It all started when little Owen was born and Bret looked at the baby. If this was a real life feud between the two, that is how I would have wanted to start my 1000th post.
But all this began with Owen's entry in Bret Hart's feud with Lawler in USWA-WWF partnership where Owen stood by his brother. Owen won his first and only heavyweight championship (correct me if I am wrong), USWA Unified World Heavyweight Championship (WCWA,WCCW, AWA title combined) here but had to drop it due to an injury.
They carried on the feud in WWF where Hart brothers took on The King's knights for survivor series where The King was replaced by Shawn in the last minute. It is in this match where friction started when Owen and Bret collided leading to Owen's elimination. Owen and Bret had a post match confrontation leading to Owen's heel initiation and the start of the family drama with Mom Hart getting involved.
Owen debuted his "better" look taking upon himself, the pink and black with sunglasses wanting to prove he is better than Bret in everything. Things seemed to change when they went for tag titles but Bret got injured causing the match to be stopped. Owen did his best, in frustration, to make sure Bret's injury got worse turning full fledged heel. He also cost Bret the title a couple of times "accidentally".
It all culminated in the WMX encounter. One of the best matches which played out beautifully in what went on to become Feud of the Year. The feud was carried on the night when Owen was watching seething as Bret won the title the same night, the same Bret who was beaten clean by him.
The match had a good psychology, storytelling, one upmanship with Owen celebrating everything from a take down and a surprise and shocking finish when Owen pulled out a victory out of nowhere over the better brother.
__________________
“My manner of thinking, so you say, cannot be approved. Do you suppose I care? A poor fool indeed is he who adopts a manner of thinking for others!” ~ De Sade
Last edited by theidealstranger : 05-21-2013 at 10:31 AM.
This is the single greatest match of all-time, IMO. This is what I wrote about it in the thread on that topic:
Quote:
What would you say is the greatest match that you've ever seen? You have to pick ONE.
For me it was Bret Hart vs. Owen Hart at Wrestlemania X:
There are several reasons why:
1)Classic buildup. Owen turning on Bret in a very realistic way, with high drama.
2)Great playing into character during the match. Owen - obnoxious, playing to the crowd, tons of charisma, and a total heel.
Bret - the older brother who really didn't want to be involved in this, suckered in, slowly flaring up when Owen starts exasperating him (face slaps).
3)Fabulous wrestling. Two incredible technicians, and they both had impeccable timing. This was probably Owen at his best. I also saw some things from Bret that I had never seen him do before. I didn't realize that he could do that standing head kick/snap, that Owen could do. I think that Bret could do a lot of flashy type stuff, but just preferred not to for some reason. It was interesting seeing him match Owen in some of that stuff.
4)Seesaw match, that had several moments where you thought it was about to be over. It was also fun seeing Owen put Bret in the Sharpshooter (it was a big deal at the time).
5)Jerry Lawler was great on the mic during this, helping the storyline along, and helping Owen get over.
6)Good crowd investment. MSG was the best in those days, and they really loved Bret. I loved the audible reaction when the outcome happened. Which leads me to...
7)Shock ending that you never saw coming. I don't think anyone expected Owen to get the win, and especially not cleanly. That rarely happened in those days. A heel getting a clean win over a superstar was kind of unheard of. Especially since the whole buildup was sympathetic toward Bret.
I was just a kid, and I remember feeling so sad, because I thought that this meant that Owen was gonna take Bret's place as a huge superstar. I thought that he was gonna be pushed as being better, especially with what happened at the next King of the Ring. Which leads me to...
8)It set up a great storyline throughout the summer. With Owen chasing Bret's King of the Ring legacy, and the rematches, etc, etc.
Just everything about this match was perfect. From storyline, to characterization during the match, to technique, to timing, to them matching each other toe to toe, skill to skill, to the surprise ending, etc., etc. How could a match be any better than that match?!
Btw, David Meltzer actually rated their Summerslam cage match 5 stars. One of the few WWF/WWE matches to get 5 stars. I don't really remember it, so I'm excited to go watch it again.
Didn't they also use realistic looking vignettes & interviews during the feud, with the Hart parents? Talking about how there was always competition between the two, etc.? It made it all seem more real.
I love knowing the behind the scenes stuff. Bret wrote this in his book about the Owen Hart turn:
Quote:
I told him there'd be no turning back. We'd have to do this old school: no more riding together, hanging out together. Never insult the fans' intelligence: make them believe it's real. And, I reminded him, I'd have final say on everything.
