Bret Hart

[ohtani's jacket]

5 hours ago, Matt D said:

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.

Bret was wrestling for the coalminers and the lumberjacks.

[elliott]

Just looking at youtube there are 20+ minute videos with the Islanders, Bulldogs, Killer Bees. There's a 24 minute Hart Foundation & Honkey Tonk Man vs Bruno & Jake Roberts & TIto match from 1987 that sounds pretty interesting to me. 21 minutes against British Bulldog & JYD. I don't really want to watch a 20 minute Harts vs Bulldogs match, but some of those others sound pretty cool. Its been forever since I've watched the Hart Foundation team. I know theres a match with the Killer Bees that Grimmas loves. I might look at some of this stuff. 

[ohtani's jacket]

I might check some out as well. 

[Grimmas]

Best Hart Foundation Tags: 

1. vs Killer Bees (1986-02-27)

"The best Hart Foundation match in history and I think the Killer Bees might be the Harts best opponents. They get all the time they want in front of a hot crowd. A great tag match that everybody should watch."

2. vs British  Bulldogs (1986-01-18)

"The best of the Hart Foundation and British Bulldogs matches and it’s weirdly on a house show in Maryland that never made a comp or Prime Time Television. It was a twenty minute match that actually had a pinfall finish, which is rare for their feud. Hot paced action here."

3. vs Demoltion (1988-08-29)

"One of the most under rated matches in SummerSlam and WWE history and I blame the announcers who miss all of the great details. The story here is that Jimmy Hart, the Foundation’s former manager, has sold all of his info on them to Mr. Fuji and Demolition. The match is then worked where Demolition steals Harts knee opponent going into the ropes spot and other aspects of Demolition knowing the Harts play book. We also get this tremendous heat sequence which starts with Bret getting thrown shoulder first into Fuji’s cane. Demolition destroy the arm until the hot tag. Hart’s megaphone downs the Foundation. I love this one."

4. vs The Islanders (1986-11-16)

"These two teams are perfect to have a sprint TV match against each other and this version of it is amazing. This match never lets up and has a great finish with Neidhart killing Tama with a lariat while he was on the top rope."

5. vs The Brainbusters (1989-08-28)

"A kind of WWF vs NWA dream match in the opening slot of one of my favourite WWF pay-per-views. Bret along with Arn and Tully are just magic against each other in the ring, showing Bret could had fit in well with the NWA. A really hot opener and one of the best openers in SummerSlam history."

[NintendoLogic]

I vehemently reject the notion that a match needs 25 minutes and main-event status to be a proper match. In fact, I'd say extra time to work is usually an active detriment because it leads to them killing time by sitting in armbars and the like. I'd rather watch a high-end 80s WWF tag than a high-end 80s NWA one precisely because they tend to offer more bang for the buck. In a world where Blood on the Sand didn't exist, Hart Foundation/Killer Bees would be a strong contender for best American tag match of the 80s. It's certainly a cut or two above other matches from the period in terms of storytelling depth.

For what it's worth, Tanahashi has said on many occasions that Shawn is his favorite wrestler.

[MoS]

I clearly see glimpses of Shawn in Tanahashi. He has the same flashiness, charisma, flamboyant personality, and a lot of his old-man work is like late 00s Shawn in its psychology, although YMMV on who does it better. 

[Matt D]

I need to watch some non-Bulldogs Hart Foundation matches. Bulldogs are the worst offenders of heel in peril and those probably poisoned me towards other HF matches. Though I love Summerslam 88 vs Demos. 

