♪
Bret was amazing. By any standard,
Bret may go down as one of the top technicians
in the industry.
Bret took the business seriously.
I think sometimes to his detriment,
he took himself a little too seriously.
Bret believed he was the WWF champion.
On November the 9th, 1997,
professional wrestler Bret Hart had fought and
clawed his way to the top as world's champion.
But in a matter of seconds, he would realize that
those who make you can just as easily destroy you.
Here's the problem:
Bret didn't want to lose his championship.
It's your last night in the company,
we need to crown a new champion.
You know what; we'll just take it from him.
It's like, I remember when I was a kid,
exactly where I was standing when John F. Kennedy
had been assassinated, and I remember
just as precisely where I was when I found out
about the Montreal Screwjob.
Screwing a Canadian hero, in Canada?
How much more evil can one get? [laughs]
And I still feel, to this day,
like I have a neon sign on my fucking head.
"I fucked you, Bret.
Never told you about it, but I fucked you."
I was so mad, I could just really explode.
The Screwjob changed so many things in the business.
The innocence of wrestling changed.
This was one of the worst things in the world that
happened to me in this business.
Say what you want about wrestling; that was real.
He really screwed that guy.
The incident known as the Montreal Screwjob
marks a turning point in the history of wrestling.
Never before had the curtain been pulled back to
fully reveal the behind-the-scenes drama.
A dark plot of betrayal was exposed,
legacies were redefined, and fans would
never see wrestling the same again.
♪
You know, it's one thing I always say about the
Screwjob, is that if you go back and you look at
all the facts, my story's never changed.
It's always been the same story right from day one
'cause I tell the truth.
I'm Bret "The Hitman" Hart, the best there is,
the best there was, and the best there ever will be.
I always say I was a real-world champion 'cause
I really traveled all around the world and defended my belt.
This is my history and my life here, all these guys.
Despite everything that's happened with the Screwjobs
and all that kind of stuff, for me,
it's mostly happy memories.
My name's Jim Cornette. For the past 35 years,
I've worked for every major professional wrestling promotion
in the United States, as a manager, announcer,
trainer, matchmaker... Pretty much done it all.
♪
I was actually there. I actually lived it.
I'm giving you my perspective,
it's just because my perspective happens
to be entertaining, and some people...
take exception to that.
I was the executive vice president of talent relations.
I've been a writer, producer, director.
Brother Love is a alter ego of mine.
You name it; I've worn a lot of hats in the WWF, WWE.
Bret "The Hitman" Hart!
The patriarch of the Hart family was Stu Hart,
and Stu was an aged old veteran.
Double tough.
The dungeon was the basement in the Hart family house.
Well, the dungeon is hard to explain.
My dad, 60 or 70-year-old man would go down there and
torture a bunch of football players and body builders.
I don't feel my arms, sir. [groans]
"Let me show you a hold here.
You just take your arm like this..."
You just ease this hand back...
Agh!
The Hart family is one of the most famous families
in the history of our business. The sons were all wrestlers,
the daughters all married wrestlers.
They had a wrestling bear that lived under their porch.
It was like the Munster's house for the people in Calgary.
Stu would invite everybody over and,
and make breakfast. They had a bunch of cats.
And he'd take the thing where he's, he's flipping the eggs,
and he'd flip the cat shit over there,
then go back to flipping the eggs, you know.
Made him tough, is what it did.
And Stu began the Stampede Wrestling Promotion in Alberta.
And, had a very successful company there for a long time.
Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to this,
another edition of...
And Bret Hart was kind of a pale, skinny, you know,
maybe 21-year-old kid or whatever,
but you could tell he kind of knew what he was doing.
And I'm more confident right now than I've ever been,
and there's no reason right now that him and me
shouldn't have those belts right now.
The Harts were very integral to professional wrestling
around the world.
In 1984, Stu Hart is trying to
keep his struggling territory afloat.
The rapidly-expanding WWF strikes a deal to acquire
the entire promotion,
along with Stu's main star, his son, Bret.
When Vince bought Stu Hart's Stampede Wrestling in 1984,
he took Bret Hart and Jim Niedhart,
who was his son-in-law, as a team.
The Hart Foundation, they were managed
by Jimmy Hart, no relation.
They were a tremendous tag team,
and Bret Hart had a perfect foil in Shawn Michaels.
When you have two guys like Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels
that are as talented as they are at what they do to begin with,
and then sometimes, there's just chemistry,
you find a duet between two singers that have
never worked together before, but suddenly, it's a hit.
Look at this. Whoa! 360 in mid-air!
Internationally, we're getting reports back that
we've got a megastar on our hands in the form of Bret Hart.
He, his work had made him this megastar.
That was all they wanted to see;
that's all they wanted to talk about.
At the same time, Ric Flair was the champion and
Ric was having some health issues.
We needed to make a change.
So, Vince is looking at it and going, "Why not Bret?"
