Bret Hart still remembers the night the Hart Foundation was supposed to hand the WWE Tag Team Championships over to The Rockers, only for everything to completely fall apart. What he doesn’t appreciate is Shawn Michaels later suggesting that the disaster may have been intentional.
Speaking to Inside The Ropes, Hart revisited the infamous match where Michaels and Marty Jannetty were originally booked to defeat Hart and Jim Neidhart for the titles. Hart said both teams had spent the day putting together what they genuinely believed could become one of their best matches together.
“We had the match with the Rockers, and we spent the whole day working out the matches and spots and stuff.
I remember going, ‘This is going to be the best tag match ever.’ Like, it was going to be a five-star match, and the Rockers were super pumped up. We’d had quite a few matches with the Rockers over that year, and we knew that nobody had seen them except for people at the house shows.
But we were like, ‘This is going to be on Saturday Night’s Main Event. It’s going to be huge. It’s going to be great exposure, and the Rockers are going to win the belts.’
So then we went in the ring, and we had our match. We started, did our spots, and everything was perfect. And they gave Jim a turnbuckle in the match, and he hit the turnbuckle kind of like I do, frontwards. But Jim’s a bigger guy than me, and he hit the top turnbuckle, and he popped it. It clicked and broke the turnbuckle. The whole top rope just broke. It just hung loose.”
That broken rope completely screwed up what the four wrestlers had planned. Hart said he and Michaels repeatedly tried to get referee Freddie Sparta to stop the match so the rope could be repaired, but instead they were continually instructed to go straight to the finish.
“I remember Shawn Michaels and me were both on top of it. I remember holding Shawn in a headlock, and I’m going, ‘Freddy, you got to fix the rope because we can’t do any of our moves. I can’t even do the Hart Attack without a top rope. I need a top rope.’
And he just froze. He just kept saying, ‘Go home,’ because they were giving the cue to go home, which in wrestling means go to the ending of your match.
And I’m like, ‘Go home? I don’t have a rope.’ I remember saying, ‘Freddy, fix the rope. It’s a commercial. Stop the match. Fix the rope.’
And he just froze and wouldn’t do it, or he wouldn’t listen to me. Finally, me and Shawn had the rest of the match with no top rope. And I remember I got so flustered because I don’t have these kinds of meltdowns or failures in my matches.
I was really frustrated. I started screwing up my moves and screwing up spots. We tripped. I remember it was like, ‘This match has turned out from being the greatest tag match we’re ever going to do to the worst match I’ve ever had in my life.’
And I kept telling Freddy to fix the rope, and he wouldn’t. He was just looking at the floor and going, ‘Go home.’ Finally, we did. We went home, and the match sucked.”
Hart was furious when he returned backstage, especially when Gorilla Monsoon asked why they hadn’t simply stopped the match. Hart said that was exactly what he had been trying to get the referee to do for roughly 10 minutes. Despite everything going wrong, The Rockers still completed the planned title victory and briefly walked away as champions. Hart said he personally told Vince McMahon afterward that the match was so bad that WWE shouldn’t even air it, but insisted his frustration had absolutely nothing to do with losing the championships.
“I remember I came back to the dressing room. I was so mad. And I remember Gorilla Monsoon coming up to me, ‘Why didn’t you stop the match?’ And I’m like, ‘I told him for 10 minutes to stop the match and fix the rope.’
He goes, ‘It’s taped. It’s not live.’ And I’m going, ‘I told him that.’ I was so mad. He screwed up big time, that ref. But Jim loved every bit of it. He was so happy.
I remember that night I told Vince, I said, ‘Don’t even air it. It is that bad that I wouldn’t even air it. I hope you’d never air that match.’ And it had nothing to do with the belts at all. I mean, me and Jim were happy to drop the belts to the Rockers.
And I think it was a day later, Vince came up and said, ‘We’re just going to scratch the whole thing. It’s off.’ And we’re going to say it never happened because the Rockers did win the belts that night. They had the belts and were champions. And the next day, the whole thing was erased.”
What clearly still bothers Hart is the suggestion Michaels made years later about what happened. Michaels reportedly questioned whether the Hart Foundation had deliberately sabotaged the match, something Hart flatly rejected. From Hart’s perspective, there was no conspiracy to prevent The Rockers from becoming champions. He said both teams wanted the title change to happen and considered Michaels’ later suggestion nothing more than a cheap shot.
“I know Shawn made comments years later that he thought we did it on purpose, which I thought was pretty cheap because I think he knows that we didn’t. I think it was just a cheap-shot remark out of Shawn when he was Shawn, you know.”
Considering the complicated history Hart and Michaels would eventually have with each other, that accusation clearly stuck with The Hitman. Decades later, Hart still maintains that the infamous title change disappeared because the match went disastrously wrong — not because he and Neidhart were secretly trying to keep the belts.
Do you believe Bret Hart’s explanation for what happened during the infamous Hart Foundation vs. Rockers title change, or can you understand why Shawn Michaels became suspicious? Let us know what you think in the comments.
This transcript was produced exclusively for Ringside News from the original recording. Republishing the transcription in full is prohibited. When using excerpts, provide prominent credit and a link to this article.
