The feud between Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels is one of the most notorious in wrestling history, but ‘The Hitman’ wishes things unravelled differently.
At the tail-end of the New Generation Era, Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels were in the midst of their infamous rivalry. Their shared bitterness for one another became glaringly obvious once the 1997 Survivor Series rolled around, as the Montreal Screwjob occurred, unceremoniously sending Hart out of the company.
The two former WWE Champions have since buried the hatchet when ‘The Excellence of Execution’ finally returned to WWE in January 2010. Sharing a handshake, Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels finally put all the bad blood behind them.
Hart, it seems, wishes they’d done so earlier. Discussing the matter on an edition of A&E’s WWE Rivals, the multi-time World Champion believes there was the potential for a decade-long rivalry between him and ‘The Showstopper’:
“It’s a shame that things got off-track with Shawn and we never got to really finish telling the stories that we could have told. Me and Shawn could have wrestled one time every year for the next 10 years and they’d have been the biggest matches in history. It’s a shame that that opportunity was squandered last, probably by both of us.”
Shawn Michaels had a similar feeling. ‘The Heartbreak Kid’ stated that he wished he could “go back and not make any of the mistakes” associated with his, at the time, real-life rivalry with Bret Hart.
Of the four singles matches the duo had together, three of them were pay-per-view headliners as both the 1992 and 1997 Survivor Series cards, as well as WrestleMania XII, concluded with the pair colliding. The ‘Mania outing was the duo’s famed 60-minute Iron Man match that saw Shawn Michaels secure his first WWE Championship.