1. Bret Was Genuinely The Best There Ever Will Be...
Generally speaking, Michaels was probably the better WWE style wrestler. However, there is more to wrestling than the WWE style. Yes, Shawns work was faster paced, with more high flying. He was also much flashier than Hart. HBK had more charisma, performed more high spots and he sold like nobody else before or since. Even having said that, as a nuts and bolts wrestler, could HBK have been on top in any era and done good business at any time in wrestlings long and storied history? No. I dont think so. In that respect, Bret was better. Much better. Michaels would likely not have been a World Champion in any era other than the one he was born into. A combination of his size, build, prima donna attitude and spot-heavy wrestling style would have worked against him. Today, HBK is remembered at, or around the top of any All Time Greats list and rightly so, but he was born into an era that allowed him a path to prove that he was worthy of such a heady position. On the other hand, Bret Hart had enough old school in his blood to satisfy an army of jaded sports writers, but he was painted in the colours of the new school approach. With the right promotion, he could have been a World Champ in any decade. Bret Hitman Hart was the best all-round wrestler of his generation, barring none. In fact, Michaels is perhaps his only serious competition for the title. Austin (seven years his junior) was a truly great wrestler, but injuries cut short his prime, Brets brother Owen Hart was also superb, but was held down by injuries and the WWF system. Curt Hennig was, well, perfect, but never the marquee name that Hart was. Satoru Sayama, the first Tiger Mask, wrestled with God-given talent and was never less than utterly stupefying, but he was mainly a star in Japan, not the rest of the world. For his part, Dynamite Kid was perhaps the best pound-for-pound wrestler of all time, but he never drew anything like the money Hart did and was never a big name outside of the sport. Rick Rude was a brilliant wrestler and personality, but again, never made it as big as Hart... The same goes for Scott Hall, Jake The Snake Roberts, Jay Youngblood, Jim Neidhart, Vader, Ted DiBiase, The Ultimate warrior and others still, many are true wrestling greats, but none exhibited the complete package to the extent that Bret Hart did. Bret Hart blazed a trail throughout sports entertainment that led him to greatness, before carrying him over a burning bridge towards utter tragedy and abject despair, but he was able to survive it all. Today, with the fence mended between the WWE and The Hitman, a new generation of fans is now able to embrace his legacy and learn why they (rightly) call Bret Hart The Best There Is, The Best There Was and The Best There Ever Will Be. Had Hart not been injured in WCW, it seems likely that he could have buried the hatchet with Vinny Mac much sooner and that Hart and Michaels, egos aside at long last, could have collided in a veterans match that would likely have eclipsed anything served by the company for the next ten, or even twenty, years. If anything, that is the ultimate tragedy of this piece, that Hart and Michaels never got it together enough to truly deliver on the white hot potential generated by two of the very finest of all time duking it out in the ring.
I am a professional author and lifelong comic books/pro wrestling fan. I also work as a journalist as well as writing comic books (I also draw), screenplays, stage plays, songs and prose fiction.
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Latcho Drom,
- CQ
