10 Crippling Times Wrestlers Worked Themselves Into A Shoot

Customary disclaimer to absolve the guilt only criticising a childhood hero can bring forth: Bret Hart was an unadulterated great in that ring.

He sold chest-busting turnbuckle bumps as if nothing could possibly hurt more, and he told in-ring stories that made a show on which Phantasio appeared wholly believable. If you built a sports entertainer from the ground up, he would look like Randy Orton.

If you built a pro wrestler from the ground up, he’d look like Bret Hart.

But Bret simply could not disassociate himself from the profession he gave his life to. Rankled by Shawn Michaels, who drilled at his psyche like a woodpecker, Bret also surveyed the changing WWF direction of 1997 with a moral grimace. To him, it wasn’t wrestling anymore. Wrestling was the preserve of the hero, an ideal for which Hart sacrificed everything. Unwilling to accept the changing paradigm, a legitimately dismayed Hart became distant from Vince McMahon, and, through some fault of his own, irrevocably warped his personal life because his perception of his professional life was antiquated—and, it must be said, a little self-centred. Wrestling is a platform on which to make money, no matter how dirty, no matter how much we as hardcore fans might resent that.

Hart was too bullheaded an artist in a world of commerce.