About the night that Owen turned heel on him:
Quote:
I brought Dallas and Blade to Royal Rumble '94. Owen and I decided that we didn't want our kids thinking there was any real problem between us, so we pulled the boys aside in the dressing room to smarten them up. I felt like I was explaining the birds and the bees. Dallas was both relieved and surprised to be in on the secret; I made them both promise not to tell anyone. It was important that they understood that Owen and I didn't really hate each other, because the business was never more important than family.
When Owen and I went out against The Quebecers, Dallas and Blade were in the front row, and I was soon placing my shades over Blade's head. He accepted them like he should have been the kid to get them all along.
This was cute:
Quote:
Owen had turned twenty-nine a few days earlier, so I suggested to him that he stay over with me to celebrate in Hawaii. My two surfer dudes were waiting in baggage claim, only now there were three of them. Tate's younger brother, Tadd, had come along. While Owen and I always made a point of kayfabing, today would be a rare exception because the surfer dudes couldn't care less about our storyline. We went straight to the beach, where we strapped on some life jackets and took off in a six-man rubber dinghy.
The sun was high and bright, and waves splashed my hand as it hung over the side. Owen and I each held a beer, and he was as purely happy as I'd ever seen him, and then maybe so was I.
After about a half hour we coasted close to the shore, ready to get back on land, when Chris decided he wanted to show us some barrier reef, where the ocean floor drops off a couple of miles off shore. A few minutes later he idled the dinghy and pointed to where the blue water fades to black and said, "That's hundreds of feet deep." Then the motor cut out. From the worried looks on the surfer dudes' faces, I realized we were out of gas.
Tate kept asking Chris whether he thought he could swim ashore. Chris stood on his tiptoes and peered out at Waikiki, a couple of miles away. No sooner did Chris decide that he could do it than he changed his mind. He explained that there had been shark attacks in the area recently. We had no flares, no food, no drink, and we were drifting farther and farther out to sea.
Owen thought it was all a rib and just smiled at me.
"Owen, I'm not kidding."
"Good try, Bret."
After a half hour, when we really started to cook in the hot sun, it dawned on Owen that this was no joke. All we could do was hope that someone would rescue us, maybe the coast guard. Finally, Christian decided that waiting wasn't going to get the job done and dove into the water. I feared for him, but he was a terrific swimmer. I reminded Owen of the episode of The Simpsons where Homer got lost at sea, but Owen was in no mood for humor.
Then I joked about what would happen if Owen and I were lost for several weeks. Perhaps we could even upstage the negative headlines about Vince and be seen as a welcome diversion! The whole wrestling world, along with our friends and families, would search everywhere for us and finally when we were rescued, when we would meet the onrush of reporters, Owen and I would kayfabe like the pros we were and persuade them that despite being lost at sea in a dinghy we still weren't talking to each other! A smile started to break on Owen's face, and we were both grinning as we caught sight of a motorboat speeding toward us carrying Chris waving a gas can. In no time we were safe on Waikiki beach.
I have to say, it's criminal how much Owen was misused after that whole feud. He showed he had the chops in every way. I was thinking about that, when I was watching the end of Bret's match with Bob Backlund, which Owen played a major part in. In at the interview at the end, Owen was so good!
Owen knew how to be a great agitator heel, plus he could wrestle his ass off. Why wasn't he put in any better storylines toward the end there? Cornette nailed it when he said "gee, how sad is it that they didn't know what to do with one of the best wrestlers on the planet?!" Aside from that, he actually had a personality, and could play a great heel! That makes it doubly sad. Oh well.
I never understood why they put Owen over Bret at WM clean and then didn't use that momentum to catapult him into the main event.
Quote:
Bret on their match "The beauty of the match with Owen was that Owen was such a great high-flyer. We were just walking through how he was going to switch and become a heel character now. Over the last few weeks, we sort of strategized and put together a pretty nice match for me and Owen at WrestleMania.
"But I realized on the day before we left for WrestleMania that the match was too polished and too nice. They would have begun cheering Owen and he would have become a babyface. It wasn't advancing his villain role at all. So, I remember talking to Owen and telling him. The day before we left, I called him up and said to meet me at my dad's dungeon.
"We met down there and we just sat and stared at each other, sitting there. I think Owen was wondering why I called him up. I said, 'Owen, we got to change the whole match. You've got too many nice moves. You've got all these aerial moves. After a while, they're going to start cheering you. Then being a villain is not going to work out for you. We have to come up with more ways to make you more vicious and more dislikable.'