[elliott]

Matt, I propose you OJ and I all watch that Killer Bees match

[Matt D]

Presuming we're talking about the 2-27-86 MSG match and I'm looking at the right one, I thought it was excellent. The crowd was hot. Monsoon said Stu was in attendance so Bret and Neidhart both had plenty of reason to be at their best. It's got the sort of structure I love, with a couple of minutes of very specific heel posturing to start (this being Neidhart's strength and reactions which no one else could do quite the same way), leading to a few minutes of babyface speed/technical advantage of a shine, where they use tags to control, right into extended heat. I didn't love the transition to the heat, with Bret intervening with a cheapshot legdrop as Blair went for a figure four, but it worked ok. It was just a little too blatant, even if that meant it was ok when the Bees just ran in to break up a pin after the backbreaker elbow drop combo later (and good! Protect those big moves). There was a hot tag a couple of minutes into the heat on Bret missing a second rope elbow drop (almost comedically really) but here the heat was really extended as they immediately cut off Brunzell with a knee from the outside. After that was much longer second heat (really a continuation of the first with that hot tag being a hope spot) which built a ton of sympathy for Brunzell with a few small bits of hope that were cut off hard, until he hit the dropkick out of nowhere for a great hope spot, but not actually a transition. It took another two minutes or so before the Harts overreached and went for their second assisted charge into the corner for the hot tag. They hit the dropkick again to tease a pin right at the time limit draw. I loved the little set ups and payoffs. Bret missed the elbow drop but hit the backbreaker/elbow drop combo later. Bret hit his own dropkick right before Brunzell hit his big hope spot one. They successfully hit the charge only to fail when they went back to the well. I ran the timecodes on this one:

2:20 Bell; start of Anvil's feature strength bit.
4:20 Drop down trip to start the (legwork) Shine
6:40 Transition (Hitman legdrop) to Heat.
9:20 Missed Elbow Drop by Bret; hot tag to Brunzel.
10:00 Cut off knee from outside by Bret, start/extension of second heat.
16:35 Brunzell dropkick hope spot
18:30 missed charge to hot tag.
21:04 Dropkick and bell.

I would have been ok with a couple more minutes of shine and paring off a minute or two of that (second) heat on Brunzell or even separating things to allow some more comeback by Brunzell after the first hot tag before the start of the second heat segment (though the match did benefit from both the first hot tag and the first dropkick serving as hope spots and not transitions). At 30 seconds or so before the hope spot dropkick, I was thinking to myself that I was just about ready for the hot tag, but in general, it was a very effective formula. Not every tag match can be run by a stopwatch, but this got a ton of real heat and plenty of elation when the faces fired back, or even when Blair went after the Harts on the floor during the heat on Brunzell. Everyone played their part well, with Brunzell getting a ton of sympathy, Blair playing fiery and pissed off and working the apron well, Jimmy being great out there trying to tamp down the clapping and what not, Anvil mugging and reacting and being a force, and Bret directing traffic.

[elliott]

Well goddamn I thought this was an awesome match. Off the top of my head its a contender for the best WWF tag match of the 80s & 90s. Loved loved loved the structure. The work itself is great. Hot crowd. Exactly what you want from a big 80s tag match. I wouldn't put it in the absolute elite tier of 80s US tags, but its not far off. Fantastic match. 

[ohtani's jacket]

Are you guys talking about the 2/17 MSG match? Solid match. I liked it a lot. Satisfyingly worked for a time limit draw. The best thing about it for me personally was getting to see Bret work with Jim Brunzell. That's a fresh match up for me as '86 was a shade before my time. Bret was pretty methodical during his Hart Foundation days (in my books, anyway), and when he did play to the crowd it came across as ham-fisted, but from a pure wrestling point of view, I really liked that front face lock that Bret used to stop Brunzell from moving to his corner. I also liked it when he gave Brunzell a dropkick of his own. Jim Brunzell's dropkick. though. That thing is like a Ciclon Ramirez tope.

[Clayton Jones]

I watched 8 Bret matches on my first round with him, the most I've sat down to with anyone I'm not trying to fill in big blind spots for. I was focusing on 1986-1991 as I'm trying to figure out if I see Bret as a peak candidate above all else, or if there's a good amount of substance outside of his peak too. The verdict is still out for me. I really like Bret in terms of personal biases, which is a little strange as I didn't grow up a big fan of his. I was always indifferent towards him as a kid, I liked him better than Shawn, but his main event style of match didn't grab me the way guys like Sting, Savage, Vader, Flair, etc did. But as I got older and "smarter" as a fan Bret's style really appealed to me, probably to the point I overrated him a bit over the years. Now for a project like this I have a hard time figuring out where I'm going to have him.

