Bret Hart & Test in Europe in 2008

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In the latest edition of Figure Four Weekly, Bryan Alvarez confirms a story originally broken by Eric Bischoff that Lloyd's of London, a British insurance company, had caused WWE plenty of headaches over Bret Hart coming out of retirement for a one off match at WrestleMania.

The context to this story is that Bret Hart, like several other wrestlers in the late 1980s, took out an injury insurance policy with Lloyd's of London.  Lloyd's probably naively assumed that the odds of a wrestler claiming a permanent disability benefit were quite small.  After all, that wrestling is completely fake, isn't it?  However, Lloyd's eventually smartened up after wrestlers like Road Warrior Animal and Curt Hennig played the system and milked their injuries for as long as possible before returning to the ring.  So when Bret claimed permanent disability after his career ending concussion issues, naturally Lloyd's was sceptical, having been burnt before.  They refused to pay up, so Bret was forced to sue them in March 2004 for unpaid benefits and breach of contract, a case he eventually won in November 2005 when he was awarded $800,000 in damages.

However, wrestling is a strange business where even a badly concussed, stroke sufferer who was screwed over by the biggest wrestling promoter in the world can't be guaranteed to stay retired.  Unsurprisingly Lloyd's mustn't have taken the news of Bret's imminent wrestling return too well and got their lawyers on to WWE.  According to Alvarez, the whole creative team were "really sweating" and that this may have been the reason why they teased a tag match between Bret Hart & John Cena vs. Vince McMahon & Batista for a couple of weeks, instead of the originally planned singles match between the two.  Apparently this is no longer a problem, as Lloyd's and WWE have come to some sort of agreement, possibly involving WWE paying Lloyd's some sort of restitution or Lloyd's having the final say on the physical structure of their singles match together.