That's the kind of guy you want to reward.
Vince McMahon's one of the most unique individuals
on the planet.
If you could cross a genius with
P.T. Barnum and Donald Trump,
you would get the love child that would be Vince McMahon.
Vince, honestly,
is a third-generation wrestling promoter.
Vince controls creative;
Vince controls the talent choices.
They run the lunch schedule past Vince McMahon, to this day.
Over the years, Vince had a good relationship with Bret.
I don't know; you know, I think that once Bret
became champion in Saskatoon that there started,
there was a change that was taking place.
[cheering]
ANNOUNCER: Bret Hart!
The criteria for a world champion in those days,
there wasn't a set physical list of maneuvers or
whatever that you had perform.
It was whoever Vince thought could be the guy.
Vince McMahon decides who the champion is going to be.
It's not actually won by anybody.
So, Bret didn't beat Ric Flair.
He won the championship in a scripted contest, okay,
in a storyline.
Bret deserved, you know, to have that accolade.
But at the same time, remember that someone
made you champion. You didn't really beat anybody.
I think Bret looked at the WWF championship like
guys years ago used to.
Maybe it was because of his father and his lineage,
but when you were chosen to be a champion of a major company,
it meant that the promoter thought that you were
the best talent, that you were the best draw,
that you would make him the most money,
that you were the guy.
While Bret's star is rising in the WWF,
a fledgling promotion suddenly starts edging out
Vince McMahon in the television ratings.
WCW in the early 90s was a secondary competitor to the WWF.
I happen to be Eric Bischoff.
You know, as the executive producer,
at least I had a voice within WCW.
WWF is up here, WCW is way down here.
There's no way I can be better than the WWF,
but I gotta be different than them.
They're tape, I'm live.
They target their content towards kids;
I decided I wanted my characters to be more reality-based.
I would use their real names.
WCW came after our talent.
The perception was they offered them a lot more money.
You know, when Hulk Hogan left the WWF,
I think it hurt Vince, personally.
It stung a little bit, and the first,
the first big names to go were Scott Hall and Kevin Nash,
in the very beginning. Ted DiBiase left.
Roddy Piper shortly thereafter.
The curtain call, as it came to be known,
happened because Nash and Hall were leaving to go to
WCW for their big contracts.
It is my last appearance for the WWE,
and it's also Kevin Nash's last appearance.
It was at Madison Square Garden,
the most famous arena in the world.
After the last match, Hall, and Nash,
and Michaels, and Helmsley - two of 'em good guys,
two of 'em bad guys - all went out to the ring and
had a big hug and a big kiss, and waved bye to the fans,
who had no idea what was going on.
With Shawn and those guys, they broke kayfabe
in front of the fans in Madison Square Garden.
The word "kayfabe" is like a lot of wrestling terminology.
It comes from the days of the carnivals.
When you break kayfabe in wrestling,
you let the fans and the general public in the
inside world and ruin the illusion.
It wasn't like that.
It all just happened organically.
Because the fans were going crazy.
I mean, it was like a magical moment.
Here were are, 25 years later, talking about it?
You had been chosen and selected to be in a secret brotherhood,
and you kept those illusions private and to yourself
because it was a code. It was a code of kayfabe.
Now, as competition between
the two biggest promotions heats up,
wrestling's fourth wall starts to crumble,
exposing its secrets.
And while Bret enters the biggest rivalry of his career,
he never could have imagined that it would end up
leading to his ultimate destruction.
Before their off-screen feud would boil over into
one of wrestling's most controversial moments,
Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels' contrasting in-ring styles
led to some of the greatest matches of all-time.
As far as wrestling styles between Bret and Shawn,
Bret was more basic, more grounded,
more hard hitting, more technical.
Michaels, from the other side, and oh!
Michaels, he's an incredible performer,
but also a lot of his stuff is more pretty and
a little bit more gymnastic.
Oh, he's caught by Bret Hart! Look at that!
I think Shawn Michaels is probably the greatest
performer all around, plus he was different.
He wasn't a big giant.
My contract was gonna expire.
Eric Bischoff has sent feelers out to me.
There were two separate occasions when I
began to talk to Bret about coming over.
And I heard the initial offer was 2 million and then
it was 2-million-something, and it got up to like 3 million.
And I'm sure they were rounding off,
but at that point, what's the difference, right?
Vince heard about them giving me an offer,
and I remember Vince said, he goes,
"I'll make you an offer," and we worked out a contract.
It was 1.5 million for 20 years, I think.
Bret favors loyalty over money,
and accepts the counter offer from Vince McMahon,
but then a mutual animosity between Bret and Shawn
begins to take hold.
Shawn was starting to get overwhelmed with the negative...
Doing a Chippendale kind of gimmick is not
a "heroic" thing to do.
Shawn Michaels saw an opportunity to be more and
more of a top guy, and also to be more and more of a prick.
Nobody breaks into this wrestling business to
work their way to the middle.
