WWE Hall of Famer Bret Hart recently appeared on the CBC Radio’s Q Podcast where the Hitman discussed his classic WrestleMania 13 encounter with Steve Austin, and how important the bout was for both men’s career. Highlights from the interview are below.
Says the match was beautiful and easy:
“It’s such a beautiful match, really. I can say it was one of the easiest, most fun matches I ever had. Which if you watch it, you go, ‘Geez, it’s one of the most violent and tense…It’s a very serious match. And it was just so much fun for me to play the part. And Steve Austin was in his prime.”
On the famous double-turn afterwards:
“I would say in thinking of that match that there’s nothing in there that you would want to take out. Like, every move is so intense and powerful. It adds – one move adds to the next move. It’s this constant building of the story. And the shifting of where a good guy can go too far. And the bad guy – it’s like cheering for the shark in Jaws. It’s just not gonna happen. But by the end of the movie, you’re cheering for the shark. And the shark doesn’t quite pull it off and becomes a hero.”
How they had just wrestled a big match a few months earlier at Survivor Series:
“Both of us are kind of like, ‘What are we gonna do? We’d just wrestled a few months before in a big match and we…thought we used up everything. We didn’t have anything. Like, why are we wrestling again now? Like, we kinda spent everything we had.”
Says they modeled the match after a school fight:
“I remember telling Steve it’s like two guys at school having a fight after school. You’re the badass guy that came into my school. And now it’s like [everything] is building to this moment where we’re going to fight after school. I’m the hero and you’re the bad guy and this is how it’s gonna shift. Because I can remember a school fight when I was a kid where the guys fought and everyone thought one guy was gonna win and the other guy was gonna lose. In the end, it was the other way around. And the guy that won became the bad guy. People didn’t like him because he won and they felt sorry for the bad guy in the school fight.”
How he was booed in American and cheered in Canada:
“It was kind of a chance for Canadians to give it to the Americans. And the Canadians kind of got behind the role. ‘We’re gonna be bad guys with Bret Hart, cheering him on.’”
(H/T and transcribed by Wrestling Inc.)