10 Major Career-Making Wrestling Matches

This is the one. This match is the textbook example of formally putting over a character to an audience willing to receive him.

As that character, Steve Austin, strutted out to the ring, you could hear the glass shatter. Despite Vince McMahon's premature bellowing - "Listen to this crowd! Listen to this response!" - the subsequent, deafening pop we associate with him did not immediately materialise. McMahon knew the objective, but it had not yet been met. To truly put Austin over as the hero, Bret Hart had to imperceptibly escalate his usual limb-targeting game in such a way that it resonated less as strategy, more as an act of petulant, unsportsmanlike lashing out.

Austin was a man of the people, as was so brilliantly reflected in the match's influential opening melee. He brought the fire, ungluing the crowd. Hart, in response, deprived the people of Austin by relentlessly hammering at his knee. This approach made perfect tactical sense, and played into the wider ambition of the story. The fans were tiring of Hart in the hero role, and Hart thus massaged this notion by using his stale strategy to a cloying, maddening excess designed to get every last Chicagoan as p*ssed off as Austin was. When Hart opened Austin's head, unleashing a torrent of blood, this was the visual cue we needed. Hart was the b*stard technician, Austin the manifestation of never-say-die.

It worked, to a legendary, industry-shaking degree; the sight of Austin bleeding like a stuck pig remains the A to WrestleMania III's 1 as the iconic visual shorthand of the very language upon the great WWE story was written.