Putting Bret Harts Character on Trial

[Mustang Sally]

What's the problem with asking WCW what they would offer?

As far as Bret's personal career path goes, there was nothing wrong with it.....especially as it concerned the idea of forcing his current employer to offer him a better deal than he would have gotten without the WCW negotiations.....and that's what happened, right? Whatever led Vince McMahon to suffer brain lock in signing Bret to a contract he soon after deemed unrealistic is something that's locked up in McMahon's head.

Still, I can understand why McMahon might see Bret's talking to WCW as a betrayal. Hart had been with WWE for 13 years and Vince had boosted Bret to career heights he had never known anywhere else......and what does Vince get at contract time? The knowledge Bret had gone straight to WCW to find out what they've got for him.

Again, I'm not saying Bret was disloyal.....I'm just suggesting that Vince might have thought so.

 

[Nature Boy]

We all have our opinions on Montreal and the rights and wrongs of it.

I love Wrestling too much to ever call it fake.

It's what these guys love to do and we love to watch them.

Very few of us on this forum could endure the pain that they all go through.

But come on...

Bret Hart never really won or lost anything!

But in terms of the affect on his character and the perception of a fictional win or loss, it was a horrible way to end his long WWF career.

As far as the Hitman character goes, I always liked him as a Wrestler, though I always found him a little bland.

He couldn't really cut a decent promo and he never really got me excited, even though he had some sensational matches against Curt Hennig, Razor Ramon, Bam Bam Bigelow and the like.

But come 1996/1997 when they booked him as a Heel and he did the anti America promos I thought finally, Bret Hart gets a little salt and grit - I like him!

Bret Hart the man?

He's Human and has his flaws like we all do.

But to allow the "loss" of one fictional belt to affect his subsequent WCW career and result in a decade long depression?

Did Larry Hagman moan for year on end after he was no longer in Dallas?

He also seems to be almost totally self obsessed.

No matter what question he is asked about any Wrestler/Angle/Promotion he always somehow manages to make the answer about himself!

I've never met Bret Hart, and have only ever seen him Wrestle once way back in 1993 so I can't judge and I say all this as a fan.

But those are a few thoughts I have.

 

[Goldie]

Still, I can understand why McMahon might see Bret's talking to WCW as a betrayal. Hart had been with WWE for 13 years and Vince had boosted Bret to career heights he had never known anywhere else......and what does Vince get at contract time? The knowledge Bret had gone straight to WCW to find out what they've got for him.

.

Vince subtley tried to goad Bret into taking the WCW deal... as he knew he couldn't afford to pay Bret the $1.5M a year contract they agreed for him to stay (the WWF offer was half of what WCW initially offered him).
Bret did take the lower WWE offer in 1996.... but it was when he realised that Vince wanted him off the payroll.... it was then he negotiated again with Bischoff in late 1997.

Bret was loyal to Vince at first.... it was when he was pushed into a corner when it came to restructuring (decreasing) his salary that he eventually went back to Bischoff.

Then of course after Montreal- on WWE television Shawn cuts a promo making out that ret was a money-grabber and it was all about Turners money.

 

[MrMojoRisin]

Granted, yet it was Bret who chose to talk to WCW when his WWE contract was near expiration, so the possibility of leaving the place he worked for so many years was originally his idea, not Vince McMahon's.

Still, isn't it interesting to speculate what would have been had Bret not agreed to take McMahon's offer to break his contract and seek employment with WCW? If he stayed in his WWE job according to the terms of his new deal?

If Bret was unenthusiastic with WCW, how would he have been in WWE after forcing McMahon to honor his 20-year deal......even after Vince gave him permission to leave? How would WWE have used him, knowing they were stuck with the contract for another two decades?

Presumably, Vince would have sucked it up and honored the contract ......using Bret as a top star, as he had before.

But who really knows?

You're talking about a year earlier though. Yeah in 96, Bret spoke with WCW and talks got pretty serious. And if he'd decided then to jump to WCW, his mindset would likely have been completely different.

