Bret Hart Vs. Shawn Michaels Complete History | Wrestling Timelines

October 6, 1997 - Homophobia

Bret and Shawn are set to clash for the belt at Survivor Series, and are once again intertwined in the onscreen narrative. Bret is the champion, but Shawn has had a better time of it, post-SummerSlam. Entrenched in creative, Shawn has just headlined In Your House: Badd Blood 24 hours ago. His Hell In A Cell match opposite the Undertaker, a company first, is phenomenal. Shawn is a red-hot heel who says things nobody else would ever dream of as part of the bratty, sex-obsessed, zeitgeist-grabbing D-Generation X stable. He feels like the wrestler of the ‘90s. Bret, working the masked American ‘Patriot’ in a dull and overlong tag, is doing, to his chagrin, hokey ‘80s-leaning fare.

History and indeed this long-form article will tell you that the Bret Vs. Shawn feud is magnetic, realistic, groundbreaking storytelling. It is, but it’s also pathetic and ugly.

In a verbal volley, Bret uses homophobic slurs to insult Shawn and ‘Triple H’ before vowing to hunt down and beat up DX by the end of the night. He fails.

Bret maintains that the homophobic slant, which clashed with his values, was Shawn and Hunter’s idea. Perhaps this explains how long it takes for him to awkwardly arrive at the wordplay - “I know what the ‘H” in ‘HHH’ stands for…” - but then, Bret’s intense dislike of Playgirl magazine is questionable. Moreover, while it’s quasi-worked, in Bret’s Calgary Sun newspaper column published just before Survivor Series, he refers to Triple H disapprovingly as Shawn’s “boyfriend”.

Bret was never the most composed guy on interviews. In a world where this increasingly matters more than the action, he is becoming an anachronism.

Shawn and Hunter seem to think that Bret is a boring, stammering geek - a barrier for a casual audience thinking the WWF is cool.