The ONE WWE Superstar Who Never Lost Clean
OR, how to make it in pro wrestling,
A loss always haunts the spot-obsessed professional wrestling megastar in the rearview.
Whether as a result of encroaching age, political sabotage, or maybe, just maybe, the wild notion that said wrestling megastar might get over it and give back with no compunction, everybody loses.
Bret Hart put his own brother Owen over, clean in the middle, in his top drawing years. On the same night he won back the WWF Championship, in fact, booking his reign before it even started because he was the absolute best.
Hulk Hogan lost "cleanly" to the Ultimate Warrior at WrestleMania VI years earlier, but revisiting that finish with the glare of an ultraviolet light reveals the stain of bullsh*t, for Hogan accentuated the classic c*nt's trick of the 3.01 kick-out by gesturing desperately to the heavens above. It was as if a divine entity had won the match for the Warrior, not Warrior himself. Hogan slammed his hands to the mat in a fury afterwards - the divine entity was black, presumably - but, hero that he was, he pulled himself together to congratulate the winner. This was so magnanimous, in fact, that he left the hero, and not the WWF Champion.
This isn't a cynical reading of the post-match, but Hogan's publicised intent. It was one of few truths revealed in his autobiography. In the years afterwards, he escaped the job by flashbulbs and other assorted chicanery, but Vince McMahon, ruthless, had him lay down under the crushing force of Brock Lesnar's bearhug in August of 2002. It's by the by, but what a perfect finish that was - a symbolic means of showing that even the fans couldn't get Hogan out of that one.
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