I mean, if you don't want to be on top,
you're in the wrong business.
I don't really care if you want to have dinner with me.
Do you want to wrestle me?
Oh, you do. Okay.
I don't think that they were really that different,
which is probably where the real life rivalry came into play.
First day, when I walked out,
and I end up trashing Shawn Michaels on the
interview about his Playgirl Magazine centerfold.
And before I went out, I said, "Shawn, I'm gonna...
Is it okay if I bring up that Playgirl Magazine and
take a jab at that and say something about it?"
He goes, "No, go ahead. Say whatever you want."
World Wrestling Federation needs a hero.
They need a role model.
They need somebody they can look up to,
not somebody that poses for girly magazines.
And I came back and Shawn was just crushed.
He almost looked like he was gonna burst into tears.
Now, now we're doing live TV and these guys are
saying things on live TV about each other.
Shawn made reference to Sunny days.
Sunny is Tammy Sytch. She was one of the valets.
She was the first real, you know,
big pinup girl of the WWF, and Shawn was making the
inference that Bret was having some kind of
an affair or some, some...
kind of relationship with Sunny.
Even though lately you've had some Sunny days, my friend,
you still can't get the job done in any situation.
Oh, boy.
Now, from a fan's point of view,
it's getting exciting.
But if you're the other guy, you're hating the dude
who's talking about you 'cause now you gotta go call home and
explain that to your wife.
You don't mess with a guy's wife or his family,
or else you can find yourself laying in a ditch somewhere.
So, we're in Hartford, Connecticut one night at the
Hartford Civic Center, and all of a sudden,
the door busts open and in comes the Brooklyn Brawler.
And he says, "Hey, Vince.
Shawn and Bret have just got in a fight in the bathroom."
Shawn finally comes into my dressing room.
We haven't talked for about a couple months.
I just remember I was just trying to be nice.
I almost like forgot that we ever had issues.
I said, "Hey, Shawn." I was brushing my hair.
And he goes, "You think I'm gonna fucking talk to you?"
And whatever it was, Bret just leg dived
and took him down right there.
So I grabbed him by the hair,
swung him around the dressing room.
His feet were actually off the ground a couple of times.
It was like two prostitutes
fighting in downtown or something.
Here comes Shawn, and he's hot.
And he has got in his hand, a handful of his hair.
It looked like a small possum.
And I'll never forget this.
He said, "This is an unsafe working environment!"
As far as I know, I think if anybody was
sleeping with Sunny it probably was Shawn.
[laughs]
As the backstage friction between
Bret and Shawn intensifies,
Vince begins to lose the TV ratings war and
is forced to cut costs.
♪
Vince comes back and looks at the commitment that
he had made to Bret Hart, and it was, it was a drain.
It was a drain on the company for
what we were bringing in at the time.
Vince told me that, basically,
he couldn't afford to pay me the contract that he'd given me.
It kind of broke my heart, like,
where it's like, okay, I get it.
I remember I got off the phone with him,
and I said, "I guess I'm, I'm done," and
I hung up with Vince and I signed my WCW contract.
I can't remember exactly what day or when I heard
that Bret had made the deal and was going to WCW,
but Vince told us Bret was gonna finish up
at Survivor Series.
He'd drop the belt and then he'd, you know,
he'd be free. It didn't turn out that way.
With Bret leaving the company,
Bret wasn't just leaving the company.
He was leaving the company and going to our competitor
that was beating us in the ratings.
To have our champion leave the company is bad enough.
To have them leave the company -
with the championship - is a kick in the nuts.
The time honored tradition is,
when you're leaving a territory or a promotion,
you lose on the way out.
I gotta tell you, in the beginning,
there wasn't a whole lot of worry about it because
it was Bret and we thought that,
that there would not be any issue with Bret dropping the
championship to whoever we asked him to
drop the championship to.
When I first heard that I was wrestling Shawn, was
maybe about three or four weeks before Survivor Series.
Anyway, so Vince pulled me in and he goes -
he was all excited, he goes,
"We're gonna drop the belt to Shawn."
So when I saw Shawn, I remember, like,
I thought this is your chance to
open the door for sort of dialogue.
So I remember when we shook hands I said,
"Shawn, I just heard that we're wrestling at Survivor Series."
I said, "I want you to know that you'll always
be safe with me in the ring,
that I'll always be professional.
I would never do anything to hurt you or injure you
or anything like that."
And he looked at me and he said, he goes,
"I appreciate that, but I just want you to know that
I am not willing to do the same thing for you," and
he turned around and walked out of the dressing room and
slammed the door.
Vince, even though he knew that Shawn and Bret
hated each other, somehow he thought this match
was magically gonna go in the ring and everything was
gonna work out like he wanted.
And, the closer that we got to the match,
the more obvious it was that it was not.
One of the things he had given Bret in that brand-new contract
with all the bells and whistles was reasonable
creative control of his character and
the way he was presented.
