No one is quite certain how it happened. Some believe that part of the colourful feathered costume Owen Hart was wearing may have snagged and prematurely triggered the release mechanism attaching him to the cable which was lowering him into the ring. Another body of thought has it that Hart may have panicked and accidentally pulled the rip-cord himself.

In either case, it happened. One minute the Blue Blazer was descending from the rafters of Kansas City's Kemper Auditorium and the next he was in free-fall. Tumbling from a height of 70 feet above ringside, he landed head-first on a turnbuckle in the corner of the ring with a sickening splat.

Although paramedics rushed to attend him, it seems clear enough that the 34-year-old Canadian died almost instantly. Fifteen minutes later it was announced to the crowd, as well as to a television audience estimated at 400,000 watching on USA cable, that Hart was dead.

During that brief interval, Vincent K McMahon, the presiding majordomo of the World Wrestling Federation, had summoned the other wrestlers on the show - which was, ironically enough, entitled Over the Edge. Having rapidly calculated in his head what 18,000 refunded tickets might cost him (and consulted, no doubt, with his lawyers about what rebates the US network might be in a position to demand), McMahon conducted a brief interface with his cast in which he told them that while he understood how they were probably feeling at that moment, after a moment of tribute, the show would go on. Anyone who felt as if he could not perform that night was welcome to step aside - but, of course, anyone who didn't wrestle would not be paid.

Unsurprisingly, the entire cast - including a gruesome character known as "The Undertaker" - agreed to wrestle that night.

When it was announced to the audience that Hart had been pronounced dead, a few parents clutching their children sensibly exited the building. But most of the crowd stayed.

Hart differed from most of his WWF brethren in that he actually had a wrestling pedigree. Whereas the common pro wrestling formula involves finding a menacingly large (and presumably attractive) man, pumping him full of steroids while he is learning how to perform the full-pretzel and helicopter moves, schooling him briefly in the mechanics of spilling fake blood, draping him in a suitably outrageous costume and, voila! - instant super-hero.

Hart, though, was the son of Stu Hart, who wrestled in the Olympics for Canada. All seven of Stu Hart's sons became professional wrestlers, but, said Owen's brother Bret, "we're westlers. I was never a stunt-man, and my brother Owen was never a stunt-man. He never should have been put in a situation where he was up on top of the ceiling of an arena to go into the ring."

"Frankly," echoed sister Ellie Hart, "wrestling was getting so far out and my poor brother Owen was a sacrifice to the ratings."

One night a decade or more ago I sat in a Las Vegas cocktail lounge with Sugar Ray Leonard's lawyer Mike Trainer. This would have been during one of Leonard's many comebacks, and for this one Trainer had engaged Titan Sports, the parent company of the WWF, to oversee the pay-per-view television distribution. Titan, Trainer was explaining to me, was at the cutting-edge of revenue-producing television technology, and light-years ahead of its competition.

"Don King and Bob Arum and the rest of them ought to pray that Vince McMahon never gets interested in boxing," I remember Trainer telling me that night, "because if he ever did, he'd put 'em all out of business!"

Apart from hiring Mike Tyson as an "enforcer" on one of his Wrestlemania shows (during the period Tyson's boxing licence had been suspended for chewing on Evander Holyfield's ears), McMahon never made any serious inroads into boxing. He was too busy making money at his own game. On the other hand, it can be argued that certain boxers, from Hector Camacho and Vinny Pazienza in this country to Chris Eubank and now Naseem Hamed on the other side of the Atlantic, have borrowed heavily on the WWF formula of flash, glitz and glitter.

Combining elements (the worst elements, some would say) of rock concerts, costume drama, and sport, McMahon has fashioned a world that has been described as "soap opera for men," replete with story-lines, subplots, and even love triangles.

That this ever-evolving process was a recipe for eventual disaster should have been evident. By continually over-reaching itself to be more outrageous than in the past, the WWF show became, almost by definition, more and more dangerous.

A night after ruling that the show must go on in Kansas City, McMahon staged another televised show in St Louis. This one had been christened "Raw is War," and it featured the usual cast of huge, muscular men in neon tights, albeit this time with tears in their eyes. McMahon had hastily revamped Monday's performance as a "tribute" to Owen Hart, and as far as we have been able to determine, the promoter's sole concession to decency was to excuse Bret Hart from performing on the day after his brother had plummeted to his death.

"Our thoughts and prayers are with Owen's family. We have to be strong for Owen; he was an extraordinary human being and consummate performer. The highest tribute that we can pay is to go on entertaining the fans he loved so much," read a statement released in Vince McMahon's name. "Tonight's show will be dedicated to the memory of Owen Hart, a beloved member of the World Wrestling Federation family."

Many wrestlers wept openly as the tributes for Hart began, and so did some of the 19,000 fans at the sold-out Kiel Centre. The wrestlers wore black armbands with Hart's initials on them. The crowd chanted, "Owen! Owen!"

In response to increasing criticism over his seemingly cavalier attitude to life and death this week, McMahon did say that WWF wrestlers will stop performing the aerial move that killed Hart, but that other stunts will continue. The WWF has sensibly scrapped earlier plans to replay Sunday's event on pay-per-view TV, and postponed some live events, including several in Hart's native Canada.

All of which is of little comfort to Martha Hart, Owen's widow.

"When you're asked to do some ridiculous stunt from 90 feet in the air, the least they could do is consider safety first before ratings, or how it looks to the crowd," she said this week. "I'm a widow at 32, and I have two children that are fatherless now. It's very hard for all of us."

Requiescat in pace, Blue Blazer . . .