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[1993-11-29-WWF-Raw] Bret Hart: Superstar of the Year


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  • 4 months later...

First, they bring out the runner-up Lex Luger. Interesting that the version of history has always been that they didn't decide until the Rumble to go with Bret, but Luger being positioned as #2 to Bret as #1 in this segment makes me think otherwise, unless this was the result of legit fan voting. Heenan cracks me up really thinking he's going to win this.

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I THINK they might have done a magazine vote for this one. The one that always seemed weird to me was Bret suddenly getting a Wrestler of the Year trophy at the end of '91. Nothing about the award been announced previously and he had only been IC Champ for a few months.

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  • 2 years later...

So they go out of their way to show Lex Luger came in second. Fine to give Bret the award since he deserved it but to bring out Luger on TV and say hey Lex did not win again. First words out of Vince's mouth, "Hey Lex Luger, congratulations". Lex, "Thank you" to a weak crowd cheer and Lex then dropping his head. Luger officially concedes the number one spot to Bret well before the Rumble. Bret makes a promise that he will win the WWF Title.

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  • 4 weeks later...

At the time (well...not by this point, but in the early part of the month) Bret-Lawler was doing relatively hot house show business while Luger-Borga was a disaster. The Lex push was effectively dead before the Rumble, though I don't doubt they did some crowd-testing at the event anyway, because why not. The Superstar of the Year trophy looks almost exactly like a half-sized version of the WM4 battle royal trophy. If Bad News Brown comes out and smashes Bret's award, this will be the greatest piece of continuity in the history of wrestling. Luger cuts a lame pro-sports-locker-room-style bag-o'-cliches promo before introducing Bret, who gets a noticeably larger pop. On an objective level, shouldn't the winner of this have been Yokozuna? Whoa, Bret acknowledges his wife and four kids--even after Luger's family showed up on-camera at Survivor Series, that was unexpected.

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  • 2 years later...

Bret seemed genuinely honored to win the vote; his interview was morre realistic than your average babyface promo. I like how he emphasized that he was dedicating the award to all ​of his brothers as well as the rest of his family. They were really slow-building the Owen feud here; I seem to remember that one of them (I can't remember which) wasn't too keen on the idea, and the other one had to talk him into it. I think it was Owen who was reluctant because he didn't want the on-screen feud to affect their tight relationship offscreen.

 

Vince must not have liked the pop Bret got, because at one point he practically ordered the fans to cheer louder. See, Vince, that's how it works; when you run five thousand-seat buildings instead of twenty thousand-seat buildings, there aren't as many people cheering, so the pop won't be as big. You'll get used to this in time, trust me.

 

Luger did what he could under the circumstances, but this was another example of Vince deliberately painting him as a loser for some reason known only to Vince himself. The Borga feud was a disaster because no one gave a fiord about Finland, plain and simple, and I suspect that Vince knew it would tank when he set it up. It's clear to me now that the perplexing thing about Luger in the WWF wasn't that he fell from grace so quickly; it's that he was able to rehabilitate himself to the point of co-winning the Rumble and getting a Mania X title shot against Yoko, whether he won or not. If I'd had to guess what he'd be doing at Mania after watching this segment, I'd have him ticketed to put over Bastion Booger in less than five minutes, considering what Vince obviously thought of him.

 

I'm pretty sure that Bret mentioning Julie and the kids was an ad-lib; we were still a ways away from WWF superstars having an active life that was worth knowing about away from the ring.

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  • 3 months later...
  • GSR changed the title to [1993-11-29-WWF-Raw] Bret Hart: Superstar of the Year

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