I'm the boss of my last 60 days.
Why would I lose to Shawn? He's disrespected me.
I'm not wrestling Shawn, or I don't-- I'm not putting
Shawn over under any circumstances until
he proves to me that he's got enough respect for me
to put me over first.
And I was on Bret's side 'cause Shawn was the prick,
not Bret. But we had to get the belt back.
The news of Vince's current champion signing with
his main competitor would spell his defeat in the ratings war.
With his back to the wall,
Vince must get his belt off Bret,
and what he's about to do will echo far beyond
the wrestling world.
With his last match in the WWF less than 24 hours away,
Bret Hart is refusing any scenario which has him
losing the belt to his real life nemesis,
Shawn Michaels.
Bret is growing suspicious of what his boss,
Vince McMahon, might do.
Showed up that day and I was ready for my match,
but I did have suspicions about the referee.
I remember thinking the only way they can screw me is,
Shawn will never pin me or tap me,
make me tap out, so I wasn't worried about that.
I said, but the way it will work is they'll get the referee.
Hello, I'm Earl Hebner. I'm the referee.
My relationship with Bret was great.
Most of the time, he always wanted me to ref his matches.
People think, oh, I count to three and it's over.
It's-- That's not the ball game.
We were sort of a coach.
You're thinking for three people.
It's very, very hard.
Do we have to? [laughs]
Just kidding. [laughs]
The day before that show,
I got on a plane, got in my seat.
The stewardess came back and said, "Mr. Hebner?"
I said, "Yes, ma'am?"
She said, "You have a first class seat."
I said, "My ticket don't say 'first class'."
She said, "Mr. Hart bought you a first class seat."
So I went up and sat beside Bret,
and we talked, and Bret said,
"Will you promise me one thing?"
I said, "What's that?"
He said, "You won't count me out?"
I said, "Nope, I will not count you out."
I said, "You know they're gonna ask you to screw me tomorrow,"
but he got the tears in his eyes and he could,
his lip quivered and he was like,
"The hell with that. I swear."
He said, "I swear to God on my kids, I will never,"
you know, and we was so adamant.
And I remember, I shook his hand. I said,
"Just tell me if something like that's gonna happen."
Complicating matters, a film crew producing
a documentary called Wrestling with Shadows
is following Bret to capture his last WWF match.
From the second I land, I've got the entire
High Road Production film crew, they're filming.
And they got the boom mics and the whole thing,
and they follow me wherever I went.
It was like a lot of people that I didn't even know,
all around the building.
The idea was that Vince would get with Bret.
I think that Vince felt that once he got in front of Bret,
face to face, that they would work something out.
But I remember the whole camera crew coming in.
They wanted to mic me up and I remember going,
"No, I kind of don't-- It's not how I operate."
And he goes, "Just in case."
My name is Harry Zafrany.
I was the sound recordist on Wrestling with Shadows.
The director told us, "Look.
We gotta be very low profile about this," you know,
"Nobody should know that Bret Hart is wired."
It was a private meeting and Bret went in wired,
didn't let Vince know that he was recording it.
I never ever want to leave here with any kind of bad feeling,
but this week has been a bad week for me.
I feel kind of betrayed a little bit,
the way this whole thing has been depicted.
It's really hard for me as a hero here to come up short.
I was determined to, to stick to my guns,
and I was not backing down.
And right away Vince goes,
"Well, what are we gonna do?"
I think what I'd like to do is get through today.
I think tomorrow I should just go in and do my speech
and forfeit the title.
I think it allows me a chance to leave with
my head up and leave in a nice way.
I would think it'd be a run-in type thing.
But I'm open to anything. I'm open to anything.
I knew that there was a point in the match
where Bulldog and Owen would run out,
referee would lose control of the match,
ring the bell.
There would be no winner, and we would go off with
a lot of chaos going on in the ring.
Yeah, like a... basically a no contest.
Like, I remember walking out to the ring,
and I knew, like, okay, be leery of submission holds
in a match like this, but I already talked to Earl,
and I thought about it and it's like,
I said, okay, I trusted Earl.
And so, I put my guard down; that was, that was my...
fatal mistake.
I'm walking down to go to the ring,
and I'm getting pulled aside.
And Gerry Brisco says, "Vince McMahon wants you to
ring the bell when he puts Bret in the sharpshooter."
I said, "What?"
He said, "Well, are you gonna do it?"
I said, "I don't know."
Gerry Brisco is a producer and agent,
and one of the toughest son-of-a-bitches
on the face of the earth.
He grabs me by the arm and says,
"Is Bret Hart gonna pay you? This is what Vince wants.
Do you want a job or not?"
I said, "I don't have an idea what I'm gonna do right now.
Y'all messed my mind up." And this is the truth.
I'm thinking, he had an opportunity to drop the belt.
I know this is not right, but I gotta have a job.
