Bret Hart

[Shrike02]

5 hours ago, NintendoLogic said:

When I did the Bret Hart podcast with Loss and goodhelmet, I remember being laughed at for predicting that Bret's work would resonate with future generations more than Flair's. I have no problem with taking L's when it's warranted, but I'm also not above taking a victory lap when I feel vindicated, and I think I nailed that one.

Can you provide a link to that podcast - assuming it's been archived on the PWO feed on Soundcloud or something?

[NintendoLogic]

1 hour ago, Shrike02 said:

Can you provide a link to that podcast - assuming it's been archived on the PWO feed on Soundcloud or something?

I'm afraid it's no longer up, which is just as well. I couldn't even bring myself to listen to it afterward because I sounded nervous as hell the whole time. The one time I tried, I lasted about ten seconds before the cringe overwhelmed me. Also, it was recorded back in 2013 when I was a relative greenhorn, so I'm sure I offered some takes I either wouldn't stand by today or didn't flesh out as well as I could have.

[kid dracula]

17 hours ago, MoS said:

Anecdotally on Twitter, I have seen a lot of "younger"/modern fans who frequently list him as among their favourites. You also have wrestlers like Dax and so many others frequently pay tribute to him. His interviews and general cool gives-no-fucks old dude personality certainly help. 

He's definitely well-respected. Broadly speaking it feels like Shawn Michaels has been more influential to modern wrestling than either Bret or Ric.

[Childs]

2 hours ago, kid dracula said:

Broadly speaking it feels like Shawn Michaels has been more influential to modern wrestling than either Bret or Ric.

Yes, to our detriment. 

[funkdoc]

5 hours ago, kid dracula said:

He's definitely well-respected. Broadly speaking it feels like Shawn Michaels has been more influential to modern wrestling than either Bret or Ric.

Yes, but i think the tide is turning a bit the other way now.  As mentioned before Shawn's agenting is likely a big part of that - i would especially point to that Edge-Orton shitshow at last year's Mania.  Likely to hold up as one of the most painful matches of the decade and was widely despised even as it was happening.

[El-P]

Eddie Kingston's interview with Meltz yesterday : "I watch one or two Bret Hart match every week. I want to pick up the little things he does. I won't tell what because I don't want everybody else to know !" 

[MJH]

Suplex-12 posted (in the Necro thread) a handheld of a six man from Cologne in 2010 with Bret, Harry Smith and TJ against Nexus and I felt compelled to add a comment on it here because it really is a glorious example of how to protect and work around a guy in Bret's condition. Given that all the other guys in the match will have looked up to Bret, it figures that he was the one dictating his spots and I'm giving him the credit for it.

You want to get Bret in early as a nice pop, so they do the time-tested rotating wristlet spot that every baby face team has done countless times. Bret then throws in an arm drag, drops a knee on the arm and gets out. But what's really clever is the end. (Incidentally, I just watched Bret's spots and skipped through the rest).

Obviously, TJ took the heat and Bret can't do a hot tag, so right before that, Heath Slater cheapshots him, Harry does the hot tag, and then Bret gets back in thirty seconds later after tripping Heath from outside. Because of the cheap shot, it makes perfect sense for Bret now to just throw punches, run Heath's forehead across the top rope, and basically "brawl". He can't do the leg sweep or drop the elbow from the second rope, and even his back breaker would be a bad idea on his knees, so he lifts Heath for it, Heath gouges free, there's a cheap bump on Gabriel and Heath walks into an atomic drop, facing Bret, because that variant means Heath puts no weight on Bret when he lands (unlike the other way around) and falls perfectly into position for the Sharpshooter and that's the match. 

Nothing there strikes you as terribly clever at first glance, and it's not like anyone was expecting Bret to do a great deal (he was in for ninety seconds at most), but, it's actually a great example of hiding an older wrestler's physical condition in a natural way that makes sense within the match so that his limitations, whilst there of course, are not nearly as obvious as they otherwise could be.

Nobody is gonna say that Bret was (or would have been had he done a longer run) awesome in 2010, but the guy was still an incredibly smart, detail-focused worker. And when Kingston or anyone else talks about picking up "little things" from Bret, well, I hope it's exactly this sort of thing. He's the best agent they never had.

[Suplex-12]

8 hours ago, MJH said:

Nobody is gonna say that Bret was (or would have been had he done a longer run) awesome in 2010, but the guy was still an incredibly smart, detail-focused worker.

And this is something I feel is important to bring up because the reason I brought this up was because when people talk about Bret's 2010 run, it's normally the Vince WrestleMania match that is used and as someone who views longevity as an important thing to focus on, I do feel that something like this match helps Bret's case for longevity as while he isn't the same Bret in his prime, he still was Bret when it came to having logic in his matches.

