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Despite this not being their most famous match, it is a real famous series, featuring a few different kinds of matches. More often than not, you’ll find me opting for the bloodbath, as they had in their more famous submission match at WrestleMania 13 four months later, but in a rarity, this is the Bret Hart vs. Steve Austin match that I have always preferred.
The thing is that, while the WrestleMania match may be slightly better, this is simply the sort of a match and a story that I’ve always preferred. Rather than a nasty fight once things have already broken down, this match is the story of things breaking down. I’ve almost always preferred the matches that show that transformation, things breaking down, entropy through simulated violence, and things like that. I’ve also always preferred this match because it’s one of a few rare statement matches from the Hitman. Bret Hart has a few matches in the last few years of his career that feel like his kind of a statement on what wrestling can and should be, and alongside the Owen Hart tribute match, I think this is one of them. They’re these unbelievably confident slower paced old style kind of 70s sorts of matches, but done with a lot of modern (for the time) moves and even greater cohesion, and they’ve always appealed to me ideologically as much as they do spiritually. Therefore, as a match that is both of these things that I love a whole lot, this is not only my favorite match between Bret Hart and Steve Austin, but one of my favorites of the decade period.
Everybody knows the story, and if you don’t, the brief backstage promos before the match do as perfect of a job summing it up in thirty seconds or less a piece as I’ve ever seen in wrestling history.
From Stone Cold’s “a cliche is a cliche, and an ass whooping is an ass whooping” to Bret’s iconic “I’m not greedy for money, I’m greedy for respect” (Bret’s is maybe the best promo of his career, also including the line about MSG being holy ground and about using the match to find out where he stood), both lay out the stakes of the match for both men real clearly. Bret Hart, still arguably the Ace of the company returning after a long time off after a real real iffy title loss in March, trying to challenge who he thought was the best wrestler in the WWF in his absence to see where he still stood, only for that gesture to be totally scorned in the process by someone who had already publicly called him out, and met by someone who just wanted to kick his ass and notch his gun.
Each man, wildly and totally different from each other, wants effectively the same thing out of this match, a statement win of real value at a point in their careers in which both men need it, only they want to achieve it in very different ways and, being at near opposite points in their career, for very different reasons.
This is pro wrestling and it is perfect.
From the opening, there is something real beautiful and special and different about the match.
It is a fight, a real contest and competition, in a way no WWF match has felt like in at least a few years. There’s a real grit to this, a layer of filth and dirt over the entire thing that I’m not even sure the WrestleMania match has. It’s a Bret Hart match, it is mostly very dignified, but they gradually get more desperate and nastier, and the match breaks down in all of these fantastic mechanical ways. Everything is so hard fought, and there are these pauses in between the major moves in the back half that feel very un-WWF/WWE like. Bret and Austin add a certain weight to everything that makes smaller things feel really important, and that has the effect of making the real big moments feel monumental. At all times, especially in the last third or so of the thing, there is always this kind of mad scramble to get into something that could be the end of the match. The result is a match that, in the best possible way, does not feel like a WWF match at all.
This match is great not just in terms of how they do everything right and the tone they strike, but also in terms of how every little piece of this thing matters. Even opening lock up exchanges wind up not only having a point to them, but displaying the contrast between the two. When Austin tries to humiliate Bret after backing him into the corner, he talks his shit. When Bret does the same, it’s him baiting Austin into a wild swing, only to easily duck and making Austin look foolish. Aggression and violence and raw naked ambition set up against science and experience, spelled out completely within one minute.
Even outside of the raw efficiency of the thing, the match is full of these great little touches, some of them I didn’t even get until this watch, like both men repeatedly using the same holds as each other early on. Knowing these two, it’s hard to see it as anything but deliberate, and again, it always feels like there’s a point to it. Either Austin using the same holds as Bret after they work on him, trying to prove a point in a more frantic and desperate kind of a way, or Bret reversing something of Austin’s into his own, and making the same point in return. It’s a “you’re not special, old man” from Stone Cold, compared to a “no, this is how you do it, you little shit” from Hart, the contrast between the two making it so much more interesting than usual with this kind of common ground. Even late in the match, Austin makes a point of stealing Bret’s top rope superplex. This idea reaches its zenith late in the match, when Bret Hart finally strikes back at Stone Cold on his terms, and uses the Stun Gun to begin his comeback. It’s the perfect kind of a Bret Hart receipt too, not loud and not obnoxious, but deliberate and impactful, coming at the perfect moment to work both as this big insult, and having maximum function within the match as well.
For the most part though, this is, as previously stated near the start of this piece, a story about transformation and progression and regression and adaptation, and all these other versions of change.
The easiest display of this is in the way that the interactions between the two change. While there is never respect going in both directions, the match does begin in a stately and dignified sort of a way, only to gradually disappear into frenetic brawling and these very personal feeling punch exchanges. It is a match in which that kind of dignity begins to disappear, that takes a professional issue and that very slowly makes it more than that, if not one hundred percent deeply personal just yet.
