10 Wrestling Storylines Where Evil Won
1. Shawn Michaels Vs. Bret Hart
People have debated for years who the better wrestler was.
The debate remains as bitter as it ever was: the snug, hermetic strategy of Bret Hart, who really did embody his 'Excellence of Execution' moniker, or the searing melodramatic flash of Shawn Michaels, who did, in fact, stop many a show with his big-bumping thrill rides?
What's more clear is who was the baddie.
Shawn Michaels was the baddie. His problems with addiction complicate the narrative in retrospect, when it's viewed with more maturity. But he was a c*nt to Dax Harwood when he was clean, so...
Shawn Michaels was the man who cultivated a toxic atmosphere. Michaels was the man who dropped a title without doing a job and returned ahead of schedule to confirm that he more likely than not could have gone out on his back. Michaels was the man who questioned Hart's integrity as a husband, and while Hart was in fact a fanny rat by his own admission, you don't out that on national television. Michaels was the man who - setting the events of Montreal into motion - directly told Hart that he wouldn't do what Hart had done, and had said he'd happily do again: the job, clean in the middle.
Michaels wasn't the man who pitched the Screwjob. Out of exasperation (Jim Cornette) and career-minded sabotage (Triple H), this was arrived at independently. But he went along with it, and had the humanity, at least, to cut a despondent figure backstage in a moment of introspection.
There's a wonderfully karmic postscript to all of this - the Tom Magee Holy Grail Vs. Crown Jewel fiasco saw Bret win something of a legacy battle - but evil had taken root for decades.