I told my brother to put all my shit in the car.
This ain't gonna look good. Get all my shit out the
dressing room and put it in the car.
So I'm walking to the ring, "God,
I promised Bret I wouldn't count him out."
That was the longest walk of my life.
We had a great match planned out and Shawn was a great wrestler.
We're gonna start fighting before the bell starts.
I don't think this match has officially even started.
Finally, after about 10 minutes of brawling and
fighting out in the crowd and stuff,
I eventually fight Shawn back to the ring,
throw him in the ring, and now the match starts.
They get in the ring.
I ring the bell to start, and I'm going,
God, don't put the sharpshooter on.
The match lasted 10, 15 minutes.
ANNOUNCER: Look at this!
SCOTT: Oh! Putting Bret into the sharpshooter.
Oh my gosh, how humiliating.
He's gonna beat him with his own finish.
Shawn actually didn't know how to put the sharpshooter on.
He steps through the wrong way,
folds my legs the wrong way.
And I moved my legs and switched them the right way.
I remember when he put it on and I flipped over,
I could see Vince McMahon, and I can see him.
He's got this cold look on his face and he's yelling,
"Ring the fucking bell."
"Ring the bell," and he kept saying it to the guy,
"Ring the bell!"
As the match was going on, I'm going,
"I don't know what I'm gonna do."
I hated it.
And I remember in that moment of looking at the
time keeper, and Vince snaps at him,
"Ring the fucking bell!"
Well, they're screwing me right now.
And I remember reaching back and showing that I wasn't
submitting and I grabbed Shawn's leg and started to reverse.
But you could hear the bell, "ding, ding, ding."
[match bell]
If I hadn't 'a rung the bell,
Vince McMahon was gonna ring that bell.
And at first I was like, I wanted to just kill Vince.
I wanted to just jump through the ropes and
just punch him out.
I couldn't believe he did it to me after all the years
that I gave him, and all the matches,
and all the hard work, and he disrespected me like that.
You son of a bitch.
I jump out of the ring, ran across the floor,
jumped the hockey fence and could still
hear the bell ringing.
Jumped in the car and we drove off.
I had enough sense to paint WCW backwards so that
you can read it on TV.
Bret did the "W-C-W" for the fans that are in Montreal.
But it was, you know, it was what it was.
I remember I had a nice good gobber of spit and I remember
I just leaned over the top...
♪
Hollywood couldn't 'a created something
better than that.
I wrecked a bunch of monitors and
threw $100,000 headphones out into the crowd and stuff.
Because of a couple of guys that couldn't get along,
they hit on the most talked about match ending
in the history of professional wrestling
since the dawn of time.
Widely viewed by fans as
wrestling's most treacherous act,
the Montreal Screwjob would tear the lid off
of wrestling's sacred brotherhood,
but it's true architect has yet to be revealed.
This is where I've told a couple of these things.
I've never gone this far, but I figure,
like I said, I'm not gonna talk about this on TV
any time in the rest of my life, so I guess at this point
I don't care who gets mad at me.
So, it was me and Vince Russo at Vince McMahon's house.
My name is Vince Russo. I was the head writer at
the WWE during the infamous Montreal Screwjob.
And quite honestly, I wasn't even
originally slated for this documentary.
And then, I wanted to be a part of it because I was there.
Like, I knew what would happen.
So, I'm sitting there that day.
First, Vince gets up and he takes a phone call from Bret.
What I could tell you about that phone call is,
you know, Vince pitched many different scenarios for
Shawn Michaels to take the belt off of Bret Hart.
And Bret soured on every single one of them.
Vince told Bret we'd go back to the drawing board,
and that's exactly what we did.
"Well, this finish won't work and that finish won't work,
and Bret just wants to come out and hand the belt over
on TV the following night without getting beat."
I'm sure he does!
So, then he goes and he calls Shawn.
Every time Vince goes in there,
then I have to sit in a room twiddling my thumbs with the
fucking guy that I hate worse than anybody in the world,
Vince Russo.
We'd get in these creative meetings and the three of us
would argue, and it wasn't the three of us,
it was Jim and me.
We could not be farther apart,
physically, philosophically, mentally, morally.
If one of us was an African American lesbian nun and
the other was a Nazi skinhead Martian from outer space,
we could not be more different.
The problem is, he's still living in 1970.
I'll never forget he made the comment,
"Oh, when a guy comes out of a box,
he's instantly over."
Like, bro, this is like 1996.
Like, who's coming out of boxes, bro?
Vince Russo's never had any respect
for professional wrestling. He booked the wrestling program
to pattern after Jerry Springer.
Our styles completely crash.
Finally, Vince comes out, and I'm about lost
my religion with the whole creative team thing anyway
'cause it's not my style of wrestling.
I'm living in Connecticut. I'm miserable.
I weight 280 pounds 'cause I'm aggravation eating.
I'm just, I'm not in my element here.
