10 Reasons Bret Hart Was Better Than Shawn Michaels

5. Hart Was Also The More Accomplished Tag Team Wrestler...

The Rockers/Midnight Rockers are one of the all-time great tag teams in the history of professional wrestling, as are The Hart Foundation. They were two teams that worked two completely different styles, but both teams put on impossibly great matches. The Rockers (Shawn Michaels and Marty Jannetty) were a good-looking pop-star style babyface tag team designed to appeal to the young girls in the audience. With their neon outfits and pretty boy MTV haircuts, Michaels and Jannetty were tailor made for pin-ups, posters and t-shirts. Make no mistake though, those boys could work. The Rockers were two smaller, athletically gifted guys that put in fast-paced and showy performances. In many ways, they served as a template for a lot of later tag teams (in particular Too Cool and The Hardy Boyz) and they dazzled fans and foes alike with their combination of speed, timing and charisma. They are rightly remembered as one of the best teams that the WWE ever had. ...But they never officially held the Tag Team Titles and were not usually featured that heavily on WWF programming. In fact, they weren€™t even the most popular tag team. On the other hand, The Hart Foundation (Bret Hart and Jim €˜The Anvil€™ Neidhart) twice wore tag team gold for protracted periods of time and were considered to be, there or thereabouts, the top of the WWF€™s (extremely well stocked) tag team division for several years. The Hart Foundation was a more traditional, €˜super strong big man/technically gifted little man€™ combination. The received wisdom (which holds, if you re-watch their matches) was that if Hart was a Ferrari, Neidhart was a tank. With the combination of the young and zippy Hitman and the powerful, (and aptly named) Anvil in full effect, The Hart Foundation were absolutely unstoppable. Managed by the legendary Jimmy €˜Mouth of the South€™ Hart and dressed in matching pink unitards, the heat received by this team at the start of their run was white hot. Once the fans turned them baby, WWF management was smart enough to go with the tide of popular opinion, which made the pairing one of the company€™s star attractions. Once again, Bret understood the psychology of tag team wrestling better than Shawn did and, as a quick revision will attest, was also the more accomplished of the two when it came to tag team matchups.