But he'd made his choice to stay with the WWE, and did it in a way that he planned on staying there the rest of his life. So that's the mindset he has a year later when Vince goes to him and tells him to try getting his WCW deal back. He struggles with that, but manages to come to terms with it... only to then leave the place he'd planned on staying the rest of his working life in the shittiest way imaginable for him.

What happens if Bret stays? I'd have to imagine that McMahon, not being the type of guy who likes hearing the word no, or being accepting of any situation he can't control, makes life so miserable for Bret that it possibly ends worse than it actually did. It's really hard to say exactly, but I think it would have been very ugly.

 

[Waylon Mercy]

Really, when it all boiled down to it, Bret would have been miserable either way. He was not a fan of the direction the WWE was headed, in terms of the sexual overtones in story lines. He would not have participated in any material related to that. He probably would have been relegated to the mid card sooner than later, and eventually his character and status in the top tier would have been diminished greatly.
The only good thing I could have seen coming out of Bret staying in the WWE would have been as a mentor to up and coming future stars such as the Rock. He could have done great things in the ring with him. Of course, the sky could have been the limit in terms of feuds with Kurt Angle and Chris Jericho as well. There might have been the potential to tangle more with Stone Cold. Possibly Taker, Kane, and Mick Foley as well.
Regardless, Hart would not have had much stroke with McMahon any more, since Triple H had made his way into his good graces, and then married into the family. I wonder, though - Triple H was a loyal and integral player to McMahon during the Screwjob. Without the Screwjob, would Helmsley have had nearly as much stroke with the boss, or would he have found other ways to ingratiate himself to Vince?

 

[Slash-LN]

"Just there to hand Shawn the belt"

Wherever I heard Bret talk about it, he said that he was waiting his turn to be "the guy" while Hogan was there and then when Hogan was gone it felt like they were grooming "this other guy" to be "the guy" and Bret was just there as the bridge. Like the company never really believed in him but they needed time to build Shawn into the man.

Bret felt like the company never really got behind him as the face of the company but he felt like he had earned it.

I read or saw an interview somewhere that Bret didn't want to lose the title to Shawn in Montreal but was willing to drop it the next night on RAW wherever they were. I don't know if that's true or not but I do remember that story being out there.

I do think Bret has been a very bitter person and I think he does kind of admit that. Or at least has at times.

As far as Bret being rude or uninterested when meeting fans I'd believe that too.

I had that issue with Ric Flair and Rey Mysterio and I had the opposite situation with Disco Inferno where I thought he was nice but people at the same signing thought he was rude. Oddly enough when I met Disco I was wearing a Bret shirt and that's what we talked about.

 

[agentmichaelscarn]

Bret won his first title at a house show. He did win his second title at Mania but he lost earlier in the night and needed Yokozuna to fall on his ass to win. He essentially won dirty. The point being is Bret is the one face in the history of WWE to never have a true "moment". Hogan had plenty, Warrior beat Hogan at WM6, HBK beat Bret at Mania 12 to achieve his boyhood dream, Austin beat HBK at Mania 14, Cena won cleanly at Mania 21, The Rock won cleanly on PPVs many of times, Daniel Bryan won at Mania XXX.

Bret never got anything close to that. His 5 reigns were done at a house show, his 2nd was to Yoko screwing up, his 3rd was after Diesel dismantled him the whole match only for Bret to sneak a pin in, his 4th was a cheap win in a battle royal and his 5th he needed his arch nemesis to use a chair for him to win. He looked weak in every one of them. Yet he never bitched, he continued to make guys look good. He got shot down by Hogan, shot down by Michaels, shot down by Taker(to put over cleanly), yet he kept chugging along. He was asked to be the face of the company yet nobody would put him over properly?

So after years of being a loyal employee, getting screwed over and passed up time and time again, made to look like the weakest face champion in the history of wrestling you are then asked to do a job to somebody when the people before you wouldn't do it to you? What do you expect him to say? Hogan was allowed to lose to who he wanted to, Flair was allowed to lose to his buddy Hennig, Nash was allowed to job to his buddy HBK on the way out, Hall was allowed to skip jobbing to Goldust, yet a 14 year loyal employee didn't get to have a say on who he got to job to? Instead he was forced to lose to the person he hated more than anybody in the world. And you expect him not to be bitter?