10 World Champions Who Bombed TWICE

4. Bret Hart

...but his WrestleMania XII (and backstage) rival too.

Bret Hart is rightfully revered as exactly as good as purported to be in his prime, with a body of work rich in quality, detail and nuance. He just wasn't - and this was unfortunately proven a few times over - a zeitgeist professional wrestler in America.

Beloved in Canada and just about everywhere else in the world, Hart as most definitely a foundational figure in WWE's post-Hogan/pre-Austin rebranding, but somebody had to be the reliable top guy in those fallow years and that was he.

Decades removed from the period and it turns out that the whole thing is a neat subversion of the Seymour Skinner meme - it really was the children that were wrong. Awesome then and innately brilliant now as displayed by the wrestlers that worship him, Hart's graft was simply too special for the era it existed in and 'The Hitman' himself too subtle a performer for a United States still looking for one last nibble of Regan-era bombast in their entertainment.