved his lifelong dream of working for a major wrestling company, becoming the game's best referee during one of the biggest boom periods in wrestling history.

Hildebrand has the singular privilege of earning universal respect from every corner of the business. He was a member as a kid of the Wrestling Fans International Association back when only the most serious of serious fans travelled to the old territories for yearly conventions. A native of Pittsburgh, he started out in the business from Bruno Sammartino's pal Dominic Denucci's school with Troy Martin (now Shane Douglas, ECW Champion) and Mick Foley (he of the Three Faces). He worked up and down the East Coast for no money as manager Mark Curtis, even writing an article about his experience working with the Icon's Icon, the late Bruiser Brody, for a TORCH annual. He trained as a wrestler in the luchador style and used a Technicho Rudo gimmick on independent shows.

He became Jim Cornette's Renfield, his Right Hand in the Last Territory, Smoky Mountain Wrestling. He did everything, travelling through the mountains of Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia four to a car, eight hours a trip, to towns where the meanest coal miners, the worst peckerheads, would spit at you as soon as look at you. He worked in the front office. He put up posters. He refereed. He played the Master Kevin Sullivan's Disciple in video skits. He even worked Battle Royals in a Jushin Liger suit, getting thrown out first because Cornette wanted to make a point about a new style. In his spare time he wrote up booking plans for Cornette to critique. He did all this while working a full-time job at a shoe warehouse. Brian learned the business the way the old-timers did.

This is where I got to know Brian a little. SMW shows ran on the outskirts of North Carolina and were, particularly in the beginning, a welcome alternative to what passed as Sports Entertainment at that time. A long-time friend of mine K.C. O'Connor even got a job with the promotion and butted heads with Brian from time to time.

At first it was a cool place to visit. One night in Johnson City, after Stan Lane lost a "Loser of the Fall Leaves Town" match to the Rock & Roll Express (and I had amused myself by standing next to some teenage girls and claiming that Ricky Morton was going to lose), I remember talking to Brian as he changed shirts and smoked a cigarette. What stuck with me was not the conversation, but the realization that Hildebrand might just have been the best conditioned athlete in the company.

Later, when my caustic criticism of Jim Cornette's bait and switch booking cons and his white racist Gangsta fantasy caused the volatile Cornette to make personal threats against me and when the relationship between Cornette and O'Connor deteriorated into vandalism and civil suits, Hildebrand showed me what kind of person he was.

I never knew what he thought about what I wrote about the promotion, but I imagine it couldn't have been positive, what with Hildebrand being a loyal employee and having to listen to Cornettes rants on the subject. When I foolishly decided I wouldn't be intimidated by Cornette's threats, I went to an SMW TV taping at an Armory in Lenoir, N.C. Hildebrand nodded at me from the ring early on.

As soon as I got home I got a phone call from Cornette, a profanity laced rant detailing what would happen to me if I dared cover another of his shows. The only thing that saved me from Cornette picking a fight that night was that no one told him I was there until the show was over.

A few months later, I went back to an SMW show at the Grady Cole Center in Charlotte. It was the fading days of the promotion. The building and the crowd were both small enough that finding someone would be pretty easy.

I knew if the bitter and stressed out Cornette saw me, he would have created a scene. He made it clear to others he wouldn't hesitate to at least take a shot at me. I wanted to see the show and avoid any trouble so I went up to the balcony. I had on sunglasses and a hat indoors. I knocked down six beers during the show to calm my nerves. I was a complete idiot.

I looked down at the curtain just in time to meet Cornette's eyes. I didn't know if he recognized me. I later learned that Cornette and, tellingly, Buddy Landel started up the stairs before Brian convinced them that it really wasn't me.

Hildebrand was smart enough, and stand up enough, to know that my taking a beating in the middle of a wrestling show from the promoter and a wrestler wasn't good for Jim Cornette, the promotion, or me. When observers said that Brian Hildebrand never lost his perspective in a business where so many others do, I know exactly what that meant.

Smoky finally, mercifully folded. Hildebrand stayed in Tennessee working indies and waiting for his big break. He finally got it, as a referee with World Championship Wrestling.

Everyone knew that Brian didn't make it because he was anyone's Bobo or son, or because he had good dope to share or because he had taken enough steroids or HGH to become a freak.

The truth is, Brian is too small and too old to make it in wrestling. He's 5-6, maybe 140 pounds when he is healthy.

He quickly became the best ref in the Big Three, expressively reacting to everything in the match without taking anything away from the wrestlers. He was always in the right place, whether he was working with fast-paced luchadors, veterans such as Bret Hart, washed-up stars such as Roddy Piper, or complete klutzes such as Mongo McMichael.

So when the news came that Hildebrand's cancer was back, concern came from all sides of what usually is a petty, back-biting, compassionless community. Jim Cornette and Mick Foley visited in the midst of their insane work schedule. E-mails and letters poured in with best wishes.

And WCW honored Brian Hildebrand, and themselves, by dedicating the Knoxville show on Nov. 30 to him.

It wasn't for television, or to prove to the fans some phony notion about charity. It was for Brian.

The show started with Mike Tenay introducing Brian and his wife, who sat at ringside most of the night. He then brought out the rest of the Nitro crew. It must have been the first time Tony Schiavone, Larry Zbyszko, or Bobby Heenan had been at a house show in decades.

Schiavone told the story of how the 140 pound Hildebrand took down a huge drunken fan who jumped into the ring during a live Nitro and held him until security arrived, earning himself the nickname "The Shooter." Heenan did his World's Gentlest Heel schtick, telling Brian if he "made love four times and drank eight glasses of water a day, he'd be cured."

A few matches later Tenay brought out SMW alumni Tim Horner, Les Thatcher, Sandy Scott, Dirty White Boy, and the Dirty White Girl in a rare nod in the modern era to a rival promotion, who even if defunct, was not exactly fondly regarded by WCW. The spirit, if not the body, of Jim Cornette was definitely felt in the old SMW home.

In the back, wrestlers went out of the way to show their concern and affection for Brian, joking and shaking his hand at every opportunity. Fellow referee Charles Robinson worked the first match and then taped the rest of the show as a gift to Brian. After the show the main event wrestlers waited to have their pictures taken with Brian. As in the ring, the attempts to express the unexpressionable were heartbreakingly poignant.

Before the main event, after Arn Anderson told Brian he "was to his part of the business what the Four Horsemen were to theirs," a moment came that brought a chill down my spine. Surprise guest Ric Flair presented a replica of the WCW Title belt, complete with Hildebrand's name on the brass plate, to Brian, relating a story of how when Flair was down about his political situation in WCW, Brian would buck him up by telling him after they left the ring, "Great match, it's an honor working with you."

Then came the main event. Chris Benoit and Dean Malenko versus the should-be WCW tag champs Eddie Guerrero and Chris Jericho - the match Brian never got a chance to ref but always wanted to see. The four worked out the entire match with Brian before the show. Close to 20 minutes of all-out, stiff action - by leaps and bounds the best American match of the year.

But what will stay with me is not this excellent match, but the finish. After a ref bump, Malenko and Benoit locked Jericho and Guerrero in their respective submissions. Then this frail man shook off his impossible burden to leap into the ring with a burst of energy, shooting his index fingers back and forth in his trademark match-ending call. In a campy and totally appropriate moment, Benoit and Malenko then ripped off Hildebrand's shirt to reveal a Horsemen shirt underneath.

In that moment, with that beatific smile, Brian Hildebrand reminded everyone that what matters is not how you die, but how you live.