I said, "Vince," I said,
"There's got to be something we can do."
I said, "It's your company and it's your belt."
So then, Vince looks at me and says,
"Well, then, how would you do it, pal?"
Well, now it's a fucking challenge.
Once again, I'm going through every finish
I can think of or every situation I ever think of
where nobody wanted to do a job.
I said, "goddamn double cross him."
You can learn more about modern wrestling from these
classic books and classic magazines than you can
by talking to people today
because history always repeats itself.
In 1931, there was another double cross in Montreal,
the Battle of the Bite.
Strangler Lewis controlled the championship and
nobody could get it away from him because
it was worth so much money.
Lewis has a title match in Montreal against
[French accent] Henri DeGlane,
[American accent] "Henry De-Glane."
They lock up and immediately,
DeGlane grabs Lewis' own hold on Lewis,
the head lock, and takes him down,
and they go down on the mat because
Lewis is working with him and they--
and probably they're gonna do some kind of reversal.
DeGlane starts screaming bloody murder
at the top of his lungs.
The referee checks DeGlane,
huge bite mark on the guy's chest.
Apparently, when DeGlane got the headlock on Lewis,
Lewis had bitten him.
Here's the thing: it was actually Dan Kolov,
DeGlane's corner man had bitten him in the locker room,
and then did this. And then, when they locked up, boom,
headlock, nobody could see what happened.
Referee disqualifies Strangler Lewis and
awards the title to Henri DeGlane.
That's a double cross,
and it's as old as the hills in wrestling.
So, when Vince says, "Well, how would you do it, then?"
"Bret's hold is the sharpshooter."
♪
But, let Shawn...
get Bret's hold on him.
If the referee just calls for the bell as a submission...
Nobody can tell anything was wrong because that's what
it's supposed to look like anyway.
And to tell anybody anything was wrong,
I said, "Bret Hart, of all people,
would have to expose the business."
I said, "What's he gonna do? Call the newspapers?"
But then Vince, "Nah!"
And he gave the "hmph" like he does when,
whenever you would be discussing tomfoolery and
he would say, "Alright, let's get back to reality,"
and we went on.
Unless I was in the bathroom during that scenario,
that scenario did not take place in front of me
when I was sitting at the table.
I'm not gonna call Jim Cornette a liar.
When I was sitting at the table -
and Cornette was sitting at the same table -
I pitched that exact scenario to Vince.
So, basically, out of pure frustration,
I said, "Vince, I said, "screw it, Vince."
Have Shawn put the sharpshooter on Bret,
and have the referee call for the bell. Do that."
Vince Russo didn't know what a double cross was.
He was sitting there with his eyes open.
People tell me all the time, "Oh, Vince, you,
you take credit for the Montreal Screwjob."
I wish I didn't pitch the idea.
That was a miserable night.
It was one of the worst experiences in my life
in the wrestling business.
I swear on my mother's grave, my father's grave,
my wife's life, and my dog's life,
the story I just told you is true.
Vince Russo is the biggest liar in professional wrestling
and imagine the territory that takes in.
♪
When I was sitting there at the monitor,
I saw him go into the spot; that's when I shit myself.
Holy fuck, he's actually gonna do this.
And look, to this-- Look, right now.
Close up on the goosebumps.
♪
Now I'm thinking...
I don't know who else knows about this.
I just know that there is a high probability that
somebody in this building is gonna want to
beat the shit out of me in the next ten minutes and
I'm gonna get out of here.
When I'm starting my car up and starting to pull out,
I heard a car rev the motor and saw the headlights
pop up behind me; that had to be Hebner.
[laughs] I beat him out of the building.
♪
Just as Bret Hart was double crossed on live television
by his boss, Vince McMahon,
WWF executive Bruce Prichard, is blindsided himself
by the sudden change in plans.
[match bell]
So, it's chaos.
I'm not even realizing what's happening in front of me.
Oh, God, I was pissed off that I wasn't smartened up as to
what they were doing, and I was pissed off because
I was left in the back alone, in a position
where everyone thought they knew that I was involved,
and I wasn't.
I felt very alone. I felt betrayed.
That piece of shit's locked himself in his office.
[crowd chatter]
The cameras are off. Show's over.
I got screwed. And I was so mad.
And there's Shawn, suddenly in my dressing room,
and he's swearing to God that he had nothing to do with it.
Shawn, you weren't in on that?
My hands are clean on this one, I swear to God.
He was a bad actor.
The one of the two was in on it, that I think.
Shawn had to be in on it.
You know, at that time, I had no idea.
Well, now we know Shawn was just putting on an act.
♪
There was like this hush in the dressing room and
everyone's kind of stunned.
I remember Undertaker got so mad that he kicked over
one of those big steel barrels.
He just slammed the door and said something about,
he was going down to Vince's office to get
a straight answer on why they did that to me.
You know, "Vince...
You gotta go over and talk to him,
explain why you did what you did.