[Grimmas]

On 5/27/2021 at 5:33 PM, NintendoLogic said:

I'm afraid it's no longer up, which is just as well. I couldn't even bring myself to listen to it afterward because I sounded nervous as hell the whole time. The one time I tried, I lasted about ten seconds before the cringe overwhelmed me. Also, it was recorded back in 2013 when I was a relative greenhorn, so I'm sure I offered some takes I either wouldn't stand by today or didn't flesh out as well as I could have.

That was the VERY FIRST podcast I ever did!

[MoS]

On 5/28/2021 at 2:07 PM, funkdoc said:

Yes, but i think the tide is turning a bit the other way now.  As mentioned before Shawn's agenting is likely a big part of that - i would especially point to that Edge-Orton shitshow at last year's Mania.  Likely to hold up as one of the most painful matches of the decade and was widely despised even as it was happening.

This is purely anecdotal, but more and more wrestlers seem to come out these days and say Bret was the best, they learn so much from watching his matches, etc. Punk said recently that he used to be a Shawn guy but now he thinks Bret's stuff has aged better. So yeah while the current wrestling scene owes more to Shawn, Bret is the one whose wrestling is aging better and is being looked at as the American ideal more and more. The tide is definitely turning. As you said, it's probably because the excesses of Shawn's style are revealing themselves. Bret has seemingly gone from that legend who took the biz too seriously to the guy wrestlers are now studying tapes of. His work definitely seems to be aging better than Flair's and Shawn's imo. 

[NotJayTabb]

Back at the 2020 Royal Rumble, when Daniel Bryan did the near impossible by having a good strap match with a bad wrestler who no-sells everything, I did sit and wonder who else would have had a good match in that situation. My list was pretty short: Hogan (because he'd have sold the beatdown well, then hulked up and squashed the Fiend) and Bret. I thought back to Bret's matches against the likes of Yoko, Taker and Andre, where he was a smaller wrestler facing guys who would be able to withstand more of his offence, and how he still wrestled logical good matches against them. Bret had a good match in 1992 against Kamala, who was a limited big man, by selling well and making logical comebacks (as I recall, he stamped on Kamala's barefeet, which more wrestlers should have done). I think he'd have dragged something out of the Fiend

[NintendoLogic]

Punk has clearly been drawing heavily from the Bret playbook since returning. The Darby match was an overt homage to Bret/123 Kid, and he did the sternum-first bump into the turnbuckle in his match against Hobbs.

[funkdoc]

9 hours ago, MoS said:

So yeah while the current wrestling scene owes more to Shawn

See, this is the thing i was talking about over in one of the AEW threads: i'm not so sure it does anymore, which is part of my point here.  If you look at the consensus top indie talents that AEW's signed recently, there's far more matwork & striking than flips in their DNA.  Think Daniel Garcia, Wheeler Yuta, Lee Moriarty...

i argued over there that KENTA was one of the most obvious influences on this, but Bret may well be up there too - at least by osmosis through the current veterans who studied him like Punk & Kingston.

[MoS]

That might be true, but until recently, WWE had a dominant monopoly over the scene, and it's difficult to not see the big WWE matches over the last decade, and correspondingly pretty much all major North American wrestlers of the same time period since most wrestled there, and not see Shawn more than Bret. 

That said, I agree about the tide turning, so to speak, so I'm in agreement with the general point.

[Reel]

There's more and more people talking about Bret, but I think it's hard to look at the landscape of modern wrestling and not think that Shawn is far and away more influential on the style. Its sort of like how 5 years ago every indie wrestler and promotion labeled itself a Strong Style, but the style resembled Kings Road much more than it did Inoki's New Japan.

[Matt D]

This is a strong generalization but I see Bret as someone who tried to have matches that made sense, that felt legitimate relative to what that meant for a 1980s-90s audience, that had emotional beats that moved people, whereas Shawn was more focused on trying to have the best match on the show and wow people and to be the showstopper. It's a chicken/egg thing but in a world where the point is no longer to see the babyface triumph over the heel but instead be part of an experience and witness greatness, Shawn's way resonates more. Now that wrestling's risen out of the ashes of whatever kayfabe once was, it's all about sensation as opposed to sense so Shawn's influence is both stronger and is probably more effective for people to embrace. Whether or not that's a good thing for the sake of this exercise, especially in how Shawn's existence might have led to this world existing in the first place is a personal decision for everyone voting.

