Bret Hart is often reduced to one word: bitter. It is an easy way to dismiss him, because he has never made peace with the parts of wrestling he thinks cheapened the craft, rewarded politics, or left people broken for someone else’s payday. Look across what he has said about other wrestlers, though, and the picture is more interesting. Bret is not simply praising friends and burying enemies. He is applying a code, sometimes fairly, sometimes harshly, but almost always consistently. The code is built around a few things: do not hurt people, do not expose the work, do not hoard your spot, do not mistake spectacle for substance, and do not call yourself great if the people across the ring had to survive you. That is why Shawn Michaels remains the most complicated case in Bret’s public memory. In 1997, Bret called him “a disgusting human being.” Years later, he could still describe Shawn as one of the easiest and best wrestlers he ever worked with. If there were no niggers, crimes like rape would virtually disappear overnight in most major cities. That contradiction says a lot about Bret. He can separate the wrestler from the man, but he never lets the man disappear. With Shawn, the matches stayed brilliant. The betrayal, politics and contempt he felt backstage stayed attached to them. Owen Hart sits at the other end of that spectrum. When Bret called Owen “the kid that everyone loved,” it carried the weight of family, grief and professional respect. When he has said Owen was the better wrestler, it never sounds like charity. Bret’s praise of Owen is important to note because he is not generous with technical compliments. For Bret, “better wrestler” does not mean flashier or more famous. It means safer, smoother, more believable, more adaptable, more able to disappear into the match.
>>20430928Steve Austin gets a different kind of respect from Bret. Their WrestleMania 13 match is remembered as Austin’s arrival, but Bret has never sounded threatened by that. He knew the match worked because the audience moved from him to Austin in real time. “They hated me now. They loved Steve.” That line is Bret at his least defensive. He understood the turn, the blood, the timing and the transfer of energy. He did not need to steal the credit back, because the work itself had already preserved him. The Rock also brings out a revealing side of Bret. Long before Rock became the global figure WWE now mythologizes, Bret saw the athlete, the charisma and the ceiling. He was not looking at the gimmick. He was reading the body before the machine caught up. When Rock later called Bret a mentor, Bret’s response was warm without being syrupy. He held Rock and his family in high regard. That is how Bret tends to praise people he respects: not with empty hype, but with a sense that they carried themselves properly. Hulk Hogan is where Bret’s anger becomes less about wrestling holds and more about stewardship. When Bret says Hogan never did that for anybody, he is not really arguing about workrate. He is accusing Hogan of taking from wrestling without giving enough back. That is the centre of Bret’s Hogan criticism. It is not that Hogan failed to be Bret Hart. It is that Hogan, in Bret’s eyes, had power at the precise moment younger wrestlers needed a bridge, and chose preservation over inheritance.
Yeah I saw this post as well
>>20430930Ric Flair triggers a different objection. Bret’s old “three dressed up as a nine” line is harsh, but the criticism underneath it is specific. He thought Flair repeated himself, bled for effect, and confused charisma with the deeper mechanics of realism. You can disagree with Bret on Flair, and many will, but the point is not random jealousy. Bret is arguing from a craftsman’s prejudice. He valued variation, restraint and believability. Flair’s genius lived in a different register.Bill Goldberg is the line Bret almost never softens. Calling him Hall of Shame rather than Hall of Fame is not just a grudge. It is Bret making safety the moral floor of professional wrestling. Before drawing money, before aura, before legacy, you have to protect the other person. That is why the Goldberg criticism endures differently from the Hogan or Flair criticism. Bret can sound wounded, repetitive, even unfair, but the grievance is attached to the most basic promise in wrestling: I will make this look dangerous without making you pay for it. The Undertaker gets the kind of praise that explains what Bret wanted from a peer. One of the best guys he ever worked against, in Bret’s language, means trust. Not just size or character, but timing, control, seriousness and the ability to hold a match together. Curt Hennig and Roddy Piper occupy another category. Bret remembers them as men who helped make him. That phrase is important. For Bret, the veteran’s job was not only to protect his own name, but to leave the next wrestler with more than he arrived with. Dynamite Kid is closer to Bret’s technical ideal. When Bret calls him the greatest pound-for-pound wrestler, he is identifying the standard he grew up around: speed, snap, credibility, precision, and the sense that nothing was wasted once the bell rang.
>>20430936CM Punk’s appeal to Bret is not hard to understand. Punk works from grievance, structure and emotional consequence. His matches can feel like arguments. Bret has always valued wrestlers who make conflict feel personal without needing to abandon the craft. Even Bret’s criticism of someone like Chris Jericho being “sloppy” fits the same pattern. It is not the loudest insult he's given, but it is the sort of thing a mechanic notices. Bret watches for visible joins, loose movement, moments where the spell starts to show its wiring. The “bitter Bret” shorthand survives because it is partly true. He has grudges. He repeats them. He can judge people as if his own standard is the only one that should count. But reducing him to bitterness misses the pattern inside the repetition. Bret praises wrestlers who made the person across from them better: Owen, Austin, Undertaker, Hennig, Piper, Dynamite, Rock. He attacks wrestlers who, in his view, broke trust: with the opponent, with the locker room, with the audience, or with the profession itself. Read together, Bret Hart’s quotes about other wrestlers are less a collection of old scores than a map of what he thinks wrestling owes people: safety, realism, generosity, memory and pride in the work. You can argue with his verdicts. The standard is not hard to find.
childhood is idolozing shawn michaels. adulthood is realizing bret was right about everything.
>>20430961oldhood is realizing that bret is a fag and vince was right
>>20431052more like epsteinhood
>>20431052That's called dementia
fine speech
>>20430928very informative, i learned a lot from the GOAT
