Bret Hart

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Over the last few days Bret Hart has been touring the Canadian media to promote his upcoming WrestleMania match with Vince McMahon and unfortunately his interviews have been filled with some jawdropping amnesia and hypocrisy.

Firstly, he had this to say about his brother Owen's tragic death while working for the WWF to CTV:  "Clearly, my brother Owen's death was just a bad accident.  You can't hold Vince McMahon directly accountable for that. It was someone underneath who didn't know what they were doing."

Wow, I can't believe that Bret has forgotten the part of the story where Vince hired incompetent stunt coordinators because the professionals were too expensive and refused to do the stunt exactly as he wanted due to its inherent danger.  So sorry Bret, but yes you can hold Vince McMahon directly accountable for that.  Maybe Martha Hart was right after all when she called Owen "a white sheep in a black family".

Secondly, Bret was on Off The Record and had the gall to bash Hulk Hogan and Ric Flair for their recent returns to the ring:  "Ric Flair, I feel sorry for him. You were talking about wrestlers saying, 'When is enough, enough? When do they ever give up and go home to their families and their real lives?' Ric is one of those guys who's a little ahead of me, but I remember a time knowing that I had to get out of wrestling and go home to my kids before they were grown up and gone or that I had no family life. I think wrestlers make this decision - and I'm sure Hogan is the same and different guys - where they decide they have to go home to their families or stay in the wrestling business and that becomes their family. Flair stayed in the wrestling business, forgot about his family, his family moved on and left him; the only thing Ric Flair knows is the dressing room, the airports, the bar after and drinking."

As much as I've taken shots at Ric Flair for his drunken carousing, even I can see that Bret Hart is the last person to be lecturing Flair about family and prioritising the wrestling business above all else.  You just have to read Bret's autobiography to know that he's just as guilty as Flair of failing to put his family, particularly his wife, first, during his wrestling career.  Bret may think he's the better man, but his decision to "go home" was made for him when he suffered a career ending injury.  It probably also should be noted that there's a good chance that Bret hasn't seen much more of his children over the last decade than Flair has, given the amount of time he's spent living in Italy and Hawaii.  It doesn't say much good about Bret's ability to adapt to real life that he got so bored with it he had to return to the ring.  Simply put, Bret's a lot more like Flair than he'll ever realise or admit to.

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.

A ton of people will think this should have been #1.

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Holy crap, they booked this match to go 2nd on the card?!?

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Sorry for being a day late with this one.

This was supposed to be the blow-off match to one of the best feuds of the 90s.

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The main event of Summerslam 1997 featured three of the biggest stars of the late 90s.

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If you've never seen Wrestling With Shadows, it's probably the greatest documentary ever made about professional wrestling. A Canadian camera crew followed Bret Hart for a year from 1996-1997 and was given unprecedented access backstage to the then-WWF. They thought Bret would be retiring or heading to WCW at the end of their year of filming. What they didn't know was that they would be capturing on film the most notorious and monumental real-life screw job in professional wrestling history, and the event that ultimately led to the death of kayfabe and the birth of professional wrestling as sports entertainment.

I urge anyone who has not seen this film to check it out here: http://www.nfb.ca/film/hitman_hart_wrestling_with_shadows/

Forrest Griffin heads to a Borders in Las Vegas to try and strongarm shoppers into buying his new autobiography. Unfortunately, some people seem more interested in buying Bret Hart's book, because Bret is a better fake fighter than Griffin is a real one. Score one for professional wrestling!