[1993-01-24 WWF Royal Rumble] Bret Hart vs Razor Ramon

[Superstar Sleeze]

WWF World Heavyweight Champion Bret Hart vs Razor Ramon - WWF Royal Rumble 1993

I am surprised no one had made a thread for this. Unique match. Razor was so strongly pushed out the gate but it was the Kid angle that got him over forever. It is weird what gets people over and doesn’t. Bret’s first reign feels so random and Shawn & Razor are interesting challengers.

Textbook Bret Hart match which I probably underrate. My issue with textbook Bret Hart is that there is not much struggle within a segment. They have very logical matches and they are very easy to remember. Slugfest to start which looked great both men have great punches. Razor knees the top turnbuckle. Bret works the leg pugnaciously. Bret is an all-time great grinder. He is one of the few that can make heel in peril work on top. Bret takes his sick sick sliding abdomen steel post shot. Hall works the back with laser focus. Great use of the sack of shit. Bret uses a back drop over the top and suicide dive to turn the tide. Bret has a top five suicide dive! Five moves of Doom. There is a little struggle with Hall shoving Bret off on the ten count punches, tip of the cap. Sharpshooter attempt but Razor yanks the ref into it. The finish run is a little clunky. I liked Bret’s reversal of the Super Back Suplex into his own. That should have led to the Sharpshooter finish. Bret overthought it with a backslide, an overly complicated roll up into the Sharpshooter. This was my very long way to say because Bret matches are so logical they are easy to follow and remember. That was a super easy match to recap. It feels logically good to watch them BUT textbook Bret doesn’t move me. High end Bret doesn’t. It feels sterile, mechanical and safe. I like organic, guttural and wild. Textbook Bret is in the very good camp but not great. Hall was very good in this but this was definitely a Bret match. I would have liked to see Hall try to do heat segments more like this. ***1/2

[squidlad]

This deserves a lot more love. Between the average review settling somewhere around 'quite good' and my understanding that Scott was hurt going into this match, I expected some fool proof, fundumentally sound work and not much more. But I was incorrect, these two guys had a match that was both logically cohesive and mechanically inventive. I counted three spots I had never seen before now: The bump off the Irish whip in which Bret slides under the turnbuckle and hits his ribs off the corner ring post, the second rope suplex counter where Bret rolls off Razor's back and hits a suplex of his own and the Razor's Edge counter into a backslide. 

Bret impresses me with his ability find good comprimises within the realities of 1993 WWF. The comprimise with Shawn Michaels at Survivor Series was to make Shawn look good but not so good he gets cheered. The comprimise here is to work a match that makes sense coming off a heated angle but is appropriate for the bloodless, child friendly product. You can't have the street fight you'd want to have so what do you do instead? What Bret does instead is start the match off hot, unloading a flurry of punches at Hall but then gets cut off with a brutal looking spot that leaves him hurt for the rest of the match. They can then settle into the normal tenor of a WWF title match without underselling the bad blood between the two men. 

Another great match in Bret's fairly underrated 1992-93 title run. Including this match I have three matches at four stars or more and another at three and three quarters. This is surely the best non-gimmick singles match of Scott Hall's career. ****