You gotta give him one.
And by giving him one, if he's gonna,
he's gonna hit you, you gotta take one."
Bret came out of the shower and told Vince get out of
his fucking dressing room, and then he said,
he goes, "If you're still here when I get out,
I'm gonna get dressed and I'm gonna punch you out."
Bret finished his shower.
I mean, he went back in, took his sweet ass time and
finished his shower.
And Vince stood right in the middle of the room
waiting for him to finish.
♪
So I finish the shower and I come out.
And, it's funny 'cause I walk out of the shower
sopping wet, naked.
Vince said something to me along the lines of,
"This is the first time I ever had to lie to one of my talent,"
which is such a lie.
I remember tying my shoes,
and I remember when I got tying my last shoelace,
I started to tie it like, this is it,
I'm gonna punch out Vince McMahon.
I can't believe I'm doing this.
And, we walked towards each other,
end up tying up, just like a pro wrestling match,
and I remember just sinking down and kind of just
turning my whole body and thinking, 14 years,
and coming up right between our arms,
and I hit Vince McMahon with the most beautiful
Mike Tyson upper cut. I popped him, literally,
off the, right off the ground.
He went straight down, out cold.
Everybody was stunned. No one could believe it.
It was dead silent for a while and nobody said anything,
and then, Bret said,
"Get the fuck out of my dressing room."
So, I mean, I have to say that I remember Shawn Michaels,
he was bawling his eyes out like a baby.
And I remember thinking, I know you were in on it.
And he knew it, he was like waiting for me to
make my way over to him and finish him off.
But, I just tapped him on the shoulder and I said,
"Shawn, thanks for the match."
He couldn't believe that I thanked him for the match,
and then he looked up at me and he just burst into tears,
like, really blubbering.
I had never, to that point,
heard of that much drama and backstage just bullshit.
Sometimes I lost sleep over
what I should have done that day.
Bret, you're not gonna understand this now,
but Vince was trying to protect his business.
It was never about not trusting you.
He didn't trust Eric.
I went into Vince's office and said,
"I need to talk to you." He said, "Okay."
I said, "I'm fucked."
He said, "I got a meeting with everybody today.
We'll take care of it."
Sat everybody down and said,
"What I did last night was my call.
It's not Earl's fault, and anybody that don't like it
can come to my office and I'll release your ass right now."
Screwjob was already in the makings.
They had to find somebody that would do it.
The conversation I had with Vince where,
where we really had the big heart-to-heart
was the following Wednesday in Stanford.
And, I told him what I thought.
Vince's reaction was, "If you had known,
then you would have known.
You would never be able to say that you didn't know.
Shawn Michaels risked everything for you and
for this company, so before you condemn Shawn Michaels,
understand what he did for you and your family."
There were a lot of "what if" scenarios discussed
the night before, and I think that everybody believed
that at the end of the day, Vince was going to be able to
convince Bret to drop the championship.
That didn't happen, so Vince asked Gerry Brisco to
let Shawn know there's a spot in the match that,
Shawn, when you get him in the,
in the sharpshooter, we'll ring the bell.
Of all people, Bret Hart, who was raised in the
wrestling business, whose father was a wrestler,
who went through the code,
he's the one that exposed the business!
So, we're talking with Bret Hart "The Hitman" today. How are ya?
It was very important to me, after 14 years of probably
the most dedicated, loyal, hard working service that
you could ever get out of a professional wrestler -
I'd given this man everything you could ever ask for and
I made it very, very clear that my character was not in
any way shape or form gonna be humiliated.
Bret was telling any and everybody that he could,
he didn't lose. He was screwed.
And, it was something that Vince felt it was important
to address on Monday Night Raw.
Did you or did you not screw Bret Hart?
There's a time-honored tradition in the wrestling business
that when someone is leaving that they show
the right amount of respect.
And the people are like, "No, we don't want to like
the rich billionaire boss.
We liked Bret Hart. He was our hero."
Bret Hart didn't want to honor that tradition.
Vince was really giving Bret Hart all kinds of shit
for not honoring the time-honored tradition of
doing the right thing on the way out.
On TV, this didn't happen ever before.
Vince, in this interview, just came across very
cold, calculated, and very, very heelish.
I truly believe that Bret Hart screwed Bret Hart,
and he can look in the mirror and know that.
Rather than sweep this incident under the rug,
Vince capitalizes on it by transforming this real-life
incident into a story line where he reinvents himself
as an evil, conniving mastermind.
When I debuted, the fans didn't know that
Vince was the owner.
He was an announcer.
And then, once the word got out that he actually
owns the company and he's the power behind the throne,
this and that, Vince ran with it.
Mr. McMahon is one of the greatest heel characters
of all time, yes.
I mean, you've heard arenas full of people chant,
"Asshole, asshole!"
CROWD: Asshole! Asshole!
If they had done it right, everybody prospered.
Shawn Michaels became the WWF champion off a big win.
