10 Wrestlers Who Lost All Passion For The Business
2. Bret Hart
Studded with the odd hidden gem, Bret Hart's WCW run was, broadly, a disaster.
The hottest wrestler on the planet also happened to be the very best, and WCW debuted him as a referee instead of simply waiting and - as a competent booker or storyteller might - ramping up the anticipation ahead of his first appearance.
Sucked into the sh*tty, mandatory vortex of the fading nWo - in a bad, undercard prelim subplot, no less - Hart never recovered. That's not entirely true, actually.
Souled Out 1998 was heavily built around his match with Ric Flair, and it generated a very impressive 380,000 buys. That number dwarfed every other WCW pay-per-view ever, with the exceptions of Halloween Havoc and Starrcade '97. Evidently, there was money to be made with Bret.
WCW, being incompetent, did not make much more; he became an associate of the nWo in 1998, a quickly retconned short-term plan, and spent the summer trading the United States title. Goldberg was far hotter, in WCW's defence, but Hart wasn't compensated with decent creative. His character was unfocused, his matches - which the WCW faithful would have otherwise loved - were dragged down with constant, numbing carny activity.
While Hart, when speaking to Inside The Ropes in October 2019, was adamant that he "did give them 100 percent every night that [he] worked," he also told the Ringer that he wished he'd never left the WWF and, frankly, his body language throughout his tenure told the story.