10 Greatest In-Ring Promos Of All Time

By 1997, WWF was finally beginning to shed the insipid 'New Generation' tag as it discovered an edgier attitude. However, one man was very clearly left behind. Bret Hart had been a bastion of traditional wrestling values as the face of the flagging company for the past four years, but his wholesome character no longer held water in the changing environs of Monday Night War.

The WWF faithful had started to reject their perennial hero, with the maturing audience tired of cheering the goody two-shoes babyface. In a creative masterstroke, the 'Hitman' took his real life frustrations with the company's direction and transformed them into an angle which straddled a very fine line between fact and fiction. After repeated storyline failures to recapture the WWF world title, Bret finally snapped, calling the company out for constantly "screwing him" in an expletive laden diatribe. The target of his tirade was ambiguous, as Bret seemed to be revealing long-standing grievances with management rather than his own inability.

Subtly outing Vince McMahon as the company's owner, Bret's anger-fueled rant was scarily prescient; just months later, he was famously cheated out of his title in Montreal before his departure for WCW. For many this may have been the start of the 'Attitude Era' - but it was heavily foreshadowed earlier that year.