I don't feel like going match by match through what I watched but here's a few general observations. I was surprised how often Bret would default, when he was a rising top babyface, to using heel tactics against guys like Warlord, Paul Roma, not the highest caliber of opponent, or even a rising heel like Rick Martel. I remember Bret doing stuff like this when he was physically outmatched or the heel cheated first, but he really went to this well often in the early 90s and I didn't find it endearing.

Every Hart Foundation match I watched (VS Islanders, Killer Bees, and trios w/Davis VS Bulldogs/Haynes) Bret was a very effective heel straight man tag team specialist. You could go through every cliche, solid hand, great mechanics, whatever, but he really was. Does this strengthen his case significantly for a project like this? For me at this point, it does slightly, but not to the extent I maybe expected it to. In every one of these matches I thought the style helped everyone look favorable and Bret rarely stood out as being significantly better than anyone else. But he was consistently very good.

Next time around with Bret I'm going to focus more on his prime years, but the one later match I did include this time looking for a hidden gem was one of my biggest disappointments of my GWE viewing so far, VS Savage from Yokohama. This may just be a battle of expectations but I read quite a few people give this match middling, slightly favorable reviews, and I just don't see it. Given the time they had, the type of crowd they were in front of, and the main event spot, I thought this was a complete dud. Maybe they didn't get the time they expected but the fact that's the best those two could do with nearly 20 minutes in that setting was a big let down.

[strobogo]

Heel tactics as a face seems to be a McMahon thing, as pretty much every IC and World level face going back to Bruno would do them, always to cheers from the crowd and face announcer.

[GOTNW]

On 12/6/2015 at 3:52 AM, GOTNW said:

I like Bret but would much rather discuss stoicism in american wrestling than his work, Ditch had a great piece on why he doesn't think Bret is an elite worker on his old board, he won't rank for me, I found most of his big matches overrated and his work doesn't particularly captivate me.

I've changed my mind and now see this take from teenage me as reactionary, even though I think it's more of a matter of changing my perspective as I grow in age and (hopefully) wisdom than thinking Bret vs Curt Hennig is better or worse than I thought 4 or 10 years ago. I do wish that Ditch post was still up somewhere. We're losing knowledge like libraries are burning in the Internet age.

I've said in Dory's thread that I would have the post-Thesz "technical" NA wrestler power ranking as Brisco>Dory>Bret. After doing some more re-watching, I have it as Brisco>Bockwinkel>Bret>Dory, and I'm seriously considering Dory for my list. So, Bret is in this time, and has no chance of falling off, in fact I'm more likely to put him in the middle.

I do maintain I don't see him as someone who has a serious case for the top 10/20. But it isn't Bret who has changed (duh), it's me and what I want from him. Looking at his stoic peers of the time like Misawa or Santo, Bret isn't going to do very well in direct comparison. Excellence of execution blah blah - I don't care. Could anything be more boring than a wrestler who just does moves correctly? That sounds like Dean Malenko. I want something more, and in prowres that's either going to be expressed through intensity, sheer beauty or more. And that's where Bret is going to be lacking. He's just not that guy. He doesn't have the intricate matwork you'll see from Brisco, or for a contemporary peer of his, El Dandy. His moves are well executed - sometimes I'll nod my head and say "hell yeah that's how you do a Russian Legsweep" ;  but they are rarely breathtaking like a Santo Dive, Atlantis Monkey Flip, Misawa Elbow Barrage or Sliding Kick.

