Awesome / Bret Hart

---

• His Iron Man match with Shawn Michaels at WrestleMania 12 is one of the great "they said it couldn't be done" matches in wrestling history, from the sheer length of the match, to the fact that it's the culmination of their fight to prove that smaller guys can be main-eventers.
• Bret's match with Chris Benoit in tribute to Owen Hart in 1999, also a Heartwarming Moment.
• Bret Hart + SummerSlam = guaranteed awesome:
  • His SummerSlam 1991 match with Mr. Perfect where he won the Intercontinental title, his first singles title.^note (In WWE. In the Hart family's Stampede Wrestling promotion, he'd been a 6x Stampede North American Heavyweight Champion and a 4x Stampede British Commonwealth Mid-Heavyweight Champion.) Awesome in itself, but the match itself was also an extremely well-executed bout that served as a coming-out party for Bret. In Madison Square Garden, no less!
  • His WWE Intercontinental Heavyweight Title match with The British Bulldog at SummerSlam 1992. If you take Bret's claim that Smith was having severe issues at the time and Bret basically had to carry him through the entire 30+ minute match as truth, made even more awesome: he had to basically play an amazing chess match with HIMSELF.
  • Summerslam 1993 sees not a great match by any traditional sense, but still a Moment of Awesome for Bret, in a sadistic way. Jerry Lawler comes out on crutches and backs out of his match with Bret, then sends Doink the Clown to replace him. For the most part, Bret destroys him. Then Jerry sneak attacks him and proves he is, in fact, well enough to wrestle, so after overcoming Jerry's shenanigans, Bret kicks his ass too, and then leaves the Sharpshooter on for nearly four full minutes while a swarm of referees and other officials try desperately to get him to break the hold. Sure, Bret got disqualified for his actions, but his Roaring Rampage of Revenge was just awesome. And then the family got involved.
  • SummerSlam 1994 saw him face his brother Owen Hart in a cage match that's still a fan favorite to this day (in a rematch from WrestleMania X that's also a great match).
  • SummerSlam 1997 saw him pull a Xanatos Gambit in his match against The Undertaker for the WWF Championship with Arch-Enemy Shawn Michaels as guest referee with the stipulation if Michaels screwed Bret over he would be barred from wrestling in the US. Throughout the match Bret has been deliberately provoking Michaels into hitting him. Near the end the match, Michaels is finally provoked into swinging a chair at Bret, only for the Hitman to dodge, ending up hitting Taker instead, leading him to winning the championship. Had it failed, he would've at least succeeded in ridding the WWF of Shawn Michaels as Michaels clearly violated the stipulation. As an added bonus, this would mark the start of the feud between Taker and Michaels, which would eventually lead to the first-ever Hell in a Cell match.
• A legendary match that was considered lost until its 2019 discovery was Bret's match against Tom Magee. The reason it's so legendary is not because it's necessarily a classic, but because Tom Magee was such an infamously terrible, unrealistic, and otherwise useless bodybuilder-turned-wrestler that nobody could possibly make him look good in the ring...except for Bret Hart, who carried him to a great match anyway.
• The aforementioned WrestleMania X opener with Owen stood out as an outstanding matchup despite being on the same card as the famous ladder match between Razor Ramon and Shawn Michaels.
• His Wrestlemania VIII match with Roddy Piper, both as a passing-the-torch moment and one of the best face vs face stories ever told. Also for Bret's brilliant pinning combination.
• Bret shows up on WWE television on January 4th, 2010, for the first time in 12 years, to a hero's welcome. He promptly buries the hatchet with Shawn Michaels in one of the most fondly remembered segments in Raw history.
• The reveal of his Batman Gambit against Vince McMahon on the 3/15/10 edition of Raw (baiting him into a no-DQ match before revealing he'd faked his injury), especially because of the coolly triumphant look on Bret's face after Vince realized he had been outsmarted.
• And of course, his WrestleMania 13 match with "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, the match that ended with the iconic image of blood pouring down Austin's face as he refuses to tap to the Sharpshooter. It served as a Face/Heel Double-Turn for Bret to heel and Austin as the white-hot face, and arguably kickstarted WWE's Attitude Era. Both The Wrestling Observer Newsletter and Pro Wrestling Illustrated declared it the Match of the Year for 1997.
  • If you get the chance, watch that match again with Stone Cold's commentary over the top. About 10% of the match is Austin talking about what he did, the other 90% is him gushing about how brilliant Bret was at everything he did.^note Well more like 88%, he also spared some time to praise Ken Shamrock for his role as the guest referee. In particular, he's grateful for Bret insisting on blading him, as Bret (correctly) surmised that the blood running down Austin's face during the ending would make for one of the most iconic images in wrestling history and do Austin's career no end of good (he was extra-grateful because blading was banned in the WWF at the time and if the match had bombed then Bret would possibly even have been risking his career if he'd been caught).
    • You can even do better than that now by catching the episode of Broken Skull Sessions where Austin sits down with Bret himself and (among other things they talk about) they watch through the match with both of them providing commentary. It's revelatory.
• His King of the Ring tournament win in 1993: Bret defeated three top-notch opponents (Razor Ramon, Mr. Perfect, and Bam Bam Bigelow) in the same night. On top of that, Bigelow was fresher as he only had one prior match^note {defeating "Hacksaw" Jim Duggan on his way out of the company}(due to a first-round time-limit draw between Tatanka and Lex Luger). Also, Bret won all three matches by pinfall without using the Sharpshooter to finish.
• From WrestleMania IV: One of Bret's first Awesome moments in the WWF was after he was double-crossed by Bad News Brown, who tossed him from the ring to win a battle royal. A very pissed-off Bret climbs back in, kicks Bad News out of the ring, and smashes the winning trophy to pieces. Don't doublecross the Hitman.
  • Based on Bret's account of how Allen "Bad News" Coage treated him in Stampede Wrestling (not very well, in terms of Allen basically squashing Bret against advice that it made them both look bad and didn't encourage fans to buy tickets), made even sweeter.
• In Your House: Canadian Stampede, from 1997, features one of Bret's most spine-chilling entrances. The team representing the USA (Ken Shamrock, The Legion of Doom, Goldust and "Stone Cold" Steve Austin) got absolutely booed out of the building by the Calgary crowd, especially Austin. But Team Canada? With every entrance from Bret's teammates (Brian Pillman, Jim "The Anvil" Neidhart, The British Bulldog and Owen Hart), the crowd just kept getting louder and louder until Bret marches out like a general to one of the loudest pops ever. (And to think: two of his teammates are actually American!)
  Jerry Lawler: THIS BUILDING IS SHAKING!!!
  • And to make it twice as sweet, the fans get rewarded with what's now considered by many fans as one of the best tag matches in the history of the company.
• In retaliation to his beatdown at the hands of Bret, Vince Macmahon tried to doll a Cool and Unusual Punishment onto him by...promoting him to General Manager, quite convinced it will show Bret exactly what decisions he'd have to pull in Vince's shoes. In response, Bret actually pulls off a competent Reasonable Authority Figure, and while he is sporting enough to pull a Both Sides Have a Point, suffering some bad blood between several wrestlers including the Hart Dynasty themselves, he keeps a level of integrity, to the point Vince ends up hastily firing him the moment he finds the slightest folly (as in getting attacked by a Sore Loser superstar the same way he does on a regular basis).

---