Austin cannot do what he wants to do to Bret on the ground, and is forced to get away from him and brawl. The way he does that — repeatedly sending Bret off the ropes for distance, using his speed advantage as well — speaks again to the more thoughtful and deliberate nature of this match, but it also speaks to a larger theme of the thing, if not more than one of them. In addition to it being this clear sign of Austin shaking off being in a Bret Hart match and trying to make this a Steve Austin match, there’s a little more to it as well. Stone Cold has to go back to what he was before the WWF, breaking the Stun Gun out, and then finally taking control. His work on the neck is, again, very deliberate, and most impressively of all, always very cruel in a way that differentiates him from Hart. This is a match that also ran the risk of being a little samey as a result of all of their similarities, but because of the small ways in which they handle things and carry themselves — Austin always with this chip on his shoulder, playing everything with as mean of a spirit as he can muster up, while Bret is always sympathetic and fighting and breathing heavy while moving forward — it never reaches that level.
Likewise, Bret Hart can never return the match to what it was, and is forced to brawl with Steve. He doesn’t do all that well at it, and while the match has these great triumphant moments where he tackles Austin through a guardrail or wins a punch exchange or two, he never really succeeds at it in the way Austin does. He can never get the match back to the way he really wants it to be, getting shut down about midway through when he tries to break out his classical comeback sequence, and taken outside.
As much as anything, these parts of the match also express a larger idea not just about the match, but about Bret Hart and the WWF and wrestling as a whole now. Bret took eight months off, but March 1996 to November 1996 contains at least one of those weeks in which decades happen, and he is coming back to an entirely new thing, and struggling to adjust. There are these really great moments sprinkled in throughout to show this, Bret spending a little too long outside when he is able to get a shot in on Austin and being hurled onto the announce table, which never happened to him before. There’s also this one great little bit near the end, which is maybe my favorite part of the entire match. After Austin’s work has moved more to the back, and a little to the legs after a Texas Cloverleaf, Bret collapses when whipped into the corner, only to collapse and slide under the bottom turnbuckle, back first into the ringpost. It’s a spot that many have used in the quarter century plus since, but that (with exceptions for when the other man purposely slides them that way) rarely feels as realistic and genuine and heartbreaking as it does here. It’s maybe the ultimate shorthand for Bret’s struggle in the last three quarters of this match, something just going unfortunately wrong as his body begins to give him problems, resulting in even just accidentally taking the sort of beating he had never quite taken before.
The beauty of the match though is that late in the match, Bret Hart adapts better than Stone Cold ever could.
Abandoning trying to out-brawl Austin, Bret instead makes small adjustments where he can that mean so much. There’s a small show of it in the middle of the match when Bret does his elbow drop off the top rope instead of the middle, but especially once he makes his comeback, it feels like a Bret Hart who understands and adjusts for Steve Austin so much more, rather than Stone Cold trying to force Bret into his match. It’s not only the Stun Gun that was previously mentioned, it’s Bret breaking out a rare Piledriver, and kind of slowly shifting Austin back into his kind of a match. If not on the ground, then slowly removing Austin’s advantages, matching his level of physicality in ways Bret can control.
When the Stunner fails and Austin goes for the old Million Dollar Dream, Bret kicks back off the buckles to roll on top, and just barely does it.
Austin’s scouted everything about Bret, but wasn’t expecting the thing he did one time nearly half a decade previously. It’s a beautiful finish, Austin panicking and regressing, only for Bret to have one last trick left. It’s also a finish that speaks perfectly to who both are as characters. Bret willing to adjust and taking the win where it is, but Austin being too aggressive and insistent, not letting go in time, and losing for it. In the end, the statement of the thing, the how, matters a whole lot less than the ultimate result. Bret Hart may now be a stranger in this WWF after eight months of letting monsters, perverts, and lunatics run the place, but on holy ground, the old Ace finds a way to force the man-in-waiting into his kind of a match again just long enough for it to matter.
Bret Hart proves what he needed to, and despite the loss, so does Stone Cold. It’s a beautiful match and an even better story, working in every possible way. As one match, a perfect story about youth and experience, ambition and patience, brawling and technique, all of that. As part one of a larger story, it’s even better, a near perfect foundation and jumping off point that allows both men to be correct, nothing to truly be settled, and a smaller or at least more purely professional issue to break out into what feels like the biggest thing in the world.
In the end, nobody got what they wanted. Steve Austin never notched his gun in a way he would be happy with. Bret Hart proved he still had it, but began to see the shift in wrestling as a whole that would eventually drive him insane. On top of that, he failed to get the only thing that, at the outset before even coming to the ring, he said he was greedy for in the first place.
The seeds of frustration, if that is even the God damned word for it.
Something close to an ideal version of this thing, and I don’t mean Bret Hart vs. Steve Austin specifically, so much as I mean professional wrestling as a whole.
HANDWERK 