Then there's the problem of great matches, cream of the crop, classics and near classics. Again, Bret isn't a case like Misawa/Kobashi/Hashimoto/Kawada/Jumbo/Flair/Lawler/Casas/Santo where a fan of his is going to point you to 30 different matches at that level, and when you adjust that to someone who isn't that into them you get you get a fifth of that which is canonically accepted as all-time excellence. If someone's really into Bret, maybe you get around 5 or 10 of those at the highest or close-to-it level, and then it's just a bunch of good-really good matches which a lot of wrestler who aren't nearly as hyped as him also have.

Then there's also the whole deal about him only really being Bret in the WWF under certain conditions, which is one of the reasons why I thought Owen was better last time, I'd watch Owen look spectacular in New Japan or wherever, and meanwhile Bret would look completely mundane outside of his ideal setting. So I adjusted for main-event placement inflation which explained Bret's stronger high-end resume and ranked Owen on the lower end of my list and didn't rank Bret at all.

And I would absolutely agree with the idea that Bret Hart was not a great improviser, and if you sent him out there with a very good worker and gave him no time to work on the match it probably wouldn't be special.

Despite all of this, I've continued to enjoy his work and appreciate him more and more. Because there is one thing Bret Hart brings to the table and it matter more than anything else to me.

I think it's pretty clear, if you've listened to him talk for 2 or more minutes, Bret Hart is a completely delusional egomaniac, and is probably not a good person. This is one of those archetypes which make for a successful pro-wrestler, kind of similar to how sociopaths rise to the top in business in an unregulated free market.

Bret Hart takes pro wrestling, how do I say this without sounding ableist... seriously in a very literate and dedicated sense. He clearly put a lot of thought into structuring his matches, transitioning from one point to another and having it all make sense. Pro-wrestling should make sense within its own confines. It shouldn't be especially difficult because the audience is already accepting the ridiculous prerequisition of treating this nonsense as somewhat legitimate combat. If Bret Hart has a ladder match, it's going to make as much sense as a ladder match can, and there won't be a moment where I'll go "gee why doesn't one of these wrestlers just jump on the damn ladder and grab the belt I really am watching phony nonsense". If I'm watching a Bret Hart cage match, I won't have a though of "these guys have forgotten they can win by escaping".

There are a lot of nominated wrestlers who can do a Brainbuster or a Suicide Dive, but not a lot of them would think up grabbing Shawn Michaels by the hair after he pushed you off a ladder so you can both fall down and have a cover for why he didn't just immediately win the match. And that's what ultimately convinced me. Bret's dedication and passion and his successful execution of it through his match planning are what keep intriguing me in his work and why I keep coming back to it, and having the willingness to watch their matches is the highest praise I can give to a wrestler as an employed adult with a thriving social life.

So, as much as part of me still wants to go "actually these random obscure wrestlers are better than Bret", I feel at peace with my appreciation of him now. In hindsight, that question from the second page to "name a 100 better wrestlers" really wouldn't be much of a challenge for someone who'd be more focused on action itself than I am.

 

[Control21]

On 9/6/2024 at 4:14 PM, GOTNW said:

I've changed my mind and now see this take from teenage me as reactionary, even though I think it's more of a matter of changing my perspective as I grow in age and (hopefully) wisdom than thinking Bret vs Curt Hennig is better or worse than I thought 4 or 10 years ago. I do wish that Ditch post was still up somewhere. We're losing knowledge like libraries are burning in the Internet age.

I've said in Dory's thread that I would have the post-Thesz "technical" NA wrestler power ranking as Brisco>Dory>Bret. After doing some more re-watching, I have it as Brisco>Bockwinkel>Bret>Dory, and I'm seriously considering Dory for my list. So, Bret is in this time, and has no chance of falling off, in fact I'm more likely to put him in the middle.