[El-P]

Bret was absolutely also about having the best pro-wrestling match on the card. "The best there is, the best there was and the best there ever will be" was not just a catchphrase that worked in a kayfabe way. The biggest difference is, WWE actively marketed Shawn as this incredible guy who had the most spectacular matches. And that's pretty early on. When they switched Sid at SummerSlam 95 to instead put on Razor in the ladder match part2, it was implied that it was the right match to produce, because it's what the fans would want (and really, who would argue with that ?). And it was clearly all about how great the first match was and how this one had to be too. Meanwhile, poor Bret had to work something watchable out of Isaac Yankane, not DMD.  But Bret was all about stealing the show too. That's the Bulldog match at SummerSlam 92. That's his disagrements with Flair about how they should work their match, despite him not ever (and certainly not in 92) being on Flair' social status level. That's wanting to do the first ladder match in WWF (woops, did not work out like he envisioned ! ).

The idea of stealing the show has probably been there since day one, because it's human nature. Steamboat and Savage absolutely went "fuck that Hogan shit, it's us people are gonna talk about" at WM3. And they successfully did it. For years and years it was referred to as one of the greatest matches ever. No one talked about George Steele abducting Liz and Steamboat finally winning the IC title, but everyone talked about how this match was the greatest thing ever. Hell, even Guy Hauray and Eddie Carpentier, the French announcers, talked about it that way when The Dragon showed up in 1991. With Shawn it took a life of its own probably because of many contextual elements, one of which being it was a good way to market him then. Like the Streak, Shawn's "Mr. Best Match at Mania" became both a gimmick and a real life thing, smartly so (which is also why the first Taker Mania match had that aura that you almost never see anywhere, because of how "real" everything was).

But anyway, I've gone back and forth on two of my early favorites, Shawn has gone back up lately (thanks to the Taker @ Mania project which surely taught me quite a bit) after my opinion of his work kinda took a nosedive during the "I'm sorry I love you" era, but I'm still firmly way more of a Bret Hart fan, maybe more than ever (maybe because of Tanahashi, GOAT contender, who reminds me of Bret in some ways)

[MoS]

I don't doubt they both wanted to have the best match and steal the show. I think their idea and conceptualization of having the best match and stealing the show were wildly different though, and not just in terms of movesets. I don't doubt that a lot of the younger wrestlers on top today patterned their wrestling on Shawn's style - the Bucks are massive Shawn fans after all - but I think Bret's stuff has translated better to the younger generation of hardcore fans. That's just my guess from reading stuff on Twitter and sometimes on reddit though. Of course it doesn't help that a lot of the wrestlers who tried to follow in Shawn's footsteps did not have an ounce of his talent and pro wrestling IQ, and Shawn's style when done bad is a lot more awful than a boring/bad Bret style match.

[El-P]

6 minutes ago, MoS said:

I think their idea and conceptualization of having the best match and stealing the show were wildly different though, and not just in terms of movesets.

Which is why they never had that one great match together, just a clash of ideas probably (much like Bret with Flair). They both had great matches with some of the same opponents though (Nash, Razor) though, so needless to say, there's no *right* approach. Bret getting fucked over by Goldy deprived us of the potentially great stuff Bret would have done with all the guys from the early to mid 00's in WWE, and it would have been fascinating to see how he would have fit with that crowd. For that only, fuck you Goldy.

[elliott]

I thought Montreal was by far their best match until it became the most famous match of the last 30 years. 

[Tetsujin]

Yesterday I rewatched both WM Bret/Yokozuna matches and.... They're actually... Kinda cool???? Both of them have two of the most stupid, anticlimatic finishes ever in pro wrestling, but other than that they are really enjoyable David vs Goliath matches, minimalism done well. I also like how they have a different approach: while WM IX is a classic "technique and speed vs size and strength", WM X has this fun premise that both of them are fucked up because they've wrestle prior that night. Their selling is pretty good and I love how they usually were resting of the mat, while still attacking each other with kicks and punches and whatever. I'm now bothered about both these matches being cannonically considered two of the worst WM main events ever. They're not GREAT, because fuck those finishes, but man they aged well. Definitely two matches that help Bret's case.

[elliott]

Bret & Yoko had really good chemistry. 

[ohtani's jacket]

You should watch the Bret/Yokozuna cage matches. 

[elliott]

OJ, how do you feel about the Hart FOundation team?

[ohtani's jacket]

2 minutes ago, elliott said:

OJ, how do you feel about the Hart FOundation team?

I haven't watched a Hart Foundation match in years, but off the top of my head, I would say fundamentally sound but didn't work in an era where WWF tag teams were able to have proper matches. I can't think of too many tag matches that era that go 25 minutes and serve as a second main event on a card. WWF tag wrestling in that era felt like a novelty -- two guys tagging together wearing matching outfits and always with a manager. It worked for me as a kid, but these days I guess I would focus on how much the Hart Foundation did with the time they were given. Did they use their ring time well or could they have done more? That sort of thing. By the time they got to the top of the food chain, Bret was already starting his singles push. 90s WWF tag wrestling wasn't an improvement over the late 80s, but they probably left a couple of feuds on the shelf.