Vince McMahon became the catalyst to the evil empire
of Mr. McMahon, and they handed the hottest wrestler
in the world - Bret Hart - to WCW,
and they drop that ball.
In the aftermath of the Montreal Screwjob,
wrestling changed forever.
The fourth wall had fallen.
Vince McMahon's villainous character would propel
his company into the stratosphere,
while Bret Hart would make his lackluster debut in WCW.
You know, if you look at how Bret Hart even came to WCW
and how I, how they launched me the very first day...
Why don't we bring the man out that's gonna
referee this match.
God, I remember like, referee?
That's so lame, like, such a lame way to bring me in.
Is that what you want, referee?
Eric Bischoff was an imbecile trying to run wrestling.
He didn't have any idea about how to run wrestling.
I have to take some responsibility in the fact that
there may have been better ways to bring Bret in.
I would be honored to be the referee...
But at the same time, we'll never know that because
the plans that we did have for Bret were executed so
piss poorly because of his just detachment from it all.
He didn't get over in WCW. Zero impact.
Hey, Bischoff!
And the WCW...
- I quit! - [cheering]
I think the legacy of the Montreal Screwjob is that
nobody knows if it was really a screwjob or not.
I happen to believe it was the real deal.
To me, I feel the same way now seeing it back
as I did the first time I saw it.
It's a total work.
Everybody was in on it and they all did it together.
Now, look at Bret's face.
He doesn't look too shocked to me.
You're gonna spit on Vince and then the truck is
gonna go, "Go tight on Vince, go tight on Vince.
Get Vince wiping the loogy out of his eye."
Vince has been in the TV business his whole life.
Nothing's gonna happen without his consent.
Everybody knows you're leaving.
You're gonna stand in what's now your opposition's ring
on a global broadcast, and you're gonna
motion the call signs of your competitor?
If that's not okay by a big boss in my mind,
they're gonna cut away from that.
I mean, I've never discussed it with Shawn.
You know, I wasn't there,
and I didn't ask guys who were there.
Watching it as an educated fan,
I would say it was a complete collaboration
by all parties, and that's all I got to say about that.
People do say it was a work and Bret was in on it.
No, man.
This is the way this piece of history went down.
Conspiracy theorists will always be conspiracy theorists.
But unfortunately, sometimes,
when people want more of a story to be there that
just isn't there, they try to create it.
He's not one of 'em too, is he?
[laughs]
I'm sorry. Just, it's just, it's ludicrous that Scott Hall
would say that he didn't talk to Shawn Michaels about this.
I know they all talked to each other about everything,
but especially about this. Why the fuck wouldn't they?
I will tell anybody to their face that thinks that
this was a work, you're a dumb stupid fucker.
These are death threats. I've gotten a bunch of 'em.
But, these were some of the most creative and
some of the most picturesque so I framed these.
"Get by the ring one more time,
you make a target under those lights.
You won't know where it comes from. Bye-bye."
They pulled it all off because I trusted the referee.
Poor Earl, and he's just a little guy.
I feel so bad for him.
To put that on him was such a rotten thing to do.
For the last 15 years, it's been the shits.
That's always a chant in any arena is,
"You screwed Bret."
We never talked for a long, long time.
Many years. It's...
even though Bret and I are friends now,
this is still upsetting.
I guess you can tell I'm kind of breaking down a little bit,
but it's something that will be with me forever.
A lot of people will say, "Hey, it was their idea,
all the way from Vince Russo,
to Jim Cornette, to Triple H,
to Shawn, to me," you know, we all said it.
The Montreal Screwjob is remembered all kinds of
different ways by all kinds of different people.
For the fans, it was like one of the first big
behind the scenes things that exploded,
and they heard about, and they realized there was more
intrigue in the locker room and in the board room
than there sometimes was in the ring.
You know, as soon you start doing that,
as soon as you don't believe it's real anymore,
it's not really worth watching.
That's the way the people feel when they lose faith
in their hero; that's when you lose people in wrestling,
because they believed in the people involved,
even if they didn't always believe all the action,
they believed in the people.
I take a lot of pride, almost ridiculous pride in
being the wrestler that I was.
I believe that I was the guy that reinforced the
wrestling aspect of the wrestling show,
and that's what I like to be remembered for.
The reality of the situation is,
is that if two guys just could've,
you know, could've got over themselves...
Well, we wouldn't be sitting here today.
I've ignored him for years, and it's on, and on.
It's my, my personal enjoyment at this advanced age,
to remind everybody at every opportunity
that he's a liar.
It's freaking wrestling. It means nothing.
I will live to piss on his grave.
Even if I'm in a walker,
my wife already has instructions.
She's out of the will if she doesn't get me there,
if I'm not ambulatory.
I'll find Vince Russo's grave and I will piss on it,
and there will be a picture of that hanging on my wall
when I pass away.
And hate is a hell of a motivator.