"So, we just altered the match. We took the whole match that we originally had and scrapped it and came up with a different match that paved the way for Owen to become the villain that he was over the next nine months. 'Cause that was critical, for Owen have them accept him as the bad guy. So, being the older, bigger brother, it was easy for me to lose my momentum and let Owen get stuck being the good guy and they're cheering for him over me. But that wasn't what the story line called for so we had to kind of tweak it a little bit and make sure that our characters were what they needed to be at the end of the match."
I guess Bret wanted to put over Owen and make him a big heel by out doing the hero in a wrestling bout and it worked. As to why the momentum was never used, am looking for it. Maybe, someone who read Meltzer can clarify. As LilOlMe pointed out, they stayed in character outside as well keeping their feud real. Had it been Stampede, their feud would have been the defining story for the promotion then on.
__________________
“My manner of thinking, so you say, cannot be approved. Do you suppose I care? A poor fool indeed is he who adopts a manner of thinking for others!” ~ De Sade
For further background on this, it had been rumored that Vince was actually considering releasing Owen in 1993 before Bret agreed to do this whole angle. After this match Owen won Vince and everyone else over, and Bret was happy to be a part of it. They hadn't known just how good Owen was until this match, but Bret vouched that Owen had always been this good. Sadly, in the later years of his career, it seems like everyone would forget just how good he was again, but for this one moment on March 20, 1994, Owen Hart was king. He shocked the world in the first match of the biggest show of all time.
Probably, Vince saw it more as Shawn or Owen for the big push after Owen proved himself but made the choice to go with HBK, purely a personal guess.
__________________
“My manner of thinking, so you say, cannot be approved. Do you suppose I care? A poor fool indeed is he who adopts a manner of thinking for others!” ~ De Sade
Vince actually wanted Bruce Hart for the role at first. Could you imagine?
Sucks HHH was friends with Michaels, because I've always felt that Owen could perfectly play "The Game" role, just with a bit more of a humorous, self-reverential, tone. When he was in NOD, he had kind of an icy, cool, demeanor at times, but I feel like that placement went nowhere, and it was kind of miscast. There have been times in interviews, and even in the Backlund match, where he'd look kind of aloof and intense. I really think that he could have played that type of role, had they gone with him. They just never seemed to really know what to do, or to go all in, aside from the Bret feud.
But back to this match. I've always had this theory that the only reason that Meltzer didn't rate it five stars (he gave it 4 & 3/4 stars), is because he gave the ladder match five stars that night, and didn't want to give two matches both five stars. Especially since that was the first time he ever gave a WWF match five stars. I've always felt that he regretted that decision, and the reason why he gave the Owen/Bret cage match five stars, was partially due to regret over not rating their Wrestlemania match that way.
It has everything he would possibly look for in a match. The drama, the storyline, the actual wrestling, the surprise ending, etc. I really think it would have gotten five stars if the Michaels/Razor match wasn't that night.
Now that I think of it, the first four matches that he gave five stars to in the WWF, were all stipulation matches. Guess he likes the pomp and circumstances a bit more than one would think...
And while we're on the topic of Meltzer ratings, did anyone else notice the first 4 WWF matches that he has rated ***** are all matches that include either Bret or Shawn?
In chronological order, Meltzers' WWF 5 star matches:
HBK/Razor Ladder Match WM 10
Bret/Owen Cage Match SummerSlam '94
Bret/Austin WM 13
HBK/Undertaker HIAC Bad Blood '97
It's also somewhat odd how all 4 matches happened in two of the same years (1994 & 1997). Is there any doubt which two men carried that company in the ring in the 90s? (Not to mention all of the other great matches they had that are close to 5 stars, and at the very least 4 or more stars? Dominance.)
__________________
"I have the ability to push the buttons of people that would never, ever lose their temper."
WMX ended with Owen Hart looking on as Bret celebrated winning the WWF Title. That right there tells me they were planning on taking their feud further. Hell, Owen had a legitimate claim on a title shot because he beat Bret clean. They could have easily made Owen a main eventer after Mania. Pushing Owen doesn't necessarily mean HBK can't get a push. Something else must have happened. Vince at first didn't see anything in Owen, but then he changed his mind, Owen beat Bret, and then....he changed his mind again? It's just odd.
Classics 8: Owen Vs Bret WMX
Classics 8: Owen Vs Bret WMX
