Bret Hart already knew he was losing the WWE Championship at WrestleMania 9, but that didn’t mean he planned on going down without putting together the best match possible. According to The Hitman, Yokozuna suddenly changed that plan in the ring and wiped out the portion of the match Bret had been saving for his big comeback.
During an interview with Inside The Ropes, Hart broke down what happened during his WrestleMania 9 title match with Yokozuna. Bret said the match had essentially been planned in three sections, and he believed they were just reaching the strongest part when everything abruptly changed. Hart explained that even though he knew he was dropping the championship, he had built the closing stretch around making the fight look dramatic. He wanted fans to believe he still had a chance before the eventual finish.
“The best stuff is coming up now. Now they got the really dramatic stuff and it looks like I’m going to lose but I’m going to… Anyway, I thought it was going to be really like the best moves that I—the best part of the match we were going to was still coming, like my comeback and the moves that I was going to do to Yoko and all this stuff.”
Instead, Hart said Yokozuna suddenly skipped ahead. Bret even admitted that he has wondered over the years whether somebody backstage had gotten into Yokozuna’s ear before the match.
“I often think that Yoko got—somebody like a bird got in his ear or somebody got in his ear and told him that, you know, to not do much for me out there, that it was his time to be a big star.”
Hart made it clear that he doesn’t know whether anyone actually told Yokozuna to change things. However, he said the sudden switch was dramatic enough that he has always believed something was going on.
“I always thought there was some manipulation there on him because right out of nowhere, Yoko completely edited out my entire comeback and all the big moves that I was saving for the end of the match and goes into the finish, the ending of the match.”
The change apparently caught more than Bret off guard. Hart remembered the match suddenly being roughly five minutes ahead of schedule, leaving Mr. Fuji scrambling to get the powder ready for the finish while Bret applied the Sharpshooter.
That finish remains one of WWE’s most talked-about WrestleMania title changes. Yokozuna defeated Hart before Hulk Hogan entered the picture and captured the WWE Championship moments later.
Bret was already dealing with losing the championship and WWE changing its plans for him, but having what he considered the best portion of his match disappear only made things worse. Judging by how vividly he still remembers the sequence, Yokozuna changing the match on the fly clearly remained one of Hart’s biggest problems with that night.
Do you think someone backstage told Yokozuna to shorten Bret Hart’s comeback at WrestleMania 9, or was it simply something that happened during the match? Let us know your thoughts and feedback in the comments.
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