Wrestlers With The Most World Titles (Across All Major Federations)

5 WWE Championships

2 WCW Championships

Among WWE's era-defining stars, Bret Hart is the odd man out. He didn't have the extravagant personality of The Rock or Steve Austin, he didn't fit the superhero mold like Hulk Hogan or John Cena. What he was was a wrestling genius, and that's what he relied on to reach the pinnacle: perfectly executed moves, realistic selling, unpredictable finishing sequences.

Bret's road to success was ironically formulaic for someone whose in-ring style was so not. He first started as a tag team wrestler in the Hart Foundation alongside Jim Neidhart, winning the tag team gold twice, after which he captured the Intercontinental title twice in 1991 and 1992, proving his worth as a solo competitor, and got his hands on the WWF title in late '92 by defeating Ric Flair on a house show in Saskatoon, Canada (a match which was thankfully recorded).

He would go on to win multiple world titles, main-event WrestleMania twice (three if you count the 9th edition) and become the first face of the WWE of the post-Hogan era. Bret Hart set a template for smaller-sized, more technical wrestlers to make it as main-event players. There was pioneers like Jimmy Snuka, Ricky Steamboat or Randy Savage, but none of them wrestled in the highest spheres as long and as convincingly as Bret did. Without him, there would have been no Chris Jericho, no Eddie Guerrero, no Chris Benoit, no Edge, no CM Punk, no Daniel Bryan, no Seth Rollins, and many others either.