I do maintain I don't see him as someone who has a serious case for the top 10/20. But it isn't Bret who has changed (duh), it's me and what I want from him. Looking at his stoic peers of the time like Misawa or Santo, Bret isn't going to do very well in direct comparison. Excellence of execution blah blah - I don't care. Could anything be more boring than a wrestler who just does moves correctly? That sounds like Dean Malenko. I want something more, and in prowres that's either going to be expressed through intensity, sheer beauty or more. And that's where Bret is going to be lacking. He's just not that guy. He doesn't have the intricate matwork you'll see from Brisco, or for a contemporary peer of his, El Dandy. His moves are well executed - sometimes I'll nod my head and say "hell yeah that's how you do a Russian Legsweep" ;  but they are rarely breathtaking like a Santo Dive, Atlantis Monkey Flip, Misawa Elbow Barrage or Sliding Kick.

Then there's the problem of great matches, cream of the crop, classics and near classics. Again, Bret isn't a case like Misawa/Kobashi/Hashimoto/Kawada/Jumbo/Flair/Lawler/Casas/Santo where a fan of his is going to point you to 30 different matches at that level, and when you adjust that to someone who isn't that into them you get you get a fifth of that which is canonically accepted as all-time excellence. If someone's really into Bret, maybe you get around 5 or 10 of those at the highest or close-to-it level, and then it's just a bunch of good-really good matches which a lot of wrestler who aren't nearly as hyped as him also have.

Then there's also the whole deal about him only really being Bret in the WWF under certain conditions, which is one of the reasons why I thought Owen was better last time, I'd watch Owen look spectacular in New Japan or wherever, and meanwhile Bret would look completely mundane outside of his ideal setting. So I adjusted for main-event placement inflation which explained Bret's stronger high-end resume and ranked Owen on the lower end of my list and didn't rank Bret at all.

And I would absolutely agree with the idea that Bret Hart was not a great improviser, and if you sent him out there with a very good worker and gave him no time to work on the match it probably wouldn't be special.

Despite all of this, I've continued to enjoy his work and appreciate him more and more. Because there is one thing Bret Hart brings to the table and it matter more than anything else to me.

I think it's pretty clear, if you've listened to him talk for 2 or more minutes, Bret Hart is a completely delusional egomaniac, and is probably not a good person. This is one of those archetypes which make for a successful pro-wrestler, kind of similar to how sociopaths rise to the top in business in an unregulated free market.

Bret Hart takes pro wrestling, how do I say this without sounding ableist... seriously in a very literate and dedicated sense. He clearly put a lot of thought into structuring his matches, transitioning from one point to another and having it all make sense. Pro-wrestling should make sense within its own confines. It shouldn't be especially difficult because the audience is already accepting the ridiculous prerequisition of treating this nonsense as somewhat legitimate combat. If Bret Hart has a ladder match, it's going to make as much sense as a ladder match can, and there won't be a moment where I'll go "gee why doesn't one of these wrestlers just jump on the damn ladder and grab the belt I really am watching phony nonsense". If I'm watching a Bret Hart cage match, I won't have a though of "these guys have forgotten they can win by escaping".

There are a lot of nominated wrestlers who can do a Brainbuster or a Suicide Dive, but not a lot of them would think up grabbing Shawn Michaels by the hair after he pushed you off a ladder so you can both fall down and have a cover for why he didn't just immediately win the match. And that's what ultimately convinced me. Bret's dedication and passion and his successful execution of it through his match planning are what keep intriguing me in his work and why I keep coming back to it, and having the willingness to watch their matches is the highest praise I can give to a wrestler as an employed adult with a thriving social life.

So, as much as part of me still wants to go "actually these random obscure wrestlers are better than Bret", I feel at peace with my appreciation of him now. In hindsight, that question from the second page to "name a 100 better wrestlers" really wouldn't be much of a challenge for someone who'd be more focused on action itself than I am.

 

Very well said. I've had him at #1 for a while and I have found it hard to dislodge him from that spot.

[cad]

That was an interesting post, GOTNW. The kind that made me sign up for this board years ago.

