Michael Sidgwick's 10 Favourite Wrestling Matches
4. Bret Hart Vs. Stone Cold Steve Austin - WrestleMania 13
The concept of babyfaces and heels has sustained the wrestling business for close to a century - and yet, it is ridiculous.
Faces are a less intelligent breed, but far superior at wrestling. Heels aren't as good at wrestling - that's why they cheat - but are able to control matches by making referees look like simpletons. Adding to the pervasive stupidity, when a babyface turns heel, they automatically become a more inferior wrestler. So why bother? This dissonance is difficult enough to reconcile - but when wrestlers turn with eye-bleeding frequency, the enterprise itself is compromised.
Bret Hart's 1997 heel turn remains, well over a decade later, the greatest in wrestling history. The beauty was in its reluctance. Hart did not want to turn heel; in clutching his valour to his chest, obsessively, he soured the audience on it. Consequently, Hart didn't start begging off or revelling in gouging eyeballs. In this match - still the best the WWF ever promoted - he modified his existing repertoire to convey the organic development his character was undergoing. Hart maintained his usual, limb-weakening approach - but laid into Austin in a manner more malicious than tactical.
As feral as it was cerebral, it created the two of the most intriguing characters in wrestling history. Episodic wrestling television is dying in 2016 - this altered the landscape and acted as a stand-alone classic in its own right.