Bret Hart has never held back when discussing Ric Flair—and now he’s accusing the Nature Boy of trying to damage his run as WWE Champion before leaving the company for WCW.
During a conversation with Inside the Ropes, Hart looked back on defeating Flair for the WWE Championship in October 1992. Hart said he initially followed the traditional approach of allowing the heel to call the match, especially when that opponent was an established veteran like Flair.
That arrangement quickly became a problem. Hart claimed Flair wasn’t giving him strong matches after the title change and pointed to their match in Ottawa one day after he became champion. According to Hart, Flair controlled nearly the entire match before calling for Hart to win with a small package without ever giving the new champion a proper comeback.
“At that time, Ric wasn’t giving me the best matches. In fact, Ric was—I don’t know if he was just having a lot of mental problems or whatever was going on—but he was almost, like, killing me off every night.”
“The day I won the title, I wrestled Ric Flair the next day in Ottawa, Canada. I remember wrestling him, and I sold for the whole match. He beat the s** out of me for about 15 minutes, and then he called the small package and pinned himself.”*
Hart said the finish completely killed the crowd. When Flair returned backstage and tried to congratulate him on the match, Hart immediately confronted him over how the new WWE Champion had been presented.
“I remember it was like you could hear a pin drop at the end of the match. It was just flat—so flat. I remember he came back to the dressing room and came back to shake my hand, and he was like, ‘It was great,’ and all that.”
“I go, ‘Where’s my comeback? I didn’t get to do anything there. I did a small package and beat you, and there was not a sound in the building when I walked back to the dressing room.’”
Hart then told Flair that he would never allow another match between them to play out that way. Flair apologized and explained that he was dealing with stress and marital problems at the time, but Hart still wanted control over his own comeback.
“I said, ‘Don’t ever do that to me again, ever. I make my own comeback. I make a comeback. I have things that I do, and you’re going to do them.’”
“Ric was apologizing to me and telling me that he’d had a lot on his mind and he’d been stressed out about—I think he had marital problems at the time, which is all true or fair, and I was okay with that.”
The issues didn’t stop there. Hart said he continued wrestling Flair across England and elsewhere, but he never believed they were having the kind of matches they should have been producing. Flair was still calling the action, while Hart felt he could get much stronger reactions if he took over.
“I was wrestling Ric Flair almost every night. I wrestled him all over England, and we had okay matches, but I just never thought they were great matches. I always thought they were second par.”
“Ric often was leading the way and telling me what to do. I’ve got to run the ropes, I’ve got to do this, I’ve got to do that—and I could do it all. But I just knew that the reactions—I could have a better match if I was leading the match.”
Hart eventually took the issue directly to Vince McMahon. With Flair preparing to leave WWE and return to WCW, Hart told McMahon that he suspected Flair was intentionally weakening his credibility as champion before heading back to the competition.
“Vince McMahon called me up because he knew that I had not been very pleased with my matches with Ric. In fact, I told Vince, I said, ‘I think he’s killing me off on purpose because he’s going back to WCW, and if they can kill me off, it helps them.’”
“I told Vince, ‘I’m not having very good matches with him. We were having better matches when he was champion,’ which is kind of strange. But that’s how Ric was.”
McMahon sided with Hart and made it clear that the WWE Champion was in charge inside the ring. Hart said that conversation gave him the authority to stop following Flair’s direction and start calling the matches himself.
“Vince goes, ‘You’re the champion. You’re my champion. You’re in charge. Nobody tells you what to do. You’re the boss in the ring.’”
“He goes, ‘From now on, you tell Ric what to do, not the other way around.’”
Hart’s accusation adds another layer to his decades-long war of words with Flair. The two legends have never agreed on their chemistry, their respective wrestling styles or who deserved to control their matches, and Hart clearly still believes Flair failed him during the earliest days of his first WWE Championship reign.
Do you believe Ric Flair was intentionally trying to hurt Bret Hart’s momentum before returning to WCW, or were their problems simply the result of two wrestlers with different approaches? Let us know what you think in the comments.
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