Bret Hart created quite the legacy for himself, and to many fans he was their childhood hero. But eventually all of the heroics came to an end when Vince McMahon decided to turn Bret heel.
Hart recently opened up about his heel turn during an interview with Sky Sports, and he made it clear that at first he wasn’t interested in playing a bad guy.
“I very much worried about losing my fan base when they wanted to turn me heel. I remember that (WWE owner) Vince McMahon laughed and joked on the phone when he called me to tell me, and I said ‘I don’t want to turn heel, I don’t want to be a bad guy’. I really took pride in being a worldwide hero, much the same as John Cena today. But much the same as John Cena today, the wrestling audience was wanting something different. They wanted somebody new. So it was like, ‘do I change styles to stay alive’?”
He went on to say that he changed his mind very quickly after Vince McMahon told him if he didn’t turn he would be working with Vader for a year.
“Vince said ‘give me five minutes and I’ll talk you into it’, and I said ‘no thank you, I’m not interested’, but he talked me into it pretty fast because my option as a good guy was that I was going to wrestle Vader for the next year. That was going to be brutal, and I was thinking ‘anything but Vader’. So the heel turn was a difficult choice to make, and I remember Vince stressed to me – and I wonder whether that was the beginning of them trying to tear me down – that ‘you are going to be a hero everywhere else except the United States’.”
Do you think Bret worked well as a heel? Sound off in the comments below.