If I go by what he often gets praised for, Bret would be the embodiment of stuff that simply doesn't excite me. I agree that his technical work is boring, and that in a way applauding someone for proper execution is just giving them credit for not screwing up. But to me realism is the same kind of thing, not far off from saying that a guy just isn't disruptively phony. I can't imagine ever jumping out of my seat because of how much sense something made. That's the kind of praise that I hear a lot about Bret, and it seems like such a negative way to watch wrestling, rating guys by who makes the fewest and smallest mistakes. It's great that he doesn't do stuff to take me out of a match, but it all sounds less like reasons to love a worker and more like preemptive defenses against potential criticism from the bastards out there who you know would like to take your heroes down a peg.

But at the end of the day Bret is, to me, a match guy. Maybe he doesn't have an endless list of classics, but in the years since this thread was made it's become clear just how disposable great matches are. What Bret Hart classic was ever disposable? I'm not sure if there's any non-AJPW wrestler whose best matches have become part of a canon the way Bret's have. He planned his matches with the eye of the movie director that he once wanted to be, with clear visions in his head and what he wanted those scenes to say about the men in the ring. Steve Austin bleeding in the sharpshooter, Diesel sapping all of Bret's reserve by sending him through a table. These were spots that popped the crowd, and I'm sure Bret wanted to pop the crowd, but he wasn't thinking them up as a way to pop the crowd. To me that's his most impressive detail work, the way his matches reflected back on the Hitman character. Yes, he was clearly a vain man. He openly seethed at the idea that Ric Flair could be considered better (just like his fans), and he wanted his matches to be seen as works of art, but it wasn't like today where the goal was for the match to make Bret the worker look good. The goal was always to craft something transformative within the mostly fictional world of wrestling and for a great match to actually DO something. So maybe he's not a match guy by numbers, but I bet he got more out of his great matches than guys who have twice the four star ratings that he does.

[WingedEagle]

4 hours ago, cad said:

What Bret Hart classic was ever disposable? I'm not sure if there's any non-AJPW wrestler whose best matches have become part of a canon the way Bret's have. 

Is this because of Bret? Or because since that time we can now access the classics in real time or near-real time? Because we're flooded with wrestling, sports, news, media, culture and takes on all of the above 24/7 and thus the bar for breaking through to become part of canon rather than forgettable has been raised to a level unfathomable 30 years ago?

I don't think the answer is clear but I think such questions and context are vital to consider when discussing such an issue.

[squidlad]

Bret was among my favourite wrestlers when I was younger but I had not watched his acclaimed matches for a long time. So when I sat down to watch them, I did so slightly nervously, thinking they wouldn't hold up.

My fresh take about Bret is that he was an average house show worker. This is where the criticism of him always doing the same moves in sequence is valid. I could type out a Bret Hart house show match right now and it would be 90% accurate to any match you could find.

The flipside of that is that he was the best PPV worker in the world with a number of TV gems. He never had the same match twice and did spots that I've never seen before. Bret greatly benefitted from being percieved as a guy who could be beat and thusly his matches are full of emotionally charged struggle to score the win, in an era where the old heirarchy had collapsed and seemingly anyone could be elevated.

Bret Hart's matches are also much more interesting than most people give him credit for. Bret is a really strange wrestler by the standards of early 90s United States. First of all, he did his best work against other babyfaces - in a time when the face/heel dynamic was still locked into place with rare exceptions. Secondly, due to him working in a greatly diminished roster, often against people with no main event credibility, he was given the very difficult assignment of making heels look good but not so good they get cheered. He did this by structuring matches to be purely competitive, deemphasizing the heel aspect all together, but with just enough meanness on the side of the heel so that sympathy doesn't spill over. The Shawn Michaels Survivor Series match is an example of this. It's a bizarre match psychology wise for the time but Bret gets it over and makes it work. There's no interference and no cheating. Bret delicately threads the needle, in front of fans trained on Hulk Hogan style main events and makes Shawn Michaels look like a superior wrestler. In the end Shawn emerges, still a heel, but with new-found credibility.

I'm very pleased with how Bret's footage is holding up and he will rank high for me.